Paper profits

Zhang Yin, one of the world's richest self-made women, is frugal in some people's view.

She never throws away old newspapers, magazines, handouts or used cardboard. After an initial sorting, she sends the wastepaper to her own company. That is a habit for all family members, from her teenage son to her nearly 80-year-old mother.

"Other people saw scrap paper as garbage, but I saw it as a forest of trees," says Zhang, chairman of Nine Dragons Paper (Holdings) Co.

Wastepaper is in fact the foundation of her estimated wealth of $3.4 billion.

Zhang, crowned "queen of wastepaper", was named China's richest person on a list released last October by journalist Rupert Hoogewerf, who before compiled Forbes' rankings. The ranking, known as the 2006 Hurun Report China Rich List, shows that Zhang is wealthier than virtually any other woman in the world, including United States talk show host Oprah Winfrey and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

This is how she turns trash into treasure: She ships several million tons of wastepaper from the US and Europe to China and recycles it into corrugated cardboard, which is then used for boxes that wrap electronics and toys. These products are stamped "Made in China" and often shipped back across the ocean to Western countries. After the boxes are thrown away, the cycle starts all over again.

Nine Dragons, which Zhang founded more than a decade ago, is China's largest packaging manufacturer.

The paper tycoon's career tracks China's economic growth, spurred by the production of consumer goods for export. Chinese companies, which make everything from bicycles to electronics, demand more and more cardboard boxes.

Her success reflects the growing power of women in China's thriving economy. There are 48 Chinese women with fortunes of at least $63 million, according to the Hurun Report.

Zhang's achievements in recycling wastepaper could also encourage the nation's promotion of a resource-efficient society and a sustainable economy, as only 30 percent of China's scrap paper is recycled each year, compared with 70 percent in the US.

Person of action

The first impression Zhang gives most people is that she is not tall and speaks very fast. Her ebullient personality may have helped make her a great saleswoman and a savvy dealmaker.

Many of the world's richest women inherited their wealth. But not Zhang.

She started out from a modest background, the daughter of a military officer. As the eldest of eight children in a poor soldier's family in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, Zhang learned independence at an early age by looking after her brothers and sisters.

"Maybe great resolution and quick reaction is the best gift from my family education," Zhang says.

People around her describe the 49-year-old lady as a person of action.

"That is true," Zhang says. "If I suddenly want to hold a meeting, everybody must be present in less than two hours. People have gradually got used to that."

Zhang grew up in Guangdong Province after her father was sent to the southern province. She started her career by working with some paper trading companies.

"I remember what a man in the business told me back then," she recalls. "He said: 'Waste paper is like a forest. Paper recycles itself, generation after generation'."

Zhang took that memory all the way on her entrepreneurial expedition.

In 1985, she ventured to Hong Kong to work for a Sino-foreign paper trading joint venture that went bust after one year. She decided to stay in Hong Kong and start her own business. With 30,000 yuan she opened a wastepaper-trading company.

After Hong Kong's paper market proved too small for her to build her "kingdom", she moved to Los Angeles in 1990. She married Liu Ming-chung, a dentist who was born in Taiwan, grew up in Brazil and is fluent in English and Portuguese.

Together they founded America Chung Nam (ACN), a wastepaper collecting company. ACN's success came with burgeoning Chinese papermakers' growing reliance on imported wastepaper due to the lack of a professional recycling system in the nation. China's own paper products also have poor quality, often made from grass, bamboo or rice stalks, but most paper made in Europe and the US is derived from wood pulp.

ACN began shipping huge containers of wastepaper back to China and has become the largest US exporter of raw materials for papermaking and the biggest container exporter among all US industries for the past five consecutive years.

In 1996 Zhang returned to China to establish her own paper making company - Nine Dragons Paper - when she identified the huge demand for packaging paper driven by the country's surging exports.

The Chinese market was then dominated by imported wrapping paper. She opened her first packaging paper making facility in Dongguan, a major manufacturing hub in the bustling Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong, and later opened another factory in Taicang, Jiangsu Province in the Yangtze River Delta.

Nine Dragons went public in Hong Kong in March last year and raised nearly $500 million through an initial public offering (IPO). Share prices for the company have since more than quadrupled.

"She always thinks ahead and has a strong long-term vision of where her company should be," says Herman Woo, a senior research analyst at BNP Paribas. Woo has known Zhang for one and a half years after he began preparing the marketing for Nine Dragons' IPO.

"She has strong industry knowledge and so much enthusiasm for her work. This is the quality that good management must have. Enthusiasm, strong vision and quick reaction," Woo adds.

Nine Dragons is still a family company. Zhang, her husband Liu, who serves as chief executive, and her brother Zhang Chengfei, deputy chief executive, together own 72 percent of the stock.

"My husband's Western cultural background is a great complement to the company. We have a mixture of Chinese and Western management," Zhang says.

Zhang's 25-year-old son is studying for a master's degree in finance at Columbia University and works for the company during vacations. She has a second son studying in high school in California.

"I want to make Nine Dragons Paper a 100-year-old business. It is not only a life-long career for me, but a business lasting for generations," Zhang says.

"If my sons cannot prove themselves first, neither one will rise high in the business," she adds.

The mother of two says one of her biggest wish is to spend more time with her two sons.

"But in the world of business, there is no difference between men and women, only winners or losers," Zhang says.

(China Daily 05/14/2007 page12)