Another 177 wealthy individuals have emerged in Shenzhen, each with a net worth of over 5 billion yuan.

The city with the largest number of billionaires in China has a new top-ranked name.

On October 27, Hurun Research Institute released the 2026 Hurun China Rich List. With 177 entrepreneurs on the list, Shenzhen overtook Shanghai and Beijing for the first time, ranking first nationwide.

Shanghai has 161 listed entrepreneurs, and Beijing has 140. Over the past year, Shenzhen added 30 new entrepreneurs to the list, making it the city with the largest growth in the number of billionaires across the country.

The threshold for this list is 5 billion RMB. In other words, Shenzhen is home to 177 entrepreneurs and their families with a net worth of more than 5 billion RMB.

What is more noteworthy is where their wealth comes from.

In the past, when people mentioned Shenzhen's billionaires, the first names that came to mind were Ma Huateng of Tencent, Wang Chuanfu of BYD, and Wang Wei of SF Express. But looking at this year's list, a number of new names are emerging.

Wang Zhiyong, founder of HKC that manufactures display panels, has a net worth of 64.5 billion RMB and made his debut on the list; Cai Huabo, founder of Longsys that produces memory chips, saw his wealth surge 256% to 61 billion RMB; 35-year-old Liu Jingkang of Insta360, which sells panoramic cameras all over the world, also made it to the list; Zhou Jian, founder of UBTECH that develops humanoid robots, is also among the ranks of the wealthy.

There are no fancy business models. The businesses of this group of wealthy people are closely related to chips, panels, memory and intelligent hardware.

Why is Shenzhen so capable of creating wealth?

- 01 - A new group of 10-billion-level billionaires has emerged in Shenzhen

The most eye-catching new billionaire in Shenzhen this year is 56-year-old Wang Zhiyong.

In 2001, he founded HKC in Shenzhen, initially engaged in display-related trade. More than 20 years later, the enterprise has become a global giant in liquid crystal panels.

On June 26, 2026, HKC Co., Ltd. was listed on the Main Board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. With an issue price of 10.12 yuan, the closing price on the first day of listing reached 42 yuan, an increase of 315%, and the total market value exceeded 300 billion yuan in one fell swoop.

The business of this company is not complicated to describe: it manufactures display panels for TVs, computers and mobile phones.

But this is a typical asset-heavy industry. A high-generation liquid crystal panel production line often requires tens of billions of yuan in investment. If any link of technology, capital and yield rate fails, the investment may be swallowed up.

It took Wang Zhiyong more than 20 years to turn a display trading enterprise into a member of the global first echelon.

Calculated by shipment area, HKC's TV panel business ranked third in the world in 2024, and the shipment area of 85-inch LCD TV panels ranked first in the world. In 2025, the company achieved operating revenue of 40.897 billion yuan, and the net profit attributable to shareholders was 3.801 billion yuan.

On this year's Hurun List, Wang Zhiyong made his debut on the list for the first time, with a wealth of 64.5 billion yuan, becoming the third largest newly listed billionaire in the country.

Another winner is Cai Huabo, founder of Longsys.

In 1999, Longsys was established in Shenzhen. It started with memory technology services, and later entered the fields of memory product R&D, brand operation and packaging testing.

In 2017, Longsys acquired the international memory brand Lexar; in 2022, the company was listed on the ChiNext Market; later, it expanded its overseas manufacturing and packaging testing layout through acquisitions.

This wave of AI has brought new opportunities to the memory industry.

AI servers require memory with larger capacity and higher bandwidth, and suppliers invest more resources in high-profit products, which changes the supply and demand pattern of the entire memory market.

In the third quarter of 2026, Longsys achieved operating revenue of 14.63 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 123.74%; the net profit attributable to shareholders was 3.745 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 436.60%.

The company's performance growth is also reflected in the founder's wealth.

Cai Huabo's net worth reached 61 billion yuan this year, an increase of 256% over last year.

Also benefiting from the memory market trend is Shenzhen-based company Demeili. The wealth of founders Li Hu and Tian Hua couple has nearly tripled compared with last year.

The two companies have one thing in common: they did not create a brand new consumer demand out of thin air, but gradually extended to high value-added links in the existing huge electronic industry chain.

This is exactly an important path for Shenzhen to create wealth.

- 02 - Why Shenzhen?

What makes Shenzhen truly remarkable is not that it has several super-rich people, but that it can continuously cultivate new entrepreneurs.

Huawei was founded in 1987, BYD in 1995, Tencent in 1998, and DJI in 2006.

These companies did not start from the same point, but eventually grew into globally important technology enterprises in Shenzhen.

There is a common business logic behind this: in Shenzhen, entrepreneurs can not only find customers, but also find almost the entire supply chain needed to produce products.

Take Huaqiang North as an example.

It gathers electronic component suppliers, solution providers, traders and various service enterprises. After the entrepreneurial team completes the design, they can find molds, PCBs, batteries, motors, structural parts and assembly factories around the Pearl River Delta industrial cluster.

Financial media once specifically discussed this speed advantage in special reports on Shenzhen's technology industry: the mature electronic manufacturing network allows entrepreneurs to quickly turn ideas into prototypes and then move to the production stage.

Shenzhen is not just a place with laboratories, nor just a place with factories. It integrates R&D, procurement, manufacturing and the market together.

This is crucial for hardware entrepreneurs.

When developing a new product, what really costs money is often not just technical R&D, but also the process of continuous trial and error, design modification, supplier search and formation of stable mass production capacity.

Shenzhen's huge industrial network reduces the time cost and coordination cost of some entrepreneurial activities.

Data can illustrate the scale of this industrial agglomeration.

According to the relevant data of Shenzhen's economic and social development in 2025, the city has more than 4.65 million business entities, more than 26,000 national high-tech enterprises, and 1333 national-level specialized and sophisticated "little giant" enterprises, ranking first among all cities in China.

Shenzhen's R&D investment in 2024 reached 245.31 billion yuan, accounting for 6.67% of GDP, of which enterprise R&D investment accounted for more than 93%.

There is a noteworthy detail here: Shenzhen's R&D investment mainly comes from enterprises.

This means that a large number of R&D activities are not purely centered on papers or scientific research projects, but directly face customer needs, product iteration and commercial competition.

At the same time, Shenzhen is not an isolated manufacturing base.

Dongguan provides huge electronic manufacturing capacity, Huizhou gathers the electronic information and new energy industries, Foshan has the industrial foundation of home appliances and mechanical equipment, and Guangzhou has resources in automobile manufacturing, scientific research and commerce.

The Pearl River Delta industrial network formed by these cities allows Shenzhen to play roles in R&D, product definition, capital operation and global sales.

Large technology enterprises provide talents and markets for this system.

Communication and chip talents trained by Huawei, battery and auto parts suppliers driven by BYD, and UAV and robotics technical talents cultivated by DJI may all become the foundation of the next generation of start-ups.

Today's entrepreneurs in Shenzhen have the opportunity to become suppliers of tomorrow's giants, and may also become their competitors.

From this perspective, Shenzhen's greatest wealth is not 177 billionaires, but the industrial network that supports their emergence.

- 03 - The next group of billionaires will emerge from here again

Shenzhen's wealth map is changing.

In the past, the Internet, real estate and consumer electronics were important sources of wealth creation. Today, semiconductors, AI hardware, robots and advanced manufacturing are creating new wealth.

The added value of Shenzhen's strategic emerging industries in 2025 reached 1.67 trillion yuan, accounting for 43% of GDP.

These figures mean that hard technology is no longer an ornament of the urban economy, but an important pillar.

What is more interesting is that the new round of opportunities does not necessarily all belong to the most dazzling end brands.

Large AI models require computing power, computing power requires servers, and servers require chips, memory, power supplies, cooling equipment and high-speed connections.

The same is true for robots. Behind a single robot is a huge supply chain of motors, reducers, sensors, control chips, structural parts and batteries.

Entrepreneurs do not necessarily have to create the next DJI or BYD.

As long as they can gain technical advantages in key components and enter the supply chain of leading enterprises, they can also build an enterprise with a scale of tens of billions or hundreds of billions of yuan.

The wealth growth of Longsys and Demeili provides such an observation sample.

However, the wealth list also has another side.

Although HKC has received much attention in the capital market, by the end of 2025, the company's total liabilities reached 63.428 billion yuan. The display panel industry requires huge investment, and technological upgrading and price cycles are always accompanied by operational risks.

The memory industry is also cyclical. The product price increase and profit growth in 2026 cannot guarantee that the same level will be maintained every year in the future.

More importantly, the wealth calculated by Hurun is mainly based on equity value and company valuation. The rise in stock prices can quickly create 10-billion-level billionaires, and the fall can also cause wealth to shrink significantly.

Therefore, the addition of 30 new listed entrepreneurs in Shenzhen this year not only reflects industrial development, but also benefits from changes in the valuation of technology stocks.

But one thing is more certain.

Shenzhen has proved that wealth can not only be created through Internet platforms, real estate and financial transactions. Manufacturing a screen, a memory chip, or a set of control systems can also build enterprises with a value of tens of billions or hundreds of billions of yuan.

In 2026, Shenzhen topped the list of Chinese cities with the most billionaires for the first time.

What deserves more attention than these 177 billionaires are the entrepreneurs who have not yet made the list.

They may be developing chips in an office in Nanshan, debugging equipment in a factory in Bao'an, or looking for the first batch of parts needed for new products in Huaqiang North.

The next 10-billion-level billionaire may be among them.

This article does not constitute any investment advice.

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