Behind him were Zhong Shanshan, owner of the beverage company Nongfu Spring which topped the list in 2021; Ma Huateng, the boss of the tech giant Tencent and its popular app WeChat; and Zhang Yiming, the founder of Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok.
Born in 1980 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Huang was a maths genius in his teens and later worked at Google China.
In 2015, he founded the e-commerce portal Pinduoduo, which became one of the most famous in China, competing with Alibaba.
The app lured consumers with huge discounts and a wide range of products, sometimes offering surprisingly low prices in a fiercely competitive market.
Its international version, Temu, was launched in 2022 in the United States, where it gained a loyal customer base with ultra-cheap products produced and shipped from China. It was later also implemented in Europe and Latin America.
Its success has coincided with high inflation that has prompted cost-conscious consumers to seek out discounts.
Although it only arrived in Europe a year ago, Temu claims to already have around 75 million monthly active users in the region.
But its success has been accompanied by accusations of unfair trade practices and poor product safety standards.
This year, consumer groups in Europe accused Temu of manipulating shoppers into spending more money by distorting their ability to make “free and informed decisions.”
