Hurun Research has released a special report revealing changes to rankings of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs who make the Hurun Global Top 100 list in the two months ending on March 31. China added six individuals to the top 100 billionaires list, the biggest addition during the period, while India lost three and the U.S. lost two. Partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the world’s top 100 billionaires lost 12.6%, or USD408 billion, in the past two months, suggesting all gains made in the past two and a half years have been erased. More importantly, only 9% of those making the Hurun list saw their wealth increase, all from China. They include executives at hog producer Muyuan, feed and meat producer New Hope, soy sauce maker Haitian, JD.com, SF Express, Xiaomi, and ventilator and life support medical equipment maker Mindray.

Rupert Hoogewerf, publisher of the Hurun Report, said he was uncertain about whether the gains would be sustainable though. This “depends on how stock markets perform relatively. I would have assumed that the U.S. and some European stock markets would bounce back, but I’m not sure if that’s going to be in one month or six months or two years or whatever.” Following the coronavirus-fueled wealth reshuffle, the U.S. now tops the rankings with 34 billionaires, while China now has 29. Only two months ago, the gap stood at 36 to 23. Hoogewerf remarked that “China has closed the gap with the U.S. at the top of the Hurun Global Rich List. Two months ago, the U.S. had 13 individuals more than China in the Top 100, but now that gap has closed to 5, on the back of China’s stock market performance in the last two months”.

One way to measure the effectiveness of China’s efforts to cushion the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic would be to look at stock market performances, he said. In the last two months since January 31, the Dow Jones Index has gone down by 21%, and German, French, UK, and Indian stock markets have gone down by a quarter. In that same period, the Shanghai Composite Index went up by 0.2%. “So relatively speaking, from a pure financial economic perspective, China has done extremely well,” he said.

But the owners of Luckin Coffee were less lucky as a scandal knocked them out of the list. Charles Lu and Jenny Qian of Luckin Coffee, one of the fastest-growing companies in the last three years, lost out after a transaction fraud worth more than USD300 million led to a fall of 90% in the stock of the NASDAQ-listed Chinese coffee chain. Still, Rupert Hoogewerf concluded that “from what we see as a mega trend, the Chinese economy in the past 20 years has created more wealth than any country in the history of the world. And rolling this forward, if the economy continues to grow at a sustainable GDP percentage, then it’s inevitably going to become a much bigger and more important economy in the world”, the Global Times reports.