(Bloomberg) -- Shen Wenrong, a steel magnate who went from machine repairman to owner of one of China’s largest private companies, has died. He was 78.

He died on Sunday after an unspecified illness, according to a notice posted on the company’s website. 

Board chairman of Jiangsu Shagang Group Co., Shen was a rare entrepreneurial success story in China’s steel industry, largely dominated by state-owned behemoths. His fortune tracked the economy’s own, surging as urbanization took hold and the country went through the most remarkable growth spurt in history.

By last year, the company he created ranked as the world’s sixth-largest producer, according to the World Steel Association, churning out 40.5 million tons of steel. 

Born in 1946, Shen got his first job as a fitter at a local cotton ginning factory in his hometown of Zhangjiagang, near Shanghai. By the mid-1980s he was managing an affiliated steel-rolling workshop, built to help repair and maintain the cotton equipment. A type of collectively owned enterprise jointly held by local villagers, it was eventually taken private, with Shen as one of the shareholders.

His timing was fortuitous. China was opening up thanks to market reforms and the province of Jiangsu was embracing a housing construction boom, including in rural areas and demand for parts was high. By the end of the 1980s, Shagang was China’s largest steel window frame producer, according to the company website.

It eventually expanded to begin producing steel bars for construction, before moving into higher-end output in the mid-1990s, later amplified with the purchase of a Dusseldorf steel mill from ThyssenKrupp AG, Germany’s biggest steelmaker in 2001.

By the end of 2002, Shen and hundreds of his workers had dismantled the plant — a year ahead of the schedule that he had agreed with ThyssenKrupp, and a full two years faster than the German company had initially estimated the job would take — before bringing everything from oxygen converters to blast furnaces some 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) to the mouth of the Yangtze River, where they were reassembled.

There, in his second-hand factory, Shen started to produce and sell automobile-grade steel for Volkswagen AG’s Chinese joint venture.

A series of acquisitions followed, raising Shagang’s annual production to close to 30 million tons and expanding its profitable reinforced steel business as China’s property surge continued. 

Shen was early to spot the unsustainable nature of China’s real estate boom demand and resulting steel oversupply, but not all his efforts to continue reshaping Shagang succeeded. Last year, a $2 billion effort to take a majority stake in Nanjing Iron and Steel Co, floundered. Holder Fosun International Ltd., owned by billionaire Guo Guangchang, sold the shares in the parent company to state-owned Citic Ltd instead.

Shen, a veteran member of the Communist Party, was known among his employees for eschewing the trappings of wealth and sticking to a spartan lifestyle — and for expecting the same of his staff. Into his 70s, he got up at 5 o’clock in the morning to check operations before greeting employees at the entrance as they arrived, according to some of his staff and business associates.

When he made it into a list of China’s richest people in early 2000, Shen brushed the news aside. To friends, he joked that he had only made it onto a “capitalist blacklist”.

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