Warren Buffett's support helps make Wang Chuanfu China's richest man

Wang Chuanfu, a manufacturer of electric cars has become China's richest man after his fledgling company was backed by Warren Buffett.

By Malcolm Moore, in ShanghaiPublished: 5:50PM BST 28 Sep 2009
Wang Chuanfu, 43, saw his personal wealth reach $5.1bn (£3.2bn) after the share price of his company, BYD, or Build Your Dream, rose by over 800pc in the wake of Mr Buffett's investment.
"I was shocked, I really was," said Rupert Hoogewerf, the founder of the Hurun Rich List, the leading index of Chinese billionaires.
"There's no way you could have predicted he would rise to the top, but we could not find anyone else worth as much."
Mr Wang has been feted around the world after BYD beat major manufacturers, such as Toyota and General Motors, to build a new generation electric hybrid car. A consummate salesman, Mr Wang demonstrated the environmental credentials of his car by drinking its battery fluid in front of journalists.
Mr Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, described Mr Wang as "a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch [the former head of General Electric]. I have never seen anything like it".
Mr Wang was born into a poor farming family and both his parents died while he was still at school. He spent his early years as a government researcher, before borrowing $300,000 from his relatives to found BYD in 1995.
Initially, BYD was a battery maker, and quickly captured half the world's market for mobile phone batteries, cutting costs by using people, rather than machines, on its assembly lines.
Mr Wang branched out into cars in 2003, building a 16m square foot assembly plant and hiring a team of Italian-trained car designers. A spokesman for the company said subsequently: "The technology for a car is not that sophisticated."
BYD has been accused of copying designs from other companies and Mr Wang said himself that "60pc of a new product is taken from publicly-available information, 30pc from existing products, 5pc from the materials that are available and only 5pc from our original research".
Although BYD's petrol vehicles have sold well, the hype has not matched reality for his electric hybrid. Only 100 of the vehicles have been sold since last December, falling well short of the company's 20,000 target.
Most of the cars which have been sold have been snapped up by the Shenzhen local government, which has a close relationship with BYD.