Cai was married to Chinese billionaire Wu Yajun, chairman of Longfor. Cai owns about one-quarter of the Beijing-based company, which builds and manages residential and commercial property projects and had revenue of 223.4 billion ($34.6 billion) yuan in 2021. The couple split their ownership when they divorced in 2012.
Cai Kui's net worth of $5.30B can buy ...
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The majority of Cai's wealth is derived from a stake in Longfor Group, a Beijing-based property developer. Cai was married to Chinese billionaire and Longfor Chairman Wu Yajun until their divorce in 2012, when they split a jointly held 75.6% stake. Wu took 45.4% and Cai 30.2%. After stake sales in 2016 and 2019, he now holds 23% of the firm, according to the 2021 annual report. Cai holds his Longfor shares through a family trust.
The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.
Shao Yuqun, a spokeswoman for Longfor, declined to comment on the net worth calculation.
Cai was born in January 1963 in Chongqing, China's largest municipality. In 1992, he married his future business partner Wu Yajun, who is also from Chongqing, quitting his job at a state-owned airplane maker in Chengdu to start a trading company in their hometown. Wu left her job working as a journalist for a real estate newspaper a year later.
The couple encountered a series of problems when they bought their first apartment, an 80-square-meter (861 square feet) flat in Chongqing. The closing was delayed for a year, natural gas wasn't available, the lighting was poor and the elevator service hours were limited. The experience led them to open a business that would build better homes in China, and in 1994 they founded the predecessor of Longfor Group.
Longfor sold its first residential project in 1997 for $157 per square meter, more than double the average household income in China at the time. Since then, Wu, its chairman, has expanded Longfor into more than 50 cities and moved its headquarters to Beijing. The company raised $1 billion in a 2009 initial public offering in Hong Kong.
They divorced in 2012, and Cai took about 40% of Longfor shares the couple used to own together, leaving his executive role at the property developer.