A couple from Jiangsu saw their wealth skyrocket by 112 billion yuan in just one year, surpassing Jack Ma and Li Ka-shing.

On October 27, Hurun Research Institute released the *2026 Hurun China Rich List*. Chen Jianhua and Fan Hongwei, founders of Hengli Group, with a fortune of 302 billion yuan, broke into the top 10 of the China rich list for the first time, ranking sixth.

This ranking is quite staggering. Right behind them are Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, Ding Lei, founder of NetEase, Jack Ma, and Li Ka-shing and his sons.

In the past year, the couple's wealth increased by 112 billion yuan, a 59% rise, equivalent to an average daily growth of over 300 million yuan.

Different from a large number of AI and internet billionaires, Chen Jianhua and his wife made their fortune from textile, petrochemical and shipbuilding industries.

Their wealth story can even be traced back to two bankrupt factories.

In 1994, 23-year-old Chen Jianhua invested 3.69 million yuan to buy a near-bankrupt weaving mill in Suzhou. 28 years later, he spent another 1.729 billion yuan to take over a shipbuilding base that had been abandoned for many years in Dalian.

The two transactions are 28 years apart.

Today, the couple not only owns a Fortune Global 500 enterprise with annual revenue exceeding 100 billion US dollars, but also controls two A-share listed companies, Hengli Petrochemical and Songfa Co., Ltd.

From a small factory with only 27 employees to a net worth of 302 billion yuan, this is a manufacturing entrepreneurship history spanning more than 30 years.

01 At the age of 23, bought a bankrupt factory with 3.69 million yuan

Chen Jianhua's first bucket of gold came from silk.

In 1971, Chen Jianhua was born in Wujiang, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. This is a famous hometown of silk in China, and many local families make a living by sericulture and weaving.

Chen Jianhua left school very early. Before he turned 14, he started to work in the silk industry and accumulated his initial wealth by purchasing and reselling waste silk.

The opportunity that truly changed his fate came in 1994.

That year, 23-year-old Chen Jianhua heard that a collective weaving mill in his hometown Nanma Town was facing operational difficulties and was ready for sale.

The factory was not worth much. 104 silk looms, 8 winders, 35 twisters and 4 doubling machines were its main assets, and the whole factory had only 27 employees.

But Chen Jianhua was attracted by the opportunity.

According to public information from the Jiangsu Provincial Federation of Industry and Commerce, the town was initially unwilling to sell the factory to a private owner, especially since Chen Jianhua was only a young man in his 20s.

After several rounds of negotiations, he finally convinced the other party.

To raise the acquisition fund, Chen Jianhua and his wife Fan Hongwei used up all their savings and raised money from various sources, and bought the near-bankrupt factory at a price of 3.69 million yuan.

The couple's entrepreneurial story thus began.

Chen Jianhua was responsible for enterprise development and major investments, while Fan Hongwei was in charge of production and operation for a long time. The two did not stay in the original small factory mode, but continuously introduced equipment and expanded production scale.

As the business grew bigger, a problem emerged.

Textile enterprises need a large amount of chemical fiber raw materials, but they could not control the price of raw materials. When upstream prices rose, the profit of downstream weaving mills would be compressed.

Chen Jianhua decided to produce raw materials by himself.

In 2002, Jiangsu Hengli Chemical Fiber Co., Ltd. was established. Hengli began to extend its business from weaving to upstream chemical fiber sector.

After that, the enterprise expanded more and more boldly.

From chemical fiber to polyester, from polyester to PTA (Pure Terephthalic Acid), and then from PTA to upstream oil refining.

Around 2010, Hengli began to plan large-scale petrochemical projects. Later, Chen Jianhua invested in building a refining and chemical integration project with an annual production capacity of 20 million tons in Changxing Island, Dalian, Liaoning.

It was a rare huge industrial investment among Chinese private enterprises at that time.

In an interview, Chen Jianhua recalled that the construction conditions on Changxing Island were extremely tough at the beginning, with no electricity, no water, and even no mobile phone signal. To push forward the project, he lived and ate on the construction site for four consecutive years.

What he wanted to do was to open up the entire industrial chain from oil refining to polyester, chemical fiber and textile.

This meant that an enterprise that originally made money from weaving began to enter the petrochemical industry, which has extremely high capital and technical thresholds.

Hengli Group expanded rapidly as a result.

On the 2026 Fortune Global 500 list, Hengli Group ranked 78th in the world with an operating revenue of 125.085 billion US dollars, even higher than Huawei.

An enterprise that started from a township weaving mill in Suzhou has grown into a world-class industrial giant.

However, Chen Jianhua is obviously not satisfied with this.

02 Bought a bankrupt shipyard with 1.7 billion yuan and built a listed giant

Chen Jianhua's second big bet took place in 2022.

This year, he set his sights on an abandoned shipbuilding base on Changxing Island, Dalian.

This factory originally belonged to South Korea's STX Group. In 2006, STX built a shipbuilding and offshore heavy industry base in Dalian, trying to seize the boom cycle of the global shipbuilding industry.

However, as the global shipbuilding industry fell into a downturn, the enterprise's operation continued to deteriorate. In 2015, STX Dalian entered bankruptcy liquidation.

After that, the huge shipyard was abandoned for seven years.

The factory area was overgrown with weeds, part of the road surface subsided, and a large number of expensive production equipment was left idle for a long time. Such a huge asset failed to find buyers after many auctions.

But Chen Jianhua saw the opportunity.

Hengli's refining and chemical base is located on Changxing Island, less than 20 kilometers away from this abandoned shipyard. For Hengli, which already has a huge petrochemical industrial chain, shipbuilding is not completely irrelevant to its existing business.

On July 8, 2022, Hengli Heavy Industry, which was established only seven days ago, took a group of bankrupt assets of 13 companies under STX Dalian at a price of 1.729 billion yuan.

The liquidation appraisal value of this batch of assets previously reached 4.348 billion yuan.

Spending 1.7 billion yuan to buy a large shipbuilding base was just the beginning.

After taking over, Hengli invested a large amount of funds to repair factories and equipment, re-introduce shipbuilding talents, and build new production facilities.

It only took 150 days for the shipyard that had been dormant for many years to restore production conditions.

But the bigger problem was: who would dare to place orders to an enterprise that had just reopened and had no shipbuilding track record?

Chen Jianhua's solution was to place orders for himself first.

Hengli built ships first, and proved its production capacity through actual delivery. In 2024, two 61,000-ton bulk carriers were launched one after another.

It just so happened that the global shipbuilding industry ushered in a new round of boom cycle at this time.

International shipping companies began to renew their old ships in a concentrated manner. At the same time, global shipyards had undergone large-scale clearance in the previous downturn, and the production capacity that could quickly take a large number of new orders was not sufficient.

Hengli Heavy Industry seized the window period.

In 2025, Hengli Heavy Industry received 115 new ship orders. In 2026, the order growth further accelerated.

In the first half of this year alone, Hengli Heavy Industry received 207 new ship orders, exceeding the total number of orders for the whole year of 2025, covering container ships, oil tankers, bulk carriers and liquid ammonia carriers.

As of public reports in October 2026, Hengli Heavy Industry has received more than 500 orders in total, and some delivery plans are scheduled to 2030.

More critically, the shipbuilding business has entered the capital market.

In 2025, Hengli Group injected its shipbuilding assets into the listed company Songfa Co., Ltd. (603268.SH), which originally engaged in ceramic business, through major asset restructuring.

A ceramic listed company was thus transformed into a shipbuilding enterprise.

The effect was soon reflected in the financial report.

In the first three quarters of 2026, Songfa Co., Ltd. achieved an operating revenue of 37.774 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 221.25%; the net profit attributable to shareholders was 6.673 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 424.87%.

In just over three years, the near-abandoned bankrupt shipyard has become a new profit growth point for Hengli Group.

From a 3.69 million yuan textile mill to a 1.729 billion yuan shipbuilding base, Chen Jianhua has bet twice on industrial assets that were not favored by the market.

The difference is that the first bet caught the expansion of China's textile industry, and the second one caught up with the recovery of the global shipbuilding industry.

03 Got 112 billion yuan richer in a year, where did the money come from?

Why did the wealth of Chen Jianhua and his wife suddenly increase by 112 billion yuan this year?

The answer is not just shipbuilding orders.

Hurun Research Institute pointed out that the simultaneous development of Hengli Group's chemical fiber, refining and chemical, and shipbuilding businesses, and the sharp rise in the market value of its listed subsidiaries, are important reasons for the couple's wealth growth.

Among them, the performance recovery of Hengli Petrochemical is particularly obvious.

In the first three quarters of 2026, Hengli Petrochemical achieved an operating revenue of 151.075 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 4.01%; the net profit attributable to shareholders was 10.256 billion yuan, a year-on-year surge of 104.20%.

This means that revenue slipped slightly, but profit doubled.

Behind this is the improvement of supply and demand in the industrial chain such as refining and PTA, and the repair of processing price difference, which drives the profitability of enterprises to rise.

At the same time, the shipbuilding business of Songfa Co., Ltd. has entered the stage of delivery and profit release.

The two listed companies, one operating petrochemical business and the other operating shipbuilding business, have become important pillars of Hengli's wealth map.

But it must be noted that 302 billion yuan is the wealth estimated by Hurun Research Institute based on assets such as equity, which does not mean that Chen Jianhua and his wife hold 302 billion yuan in cash.

Moreover, heavy asset business does not only have a glamorous side.

As of the end of September 2026, Hengli Petrochemical had total assets of about 266.3 billion yuan, total liabilities of about 191.4 billion yuan, and the asset-liability ratio reached 71.88%.

The company still needs to bear huge capital expenditure, financing cost and the risk of industry cycle fluctuation.

International politics also brings new uncertainty.

In May this year, Reuters reported that the refining business under Hengli Petrochemical was sanctioned by the United States on the accusation of purchasing Iranian oil. Hengli denied the relevant procurement accusation, but part of its international trade business has been affected.

For such an enterprise deeply involved in the global energy and shipping market, changes in the international trade environment may affect raw material procurement, overseas cooperation and future investment.

The same is true for the shipbuilding business.

Global ship orders are very hot today, but shipbuilding is a business with obvious periodicity. It usually takes one year or even longer for a large merchant ship from signing to delivery.

More and more orders also mean that enterprises must invest a lot of funds to expand production capacity, and bear risks such as raw material prices, exchange rates, and delivery progress.

This is also an important difference between Hengli and internet companies.

Internet enterprises can often achieve rapid expansion relying on software and user scale, but every penny Hengli earns is inseparable from real factories, equipment, workers and capital investment.

From this perspective, the wealth story of Chen Jianhua and his wife reflects a change in China's billionaire circle.

In the past, people paid more attention to the huge wealth created by the internet and real estate industries. In recent years, new energy, semiconductors and AI have become new wealth creation centers.

However, Hengli has proved that traditional industries such as textile, chemical and shipbuilding can also generate wealth at the level of hundreds of billions of yuan.

Especially in the shipbuilding industry, when global orders flow back to China, enterprises with sufficient production capacity, capital and delivery capabilities will have the opportunity to obtain new profits.

In 1994, when 23-year-old Chen Jianhua bought that weaving mill, he could hardly imagine that 32 years later, he would own an industrial empire spanning petrochemical and shipbuilding sectors.

From 3.69 million yuan to 302 billion yuan, the scale of wealth is completely different from the past.

But Chen Jianhua's business choices over the past 30 years have one thing in common: he dares to buy factories that others are unwilling to take over, and then invest funds to expand them.

However, the other side of this model is also clear — every huge investment means betting on bigger chips.

For Chen Jianhua and his wife, who have ranked sixth on the China rich list, the next test is not how many more factories they can buy, but how to make these huge investments continuously converted into profits.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Pencil News" (ID: pencilnews), the author is Pencil News, and 36Kr publishes it with authorization.