Background
Huang was born in 1969. Huang Guangyu comes from Shantou, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Huang’s is a classic Chinese rags-to-riches story.
光裕 黄
Huang was born in 1969. Huang Guangyu comes from Shantou, a city in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Huang’s is a classic Chinese rags-to-riches story.
Huang Guangyu was educted locally.
At age 16, with just a ninth-grade education, he quit school and tried to do business in Mongolia along with his older brother Huang Junqing. After one year of operation, the brothers decided to switch from clothing to consumer and entertainment electronics because they foresaw that an increasing level of income would likely be matched by an increasing demand for household appliances. Their prediction was right on target, and with $500 in seed capital and indefatigable drive, the young and entrepreneurial Huang set up a roadside stall in Beijing in 1986 to sell radios and gadgets purchased from factories near his home town in southern China. In a few years, household appliances and consumer electronics rose to the top of the shopping list for many Chinese families, and the Huang brothers’ business quickly developed.
The brothers went their separate ways in business after 1993. While the older brother founded a new venture called Towercrest Group and tried to get a stake in the real estate market, Huang Guangyu built up the retail store chain GOME. Huang Guangyu opened his first retail store in Tianjin outside Beijing, and started an interlinked business strategy all over China. Since then, GOME has expanded into other large Chinese cities and gained the awareness and acceptance of Chinese consumers. After transferring 65 percent of the shares of GOME Appliance Co. Ltd to a company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and after renaming the company as GOME Electrical Appliance Holding Ltd, shares in GOME have been traded on the Hong Kong stock exchange since 2004.
Marketing its business strategy as ‘Business Opportunities for Mutual Prosperity’, GOME has become the biggest department store chain for electronic devices in China. In 2006 Guangyu started a strategic alliance with Warburg Pincus and merged with Yongle, the third largest department store chain for electronic devices in China and hence a strong competitor of GOME. At the end of 2006, GOME had 587 stores in more than 160 cities.
More recently, Huang Guangyu began to expand into the real estate business, found- ing another venture in 2002, the China Eagle Group. In August 2007, GOME Group announced the extension of its clothing stores and real estate business. China Eagle Group invested RMB3.8 billion to build up an international fashion center, a bold move that reflects Huang’s new business model in China. The fashion center encompasses 600 000 square meters, which includes 330 000 square meters for wholesale clothing, 120 000 square meters for traditional retail stores, 36 000 square meters for offices, and 5000 square meters for a hotel. Huang’s ambition was ‘making GOME one of the 500 largest companies in the world by 2008’. For many, he has already succeeded in many ways. In 2006, Huang Guangyu was ranked number one on the Forbes list of the richest Chinese nationals with an estimated fortune of about RMB18 billion (US$2.3 billion).
