As long as the motivation is always there, the "new stories" belonging to these elderly warriors will continue to be written continuously.
Author: Zhu Mo
Source: Kuaidaocaijing (ID: kuaidaocaijing)
It is said that the iron should be hot, and the fame should be early.
At first glance, this is indeed the case. Ma Huateng started a business at the age of 27, Ma Yun started a business at the age of 28, Wang Xing and Zhang Yiming began to "toss the road" after graduating from university, just because there are young people to do the cost, even if they are temporarily frustrated, they can afford the cost of trial and error, and in the young adulthood, they can go to the peak.
But there are also others who prove that age is never a restriction on doing things. Zhong Shuishui, the 68-year-old chairman of Nongfu Shanquan, is known for his fierceness and once topped the "richest man in Asia"; The 78-year-old Ren Zhengfei is still Huawei's irreplaceable soul core; Guo Henian, one of the oldest Chinese entrepreneurs, Arowana and The owner behind Shangri-La, is 100 years old but has no intention of stepping down.
The most precious thing is that these big men who aspire to thousands of miles, even if they have reached the age of old age and have gone through great ups and downs, still have the courage and courage to start again, and Zhou Jiarong, the "father of King Kang", is one of the representative figures.
▲ Zhou Jiarong
From a technician to the first engineer of Yunnan Baiyao when he was young; After retiring at the age of 60, he started a business in the broken temple and made a popular "Kang Wang", but he was forced to leave the house and sell all his efforts to Bayer; At the age of 83, he made a comeback and aspired to make Chinese cosmeceuticals.
Life goes on and on and on. Either in entrepreneurship, or on the road to entrepreneurship, as a well-deserved time "conqueror", the various things surrounding Zhou Jiarong's body can be summarized by the word legend.
01
At the age of 60, he started a business in the broken temple and became the "father of King Kang"
Life is like a river, bending straight and straight, some people laughing at the beginning, some people winning at the end.
Zhou Jiarong is not the darling favored by fate. The young deafness and the early death of his father made Zhou Jiarong have to pay more effort and concentration than others.
In 1958, Zhou Jiarong took the college entrance examination and successfully passed the pharmacy major of Nanjing Pharmaceutical College, after graduating from college, Zhou Jiarong took the initiative to apply for a branch to go to Yunnan and was assigned to the Southwest United Pharmaceutical Factory, which was a lifetime.
Southwest United Pharmaceutical Factory is the predecessor of Kunming Pharmaceutical Factory, in which the workshop producing Yunnan Baiyao became Yunnan Baiyao Factory independently in 1971. At that time, Yunnan Baiyao only had powder, the packaging was so simple that there was no instruction manual, coupled with the complex formula and strong medicinal properties of Yunnan Baiyao, many consumers had accidents due to excessive dosage.
In response to the accumulated shortcomings, Zhou Jiarong, who was in danger, carried out a series of drastic changes, in addition to transforming production equipment, adjusting processing conditions and time, Zhou Jiarong also pioneered the powder into capsules to reduce the risk of overdose.
There is also an episode here, the factory bought back a set of capsule production equipment from Germany, but the German experts who said good disappeared. Zhou Jiarong can only debug day and night against the English instruction manual, the kung fu pays off, and the capsule production line is successfully ignited at one time.
Later, Zhou Jiarong, who was promoted to the first chief engineer of Yunnan Baiyao, led the development of Baiyao plaster, making Yunnan Baiyao a household name.
▲ Zhou Jiarong's work card
In 1988, Zhou Jiarong could not work normally due to a recurrence of stomach disease and had to leave his post early. In the decades of scientific and technological innovation practice of Yunnan Baiyao Factory, Zhou Jiarong led the team to continuously promote the development of Yunnan Baiyao's time-honored brand to the development of modern pharmaceutical enterprises, and became a meritorious figure that can be recorded in the history of the development of Yunnan Baiyao and even China's pharmaceutical industry.
After retiring, the 60-year-old Zhou Jiarong saw many frontline fighters in the wind and sun, fungal infections on their skin, but there was no medicine on the market that could specifically solve the problem. Zhou Jiarong, who could not sit still, immediately invited a group of old experts in the pharmaceutical industry in Yunnan, raised 287,000 yuan of start-up funds, and embarked on the road of entrepreneurship without hesitation, establishing Dianhong Pharmaceutical, which has since ranked among the top three private pharmaceutical enterprises in Yunnan.
In 1993, Zhou Jiarong rented a dilapidated small factory covering an area of 3.2 acres at Guanyin Temple on Phuket Road on the outskirts of Kunming City, recruited 8 workers, and rode 7 kilometers of bicycles from his home to work every day, in extremely difficult conditions. Even so, from mixing, stirring, emulsification to testing, every step, Zhou Jiarong insisted on doing it himself.
On January 8, 1994, the first "Pikang King" finally appeared. Zhou Jiarong held a small order meeting the following month, only took 200 samples to test the water, and did not expect to be snatched up by the pharmaceutical company in half an hour.
Due to the outstanding effect of sterilization and antipruritic, in the case of almost no advertising, Pikang Wang quickly sold all over the country, and the supply of major pharmacies was in short supply, and the sales return of that year reached 10 million yuan.
There is no harm without comparison, other pharmaceutical factories on the market that treat skin diseases have either closed down or taken the initiative to enter the arms of Dianhong, and King Pikang has also taken the opportunity to go to Southeast Asia.
On the basis of the success of "Pi Kang Wang", Zhou Jiarong led Dianhong Pharmaceutical to independently develop and produce 11 varieties of "Kang Wang" brand external drugs and other internal medicines. Among them, the anti-dandruff product "Kangwang Lotion" is also the only champion product in the field of Chinese drug desquamation that can compete with foreign brands.
In 2006, Dianhong Pharmaceutical's drug sales exceeded 600 million yuan, and in 2013, it grew rapidly to 1.3 billion yuan, which was not only listed as a key dermatology enterprise of the Ministry of Commerce of China, but also listed in the "Top 500 Asian Brands".
Later, in order to make the enterprise go to a higher level, Zhou Jiarong listened to the suggestion and decided to introduce a Western management model, specially hiring professional managers who returned from overseas to manage the enterprise.
At this time, Zhou Jiarong did not dream that he was bent on good, but unexpectedly buried the root of the curse.
02
Forced to abdicate and sell the business, the 83-year-old came out of the mountains and then took charge of the jianghu
In 2013, due to the proliferation of counterfeiting and imitation, it has threatened the brand reputation of "Kang Wang". The management model of the new successor's "water and soil dissatisfaction" has also disrupted the growth pace of Dianhong Pharmaceutical, resulting in a sharp increase in costs and a decline in revenue.
At a board meeting, Zhou Jiarong was shocked to find that his controlling interest was gone, the chairman was also removed, and he was suddenly vacated.
What is even more difficult to accept is that young shareholders believe that the cycle of drug research and development is too long, and in order to seek faster profits, they have decided to sell at a price and sell the company, all of which has been deliberately planned for a long time.
Zhou Jiarong was heartbroken and ran to persuade over and over again, but in the end he was outnumbered, and Zhou Jiarong, who had lost his right to speak, could not save the situation, and had to watch the situation spiral out of control.
At the beginning of 2014, Germany's Bayer invested 3.6 billion yuan to acquire 100% of the shares of Dianhong Pharmaceutical, which was widely considered to be a high-premium transaction, and Dianhong earned it.
Unlike the happy faces of the people around him, Zhou Jiarong was silent all the way, straight to the conference room on the 6th floor of Dianhong Pharmaceutical, the last one signed to leave, and the first venture ended in an extremely bad ending, which became Zhou Jiarong's heart disease.
After the completion of the acquisition, the company was completely taken over by the new management sent by Bayer, and the experienced old engineers and old employees of Dianhong were dismissed in batches.
Not only that, Bayer has also discontinued all Chinese medicine products. It should be known that as a national intellectual property pilot enterprise, Dianhong Pharmaceutical has 196 authorized patents, and even the implementation rate of professional technology is much higher than the market average, reaching more than 85%.
Now, these patents are accompanied by drug approvals, but they are said to be lost and discarded. After only 2 years, the sales scale fell sharply from more than one billion to half, and Zhou Jiarong looked in his eyes and hurt in his heart.
Just when everyone thought that Zhou Jiarong would close the mountain, in 2016, the 83-year-old Zhou Jiarong announced that he had started a second business and plunged into the daily care products industry. "I made the wrong decision, but there is no regret medicine in the world, and now I want to start all over again."
However, if you start a pharmaceutical company from scratch, you need to go through a series of processes such as approval, experimentation, approval, etc., and it usually takes 10 years or more for innovative drugs to go from research and development to marketing.
After thinking for a long time, Zhou Jiarong, who wanted to race against time, decided to start from products with short research and development cycles such as cosmeceuticals and health care products, and use the mentality of making medicine to make cosmetics.
In order to verify the feasibility of the idea, Zhou Jiarong bought all the popular products on the market. In the process of investigation, Zhou Jiarong found that although there are many daily chemical care products on the market, functional daily care products are relatively rare.
For this situation, Zhou Jiarong had entrepreneurial inspiration and chose "artemisinin" as a breakthrough. Artemisia annua, a functional plant, has a significant effect of removing mites and sterilization, but has not been able to get full results in the application, if you can do a good job, the future will be promising.
After ChengZhu was in the chest, Zhou Jiarong once again found his colleagues and co-founded the "Qunyou Creatures". The R&D team is five pharmacists with an average age of more than 80 years old, including Zhou Jiarong, so it is called the "400-year-old R&D Group" by the media.
The sword was sheathed, the brilliance was fully displayed, and everything was methodically pushed forward under the leadership of Zhou Jiarong.
03
Life is constantly struggling, and new stories will continue to play out
In terms of the age of the enterprise, Qunyou is a start-up; But in terms of the age of the founders, Zhou Jiarong is a predecessor. Despite his advanced age, Zhou Jiarong's thinking has both a principled side and an inclusive and open side.
At the beginning of Qunyou Biology's just starting out, someone once proposed that Zhou Jiarong use different levels of raw materials in the cosmetics industry, which can save a lot of costs, but was rejected by Zhou Jiarong's stern words, "quality is the lifeline of the enterprise" This creed almost runs through Zhou Jiarong's entire entrepreneurial career.
After immersing itself in research, Qunyou Bio launched three brands of "Rongxin", "Conquest" and "Crack Bo", and the core ingredient is Artemisia annua. The "Rongxin" series of skin care products uses Artemisia annua as raw material to build a unique pharmacist skin care product system; "Conquest" is the advocate of artemisia annua in the field of domestic hair washing and care; "Crack Bo" also uses artemisia annua extract to eliminate inflammation of the chapped skin and accurately repair the cracks.
▲ "Conquest" series
Of course, Zhou Jiarong also knows that the product is only part of the company's operation, after eating the loss of The Dianhong Pharmaceutical business model, Zhou Jiarong will market and disseminate, let go to the young people who are more sensitive to the Internet wind.
At present, Yunnan Qunyou has set up r&D centers and production bases in Yunnan, and set up central market departments and e-commerce operation centers in Shanghai and Hangzhou respectively, adhering to the "three legs" of single-brand stores, large circulation and supermarkets, and e-commerce.
At the same time, Zhou Jiarong, who has learned the lessons, has arranged a more stable corporate structure: more concentrated equity, cross-generational alternating design, and long-term team stock ownership plan. In terms of dealing with capital, Zhou Jia was cautious and cautious, and so far only one Bandi Capital has been introduced.
In addition, Zhou Jiarong will also contact a variety of industry people, understand dynamic information from different perspectives, and always keep thinking and updating.
In China's private enterprises, there is no shortage of big guys like Zhou Jiarong, who have reached the peak of their age and career at the same time. For example, Su Zengfu, the founder of Suber Group, started his business for the first time at the age of 53, relying on the spirit of persistent craftsmanship, Suber turned out to be born, like a day in the sky. In 2004, Suber landed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, becoming the first listed cookware company in China.
After that, Su Zengfu started a second venture at the age of 68 and entered the sanitary ware field. Not only has he overcome the problem of polishing cost recognized by the industry, but the automated production line he led has made the world see the other side of "Made in China" and provoked the banner of national brands.
Wang Binzhang, the founder of the "Heavenly Umbrella", also bet all his wealth to build umbrellas at the age of 60 in the voice of opposition. By 2015, when Wang Binzhang died at the age of 91, Paradise Umbrella had become an umbrella giant with annual sales of 2.6 billion yuan, accounting for 80% of the domestic umbrella.
Just recently, 78-year-old Wuhan Dameng Database founder Feng Yucai submitted a prospectus on the science and technology innovation board, trying to impact the first stock of the domestic database, if successfully listed, its market value or will exceed 50 billion yuan, becoming one of the largest IPOs of the science and technology innovation board this year.
Love does not die, hope does not die, entrepreneurship itself is a life cultivation, every step taken, is the node of destiny, but far from the end. As Zhou Jiarong said: "When people live, there are only two choices, one is to create, and the other is to consume." I am now in my 80s, and although my physical strength is far less than before, I still have to continue to struggle, which is the meaning of my life. ”
As long as the motivation is always there, the "new stories" belonging to these elderly warriors will continue to be written continuously.
(The picture of this article is from the network)
Resources:
1. China Story Magazine "The Rich Life of Zhou Jiarong - Interview with Zhou Jiarong, Founder of The Rongxin Brand"
2. 21st Century Business Herald "Regret selling his company, 84-year-old he found four octogenarians to concoct "regret medicine"" together"
3. The world's online business "56-year-old borrowed money to start a business, 78-year-old hit the IPO, he made a company with a valuation of tens of billions"