As we all know, there is a man who has recently become the richest man in China. He is Zhong Shanshan, the founder of Nongfu Spring.
Zhong Shanshan used to be a reporter of Zhejiang Daily. Today, let's talk about his story:
You may not have heard of Zhong, but you must have drunk Nongfu Spring, and you are familiar with the advertising slogans of "Nongfu Spring is a little sweet" and "we don't produce water, we are just porters of nature".
As a leading domestic enterprise of packaged drinking water, Zhong Shanshan held 84.41% of the shares through his company after listing. It is worth mentioning that before he sent Nongfu to the market, Zhong had already gained an A-share listed company.
In April 2020, Wantai bio was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, with an issue price of 8.75 yuan and a fund raising of 381.5 million yuan. According to the calculation, Zhong's shareholding in Wantai bio is as high as 75.15%. It can be seen that the market value of Zhong's shareholding in Nongfu Spring and Wantai bio is more than 256.7 billion yuan.
Although Zhong is a super rich businessman, he seldom appears in public, mysterious and low-key. He even has a nickname - "lone wolf", rebellious and conceited.
In this regard, Zhong once said: "I'm a loner. I don't care what my peers are doing or thinking."
This arrogant and unassuming personality may be related to his early experience.
In his childhood, Zhong was forced to drop out of school. Later, he was sent to a bricklayer's house to do small work, and later turned to work as a carpenter.
In 1977, the year when the national college entrance examination was resumed, Zhong failed in the examination.
After that, Zhong went to the provincial capital. At first, he managed infrastructure in the Provincial Federation of literary and art circles. Then he went to work for Jiangnan magazine and Zhejiang Daily successively. He worked as a reporter for Zhejiang daily for five years.
Then he left the newspaper and started the Pacific Post, but he lost all his money.
After Zhong's failure in growing Lentinus edodes, he thought of the entrepreneur Zong Qinghou he interviewed. In 1991, Zhong became the general distributor of Wahaha oral liquid in Hainan and Guangxi provinces.
However, due to Zhong's "collusion" behavior, he sold Wahaha oral liquid from Hainan at a low price to Zhanjiang, Guangdong at a high price to earn a difference. Of course, this also made Zong Qinghou very angry, and the two people were very unhappy.
In October 1993, after leaving Wahaha, Zhong took inspiration from health preserving soup and established Yangshengtang Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. in Hainan.
As soon as "Yangshengtang turtle pill" product was launched, the market reaction was good, which made Hainan Yangshengtang take a place in many health care products brands rising in the 1990s, and also made zhong the first bucket of gold in the real sense.
Starting with health care products, whether the capital empire Zhong created today has the original sin of cunning can only be judged by those consumers who used to.
In the following 20 years, Yangshengtang successively launched more than 10 brands and products such as "Nongfu Spring", "Duo Er", "qingzui", "mother beef stick" and "happy growth".
It's hard to imagine that many brands and marketing ideas, including "Yangshengtang" and "Nongfu Spring", were created by Zhong.
From 2012 to 2019, Nongfu Spring has maintained the leading position in China's packaged drinking water market share for eight consecutive years. In terms of sales volume of packaged drinking water, Nongfu Spring is the second largest packaged drinking water enterprise in the world.
Nongfu Spring's market share of packaged drinking water in China has reached 20.9%, and its retail volume is more than 1.5 times that of the second largest enterprise. In addition, Nongfu Spring is one of the most profitable enterprises in China's soft drink industry.
