A former schoolteacher and his sister became billionaires thanks to a business built on the materials that hold together smartphones, electric vehicles, semiconductors, and AI servers.
Translated with AI assistance
While tech giants are pouring billions of dollars into data centers and artificial intelligence, a Chinese family made theirs on a far less glamorous product — adhesive tape. Not the office kind, though. Shares of Crown New Materials Technology surged 787% on their first day of trading in Shenzhen, turning the company’s founder, Michael Mai, and his sister, Mai Huixia, into billionaires (albeit only on paper for now).
The company listed on the Main Board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on November 3, 2026. On the first day, the share price momentarily reached 150.58 yuan, nearly nine times the offering price. Due to the sharp movement, trading was halted twice. At the close, the stock was worth 84.55 yuan, maintaining a gain of almost 398% compared to the IPO price.
According to Forbes estimates, the fortune of 62-year-old Michael Mai reached approximately $2.5 billion following the listing, while that of his 64-year-old sister, Mai Huixia, stood at around $2 billion. This refers to the value of their shareholdings — that is, their «paper» wealth, rather than cash received.
Ma’s story is far from the typical path of a tech billionaire. He worked as an elementary school teacher in Zhongshan, left education in 1984, and from 1985 onward worked at various factories producing industrial materials, including adhesive tape. In 2000, Ma and his sister founded Crown New Materials.
The word «tape,» however, greatly simplifies the company’s business. Crown specializes in industrial and electronic adhesive materials, pressure-sensitive adhesive systems, and functional films used in consumer electronics, automobiles, new energy, home appliances, and wearable devices. The company also manufactures electrically conductive and radio-wave absorbing materials for AI servers and data centers, which are used to protect equipment from electromagnetic interference.
Crown is far from the only example of how the AI boom is creating enormous fortunes out of the most inconspicuous components. Taiwan’s King Slide Works started out in 1986 with furniture hardware and drawer slides, and in 2000 moved on to server rails. Now its metal tracks hold heavy AI servers inside racks and allow them to be pulled out for maintenance. Today, the company controls over 70% of the market for high-end AI server rails, and its capitalization has grown by more than 3000% in less than four years since the launch of ChatGPT — reaching $43 billion. As of the end of August 2026, Bloomberg estimated founder Lin Tsung-chi’s fortune at $19.4 billion.
In other words, you can make billions even on adhesive tape. Or on metal guide rails. The main thing is that an AI server worth hundreds of thousands of dollars can’t do without them.
