Busy Ming Group, a Chinese snack retailer known for its low-cost products, has minted two billionaires thanks to its blockbuster Hong Kong market debut on Wednesday that saw its shares surge over 70% from their initial public offering price.
The two new members of the three-comma club are Yan Zhou and Zhao Ding. According to Forbes estimates, Yan, the 38-year-old chairman, has a fortune of $3.1 billion, while Zhao, the 36-year-old deputy chairman, has a net worth of $2 billion. Both derive their fortune from stakes in the Changsha, Hunan-headquartered retailer.
Busy Ming raised HK$3.7 billion ($470 million) in the IPO, selling 15.5 million shares at HK$236.6 apiece, at the top end of a marketed range. It plans to use the proceeds to upgrade its supply chain and stores, and step up promotional activities, according to its prospectus. The share sale, whose retail tranche has been oversubscribed almost 1,900 times, attracted cornerstone investors including BlackRock, Tencent and Temasek.
The company didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment on Yan’s and Zhao’s wealth. Investors are optimistic about Busy Ming’s prospects due to its low-cost strategy, Kenny Ng, a Hong Kong-based securities strategist at Everbright Securities International, says via messages sent by WeChat.
The retailer, for example, offers goods such as a 54-gram box of chocolate biscuits for 2.9 yuan (40 cents), or a 500-gram bag of roasted cashew nuts for 49.9 yuan.
Its prices are typically 25% cheaper than those from supermarkets, Arun George, an analyst who publishes via the Smartkarma research platform, wrote in a January research note. Everbright’s Ng says this makes Busy Ming less vulnerable to China’s consumption downturn, as households tighten their belts amid a prolonged property slump and threadbare social safety net.
“Over the past few years Busy Ming has demonstrated exponential growth,” says Ng. “Investors think the company has a chance of sustaining such growth over the short term.”
Ng says the retailer should be able to grow rapidly this and next year. Sales rose 75.2% year-on-year to 46 billion yuan in the first nine months of 2025 (the latest financial results available), according to its prospectus, while net profit more than tripled to 1.6 billion yuan during the same period. Busy Ming operates a network of about 20,000 stores across China, with most of them in lower-tier cities and towns.
The company may have set its sights on the low-cost strategy from day one. Yan founded snacks brand Busy for You in Changsha in 2017, while Zhao founded his own snack retailer Super Ming in the city of Yichun in southeastern Jiangxi province in 2019. The two companies merged in 2023 to become Busy Ming, which continues to sell under both brands.
In a January interview with local media LatePost, Yan said he wanted to build a cheap snack brand for the masses. The mogul reminisced about growing up in a rural village in his home province of Hunan, and how people there were delighted by small and affordable snacks.
Zhao saw a similar opportunity, according to local media 36Kr. He ventured on his own after dropping out of high school, and sold snacks as early as 2008, according to the 36Kr report. After the merger, Busy Ming raised funding from investors HongShan Capital Group (formerly Sequoia Capital China), 5Y Capital and Gaorong Ventures before tapping the public markets.
“Our founders, Mr. Yan Zhou and Mr. Zhao Ding, are young and highly insightful entrepreneurs,” the company wrote in its prospectus. “Through precise targeting of consumer groups, innovative business models and a disruptive supply chain system, they have provided consumers with products with high value for money.”