Haitian Flavoring's vice chair Cheng Xue is the wealthiest professional manager in China, with assets of 65 billion yuan ($10 billion). Tencent president Martin Lau Chi-ping and Eric Jing Xiandong, CEO of Alibaba's Ant Group, came in second and third place, as Hurun Research Institute released its China Richest Professional Managers 2021 list yesterday, the first of its kind.

Executives of soy sauce maker Haitian Flavoring, internet giant Tencent, e-commerce titan Alibaba, dairy firm Yili, hotpot chain Haidilao and electrical appliance maker Midea swept the top 10 spots on the list.

China has 900 million working-age people aged between 16 and 59, the report said, pointing out the wealth threshold for this ranking is 4 billion yuan. The top 50 professional managers, including 11 female executives, have an average age of 50, and served at their current companies for 17 years on average.

"We hope that this list can make professional managers understand creating value for their companies can bring wealth to themselves as well; and let entrepreneurs understand a better inventive mechanism can create larger value for the companies," said Rupert Hoogewerf, or Hu Run, chairman of Hurun Report.

The 50 most successful professional managers came from 24 enterprises, all listed as Hurun's top 500 companies in China. Of these, 11 ranked in Hurun's world top 500 firms, he added.

"There are two paths to success as a professional manager: One is to join a startup team after graduation and expand one's own wealth with the enterprise, such as Yang Lijuan of Haidilao," Hoogewerf said. Yang joined Haidilao as a waitress in 1994, and is the chief operating officer of the hotpot chain with 12.5 billion yuan in wealth now. Aged 42, she is also the youngest executive on the list.

"The other path is to gather experience at a Fortune 500 company, and then join a quick-growing company, like Alibaba's CEO Daniel Zhang Yong," Hoogewerf said.

"China's female professional managers are very successful," said Hoogewerf, noting one-fifth of the top 50 professional managers in China are female, higher than the 15 percent self-made female entrepreneurs on another list from Hurun.

Very few current professional managers are able to make wealth reaching the 4 billion yuan threshold, Hoogewerf said. "The most successful professional managers around the world are Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Google's Eric Schmidt."