The world's population of billionaires has become more female over the past two decades, while holding onto a fortune remains tough in the face of inevitable forces of tax, death and business uncertainty, a study shows.

Female billionaires have grown in number at a faster pace than men over the past 20 years while Asian women have seen their ranks grow particularly rapidly, according to a report by UBS and PricewaterhouseCoopers that also shows how billionaires in general have prospered at a faster pace than the global economy.

However, while Asia has seen the quickest pace of growth in the number of female billionaires, 80 per cent of such women come from the US and Europe, the study, issued yesterday, showed.

More than half of Asian female billionaires are self-made, compared to 19 per cent in the US and only 7 per cent in Europe. In total, the number of female billionaires expanded 6.6 times to 145 in the two decades from 1995, while the number of male billionaires rose 5.2 times to 1,202.

The Billionaires Insights report was drawn from a survey of 1,300 people in 14 markets, accounting for 75 per cent of global billionaire wealth.

With a number of wealth managers viewing the Asia-Pacific market as one in which they hope to prosper, a picture of fast-expanding numbers of the region's female super-rich will focus minds of firms on seeking to connect with this population. The number of Asia’s female billionaires has grown 8.3 times over the past 10 years, from just three such persons in 2005 to 25, according to the report. “Admittedly, this rise is from a very small base but it tells the story of how women have played a part in Asia’s economic rise,” the report said.

One possible conclusion for the wealth industry is that as the ranks of billionaires expand in regions such as Asia, so will demand for structures such as family offices, which is still a relatively young sector in the region. This publication asked UBS about this point.

“We are seeing exponential growth in Asia in family offices...many are coming to us for help,” said Josef Stadler, group managing director, global head of ultra high net worth at UBS. In China, for example, about one new billionaire is created each week – around 50 to 60 persons a year, he said. “There is big demand to engineer family offices services,” he said.

It is a mistake, however, to assume that the younger Asian market is less up-to-date with how to operate family offices. “You have some of the most sophisticated family offices sitting in Asia, from Singapore and Hong Kong,” Stadler said.

Globally, UBS has bank accounts for 55 per cent of the world’s billionaires and about three-quarters of Asian billionaires have an account with UBS (typically, such persons will have a number of accounts with different firms), he continued. 

Seeking to explain the change in fortunes of women, the report said 52 per cent of Asia's female billionaires are first-generation entrepreneurs and tend to be younger than their female peers in other parts of the world. They have an average age of 53 in Asia, which compares with 59 in the US and Europe.

“As cultural norms change, women who have inherited wealth on the death of their husbands, or daughters who have succeeded their fathers, are becoming increasingly assertive. We discovered that women inheriting business empires from their husbands or fathers are far more likely than their male counterparts to take the initiative, stepping into the patriarch’s shoes and often driving expansion to the next level,” the report said.

And in comments which resonate with some political concerns about allegedly rising inequalities, the report states that the wealth of billionaires of both sexes rose almost eightfold, from $700 billion in 1995 to $5.4 trillion in 2014, while global GDP almost trebled to more than $77 trillion over the same period. However, a point to consider is that a large chunk of billionaires in 1995 were no longer in that bracket 20 years later, showing how volatile financial fortunes can be. Of the billionaires monitored in 1995, fewer than half were still on the list in 2014, as taxes, death, dilution and business failures took their toll. From 1995’s class of 289 billionaires, 66 have died, 24 fortunes have been dissipated through family dilution, and a further 73 have disappeared because of business failures and other factors. 

The report examined the “core” population of billionaires who have survived the attrition of time, tax, death and business dramas, saying the wealth of “core constituents” multiplied 3.8 times over the past 20 years, versus a GDP expansion rate of 2.5 times.

This “exceptional” class of billionaires has done well particularly in the consumer and retail, technology and financial services sectors, which in total account for almost two-thirds of wealth. Regionally, real estate is more of a “sweet spot” for billionaires, while industrials are more important, relatively, for Europe-based billionaires.

When asked why there was no discrete Middle East region as a category in the report, UBS told this publication that for the purposes of the study, the region was folded into the “Asian” category.