While scores of billionaires have seen their net worth eroded amid the Covid-19 virus outbreak, Singapore's richest person has added some $3.5 billion to his fortune this year.
Li Xiting, chairman of Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics, is among the top five gainers in the world, and his fortunes sit at $12.5 billion as of April 2, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The Shenzhen-based medical equipment manufacturer he founded in 1991 supplies ventilators – life-saving devices that are seeing a worldwide shortage due to the pandemic. Since the start of the outbreak, shares in the firm have climbed 40 percent.
The firm has a market cap of $44 billion, and has 17 subsidiaries in China and operations in 30 countries. Its products also include health monitoring systems, defibrillators, anesthesia machines and infusion systems.
Self-Made Billionaire
According to «Bloomberg,» Li was born in 1951 in Anhui province, China. He graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China with a bachelors degree in physics and worked as a researcher at institutes in China and France between 1976 to 1987, before working at a medical equipment firm in Shenzhen for four years.
He started Mindray in 1991 with Xu Hang and Cheng Minghe, which was publicly traded in New York in 2006. Li and a consortium took the company private about 10 years later, and in 2018 relisted it on the Shenzhen stock exchange.
It is not known when he was granted Singapore citizenship. According to Mindray's contact page, the firm does not operate in the city-state.
Cases Worldwide Top 1 Million
As of Friday, more than 1 million people worldwide have been infected with the Covid-19 virus, with the United States leading with more than 250,000 cases. The death toll stands at more than 52,000 in over 170 countries worldwide.
