Investing in the domestic version of Viagra, Zhou Hongyi has totally hit the jackpot.
In 2026, the most counterintuitive long-term investment in the Hong Kong stock market surprisingly came from Zhou Hongyi.
When people mention Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 Group, most of them first think of the "Red-clad Leader" who frequently speaks out on social platforms, the veteran deeply engaged in cybersecurity, and the industrial tycoon who advocates loudly for the AI large model track. Few people know that he, who is widely regarded as a player deeply involved in VC/PE, industrial investment and personal angel investment and "loves chasing market hot trends", can also settle down to "be friends with time".
Recently, Wansheng Wanshui, a biotech company listed under the Hong Kong Stock Exchange 18A rule, released an interim performance announcement that shocked the market. In the first half of 2026, the company's revenue surged 693.7% year on year, with a gross profit margin as high as 89.4%. The core product driving this explosive performance is Angweida, a Class 1 innovative drug known as the "domestic Viagra". Behind this outstanding financial report, an early investment that had lain dormant for 8 years came to light.
In 2018, Wansheng Wanshui, which was not favored by capital and could not obtain external financing, was mired in a severe predicament. At the critical moment, Shen Jingshan, the founder, made a bold decision to independently develop the "domestic Viagra". Unexpectedly, this decision soon won favor from industrial capital. Zhongcai Qihu suddenly provided 20 million yuan in early-stage funds, which not only saved the company, but also witnessed the birth of the "domestic Viagra". The core participant of Zhongcai Qihu is exactly Zhou Hongyi. Based on the static calculation of Wansheng Wanshui's current market value of about 13 billion Hong Kong dollars, the book return of Zhongcai Qihu has exceeded 15 times. No one expected that Zhou Hongyi would achieve an investment comeback relying on the "domestic Viagra".
I
Zhou Hongyi, who has been actively speaking for AI, the world's biggest market hot trend, has made his most profitable investment on the "domestic Viagra".
This matter is full of "counterintuitive contrast". This investment is a high-return long-term investment since he entered the fields of VC/PE, industrial capital and personal angel investment, which implicitly reflects the "dichotomy" of Zhou Hongyi's investment logic: he chases market hot trends while betting on long-term value.
The story of Wansheng Wanshui dates back to 2013 at Suzhou Industrial Park of Biomedicine. That year, 51-year-old "doctoral supervisor" Shen Jingshan, with entrepreneurial dreams, resigned from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His idea was supported by his wife, who was willing to take out 5 million yuan of savings to support him to start a business. In his first entrepreneurship, Shen Jingshan had no relevant experience and no professional financing team. He invested most of the funds in supporting the scientific research team and purchasing experimental consumables, focusing on developing new small-molecule drugs targeting antiviral and neuropsychiatric fields.
Small-molecule drugs for antiviral and neuropsychiatric indications have very distinct industry attributes: long R&D cycle, continuous capital consumption, and difficulty in generating sales revenue in the short term. This made it difficult for Shen Jingshan's team to obtain support from external VC/PE institutions. From 2013 to 2018, capital in China's primary market for innovative drugs was highly concentrated, with hot money pouring into popular targets such as oncology innovative drugs and vaccines. Such projects had common characteristics for capital: "easy to tell a good story, clear exit path, and are the targets competed for by mainstream domestic institutions."
The situation of Shen Jingshan's team was the opposite. In the 6 years of entrepreneurship, he and the company did not get any external investment, and the initial 5 million yuan of start-up capital was about to be exhausted. The company's R&D expenditure and staff salaries were unsustainable. In fact, there were not no VC/PE institutions that came to conduct due diligence over the 6 years. Many institutions reached a highly consistent conclusion after investigating Wansheng Wanshui: "The cycle is too long, and the commercial prospect is invisible."
He did not gain nothing in these 6 years. Shen Jingshan led the team to continuously accumulate experience in small-molecule drug R&D, maintained the existing product pipelines, and re-examined the domestic pharmaceutical market. He found that "many rigid-demand segmented fields have long been monopolized by overseas original research drugs, and domestic original research is almost blank." The more realistic problem in front of him was: "Should the team disband on the spot, or strive to survive?"
After careful consideration, they decided to survive. Shen Jingshan and his team boldly changed their track and entered the field of original anti-ED drugs. The full name of ED is "male erectile dysfunction". The world's first-generation original anti-ED drug is Pfizer's Viagra (Sildenafil), which is known as the "original Viagra" to the public. Viagra entered the Chinese market in 2000, won the favor of Chinese male consumers, and occupied a dominant position in the anti-ED original drug market.
What Shen Jingshan wanted to do was to break away from the shackles of generic drugs and break the restrictions from the underlying technology.
II
Of course, it is extremely difficult to achieve this goal.
The shackles from foreign-funded pharmaceutical systems are first reflected in the impenetrable patent wall. Pfizer has laid out a huge number of basic patents, derivative patents and administration regimen patents in the field of PDE5 inhibitors, covering molecular scaffolds, target binding modes, crystal forms, preparations and other dimensions.
If you only make minor modifications to the original molecule, you will easily fall into the patent trap. In the past, most domestic pharmaceutical companies preferred to "wait for the patent to expire before developing generic drugs". To "truly get rid of the track set by foreign capital, it is necessary to find a brand-new lead compound from scratch."
In other words, to build a completely independent system. Shen Jingshan's determination to develop original anti-ED drugs came from his research on a patent system that fundamentally avoids the patents of overseas original drugs. He planned to concentrate resources to tackle the R&D of Class 1 innovative anti-ED drugs with brand-new molecular structures. According to the data from the "2026 White Paper on China's Anti-ED Drug Industry", the market size of domestic anti-ED drugs in 2019 was only 4.28 billion yuan. This track was a "niche" market in the entire pharmaceutical industry at that time, and Shen Jingshan's transformation was more like a gamble.
After the direction was set, new problems emerged. The clinical promotion of the R&D of original anti-ED drugs required long-term capital, and Wansheng Wanshui could no longer support the complete clinical R&D process after 6 years of consumption. At the critical moment, industrial capital Zhongcai Qihu provided 20 million yuan of "turnaround" investment. Zhongcai Qihu, also known as Zhongcai Qihu Phase II, has Qihu Zhongcai as its general partner (GP). This GP is jointly established by Zhou Hongyi's Qifei Xiangyi and Zhongcai Financial Control. Qifei Xiangyi plays a dual role in Qihu Zhongcai: on the one hand, it contributes capital as an LP, on the other hand, it holds 40% equity of the GP institution, whose strategy focuses on long-term value investment.
With the 20 million yuan of "life-saving money", Wansheng Wanshui stabilized its cash flow. Then came the long R&D marathon. It was not until 2025 that Angweida, the Class 1 innovative drug known as the "domestic Viagra", was officially approved for marketing. The long waiting process in between was extremely tormenting. It is worth mentioning that shortly after the "domestic Viagra" was approved for marketing, Wansheng Wanshui was listed on the 18A board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
The Hong Kong Stock Exchange 18A is a special listing channel launched in 2018, characterized by "allowing unprofitable and even revenue-free biotech companies to conduct IPOs". Before the launch of the "domestic Viagra", Wansheng Wanshui had "zero revenue for more than 10 years, and persisted entirely with enthusiasm and dreams". In 2026, the admission of Angweida to hospitals accelerated, and its commercialization scale expanded, driving a substantial increase in the company's performance in the 2026 half-year report.
In July, Wansheng Wanshui completed the "full circulation of H shares", and the lock-up period for pre-IPO old shareholders will expire in November 2026. This means that Zhongcai Qihu, one of the biggest winners of Wansheng Wanshui's early investment, will obtain a very generous exit return.
Based on the static calculation of Wansheng Wanshui's current market value of about 13 billion Hong Kong dollars, Zhongcai Qihu holds 4.3702 million shares, accounting for 2.6075% of the total share capital, with a corresponding book market value of about 339 million Hong Kong dollars, equivalent to about 312 million yuan. Compared with the principal of 20 million yuan invested in 2018, the book return has exceeded 15 times. This investment can be regarded as a "god-level" case in Zhou Hongyi's entire capital territory, helping him achieve a great success.
III
The investment in the "domestic Viagra" made Zhou Hongyi achieve huge success in 2026.
It also let the public see his "two sides", or an extremely complex "dichotomy" in his behavior.
This "dichotomy" has long accompanied Zhou Hongyi. For example, he explicitly denies that he chases market hot trends, and positions himself as a person who "identifies the structural opportunities brought by technological changes in advance and lays out the major trends of the future ahead of time". But in the eyes of the public, he is always dancing with the market hot trends.
One of the most representative cases is that in 2014, 360 reached a strategic cooperation with Coolpad, investing more than 400 million US dollars to jointly establish Qiku Mobile. 2014 was the most booming year for cross-border entrepreneurship in the domestic smartphone industry. After Xiaomi Mobile achieved success in 2013, the strongest market hot trend of mobile Internet with smartphones as the entry point formed in China, and people generally believed that whoever controlled the terminal would grasp the traffic.
For a while, Internet practitioners all "crossed borders" to develop mobile phones. Alibaba made a strategic investment in Meizu, and promoted the YunOS operating system, trying to implant Alibaba's ecosystem into mobile terminals. Jia Yueting, the founder of LeEco, who was once called "the biggest swindler in China", went even further, directly putting forward the concept of ecological mobile phones that do not make profits from hardware but from memberships and film and television content, pushing the domestic mobile phone hot trend to a climax.
Zhou Hongyi also noticed the trend of mobile phones that year. In the next year, he added another 45 million US dollars to increase his equity in Qiku Mobile to 49.5%, but this cooperation only lasted for less than a year. The intervention of Jia Yueting broke the agreement between the two parties, and Qiku Mobile failed to move forward in accordance with the original plan, which became an "unsuccessful" case in Zhou Hongyi's early career. Another representative case is ByteDance.
Many people may not know that Zhou Hongyi was once an early investor in Toutiao, the predecessor of ByteDance. He made the investment in 2013, but withdrew in 2016. At that stage, ByteDance had not fully grasped the market hot trend of the mobile Internet era, and he exited before the trend exploded. As a result, ByteDance's valuation later rose to hundreds of billions of US dollars, which became a major regret in his early investment career.
Another impressive case to the public is Hozon Auto. In 2021, 360 issued an announcement on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, planning to invest a total of 2.9 billion yuan to lead the D-round financing of Hozon Auto. After the investment, it held a total of 16.594% equity of Hozon Auto, becoming the largest shareholder except the management team. At that time, it was the boom of new energy vehicle manufacturing, and Zhou Hongyi publicly spoke for Hozon Auto many times. However, the performance of this investment was not ideal. In 2022, 360 confirmed an investment loss of 593 million yuan under the equity method for its investment in Hozon Auto. In 2023, it confirmed another 687 million yuan of investment profit and loss. The book value of 360's equity in Hozon Auto shrank by 1.76 billion yuan.
In addition to the above cases, Zhou Hongyi also bet on the metaverse, the "shortest-lived hot trend in the AI field". In 2022, 360 launched the metaverse product N World. This project quickly cooled down after the metaverse trend faded, and failed to grow into an independent hit business. Since AI became the world's biggest market hot trend again, Zhou Hongyi has been focusing on the AI track, launching a series of AI large model products, including the 100-billion-level cognitive general large model "360 Brain" independently developed by 360, and the "360 GLM" jointly developed with Zhipu AI.
"He does not admit that he chases hot trends, but he can be seen everywhere in all kinds of market hot trends." However, he also shows the "dichotomy" trait, and knows how to "be friends with time". Just like using industrial capital such as Zhongcai Qihu to lay out long-cycle unpopular tracks, and wait patiently for the realization of long-term value.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Investor", author: Yunfan, published with authorization from 36Kr.