Background
Xu Rongmao was born in Shishi, in the coastal Fujian Province just northeast of Guangdong and directly west of Taiwan, Xu shares the rags-to-riches story of many of China’s new real estate moguls.
荣茂 许
Xu Rongmao was born in Shishi, in the coastal Fujian Province just northeast of Guangdong and directly west of Taiwan, Xu shares the rags-to-riches story of many of China’s new real estate moguls.
As the son of a machine worker and a doctor, and the eldest of eight children, he graduated from high school during the Cultural Revolution and was sent to the country to work as a laborer and barefoot doctor.
Later he migrated to Hong Kong to work in a textile factory, where it is said that he made a fortune in stock trading. In the early to mid-1980s, he continued trading Hong Kong shares and began investing in textile factories. Xu returned to China and exported textiles, predominantly to the United States, before investing US$1.2 million into a knitting factory in his hometown of Shishi in 1988. This was his first major step into the realm of real estate, and the construction of this so-called ‘knitting factory’ would later be recognized as that of a hotel building. The entire construction process of the ‘factory’ followed the specifications of hotel standards and design. As soon as construction was completed, government policy changed, allowing investment in private hotels. Thus Xu Rongmao became the first private owner of a three-star hotel in China.
Xu has focused strongly on areas of great business opportunity, leaving for Australia in the 1990s, when opportunities in Fujian died down, to take lucrative risks in the Australian real estate market. From there he moved towards the Beijing and Shanghai markets, and having made valuable friendships with high-ranking government officials throughout his career, acquired inexpensive land and began creating new building designs and pre-selling apartments to fund their construction. From this point on, Xu focused his efforts through the Shimao Property Group towards luxury properties, most notably restoring an area of dilapidated buildings to a massive high-end riverfront apartment complex in the Pudong district of Shanghai.
Xu is chairman of the Shimao Group, an investment holding company engaged principally in property development through its subsidiaries. The group has two publicly listed companies: Shimao Property (0813.HKG) and Shimao Stock (600823.SHG). In June 2007, Shimao Property Holdings Limited employed around 3300 people and the group recorded revenues for the six months ended 30 June 2007 of US$322.2 million. With the opening of Shimao Property Group’s Hyatt on the Bund in June 2007, Xu’s company became the industry leader in the five-star hotel market in terms of total number of hotel rooms. Xu has stated that the company’s goal is to increase their portfolio of five-star hotels to ten by 2010 and he expected the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 World Expo to continue to provide opportunities in the Chinese hotel industry. In addition, in 2007 the company had another 25 projects in various stages of completion across the country.
Xu is extensively involved in various committees including political organizations and is a member of the National Committee of the 10th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a member of the Standing Committee of Fujian Political Consultative Conference.