Beijing takes over New York City as billionaire capital of the world

China's capital Beijing has taken over the Big Apple, New York City, as home to the most number of billionaires, according to a Shanghai firm, Hurun. Hurun publishes a monthly magazine showing rankings of the world's richest people.

According to the statistics, nearly 95 to 100 billionaires are presently residing in Beijing despite the tumbling Chinese stock market. The founder of Hurun, Rupert Hoogewerf, believes the growing wealth can be attributed to the wealth of new initial public offerings, which were previously held back for several years.

Hoogewerf said he made the wealth calculations following 15 January when the Chinese market tumbled. If the calculations were made at the peak of the market during the summer 2015, the number of Chinese billionaires would total 150, according to Hoogewerf.

Second in the list still remains NYC followed by Moscow with 66 billionaires, Hong Kong with 64 and Shanghai with 50, said Hurun. "What we showed today is that at the super-wealth creation level, the Chinese are now leading," said Hoogewerf, reported Yahoo News. "People will look at China the same way that people looked at Stanford or Silicon Valley in the 1990s."

Amongst the billionaires, include 27-year-old Wang Han who inherited 27% of discount airline Juneyao Airlines from his father in 2004. Despite aviation billionaires being rare in China due to the low returns in the industry, China's growing stock market in 2015 created nearly 75 new billionaires.

Earlier, reports emerged suggesting China has created a million new millionaires with the total private wealth of the Asia-Pacific region surpassing Europe's. According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, the number of millionaires in China rose from three to four million in 2014, fuelled by growing investment in domestic equities.