Another prominent private equity tycoon has passed away.

On October 21, Mingyao Investment released an obituary, announcing that Zeng Zhaoxiong, founder and chairman of the company, passed away due to illness in Shenzhen at 5:03 on October 20, 2026, at the age of 57.

In China's capital market, Zeng Zhaoxiong is a highly recognizable name.

He once worked at the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, moved between securities firms and overseas asset management institutions, and successively served as investment director and fund manager at many public offering fund companies including Xiangcai ABN AMRO, Invesco Great Wall, China Merchants Fund, and Cinda Aoyin. In 2009, he shifted from public funds to private equity, and successively participated in the founding of Heyin Investment and Mingyao Investment. With his long-term accumulated investment performance and unique investment style, he was known in the industry as the "ageless private equity champion".

The fund he once managed won the market-wide championship in 2004, and also delivered impressive investment returns in the private equity sector.

However, it is obviously not enough to understand Zeng Zhaoxiong only through performance and rankings.

Among the numerous interviews he left behind, several viewpoints appear repeatedly: looking for companies with sustainable growth potential, conducting in-depth research on the business models and management teams of enterprises, guarding against price deviations caused by short-term market sentiment, and controlling the drawdown of the investment portfolio as much as possible.

These seemingly simple principles ran through his entire career.

From the early construction of China's capital market, to the growth of public offering funds, and then to the gradual standardization of the private equity industry, Zeng Zhaoxiong always tried to answer the same question: when the market is changing every day, where exactly should investors spend their time?

01

The Original Starting Point

Zeng Zhaoxiong's bond with investment began in his university days.

He once recalled that the Hollywood movie *Wall Street* released in 1987 greatly touched him.

At that time, as a college student, he came up with a simple idea: a securities market similar to Wall Street would definitely emerge in China in the future, and in this market, fund managers would become important players influencing wealth allocation.

He thus set his ambition to become a fund manager.

However, after actually stepping into the investment industry, Zeng Zhaoxiong realized that there was still a long way to go from having interest to becoming a real investor.

In 1992, he joined the newly established Shenzhen Stock Exchange and became one of the early builders of China's securities market.

For Zeng Zhaoxiong at that time, the exchange provided a unique perspective to observe the capital market. There, he learned how the market was organized, how rules were established, and how the securities trading system operated.

But he soon realized that understanding the market and directly participating in investment are two different things.

In his own description, the stock exchange is a market organization, while securities investment institutions undertake another type of responsibility, and the two view the market from completely different angles. For Zeng Zhaoxiong, who was bent on becoming a fund manager, staying at the exchange could not fully achieve his career goals.

In 1997, he chose to leave the exchange and joined a securities firm, gradually shifting from brokerage business to investment banking business, and later came into contact with asset management.

This experience allowed him to start understanding the market from the perspective of enterprises and capital. The stock exchange let him learn the rules of market operation, while the investment banking business gave him the opportunity to get in touch with corporate financing, commercial operation and capital operation.

But what really changed his perception of investment was a subsequent overseas experience.

In 2000, Zeng Zhaoxiong came to London, the United Kingdom through a Sino-British cooperative training program, successively received training in private banking, securities trading and asset management related departments, and participated in work as an Asia-Pacific analyst, assistant fund manager and other roles.

When he arrived in London, he happened to catch up with the burst of the dot-com bubble.

In March 2000, the NASDAQ index peaked around 5132 points. After that, the market experienced violent shocks, and by the spring of 2001, the index once fell to around 1614 points.

This market change from fanaticism to panic left a deep impression on Zeng Zhaoxiong.

At the peak of the bubble, investors often believed that growth could continue infinitely; when the market reversed, companies that were once sought after might be collectively sold off in a short period of time.

The operating conditions of enterprises, the valuation level of the market, and the sentiment of investors were intricately intertwined in this sharp decline.

Zeng Zhaoxiong later recalled that that experience made him feel the greed and fear in the capital market firsthand, and also made him start to seriously think about a question: what kind of investment method can stand the test of market cycles?

During his stay in London, he systematically got in touch with fundamental research and long-term value investment methods, read investment works by Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch and others, and obtained the relevant professional qualifications for UK fund managers.

He gradually realized that behind each stock is a real operating enterprise. Stock prices are affected by market sentiment, while the business model, competitive advantage and operating capability of an enterprise can only be judged through more in-depth research.

Later, Zeng Zhaoxiong brought this awareness back to China.

Around 2001, he returned to China and officially entered the public offering fund industry.

Many years later, he still mentioned that experience. In his view, the market will not simply repeat history, and a truly effective investment method needs to be built on the understanding of enterprises and economic changes.

02

From Public Fund Champion to Private Equity Entrepreneur

After returning to China, Zeng Zhaoxiong successively took investment management positions at public offering fund companies including Xiangcai ABN AMRO, Invesco Great Wall, China Merchants Fund, and Cinda Aoyin.

During his tenure at Xiangcai ABN AMRO, he began to serve as investment director, participated in the construction of the investment research system, and gradually formed an investment method centered on fundamental research and selective stock picking.

In 2004, the Xiangcai ABN AMRO Select Equity Fund he managed won the market-wide championship.

Later, during his tenure at Cinda Aoyin Fund, the fund he managed set a record of a yield of more than 83% in 9 months after its establishment in 2007.

These performances earned Zeng Zhaoxiong a reputation in the public fund industry, and also drew more attention to his investment methods.

However, his public fund career was not all highlight moments.

In an interview reviewing his early investment experience, Zeng Zhaoxiong mentioned that under the background of macroeconomic regulation and control in 2004, the market environment changed. At that time, he paid more attention to bottom-up stock research, and did not give sufficient consideration to top-down position adjustment, which affected the fluctuation of his portfolio.

This experience made him realize that selecting good companies is only part of investment.

The growth of enterprises determines the source of long-term returns, but the market environment, valuation changes and portfolio risks will also affect the final returns that investors can obtain.

Since then, he has attached greater importance to risk control.

In 2009, Zeng Zhaoxiong left the public fund industry and entered the private equity industry, co-founding Heyin Investment with his partners.

Shifting from public funds to private equity means that the working mode of investment management has changed. Public offering funds have a relatively mature organizational system and product operation mechanism, while private equity needs to independently deal with a series of issues including institutional operation, customer service, team building and long-term performance in addition to investment.

Zeng Zhaoxiong had a clear understanding of this.

He once said that starting a private equity business is not easy. Institutions need to face fierce performance competition, and must also answer the most realistic question from customers: why should I entrust my capital to you for management? Can you control investment risks well while pursuing returns?

The experience at Heyin Investment also gave him a deeper understanding of partnership entrepreneurship. He once said frankly that in the early stage of entrepreneurship, partners can share risks and complement each other, but as the company develops, differences in investment concepts and business philosophies may gradually emerge.

"It is easy to go through hard times together but hard to share prosperity" is his summary of such problems.

In 2012, Zeng Zhaoxiong founded Mingyao Investment, served as chairman and fund manager, and started to build an investment institution in accordance with his own philosophy.

For him, the focus of this entrepreneurship was to keep the positioning of the institution consistent with the investment method.

He did not plan to build the company into a comprehensive platform covering all investment styles, but hoped to concentrate resources on doing one thing well: growth-oriented value investment.

In 2013, against the background of intensifying market volatility, the products under Mingyao Investment achieved a return of over 40%.

In 2014, Mingyao Investment obtained the first batch of private equity investment fund manager registration from the Asset Management Association of China. In Zeng Zhaoxiong's view, this was not only an important step for the private equity industry to move towards standardization, but also a recognition of long-term adherence to the fundamentals of investment.

From public funds to private equity, he completed the transformation of his professional identity, but never changed his emphasis on corporate fundamentals.

03

Investment Means Finding Truly Good Companies

If you want to sum up Zeng Zhaoxiong's investment philosophy in one sentence, "growth-oriented value investment" is an unavoidable keyword.

He once explained his method in this way: he hopes to find companies that can continue to grow in the next three to five years, and obtain investment returns through the improvement of the intrinsic value of enterprises.

In Zeng Zhaoxiong's view, simply judging whether a stock is cheap by the low price-earnings ratio can easily ignore the industry cycle the enterprise is in and whether its future earnings can be sustained.

A company with a very low price-earnings ratio may be undervalued by the market, or it may be at the peak of earnings, and its future performance will gradually decline.

Therefore, research cannot stay at the level of price and valuation, but needs to go deep into the business operation process of the enterprise.

He once put forward a very clear stock selection criterion: "I will not buy a company if I cannot see its prospects for the next three years."

In his early interviews, he also regarded the ability to maintain high growth in the next three years as an important reference for screening growth enterprises. For him, growth must be based on business models, industry space and management capabilities. Simple performance fluctuations cannot prove that an enterprise has long-term investment value.

Zeng Zhaoxiong once used a vivid metaphor to explain his stock selection method: first choose fertile land, then decide what seeds to plant, and finally select a good farmer.

The so-called "fertile land" refers to industries with long-term development space; "seeds" correspond to the business model of the enterprise, which determines how far the company can grow in the future; the "farmer" is the management team of the enterprise, which determines whether the business model can be truly implemented.

The three links are indispensable.

Under this method, Zeng Zhaoxiong once focused on researching and investing in enterprises such as Yunnan Baiyao, Gold Mantis, Blue Focus, and Fuling Zhacai.

Taking Yunnan Baiyao as an example, he paid attention not only to the company's short-term earnings and valuation, but also to the competitive advantages and brand accumulation of its core products, as well as the management's ability to expand into fields such as daily chemicals.

In the investment case of Gold Mantis, what he valued was the scattered industry pattern, the huge market space and the company's business model. At that time, the public decoration industry still had a large number of scattered competitors, and the market share of leading enterprises in the industry was not high. If the company could continuously improve its operating model and expand its business scale, it would have the opportunity to turn its first-mover advantage into a competitive barrier.

These cases reflect one of his habits: looking for clues from real life and industrial changes, and then converting the clues into judgments about the future of enterprises.

He once said that investing in stocks is investing in the future of the company, which is essentially a kind of venture capital. Buying stocks means that investors believe that the value created by the enterprise in the future is higher than the level reflected by the current price.

This also explains why he is unwilling to simply understand investment as chasing market hotspots.

In his view, companies that are really worth holding for the long term need to have the ability to continue growing. What investors need to judge is whether the enterprise can do better in the future, and whether this change has not been fully reflected in the stock price.

04

Spend Time on Researching Companies

Zeng Zhaoxiong's investment method has a distinctive feature: research should be in-depth, and decision-making should be as simple as possible.

He once said in an interview that investment needs to do subtraction. A team cannot thoroughly study all the rapidly rising companies in the market. Instead of chasing a large number of opportunities, it is better to concentrate energy on finding a small number of enterprises that you truly understand.

In his early investment framework, the portfolio usually revolved around about ten stocks, and the stock selection scope would continue to narrow as the research deepened.

This method puts very high demands on research.

Fund managers should not only understand the development direction of the industry, but also study the cost control, cash flow management, business strategy and the work style of the management of the enterprise. The judgment of a company cannot only look at the performance change of a certain quarter, but should continuously track and verify the original investment logic.

Zeng Zhaoxiong attached particular importance to the cash flow of enterprises.

When participating in equity investment of small and medium-sized growth enterprises such as those on the New Third Board, Mingyao Investment tended to choose enterprises with relatively mature teams, strategies and products, and attached importance to net operating cash flow. He remained cautious about projects that relied on round after round of financing to maintain operations and whose business models had not yet been verified.

This set of criteria also applies to his judgment on enterprise founders.

He believes that investing in small and medium-sized growth enterprises is to a large extent investing in the founders and management teams. If an enterprise has a seemingly good business model, but long-term ignores the problems of liabilities, inventory and cash flow, operational risks may be exposed in a concentrated manner when the environment changes.

Enterprises can have ambitious goals, but they must have matching financial management capabilities.

In Zeng Zhaoxiong's view, to judge the value of a company, we should not only see where it can grow in the future, but also figure out whether it can survive to reach that point.

This attention to operational details is in sharp contrast to his attitude towards market sentiment.

He does not like to pay excessive attention to real-time market quotes, and once summed up his understanding in one sentence: "Staring at the market is like pulling a cart with your head down; people need to look up at the road more."

For an investment, he cares more about whether the fundamentals of the company have changed, rather than how much the stock price rose today or how much it may fall tomorrow.

However, long-term holding does not mean never selling.

Zeng Zhaoxiong once said that after buying a company, if the stock price does not rise for three months, the market may not have realized its value yet; but if half a year passes and the stock price still does not rise or even continues to fall, investors should re-examine their judgment.

The market may make mistakes temporarily, but investors may also make mistakes.

This attitude of remaining vigilant towards his own judgment is the other side of his investment method.

He also admitted that selling is more difficult than buying. When buying, investors usually have formed a set of reasons to be optimistic about the enterprise; during the holding process, when the stock price rises sharply and the valuation gradually expands, whether to continue holding or realize the returns requires repeated trade-offs between the enterprise's fundamentals and the market pricing.

In his view, the time point when you really need to sell is when the fundamental of the enterprise has changed fundamentally, rather than when there is a short-term fluctuation in the stock price.

05

From A-Share Market to Tesla

Zeng Zhaoxiong's investment scope is not limited to the A-share market.

In his investment framework, social changes and industrial trends are important starting points for finding opportunities. Changes in consumption habits, technological progress and industrial structure adjustment may all breed new opportunities for enterprise growth.

He once used a very life-related question to explain his observation method: when