Asian women are amassing their business clout, joining the world's elite ultra-rich club with their billionaire numbers witnessing phenomenal growth in the past two decades.

A report by Swiss Bank UBS and accountancy giant PricewaterhouseCoopers says it is Asia's female entrepreneurs who are fueling the robust growth as the number of women billionaires globally soared nearly sevenfold to 145 last year.

The study found that female billionaires have outpaced their male peers in both their ranks and wealth which are growing at faster rates.

In 1995, the number of female billionaires worldwide was just 22.

However, the global billionaires' club is still very much dominated by men, whose number remains far larger at 1,202, although it has grown by a relatively smaller factor of 5.2.

Amid the region's fast-growing and young economies, Asia's female billionaires are blazing the trail with their number jumping more than eightfold - from just three to 25 in 2014 over the past 10 years.

Female billionaires in Asia make up almost a fifth of the population of the world's richest women, and are generally younger than their international counterparts.

While the wealth of their US and European counterparts tends to be mostly multi-generational, more than half of Asia's female billionaires are self-made entrepreneurs with an average age of 53. Some of them were educated in Europe or the US before returning home and implementing Western business practices, which complement local business traditions.

And a staggering 96 percent of female billionaires in Asia are breaking the mould, being active wealth creators for their family businesses, compared with 57 percent in the US and 63 percent in Europe.

The report notes that the ascent of Asia's female entrepreneurs "tells the story of how women have played a part in the region's economic rise".

In Hong Kong, about 30 percent of the ultra-high net worth (UHNW) individuals with investable assets of more than $50 million are female, and the number has been going up steadily, said Francis Liu, regional market manager of UBS Wealth Management.

Among UBS' top 50 female UHNW clients in Hong Kong, about 10 percent are self-made, and 10 percent of them have passed on their businesses to their daughters, he said.

The report concluded that the concept of "once a billionaire, always a billionaire" does not hold true. The hard fact is that only 126 out of 289 billionaires, or 40 percent, counted in 1995, have managed to hold on today, speaking volumes about how fleeting billionaires' wealth can be.

sophia@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 12/16/2015 page8)