Born in 1945 in wartime China, the beverage billionaire Zong Qinghou grew up desperately poor in Hangzhou and often went hungry. His father was unemployed, and his mother supported the family of five children on a monthly salary of 40 yuan as a factory worker, he said in an oral history book marking 40 years of China’s economic reforms. “Because of the hardship, as a child I had many dreams and hoped to make big money to repay my parents,” he said. As the eldest child, Zong left school after junior high to support his family and spent more than a decade doing odd jobs, including hard manual labor at a remote state-owned farm.”
In 1978, the year Deng Xiaoping ushered (开启) in China’s economic reforms, Zong returned to Hangzhou and spent the next decade working as a salesman, sometimes traveling to the southern large city of Guangzhou for trade fairs. “My only dream at that time was to have my own company and do what I wanted to do, and I had been looking for such an opportunity,” he said in the oral history book. The opportunity finally came in 1987. Zong borrowed 140,000 yuan to set up his own retail company, selling ice pops and stationery to students at a nearby elementary school.
The company, which employed only two retired teachers and sold ice pops for a penny each, would later become Wahaha, which is privately owned. During his door-to-door sales, Zong learned that many children were picky eaters and suffered from varying degrees of malnutrition (营养不良), which was a big headache for parents. Spotting a potential opportunity, he partnered with a professor of nutrition to invent a vitamin drink for children, called Wahaha Oral Liquid.
The product proved a huge hit, achieving nearly 100 million yuan in annual sales in the third year of its release. That year, Zong founded the Hangzhou Wahaha Group after acquiring a failing state-run canned food factory.
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