Author/ Author of "Finance and Economics" Weekly Zhang Jikang
Editor / Chen Fang
By doing business in women's faces, Zhao Yan, 56, became the "queen of hyaluronic acid". She started her business in 1988, like a crosser who has mastered the context of the times, and accurately did every multiple choice question left to her by business. In 2021, she also ascended to the throne of Shandong's richest woman, but since July last year, she has also encountered troubles, shrinking her net worth by 55 billion yuan.
"Bloomage Biology is a biotechnology company..." Zhao Yan, who spoke a less than standard Mandarin in front of the camera, did not take the speech the whole time, and told the outside world about the specific situation of her helm of the company.
This is the scene on January 11, when 56-year-old Zhao Yan wore a red scarf, a light gray suit, and a double ponytail as always, step by step to the stage to pick up the trophy prepared by the organizers, she was the only female entrepreneur among the top ten economic figures of the year in 2021.
Zhao Yan's 2021 is very beautiful. This year, with the sharp rise in the market value of Bloomage Biologics, as the actual controller, she sat on the throne of the richest woman in Shandong, and for the first time squeezed into the top ten of the Hurun female entrepreneur list, and her ranking on the Forbes Mainland Rich List also rose 12 places to 62nd.
Zhao Yan's wealth soared thanks to the women who loved beauty. Her hyaluronic acid business captured the desires of those who wanted to achieve frozen age and anti-aging. Relying on this colloidal substance called hyaluronic acid, Bloomage's revenue in the first three quarters of 2021 exceeded 3 billion yuan, which was 379 million yuan higher than the annual revenue in 2020.
However, since the second half of 2021, the "queen of hyaluronic acid" Zhao Yan has also encountered troubles, and the stock price of Bloomage Biology, which she manages, has shrunk sharply in just half a year, and the share per share has fallen from the highest point of 314.58 yuan in July last year to only 119.78 yuan on January 27, 2022, and the total market value has evaporated from 93.5 billion yuan to 57.494 billion yuan. According to the shareholding ratio, Zhao Yan's net worth shrank by 55 billion yuan in just half a year. Many people wonder, what happened to Bloomage Biology?
A business that comes out of a woman's face
Taiwanese entertainer Big S once said: "Without hyaluronic acid, female stars simply cannot survive." In order to fight the midlife crisis of "old age and decay", her sister Xiao S confessed on social platforms that she had played hyaluronic acid and botulinum toxin. This is not an isolated case, and it is common for female celebrities to inject hyaluronic acid to rejuvenate their faces.
Women are all beautiful, and ordinary girls are also eager to stay like female stars, and they invariably focus on hyaluronic acid.
Search for the three words of hyaluronic acid on the Little Red Book, and immediately more than 40,000 notes will pop up, such as lip enlargement, tear trough filling, frozen age anti-wrinkle..... Countless women share their experiences of exposure to hyaluronic acid, and some eager people leave messages in the comment area to learn from the experience, "Is it painful to play hyaluronic acid?" "How much does a stitch cost?" "How's it going?" "Are there any side effects?"
Women who love beauty have propped up a market of 100 billion. According to the "2021 Medical Aesthetic White Paper", the size of China's medical aesthetic market was about 227.4 billion yuan last year, and it is expected to increase to 264.3 billion yuan in 2022. Compared with the medical aesthetics through surgery, people love non-surgical light medical aesthetic projects, and the scale of young medical aesthetic users in 2021 increased by 20.59% year-on-year.
Women are the main force of consumption in the medical aesthetic market, accounting for 89.1%. Among them, most of them are post-90s and post-00s, and these young people in their twenties and thirties are more afraid of getting old than their parents' generation. According to the medical beauty white paper, 79% of medical beauty users are post-90s and post-00s, and the most medical beauty items they buy are slimming face wrinkle removal, hyaluronic acid, anti-aging firming, liposuction, whitening and rejuvenation. Among them, hyaluronic acid has the highest repurchase rate.
Hyaluronic acid can fly from the "female star and noblewoman exclusive" into the homes of ordinary people, and Zhao Yan is indispensable. But Zhao Yan's becoming the "Queen of Hyaluronic Acid" is purely accidental.
Zhao Yan, who studied MBA at Peking University 20 years ago, met Ling Peixue, a classmate who was looking for funds everywhere, who engaged in hyaluronic acid business with 30 scientific research experts for two years, but because he was not good at business, he lost money for two consecutive years, and the company's net assets were only 3 million yuan. After learning that Zhao Yan had money, the other party immediately invited her to visit Shandong Freda Biology, the predecessor of Bloomage Biology.
It was difficult to be gracious, Zhao Yan came to Freda Biology with her assistant, and the factory environment that came into view was very simple, with an area of less than 500 square meters, and there were only 2 offices, all of which were rented. This greatly reduced Zhao Yan's investment ideas, but she still patiently listened to researcher Guo Xueping in detail about hyaluronic acid, and a bunch of professional terms listened to her sleepily until she heard the phrase "one hyaluronic acid molecule can lock up 1,000 water molecules".
Zhao Yan, who is a biology major, has a very sensitive sense of smell, and as a woman, she knows that women are often troubled by the skin care problems of unbalanced water and oil. If hyaluronic acid is applied to beauty and skin care, the market space can be large.
I have to say that women still understand women. Zhao Yan, who had a premonition that the hyaluronic acid market space was large, decided to inject capital into Freda Biology, which was on the verge of closure, after listening to Guo Xueping's introduction. In 2001, she spent 12 million yuan, a premium of 1.5 times, to buy 50% of the shares.
Not only taking money, Zhao Yan, who saw that Freda Biology lacked standardized management drawbacks, also recruited management personnel with a high salary of 500,000 yuan, so that Ling Peixue and Guo Xueping scientific research experts could concentrate on technology. And also changed the company name to Bloomage Biology, adjusted the organizational structure of the enterprise, a fierce drug, the next year's income has doubled.
The ambitious Zhao Yan also set a distant goal for Bloomage Biologics to become the leader of the global hyaluronic acid supply market. In 2007, Bloomage Biology, which she managed, broke the monopoly of imported brands and became the world's largest supplier of hyaluronic acid, providing nearly 40% of the world's hyaluronic acid raw materials every year.
The money on a woman's face is indeed easy to earn. For many years, bloomage's gross profit margin has been stable at about 80%, directly comparable to Moutai. In July last year, Bloomage Bio's stock price also reached an all-time high, with a total market value of more than 150 billion yuan, and Zhao Yan, as the actual controller, naturally sat on the throne of Shandong's richest woman.
He became famous by building buildings on Chang'an Avenue
Some people conclude that China's richest women mainly come from three industries: real estate, manufacturing and medicine, and Zhao Yan has seized every round of wealth waves set off by the times, and her career history is closely related to these three industries.
Zhao Yan's first venture was in Hainan. In 1988, Hainan Province was officially established, and for a time, talents from all over the country came here to start a business. Ignited by the passion of entrepreneurship, she quit her job as a teaching assistant and made up 5,000 yuan with three colleagues to come to Hainan to pan for gold. Soon, by reselling the refrigerator, Zhao Yan earned the first bucket of gold in her life in Hainan.
With 800,000 yuan, Zhao Yan opened a garment factory, but what really made her achieve the small goal of 2 million yuan was to buy and sell land. The three plots of land she bought in Hainan doubled several times after the "Southern Tour Speech", and the original 120,000 mu of land, the most expensive piece of land sold for more than three million mu. In an interview, she said, "All of a sudden, I realized my financial freedom. ”
Later, watching everyone take copies and resell the land, Zhao Yan felt that there was danger and fled with the same precision as the six gentlemen of Wantong. In 1993, she returned to her hometown of Weihai in Shandong Province with a large amount of money and spent 200 million yuan to build the Guomao Building in Weihai, but it was ruined due to land ownership issues. She felt that she could not save her life, and she sent it directly to the government with a fierce heart.
Zhao Yan came to Beijing with the rest of the money and leaned over on Chang'an Avenue to build a building. Her first project was to invest in the construction of the Huaxia Bank Building in Dongdan, although the floor price was twice as expensive as the surrounding area, which cost 8,000 yuan a square meter, but she believed that land on Chang'an Avenue was scarce, so she decided to take it. After the building was built, it was sold to Huaxia Bank Building at 17,000 yuan per square meter, and although it did not make much money, it was well-known in the real estate industry in Beijing.
After this, Zhao Yan successfully invested in the construction of the Central World Trade Center project, when the deposit set by the development office was 2 million yuan, she directly threw 60 million deposits, standing out from many investors, and later Beijing decided to plan and build a CBD on this plot, Zhao Yan gambled again.
What really made Zhao Yan famous was the construction of the Wukesong project, she took a piece of land around the Wukesong Gymnasium of 300,000 square meters to build the headquarters building of the state-owned enterprise, one day heard that the opposite developer planned to build a small commodity wholesale market, she could not sit still, rushed to the relevant government departments, wanted to persuade the leaders not to reduce their own value, the result of several twists and turns, Zhao Yan took over the unexpected Wukesong Gymnasium project.
This is a money-burning project, not counting the money to buy land, the construction cost alone is as high as 1.3 billion yuan, and the annual operation and maintenance costs of 30 million yuan are also paid. For this project that can only succeed and cannot fail, Zhao Yan, who does not understand sports, has traveled to the United States several times, and the consultant fee alone has spent millions of dollars to have later success.
Later, Zhao Yan went to Peking University for further study, and due to fate, she would embark on the road to prosperity of hyaluronic acid.
After buying Bloomage Biology in 2001, Zhao Yan once again showed her characteristics of daring to gamble and dare to do, and when the annual income in 2003 was only 20 million yuan, she tried to invest nearly 100 million yuan to buy land and build a factory. In 2005, the factory with an investment of more than 200 million yuan was put into operation, and two years later, Bloomage Bio became the world's largest R&D and production enterprise of hyaluronic acid.
After the scale came up, Zhao Yan immediately led Bloomage Biologics to Hong Kong to list, although on the day of the 2008 roadshow, Lehman Brothers, which was far away on the other side of the Pacific, declared bankruptcy, the financial crisis swept in, and more than a dozen companies in the same batch announced the suspension of IPOs, but Zhao Yan still chose to go public, and finally could not raise HK$70 million in financing.
However, after the listing, it was not all smooth sailing, and Bloomage Bio's stock price suffered a "waist cut". In 2017, Zhao Yan mortgaged Bloomage International Center to the bank, borrowed HK$4 billion, and privatized Bloomage Biotech. After that, Zhao Yan decided to enter the B2C field and try to fully open up the industrial chain of hyaluronic acid from raw materials, medical treatment, functional skin care products and other channels.
After two years of planning, in 2019, Zhao Yan, wearing her own design clothing, sounded the gong of listing on the science and technology innovation board. On the day of listing, Bloomage Bio reported a closing price of 85.1 yuan / share, up 78% compared with the issue price, and the market value rushed to 40.8 billion yuan. On the same day, Zhao Yan became the richest man on the Science and Technology Innovation Board with a value of more than 24.1 billion yuan.
Under the leadership of Zhao Yan, Bloomage Bio is no longer a supplier of hyaluronic acid raw materials, and has a number of functional skin care brands, including Runbaiyan, Quadi, Mibel and BM Muscle Work. In the first half of 2021, Bloomage Bio's revenue reached 1.937 billion yuan. Among them, functional skin care accounted for 61.98%, a year-on-year increase of 197.55%. The raw material business and medical terminal business were only 415 million yuan and 314 million yuan.
The annoyance of the "Queen of Hyaluronic Acid"
However, since the second half of 2021, Zhao Yan, the "queen of hyaluronic acid", has also encountered troubles.
In July last year, Bloomage's stock price went all the way down after hitting its highest point of 314.58 yuan. On January 27 this year, Bloomage Bio fell 2.65% per share to close at 119.78 yuan, and the total market value plunged 61.9% compared with the highest point, evaporating a total of 93.5 billion yuan to 57.494 billion yuan. According to the shareholding ratio, Zhao Yan's body value shrank by 55 billion yuan in just half a year.
Some investors can't help but run to the interactive platform to ask, why did Bloomage Biotech's stock price repeatedly hit new lows? The secretary of the board of directors replied that the company's fundamentals are normal, with the in-depth advancement of scientific and technological research and development, the company's core barriers continue to consolidate, emphasizing that the company's various business operations continue to improve. As for the sharp decline in stock prices, the explanation said that the stock prices in the secondary market were affected by various factors such as the macro environment, industry policies, and long-short games.
Indeed, bloomage rival Aimek's share price has also suffered a hit, continuing to fall from its highest point of $844.44 per share in July 2021. On January 27, Aimek fell 0.79% per share to close at 465.19 yuan, down 44.9% from its highest.
However, compared with Aimeike, the decline of Bloomage Bio is still higher, which shows that it still has its own reasons.
Zhao Yan has repeatedly stressed the importance of talent, but Bloomage Biology, which she manages, is facing the crisis of brain drain. On January 5, Bloomage Biotech issued an announcement that Li Huiliang, deputy general manager, chief technology officer and core technical personnel of the company, resigned from the company's relevant positions for personal reasons.
It is understood that Li Huiliang joined in 2018, during which he was responsible for the Shanghai R& D Center and participated in the application for 11 invention patents. His departure was abrupt, with 92,000 shares that Bloomage had given him incentives in March last year not yet expiring, which meant he had given up his assets worth tens of millions of yuan and did not want to wait until the day he could cash them out.
He is not the only one who insists on leaving, and two months ago, Jin Yong, chairman of the supervisory board of Bloomage Biologics, also submitted a resignation report. At the end of 2020, Jiang Rui, director, deputy general manager and secretary of the board of directors of Bloomage Biologics, has submitted an application for resignation. The reasons they gave for leaving were all personal reasons, and the real reasons were unknown to the outside world.
In addition to the frequent departures of executives, as a company that relies on technology for a living, Bloomage Has been questioned the most in recent years, but the investment in research and development is far less than the marketing investment.
Although Zhao Yan once said in her speech that blindly chasing "traffic" will only plunge herself into the mud. However, from the financial report, Bloomage Bio is still running wild on the road of marketing and burning money, in the first three quarters of 2019-2021, Bloomage Bio's sales expenses were 521 million yuan, 1.099 billion yuan and 1.397 billion yuan, and the money spent in the first three quarters of 2021 has exceeded the sum of 2020.
In contrast, Bloomage's investment in research and development is very small, and Bloomage spends 5 to 7 times more money on sales than in research and development every year. In the first three quarters from 2019 to 2021, Bloomage spent 93.8862 million yuan, 141 million yuan and 192 million yuan on research and development, accounting for only single digits in its total revenue, 4.98%, 5.36% and 6.3% respectively.
This is really dragging the hind legs of the science and technology innovation board, and the R&D expense ratio of Bloomage Biology is the proportion of R&D investment in the total revenue, which is far lower than the average of the science and technology innovation board. According to the data released by the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the average R& D expense rate of science and technology innovation board companies in 2020 is 12.03%, of which 6 have an expense rate of more than 100%, and their R & D investment is even higher than revenue.
Bloomage Bio, which relies too much on marketing, has also been "regurgitated" by traffic. In October 2021, Bloomage Biologics' brand Runbaiyan chose the controversial male anchor Sun Xiaochuan as a promotion, and played a promotional copy of "let the earth dog become a 'water dog'", causing a large-scale protest by female consumers. On the evening of October 16, Runbaiyan's official Weibo issued an apology statement promising rectification, but it was still labeled "insulting women" by consumers.
At the opening of the market on Monday, October 18, Bloomage's stock price immediately fell by 6.35%, and the market value evaporated by 5.597 billion yuan. Runbaiyan, which was originally scheduled to be on the shelves of Via's live broadcast room on the 20th, was also temporarily cancelled.
Research and development costs are not high, selling things are very expensive, Bloomage Bio's official website shows that its hyaluronic acid drinking water price is 53 yuan 6 bottles, an average of 8.8 yuan a bottle; hyaluronic acid chewable tablets price of 139 yuan 4 boxes, an average of 34.75 yuan a box. This is questioned by the outside world as an IQ tax, and the core point is that these foods with a small amount of hyaluronic acid can play a question mark.
In the face of the CONTROVERSY of IQ tax, Zhao Yan publicly stated last year that it is normal for new things to be questioned, hyaluronic acid can be added to ordinary foods, and it has a history of 20-40 years abroad, and Chinese consumers' cognition of hyaluronic acid substances still stays in the field of medical beauty and cosmetics. But this did not quell the voice of doubt, Baidu search Huaxi Bio to collect IQ tax appeared in the entry of 1.11 million, the most is "the cost of less than 20 yuan but sell 3,000 yuan, blatantly collect IQ tax."
It has been 33 years since Zhao Yan first started her business, from clothing manufacturing to investment in real estate, and then entering hyaluronic acid, Zhao Yan seems to have mastered the context of the times, accurately doing every choice question left to her by business. But this time, how far she can go in the hyaluronic acid business remains to be tested.
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