Wang Jian
Chinese entrepreneur who built the high-spending HNA Group
WANG JIAN, who has died aged 57 after an accident in France, was the billionaire chairman of HNA Group, a privately owned conglomerate that was described as “China’s most aggressive dealmaker”.
Wang Jian and his business partner, Chen Feng, were former civil aviation officials who teamed up to start a regional airline and went on to build one of China’s most expansive business groups, with assets at home and abroad amounting to some $230 billion. Wang’s reputation was that of a hands-on manager, while the older Chen – described as “a Buddhist with a taste for luxury cars” – was the better-known face of HNA. Each was believed to own 15 per cent of the group.
In recent years they had embarked on a debt-driven $50 billion spending spree that provoked criticism – and exemplified the riskier aspects of China’s emergence in the international business scene. Overseas, HNA became the largest shareholder in Deutsche Bank, with a stake of 9.9 per cent; it bought 25 per cent of Hilton Worldwide and a similar stake in a Spanish hotels group, while its international aviation arm, including the luggagehandler Swissport, had one of the world’s largest aircraft rental fleets.
Partners in the US included the former Florida governor Jeb Bush, with whom HNA co-invested in a shipping business, but an attempt to buy Skybridge Capital, a hedge fund founded by the former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci, was abandoned after difficulties with US regulators.
Likewise, New Zealand authorities blocked HNA’S $460 million acquisition of a vehicle finance business from a local bank; and a $200 million deal to buy an Australian logistics company fell through because of funding problems.
In China, HNA was heavily involved in peerto-peer lending platforms and real estate. Attention focused on its practice of borrowing against existing assets to fund new ones – known in Chinese as “a snake swallowing an elephant” – and its accumulation of some
$19 billion of offshore debt.
In the last year, pressure from the Chinese authorities, concerned about “irrational” investment by overborrowed companies, forced HNA to turn itself from buyer to seller: development sites in Hong Kong and part of the Deutsche Bank stake were sold off, and HNA staff were warned of 100,000 job cuts ahead.
Wang Jian was born in the northern coastal city of Tianjin in 1961. He graduated from China’s Civil Aviation University in Tianjin in 1983, began his working life with the country’s civil aviation authority, and was seconded for training with Japan Airlines. He later took an MBA at Maastricht School of Management.
From 1989 Wang was involved with Chen Feng in the foundation of Hainan Airlines, shortly after the tropical island of Hainan became a “special economic zone” and a place where free-market experiments were encouraged. Launched with support from the World Bank, their venture became China’s first shareholder-owned airline, attracting investment from the Hungarian-american billionaire George Soros.
After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Hainan Airlines had to be recapitalised by the provincial government, but Chen and Wang went on in 2000 to create HNA, which acquired several other regional carriers and Hainan’s main airport. In due course they regrouped their aviation interests into a separate holding company as HNA diversified.
The structure and ownership of their interests is said to be impenetrable but Wang Jian was reported to have accumulated a fortune of $1.7 billion. Taking a break from a business trip to France to visit the provençale hilltop village of Bonnieux, he was posing for photographs when he slipped off a wall on to rocks below. The authorities do not suspect foul play.
Wang Jian, born 1961, died July 3 2018