At 23, Wang Qicheng always wore a shirt, a pair of glasses, and kept his hair short and neat at work, hoping to make himself look older and more trustworthy to his clients.

Twelve years later and looking relaxed in his office in Hangzhou, Wang, 35, is dressed in a black casual T-shirt and black slacks, as he recounts how he built a vast fortune at such a young age.

Now the owner of a conglomerate of nearly 70 wholly or partly controlled companies, including a listed firm with a market value of 10 billion yuan (HK$12.2 billion), Wang talks engagingly about being the youngest self-made billionaire in the A-share market.

What began as a university graduate start-up specialising in intelligent building engineering, Hakim Unique Group expanded rapidly into other areas – some related, some not – including internet finance, media, and health care through buying shares in companies or acquiring them outright.

“I like meeting new challenges,” Wang said, explaining why he dabbled in unfamiliar fields. Despite their disparate features, he believes the firms in his empire benefit each other, forming an “ecosystem”.

Through intelligent building projects such as door control systems and free public Wi-fi, Hakim, the company Wang built from scratch, amassed a large database of users, who became potential targets of the group’s newly established internet finance services.

Unique Media – the group’s other flagship firm led by Wang’s wife, Wu Yan, and which includes Hong Kong film director Peter Chan as an investor – supplies Hakim-made intelligent devices with entertainment content.

It also serves as an in-house advertising agency for other firms in the group, 12 of which have an annual net profit of more than 100 million yuan. Wang says he was raised in an “ordinary” family and both his parents were civil servants in Hangzhou, the provincial capital of Zhejiang. The only information he volunteers is his parents had to borrow from relatives to buy a government-subsidised flat that cost only 30,000 yuan when he was young.

His parents’ financial straits inspired him to start up his own business, Wang said. He attributes his confidence and success to an ability to sniff out trends and take prompt action.

“Just like Lei Jun [founder of mobile phonemaker Xiaomi] said, even a pig can fly when it stands in a whirlwind. We were standing in the whirlwind,” he said of Hakim’s early years.

Wang had his first taste of business as an intern in Supcon, an intelligent-building solutions provider, before graduating from Zhejiang University in 2003. Wang said the projects whetted his appetite for entrepreneurship.

According to standard practice at the time, a 30 per cent advance payment was required as soon as a contract was signed, meaning the contractor received a decent sum of money before work even began.

The projects Wang worked on typically involved laying cables – usually the lowest cost component of the projects – for the first six to 12 months. Installing more expensive electronic equipment for access control, parking systems and so on, came at a later stage.

Not only were large expenses delayed, the prices of specialist equipment would often drop – sometimes substantially – before it needed to be installed, generating more profits.

There were also no official qualifications in this sector at that time, Wang recalled.

“You could compete for projects as long as you knew how to write a bid,” he said. “So I thought that it was a good opportunity for a start-up.”

Offering a well-packaged bid at below market price, Wang and his partner – a young colleague who jumped ship from Supcon – won their first contract, worth 5 million yuan. From this they pocketed a 40 per cent profit.

“It was during the construction boom, of which we were just a small part. But ours was the most profitable part, even more lucrative than decoration. We rose against this backdrop,” Wang said.

Unlike today, when young start-up entrepreneurs are highly respected and enjoy support from a central government eager to foster entrepreneurs, Wang had to play down the fact that he was a new university graduate when he started out.

“I even asked an older friend to be my company’s legal representative, because people wouldn’t trust a company led by a man at his 20s,” Wang said.

In 2010, Hakim floated rumours about going public. “We didn’t really mean it,” Wang said. “We just wanted to boost staff morale.”

But the government took it seriously. The finance department of Hangzhou’s Xiacheng  district, where his company was registered, visited Hakim with a group of accountants and lawyers, hoping to add it to the district’s embarrassingly short list of listed companies – two, in total – whereas in Binjiang  district had more than 100.

With 100 projects already on their books and having bought its own office building, Hakim was assessed as a good quality corporate offer.

“By our efforts – and luck, of course – we became the first listed company controlled by a person born in the 1980s,” Wang said.

After Hakim went public in 2012, he handed over the day-to-day reins to his wife so he could concentrate on building the corporation through acquisitions and investments.

But competition has become fiercer, and despite its experience and professionalism in the sector, Hakim has lost some of its edge as rule changes opened up bids to less-qualified competition.

“We’d been in business for 10 years and needed to transform,” Wang said.

Comparing himself to the first private entrepreneurs on the mainland in the late 1970s – such as property developer Wang Jianlin  and Alibaba founder Jack Ma Yun  – he said the key to his achievements today is being sensitive to opportunities.

He also saw himself as a man of action. “One can never succeed without a strong ability to act decisively. For example, we often come up big ideas at night, but the next day when we wake up, we might think what if we lose? So we drop the idea.”

As head of a conglomerate, Wang has became more media-friendly. His name has appeared more frequently in the media in recent years, from local newspapers such as the Qianjiang Evening News  to Forbes magazine.

“It’s not like engineering. People in the investment and internet business world need to know who I am,” he said candidly。

来源：South China Morning Post (南华早报）