Wuliangye puts 150 million yuan into "brewing" batteries. Can this baijiu giant's high-stakes gamble in the solid-state battery track win?
Wuliangye makes a cross-border bet on all-solid-state batteries, with its core business under pressure facing transformation tests.
Energy Insight learned that on September 1, 2026, Academician Ouyang Minggao held the "Huayi Qingchuang - Puhua New Materials Silicon-Carbon Anode Product Launch Conference" at the Yibin World Power Battery Conference. Seated in the audience were the mayor of Yibin, as well as a group of practitioners in the lithium battery industry.
The protagonist of this launch event is a company registered only one month ago, Yibin Puhua New Materials Technology Co., Ltd., with a registered capital of 150 million yuan. In the shareholder list of Puhua New Materials, Wuliangye-related entities hold a total of 60% of the shares. A liquor enterprise, during the in-depth adjustment period of the industry, invested 150 million yuan to bet on all-solid-state batteries right at its home base.
Just one month ago, Wuliangye welcomed its new chairman Deng Min, a veteran who has worked at Tianyuan Co., Ltd. for nearly 30 years and witnessed the transformation from traditional chemical industry to new energy. Wuliangye's 2025 annual report shows that the annual operating revenue was 40.529 billion yuan, down 54.55% year on year, and the net profit was 8.954 billion yuan, down 71.89% year on year.
The core business is losing momentum, the new leader is in place, and the solid-state battery project is launched. The combination of these three events points to a clear signal: this liquor giant is upgrading its new energy layout from "financial investment" to "industrial bet".
01
Deng Min, a Cross-border Veteran
Can He Solve Wuliangye's Fundamental Problems?
On June 8, 2026, Deng Min resigned as chairman of Tianyuan Co., Ltd. On the same day, Wuliangye announced that it had nominated him as a candidate for non-independent director. 18 days later, he was officially elected chairman. Before that, the position of Wuliangye's chairman had been vacant for nearly four months. The former chairman Zeng Congqin was investigated in February, which shocked the whole industry.
There is no trace of liquor in Deng Min's resume. The 56-year-old, a native of Hejiang, Sichuan, started his career as a technician at Yibin Tianyuan Chemical Plant, and worked his way up to the chairman of Tianyuan Co., Ltd. Tianyuan Co., Ltd. takes chlor-alkali chemical industry as its main body and extends to lithium battery materials and polymer materials, and Deng Min is exactly the operator of this transformation. In 2025, Tianyuan Co., Ltd. turned losses into profits, with a net profit of 87.7825 million yuan; its attributable net profit in the first quarter of 2026 surged by 573.52% year on year.
A person who understands chemical engineering, new energy, and the Yibin state-owned assets system has been transferred to take the helm of a listed liquor company. The logic makes sense: what Wuliangye needs is no longer a conservative in the liquor industry, but an executor who can promote cross-border transformation.
However, the problem is that the business logic of liquor and lithium battery is vastly different. The liquor industry relies on brands, channels and consumer minds, while lithium battery materials rely on technology, cost and supply chain efficiency. Deng Min's transformation experience at Tianyuan Co., Ltd. is valuable, but that was extending to lithium battery materials based on the foundation of a chemical enterprise, with a natural connection in the industrial chain. Wuliangye's leap from liquor to battery materials is far greater. A liquor seller has to manage a production line spanning from distiller's grains carbonization to silicon-carbon anode and then to all-solid-state cells, with knowledge barriers of more than one industry in between.
The more tricky issue is time. The 2025 annual report, whose operating revenue was revised down by more than 30 billion yuan under "accounting error correction", has fully exposed Wuliangye's operating pressure. There is no sign of a V-shaped reversal in the core liquor business in the short term, while the new energy business requires a long cycle of R&D and capacity ramp-up. Therefore, what Deng Min is facing is not a multiple-choice question of "whether to transform", but a survival question of "whether the transformation can be completed in time".
02
The Double-edged Sword of Yibin
The Complete Industrial Chain Is an Advantage, But May Also Become an Innovation Trap
The settlement of Puhua New Materials in Nanxi District, Yibin, is no accident. The industrial changes of this city over the past seven years have provided almost the only soil for this cross-border move.
After CATL settled in 2019, Yibin's power battery industry started from scratch and quickly became the largest industry in the city. In 2025, Yibin's power battery output reached 176GWh, accounting for 16% of the national total and 11% of the global total. CATL has built 10 factories in Yibin with a production capacity of 270GWh. Centered on this core leading enterprise, Yibin has introduced more than 120 projects, building a complete industrial chain covering materials, cells and recycling. In 2025, the total output value of Yibin's entire power battery industrial chain exceeded 124.5 billion yuan.
As the largest municipal state-owned enterprise in Yibin, Wuliangye is deeply bound to the economic destiny of the city. When Yibin takes the power battery industry as the core starting point of urban transformation, Wuliangye's participation in some form is not only a commercial decision, but also an extension of the city's strategy.
The existence of Academician Ouyang Minggao's workstation provides technical endorsement. In September 2020, Ouyang Minggao settled his only domestic workstation in Yibin. Over the past six years, more than 400 intellectual property rights have been applied for, and 25 enterprises incubated from scientific and technological achievements transformation have been established. Huayi Qingchuang is exactly one of them. Its original "one-step" silicon-carbon anode preparation process consumes only one tenth of the energy of the traditional graphitization process. The second largest shareholder of Puhua New Materials is Huayi Qingchuang, holding 40% of the shares.
But every coin has two sides.
Yibin's power battery industry is highly dependent on CATL, the single "core leading enterprise". The 300GWh capacity plan and the 124.5 billion yuan output value are mostly developed around CATL's demands. This "single-core driven" model is an advantage in the industrial growth period, but once the leading enterprise adjusts its procurement strategy or technical route, the living space of supporting enterprises may be sharply compressed.
Puhua New Materials produces silicon-carbon anodes targeting all-solid-state batteries, which theoretically can avoid direct competition with the existing graphite anode system. However, all-solid-state batteries are far from commercialization, which means that Puhua New Materials' products lack large-scale orders for a very long period of time, with neither stable procurement from CATL nor clear commitments from other major customers.
Yibin's industrial ecology gives Wuliangye the possibility of "nearby supporting", but also makes this project bear excessively high expectations. The local government hopes Wuliangye will participate in the new energy industry, CATL hopes the local supply chain will be more complete, and the academician workstation hopes the technological achievements can be industrialized, and the demands of all parties are placed on this new company with a registered capital of 150 million yuan.
03
Turning Distiller's Grains into Anode Materials
The Story Sounds Great, But Can It Be Commercially Viable?
The most eye-catching product at this launch event is a porous carbon material converted from distiller's grains.
Yang Min, Chairman of Huayi Qingchuang and General Manager of Puhua New Materials, introduced in detail that this product uses distiller's grains, a by-product of liquor brewing, as raw material, and is prepared through biological fermentation pore-forming and low-temperature catalysis processes. It has the properties of high electrical conductivity, high particle strength and high specific surface area, which can effectively buffer the volume expansion of silicon during charge and discharge. Its cost is lower than that of mainstream coconut shell-based products, while realizing the recycling of solid waste.
The clever part of this story is that it turns Wuliangye's most troublesome by-product (distiller's grains) into the precursor of lithium battery materials, turning "cross-border" into "industrial chain extension". The logic is perfectly closed: liquor production generates distiller's grains, distiller's grains are turned into porous carbon, porous carbon is made into silicon-carbon anode, and the anode is installed into all-solid-state batteries.
However, between a beautiful story and a profitable business, there is the threshold of mass production.
The "Qichen" series all-solid-state batteries released at the same time have an energy density exceeding 400Wh/kg, and a thermal runaway threshold exceeding 400℃. The specific capacity of the lithium sulfide cathode exceeds 1000mAh/g, the specific capacity of the silicon-carbon anode exceeds 2500mAh/g, and the cycle life exceeds 1500 times. These figures are indeed impressive at the laboratory level.
But the industrialization dilemma of all-solid-state batteries is a consensus in the industry. The industry generally believes that all-solid-state batteries are still far from large-scale mass production. Ouyang Minggao himself also stated at the 2026 World Power Battery Conference that all-solid-state battery technology is extremely difficult, and technological breakthroughs and industrialization are highly dependent on the empowerment of AI R&D platforms.
In other words, the "Qichen" series at the launch event is still a laboratory product at present. From the laboratory to the pilot production line, and then to the GWh-level production line, every step is a capital black hole. Wuliangye's 150 million yuan of registered capital may be enough at the material R&D stage, but it is far from enough to support the all-solid-state batteries to be truly commercialized — the industry generally expects small-batch production to be realized in 2027-2028.
Back to Wuliangye, its previous cross-border experience is not optimistic. In 2018, it acquired 51% equity of Kaiyi Auto for 2.494 billion yuan, and later invested billions of yuan to build factories, but Kaiyi Auto's sales were bleak, and its models received mediocre responses. The lesson from that cross-border attempt is that having capital does not mean you can do a good job in manufacturing, and capital cannot replace technology accumulation and industrial cognition.
This time, Wuliangye's choice is more focused: it does not make complete vehicles, but focuses on materials; it does not start R&D from scratch, but binds the technical team of the academician workstation; it does not expand nationwide, but takes root in Yibin's industrial ecology. The strategy is much more pragmatic than when it entered the automobile manufacturing industry. However, the commercialization cycle of all-solid-state batteries may be longer than Wuliangye's management expected. How long the cash flow from the core liquor business can last is an unavoidable problem.
A liquor seller turns distiller's grains into battery materials, and turns liquor brewing by-products into a new energy story. This story won applause at the launch event. But after the applause, there is a long mass production ramp-up process, continuous capital investment, and the inherent uncertainty of the all-solid-state battery industry.
Wuliangye has calculated more smartly in this cross-border move than when it entered automobile manufacturing, but the bet is no smaller at all.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Energy Insight", written by Wang Mengjiao, and published with authorization from 36Kr.