Zhong Shanshan has made another investment in the richest woman.

Zhong Shanshan, the former richest man, has made another move.

Recently, Jowell Biotech announced in a public notice that Yangshengtang Co., Ltd. plans to acquire 3,607,243 shares of the company through private placement. The announcement also disclosed that Yangshengtang first increased its holdings by 10,000 shares through centralized bidding on October 19, with a transaction price ranging from 137.50 yuan to 138.28 yuan, amounting to approximately 1.3778 million yuan. After the registration of the privately placed shares is completed, Yangshengtang and its concerted party Jiusi Management Consulting (Hangzhou) Partnership (Limited Partnership, hereinafter referred to as "Hangzhou Jiusi") will hold a total of 9,360,510 shares of Jowell Biotech, accounting for 7.8877% of the total shareholding.

It is worth mentioning that this is not the first cooperation between the two parties. In June 2025, Jowell Biotech announced the introduction of Yangshengtang as a strategic investor, with a planned private placement to raise 2 billion yuan. In September 2026, the amount of funds raised through the private placement was reduced to 1 billion yuan. At the same time, Yangshengtang promised that within 18 months from the date of the announcement of the completion of the private placement, it will accumulate no less than 1 billion yuan in additional holdings through the secondary market, and the current additional holding plan is no less than 100 million yuan within 6 months.

This is not the first time that Zhong Shanshan has made layouts outside the beverage and vaccine sectors. In addition to betting on Jowell Biotech in the medical aesthetics track, Yangshengtang has made more frequent moves in hard technology. Since this year, Yangshengtang-related capital has appeared in the shareholder lists of Acorn Robotics, Zhibang Lithium Battery, and Qingyuan Electronics. More notably, Zhong Shanshan's figure can also be found when penetrating the shareholder chain of DeepSeek layer by layer.

Quietly, an investment map of the "Zhong Shanshan System" centered on Yangshengtang has gradually taken shape.

Zhong Shanshan Increases Holdings in the Company Owned by the Richest Woman in Shanxi Province

Jowell Biotech, which Zhong Shanshan has repeatedly increased holdings in, is a company founded by Yang Xia, a native of Shanxi, over more than ten years. Yang Xia is no unknown figure. On the 2025 Hurun Global Rich List, Yang Xia ranks as the richest woman in Shanxi with a net worth of 11.5 billion yuan.

Born in Qinshui, Shanxi in 1974, Yang Xia chose to teach at the university after obtaining a master's degree in clinical medicine from Shanxi Medical University in 1997, focusing on teaching and scientific research in the field of liver transplant surgery. For the following ten years, Yang Xia's identity remained a university teacher.

However, during the teaching and research process, Yang Xia discovered entrepreneurial opportunities. Liver transplantation requires organ preservation solution, in which collagen needs to be added. At that time, the extraction technology of human collagen was mainly mastered in the United States, with high import prices, and natural collagen had the problems of high immunogenicity and poor water solubility. Yang Xia then thought of replacing it with artificial synthesis methods.

Thus in 2008, Yang Xia resigned from her teaching position and jointly invested 500,000 yuan with her husband Ren Xianwei to register and establish Jowell Biotech. After more than ten years of development, Jowell Biotech rang the listing bell in 2023, winning the title of "the first stock of recombinant collagen" on the Beijing Stock Exchange.

When talking about the story of Jowell Biotech's development in later years, Yang Xia admitted that compared with popular fields such as oncology, she prefers to choose tracks that are built "from scratch", and carry out applied R&D and industrialization starting from scientific discoveries. "Current development pays more attention to scientific nature. If we go to copy others, it will definitely not work, nor will it work to carve out a piece of cake in other tracks, so we have created a brand new track and brand new products."

As this "from scratch" track entered the volume release stage, Zhong Shanshan came into Yang Xia's sight.

On June 26, 2025, Jowell Biotech announced the plan for the first cooperation. Yang Xia transferred 5,753,267 shares she held (accounting for 5.00% of the total share capital) to Hangzhou Jiusi controlled by Zhong Shanshan at a price of 243.84 yuan per share, totaling 1,402,876,600 yuan; on the same day, Jowell Biotech signed a subscription agreement with Yangshengtang, planning to privately issue new shares to the latter.

Talking about this cooperation, Yang Xia later said in an interview with the media that it is the mutual appreciation between entrepreneurs, "I have met many investors, and I think Mr. Zhong is an entrepreneur who truly understands the industry and life sciences, and he is also an entrepreneur who can deeply integrate underlying science with the industrial chain. He supports China's original innovation and wants to truly build an industry with global discourse power. So we talked for only 10 minutes and quickly finalized the cooperation."

As for why Jowell Biotech needs Yangshengtang, the company's announcement is very straightforward, "Introducing Yangshengtang as a strategic investor can empower the company in many aspects such as product R&D, industrial production, commercial promotion, market strategy and operation management, and form cooperation in multiple fields including raw materials, food and beverage additives, cosmetic additives, drug development, commercial transformation of existing products and large-scale industrial production of humanized collagen, so as to help listed companies break through bottlenecks in capacity construction, product commercialization, market channel construction and management, and promote high-quality development of the company."

For this transaction, Haitong International pointed out in a report at that time that Jowell Biotech could quickly penetrate mass consumer scenarios with the help of Yangshengtang's channel network covering more than 3 million retail terminals.

According to the latest announcement, after the registration of privately placed shares is completed, Yangshengtang and its concerted party Hangzhou Jiusi will hold a total of 7.8877% of Jowell Biotech's shares. Before that, the 2026 semi-annual report showed that Hangzhou Jiusi was already the second largest shareholder of Jowell Biotech, with a shareholding ratio second only to Yang Xia.

The Former Richest Man's Huge Investment Empire

The 7.8877% equity of Jowell Biotech is only the tip of the iceberg in Zhong Shanshan's asset map.

This Chinese entrepreneur in his seventies is already widely known. He is a frequent presence on China's rich lists. Hurun Rich List data shows that Zhong Shanshan has been on the Hurun Rich List for 6 consecutive years, and has topped the list of China's richest man four times in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025. However, on the latest 2026 Hurun Global Rich List, Zhang Yiming ranks first in China with 550 billion yuan, while Zhong Shanshan ranks second with 515 billion yuan.

It is obvious that AI, semiconductors and new energy have become the main themes of current wealth growth, but Zhong Shanshan, who is in the food and beverage sector, can still occupy a place in the public view, which is enough to show his outstanding capabilities.

There is no doubt that Nongfu Spring is the basic disk for Zhong Shanshan to stay firmly on the rich list. Nongfu Spring's 2025 financial report shows that the company's total annual revenue was 52.553 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22.5%, exceeding 50 billion yuan for the first time; the gross profit margin was 60.5%, 2.4 percentage points higher than the previous year; the net profit attributable to shareholders was 15.868 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 30.9%. At present, the total market value of Nongfu Spring exceeds HK$450 billion.

Due to the business of "selling water", Zhong Shanshan was questioned by the outside world when he topped the list of China's richest man back then, and was compared with Elon Musk, the richest man in the United States. The implication was to tease that China's richest man "sells water", while the richest man in the United States "builds rockets".

In response to this, Zhong Shanshan, who rarely talks about investment in public, directly responded to many issues that the outside world cared about when he was a guest on the "Dialogue" column in 2024. He talked about the difference between himself and Musk, "There is a very big difference between the two of us. What was I doing when I was 25? I only attended primary school for four years, and worked as a farmer for 17 years. That's all my experience. When Elon Musk was 24 years old, he was already a PhD candidate at Stanford University, but he dropped out of his doctorate degree to start his business and pursue his ideal career. These two experiences are not comparable in terms of social evaluation. But as the richest men, our social responsibilities are comparable, because wealth itself comes with social responsibilities."

On the same program, Zhong Shanshan also said, "I am a water seller, and I was a farmer myself. I tend to do things from the perspective of a farmer and based on my own knowledge. I am not that great. I think as a Chinese entrepreneur, I have my own pride. I have solved problems that Americans have not solved, and I have maintained farmers' normal income, so I am proud of myself even though I am not as earth-shattering as Musk."

Zhong Shanshan has indeed practiced this idea of "doing things based on my own knowledge", but Wantai Biological is a special case among them.

Back in 2001, Zhong Shanshan made a transaction that many people could not understand at that time. He bought 95% of the equity of Wantai Biological for 17.1 million yuan through Yangshengtang. At that time, Wantai Biological was only a small pharmaceutical company that barely made a living with only one low-end diagnostic reagent. It was not until 2018 that the domestic bivalent HPV vaccine "Xinkening" jointly developed by Wantai Biological and Xiamen University completed clinical trials and entered the listing approval stage. In 2019, Xinkening was approved for marketing, becoming the first domestic HPV vaccine.

In April 2020, Wantai Biological, known as "the first stock of domestic HPV vaccine", landed on the main board of A-share market. Its stock price skyrocketed on the first day of listing, and once recorded 26 consecutive daily limit ups. The maximum market value of Wantai Biological once exceeded 100 billion yuan. Although its current stock price has fallen from the high level, its past glory is self-evident.

More critically, the case of Wantai Biological is still an "irreplicable" deal in the venture capital circle. The reason why it is "irreplicable" is not how deep the moat of this business is or how high the technical barrier is, but that no venture capital fund can accept not exiting and having no valuation for nearly 20 years. The most crucial point of Zhong Shanshan's success is that he used his own money and did not need to be responsible to investors.

The "Water-selling" Rich Man Starts to Bet on Hard Technology

Zhong Shanshan, who often mentions his identity as a "farmer", is relatively "low-key" in the capital market.

Although Nongfu Spring is a listed company with a scale of more than HK$450 billion, it has not established its own CVC since its establishment. There is no need to compare it with Internet giants whose strategic investments spread across various industries. Even Wahaha, which is also in the food and beverage sector, has long had its own CVC — it established Wahaha Venture Capital in 2010, completed the record of private fund manager in 2021, and launched a fund with a registered capital of 500 million yuan in 2022 to act as GP itself.

But in the past two years, the trend has been changing quietly.

First, let's talk about the investment platforms under Zhong Shanshan's Yangshengtang system. In 2021, Yangshengtang established Guanzi Private Fund Management (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Guanzi Venture Capital"), according to the data from the Asset Management Association of China, the fund has a management scale of 1 billion to 2 billion yuan.

Tianyancha data shows that Guanzi Venture Capital has invested in five enterprises including Jiayue Pharmaceutical, Thermoro Biotech, Life Biotech, Maiba Pharmaceutical, and Ruijian Pharmaceutical, mainly focusing on the biomedical field. The latest move took place in June this year, when it invested in "Tianjin Huixing Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership)" (hereinafter referred to as "Tianjin Huixing"), a fund affiliated with IDG Capital.

By penetrating the equity layer by layer, it is not difficult to find that Tianjin Huixing was established specifically for investing in DeepSeek. Back in April this year, DeepSeek launched its first round of financing and completed the delivery in June. The list of participants in its first round of financing is very impressive, including state-owned background institutions, Internet enterprises, investment institutions, industrial capital and other parties. Digging deeper along the equity chain layer by layer, it is not difficult to find Zhong Shanshan's presence.

In addition to Guanzi Venture Capital, Qiantang Material Laboratory Technology (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Qiantang Material Laboratory"), established by Yangshengtang in May 2024, is also one of the indispensable investment platforms in the Yangshengtang system.

According to the introduction, Qiantang Material Laboratory takes "crossing the valley of death in the transformation of scientific and technological achievements" as its mission, builds a theory and practice system of in-depth integration of industry, university and research led by enterprises, takes over vertical scientific research achievements, allocates key element resources such as capital, space, talents and markets for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, empowers scientist entrepreneurial teams in all aspects, builds an internationally influential headquarters base for scientist entrepreneurship, and gradually develops into a continuous innovation R&D center for the Yangtze River Delta new material industrial cluster and a source of developing new quality productive forces.

Therefore, compared with Guanzi Venture Capital, which mainly focuses on the biomedical track, Qiantang Material Laboratory's investments are concentrated in hard technology. As shown in the figure below, since 2024, Qiantang Material Laboratory has invested in 11 hard technology enterprises, such as Qifang Materials and Acorn Robotics.

Several of Zhong Shanshan's investments in hard technology are consistent with policy statements in the past two years.

In October 2025, the "Proposal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the