Chinese Billionaire Guo Guangchang Buys Like Buffett

Twice a week in the winter of 1987, students living in the No. 5 dormitory of Shanghai’s Fudan University would hear a familiar knock close to midnight. A slight, bespectacled philosophy major was making his rounds selling bread door-to-door. The student, Guo Guangchang , earned about 30 yuan ($4.80) a month to help support himself through college. “I had a government subsidy then, but living costs were high,” he says.

Guo has plenty of dough these days. Chairman of Fosun Group, an investment company with assets of $48 billion, he’s China’s eighth-richest person, with a personal fortune estimated at $5.7 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In contrast to state-owned companies that typically buy resources such as mines and oil fields to supply the country’s burgeoning economy, Guo, 47, looks overseas for brands, technology, and financial assets that cater to the nation’s growing ranks of the affluent. “Our focus going forward is on sectors where the life of China’s middle class can be upgraded: health, travel, leisure, education, and the Internet,” he says. “We call it marrying China’s growth with global resources.”