Niu gensheng bio
Niu gensheng bio
Niu gensheng bio and husband...
Niu Gensheng is at the forefront of China’s philanthropy new wave
When he was one month old, Niu Gensheng was worth 50 yuan. He knows, because that was the price he fetched in 1958 when his impoverished parents sold him to a more prosperous family in a neighbouring village in Inner Mongolia.
By the time he was 46, in 2004, Mr Niu’s circumstances and net worth had been transformed.
That year he listed China Mengniu Dairy, the milk company he founded five years earlier, in Hong Kong. Virtually all his proceeds, hundreds of millions of dollars, he immediately put into the Lao Niu Foundation, which is based in Inner Mongolia and works to improve education and the environment in China and beyond.
Today, the adopted son of a rural family consorts with global philanthropists such as Bill Gates, former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Ray Dalio, the founder of hedge fund Bridgewater.
But in 2004, Mr Niu’s act of giving away virtually all the proceeds of a listing was unheard of i