"There were three roads for me," he said. "Go to school, be a soldier or find your own way to survive." Studying was expensive, Huang said, and the army didn't want a scrappy kid like him.
So at age 16, he and his brother set out for Inner Mongolia, traveling for days by train in search of opportunities 1,400 miles north. They hawked radios and small electrical goods. But the pair lasted only a few months, Huang said. With a little more than $100, they headed for Beijing's bright lights.
When Huang and his brother arrived here in 1986, Mao Tse-tung had been dead for 10 years and China's embrace of capitalism was taking shape. People were permitted to start businesses, incomes rose and consumers were demanding refrigerators and washing machines.
"Coming to Beijing was a turning point in my life," Huang said excitedly.
The brothers rented a stall near Tiananmen Square. With no money to buy goods, Huang stacked empty television boxes inside to make their stall look full, said Liu Hongyan, author of a biography of Huang. When shoppers ordered an item, Huang ran out and bought it from another merchant, hauling it back in a three-wheel cycle to sell it at a profit.
Analysts say that some 17 years later, Huang would use the same cunning to catapult Gome to the top of China's $60-billion retail industry. After Huang established a chain of 120 stores, he chose about 90 of Gome's most profitable outlets to be listed in a company traded on the Hong Kong stock market. He kept the 30 laggards private so outsiders saw only the rosy side of Gome, according to Wang Jizhou, an analyst with Alliance Investment Consulting in Beijing.
"It was like Huang had two bottles -- one with wine, the other with water -- but investors believed both of the bottles were full of wine," Wang said.
With about $400 million from the listing and $150 million from U.S. private equity firm Warburg Pincus, Huang has more than doubled the number of stores in the last two years to about 460 in 131 cities. His workforce is 100,000 strong.
Often likened here to Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, Huang aims to drive sales by offering the lowest price. He cuts out the middlemen and negotiates directly with emerging manufacturers like appliance maker Haier, buying large volumes of merchandise and slashing retail prices so deeply that rivals have trouble competing.
