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CNN
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Zong Qinghou, the rags-to-riches founding father of one among China’s greatest beverage makers, has died.
The self-made billionaire, who was as soon as China’s richest man, died of an sickness on Sunday on the age of 79, his firm Hangzhou Wahaha Group stated in a brief statement, with out offering additional particulars.
In China, Zong was generally known as a legendary businessman who grew his mushy drinks empire from a tricycle cart hawking ice pops to high school children right into a conglomerate promoting every little thing from milk drinks to bottled water and canned porridge.
Zong was additionally hailed as a nationwide hero for wrestling full management of Wahaha, which implies “laughing little one,” from its French associate Danone greater than a decade in the past. Victory in that bitter battle boosted Zong’s wealth to $8 billion, making him China’s richest man in 2010 and once more in 2012, in response to Forbes.
His dying was mourned throughout China. Condolences poured in from outstanding Chinese language entrepreneurs together with Alibaba (BABA) co-founder Jack Ma and Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun. Wahaha staff and residents within the japanese metropolis of Hangzhou laid flowers exterior the corporate.
Zong is survived by his spouse and his daughter, Zong Fuli, who has lengthy been groomed as his successor.
The beverage tycoon’s rise got here to embody the can-do spirit of China’s first technology of personal entrepreneurs, who helped propel the nation’s explosive financial development within the years after it moved away from Chairman Mao Zedong’s class wrestle to embrace market reforms within the late Nineteen Seventies.
Regardless of his wealth, Zong was recognized for his frugal life-style, which set him other than lots of China’s new wealthy. He was nicknamed “the richest man in material footwear” for all the time sporting plain black footwear, full with a darkish jacket and slacks.
In an interview with the state-run Individuals’s Each day in 2010, Zong stated the title had introduced little change to his life.
“Every single day, I nonetheless smoke two packs of cigarettes that price 12 yuan (then $1.80) every, have two cups of tea, and eat my three meals on the firm canteen,” he stated.
He was recognized for beginning work round 7 am and never leaving the workplace till 11 pm, working for greater than 12 hours a day lengthy earlier than the grueling “996” work schedule grew to become commonplace. 996 refers to working 9 am to 9pm, six days per week.
Born in 1945 in wartime China, Zong grew up desperately poor in Hangzhou and infrequently went hungry. His father was unemployed, and his mom supported the household of 5 kids on a month-to-month wage of 40 yuan as a manufacturing facility employee, he said in an oral historical past guide marking 40 years of China’s financial reforms.
“Due to the hardship, as I little one I had many desires and hoped to make huge cash to repay my dad and mom,” he stated.
Because the eldest little one, Zong left faculty after junior excessive to assist his household and spent greater than a decade doing odd jobs, together with onerous handbook labor at a distant state-owned farm throughout Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when thousands and thousands of younger city Chinese language had been despatched to the countryside to “endure re-education by poor peasants.”
In 1978, the yr Deng Xiaoping ushered in China’s financial reforms, Zong returned to Hangzhou and spent the following decade working as a salesman, generally touring to the southern metropolis of Guangzhou for commerce festivals.
“My solely dream at the moment was to have my very own firm and do what I wished to do, and I had been searching for such a chance,” he stated within the oral historical past guide.
The chance lastly got here in 1987. Zong, 42, borrowed 140,000 yuan (then about $38,000) to arrange his personal retail firm, promoting ice pops and stationery to college students at a close-by elementary faculty.
The corporate, which employed solely two retired academics and offered ice pops for a penny every, would later turn out to be Wahaha, which is privately owned.
Throughout his door-to-door gross sales, Zong discovered that many kids had been choosy eaters and suffered from various levels of malnutrition, which was an enormous headache for fogeys. Recognizing a possible alternative, he partnered with a professor of vitamin to invent a vitamin drink for youngsters, referred to as Wahaha Oral Liquid.
The product proved an enormous hit, boasting almost 100 million yuan (about $19 million on the time) in annual gross sales within the third yr of its launch. That yr, Zong based the Hangzhou Wahaha Group after buying a failing state-run canned meals manufacturing facility.
By 1996, Wahaha had expanded its merchandise to take advantage of drinks, carbonated drinks and bottled water, and Zong got here up with a long-term marketing strategy that required funding price a whole lot of thousands and thousands of yuan.
Securing a mortgage of this dimension from state-owned banks was troublesome on the time, and Zong turned to international capital, in response to the 2010 profile of Zong within the Individuals’s Each day.
Wahaha partnered with Danone, which acquired a controlling 51% stake within the joint ventures.
However the partnership soured in 2007, when Danone publicly accused Wahaha of creating and promoting Wahaha-branded drinks exterior their joint ventures and reducing the French firm out of the earnings.
Zong accused Danone of orchestrating a “hostile takeover” and attempting to purchase out Wahaha’s stake at a low worth.
The feud escalated right into a high-profile authorized battle that made into the agenda of a gathering between then Chinese language and French presidents in Beijing, in response to Chinese language media reviews on the time.
The dispute was ultimately settled in 2009, with Danone selling its stake for about $500 million and ceding all management to Wahaha.
Zong later described the authorized battle as a “stunning self-defense counterstrike to defend the dignity and pursuits of a nationwide enterprise.”