Amer is big, much bigger than most Chinese tech companies but the public knows very little about it.
Wang Wenyin, founder and chairman of Amer International Group. Photo from CFP
By GE Zhenwei
In 1992, when WANG Wenyin got a job there as a warehouseman, Shenzhen was still a kind of fishing village, though a fishing village with a lot of construction sites. DENG Xiaoping had already anointed the place as the central petri dish for his economic experiments.
Wang, a poor kid from Anhui Province, went to the embryonic metropolis, found work in a warehouse and soon reckoned he was the best warehouseman in town. It’s hard to imagine that warehousing was once a cottage industry managed by human brains instead of the distant global-heating machines that we call “the cloud.” But, according to Wang, he memorized the locations of thousands of wires and plugs and could locate what was needed within seconds.
Three years later, Wang started the extension cord factory that thirty years later has grown into Amer International Group, the biggest private company in Guangdong Province.
Let’s say that again: “the biggest private company in Guangdong.”
It’s pretty hard to get one’s head around that. Guangdong generates about the same GDP as the state of New York but has roughly ten times the population. So, yes, bigger than Huawei, Tencent, or any other tech giant in the news.
For a Fortune 500 company (68th in 2022) with US$100 million (730 million yuan) in annual sales, Amer is unusual. It never went public. Wang seldom grants interviews. Its website lists metals, high-tech and culture as its three main business areas. Amer makes most of its money from copper, with trading hubs in Geneva, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, and mines around the world.
Although mining and refining are not as lucrative as tech – Amer’s profits were only 6 percent of Tencent’s – volumes are gigantic. The company brings in enough from metals to fund its expansion into finance, real estate and semiconductors, and more recently, precious stones and rosewood, Wang’s “passions” of choice. Amer headquarters is smothered in jade and rosewood. The ground floor has rosewood desks and chairs worth over a billion yuan.
The few highly curated public stories about Wang – myths, essentially – portray him as a rogue genius, rounding up equipment as his competitors were going bankrupt during the Asian financial crisis, and again during the SARS outbreak. But that time, he bought copper mines, right before the commodity boom of the 2000s. The rest, as they say, is history.
Today Amer operates mines in more than 20 countries and owns mining rights to 4 percent of the world’s copper reserves. After 2008, at the nadir of the financial crisis, it acquired copper processing facilities in Europe and North America. Fortune magazine called Wang the “prince” of copper. In a 2014 interview, a cavalier Wang told reporters that he was ready for the next round of mass acquisition. The biggest risk in business, he said, was to not take risks.
Amer started investing in semiconductors in 2011 and now controls 32.5 percent of HiWafer, a chipmaker, but without the same success as in metals. Wang has dabbled in big data, EVs and materials since 2015, but the most investment was in finance and real estate.
Last year, Amer acquired a 14.3 percent stake of Anhui’s Huishang Bank for 16 billion yuan, an egregious overvaluation considering the bank's bad loans, but Wang’s “local” bank. Less than two months later, Amer became the sixth largest shareholder in the Bank of Lanzhou and Wang installed himself as chairman.
More significant is Amer’s hoarding of land. In 2018 Wang’s unclosed deals alone were worth hundreds of billions of yuan and the land grab has continued ever since. As a private company, Amer is not obliged to disclose its financials, but its website boasts “10 square kilometers of commercial development parks and 100 square kilometers of industrial development parks.” It also lists 22 industrial parks in lower-tier cities where local governments will do almost anything to get in bed with a Fortune 500 company. Amer also paid 5 billion yuan (US$700 million) for 1.2 percent of Evergrande. Wang told his executives to “learn from the Evergrande team” in a company newsletter from 2017.
Wang insists that Amer remains a private company. In 2017, he said that he would rather be low-key and participate in the stock market via speculation in equities. Amer probably controls almost 600 companies but isn’t tied to the same disclosure standards as public companies. The sales figures used for the Fortune ranking, are self-reported, i.e. numbers with no basis the company can simply invent.
Wang himself acts exactly like someone with a lot to hide. His carefully choreographed public appearances project the image of a globe-trotting billionaire who lies low and strikes boldly.
What the public knows about him, if anything, is his profuse amateur philosophizing. Wang takes great pride in the hokey inspirational quotes he claims as his own:
Whoever controls supply controls profits.
Whoever controls the upstream controls the market.
Whoever controls scarce resources wins!
In terms of a massively destructive industry like copper mining, it’s not clear how anyone wins except maybe by doing substantially less damage to the environment overseas than competitors.
How did he come to control so many precious resources? The answer lies in more motivating memes:
We stay put when everyone else is greedy;
We are greedy when everyone else retreats.
How does he choose what to acquire? Check the next fortune cookie:
Turning a company around is like plastic surgery.
You only need three cuts to carve the beauty out of a plain face.
If you can’t, don’t buy it.
Amer employees get reading assignments regularly, including some that Wang claims to have written himself, and they are expected to submit reviews and feedback. The reading load increases with seniority. Executives must read 24 set texts each year. Wang himself claims to read a hundred. His favorite? Tao Te Ching, which does not say anywhere at all that:
A great entrepreneur must first be a good philosopher.
