Wuliangye started to make VC

Text | PEdaily in the investment field

After Maotai, Wuliangye came.

The investment community has learned that recently, Yibin Chunzhixiu Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership) was established, and its business scope includes engaging in equity investment, investment management, asset management and other activities with private equity funds. The fund is jointly funded by 21 enterprises, including Yibin Wuliangye Fund Management Co., Ltd., a fund company under Wuliangye Group, and also serves as the GP of the fund.

It can be said that this is Wuliangye’s personal end to be a VC. At present, the latest market value of Wuliangye is about 600 billion RMB, which is a proper liquor giant.

Looking at it, the layout direction of Wuliangye in the field of venture capital is mostly concentrated in the direction of new energy, which coincides with the strategic industry that Yibin, the city where it is located, is making efforts. Obviously, this is also a rare cross-border-Wuliangye invested the money earned by liquor in the most urgent science and technology track in China.

Just now, Wuliangye set up a new fund, and the VC map emerged.

According to the data, Yibin Chunzhixiu Equity Investment Partnership currently has a scale of 300 million yuan. The funders include Chengdu Wushang Supply Chain Management Co., Ltd., Henan Xinshenglin Trading Co., Ltd., Shaanxi Huading Liquor Co., Ltd. and Yibin Wuliangye Fund Management Co., Ltd. and other 21 enterprises.

Among them, Chengdu Wushang Supply Chain Management Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Wuliangye Group, contributed 169 million yuan, accounting for more than half of the shares.

In detail, this is Wuliangye’s third investment in equity this year. On September 22nd, Wuliangye Fund established Yibin Nongxiangxiu Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership) with a scale of 300 million yuan. In June, Wuliangye Fund also established Yibin Mingmenxiu Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership) Fund.

Liquor’s "printing machine" ability really deserves its reputation. In the latest earnings season, Kweichow Moutai and Wuliangye, two leading liquor enterprises, handed over their transcripts with daily earnings of 202 million yuan and 96 million yuan respectively. How to manage assets with such a huge cash flow? Their answer is, invest.

In fact, Wuliangye Group has long started the layout of equity investment. In 2017, Yibin Wuliangye Fund Management Co., Ltd. was established, and a number of funds have been set up in conjunction with Sichuan Venture Capital, Chengdu Investment and Yibin Science and Education Industry Investment Group, such as Yibin High-end Growth Industry Investment Guidance Fund, Sichuan Chuangxing Advanced Manufacturing Investment Co., Ltd. and Yibin Talent Innovation and Entrepreneurship Equity Investment Fund. However, from the perspective of share ratio and participation, Wuliangye is more like "holding a money field".

Until this year, Wuliangye settled intensively in the venture capital market. Impressively, in April, Wuliangye Group invested RMB 1 billion to establish Sichuan Wuliangye New Energy Investment Co., Ltd. (referred to as Wuliangye New Energy).

Two months later, Wuliangye New Energy completed its first investment-becoming a shareholder of Sichuan Heguang Tongcheng Photovoltaic Technology Co., Ltd., with a shareholding ratio of 10%. This is a new company established less than 100 days ago, but Xie Yi, the founder of Heguang Tongcheng, is really an "old acquaintance" in the photovoltaic industry-once the chairman of Tongwei Co., Ltd. In addition to Wuliangye, the shareholders of the new company include Yibin SASAC and Kunde Investment.

In addition, Wuliangye also established Sichuan Zhongxin Green Energy Co., Ltd. with the oil and gas giant PetroChina, with a registered capital of 91 million yuan, and its business scope includes the wholesale of refined oil, the sales of charging piles, the sales of hydrogenation and hydrogen storage facilities for stations, and the lease of photovoltaic power generation equipment. The combination of traditional energy big brother and liquor big brother is quite interesting.

Why do you do VC? Yibin is fighting a new energy war.

Wuliangye has always occupied a place in China Liquor Jianghu.

In the past, Wuliangye did not worry about sales and performance. But in recent years, growth bottlenecks have gradually emerged-

In 2019, Wuliangye’s revenue and net profit growth rate were still above 20%, but since 2020, these two data have both declined. In 2022, the growth rate of Wuliangye’s performance hit the lowest point in six years. In the first half of this year, Wuliangye’s revenue increased by 10.39% and its net profit increased by 14.38%, ranking the bottom among the "Maowu Luyangfen".

Tang Qiao, then chairman of the board of directors, once openly admitted that "the expectation that Wuliangye Co., Ltd. will continue to maintain continuous high-speed growth for ten years has been impossible to realize. The group should take into account the development of joint-stock companies, which means that in the future, joint-stock companies will not only sell wine, but also develop other industries, at least those with returns. Because the high-end wine industry has reached the ceiling. "

Therefore, Wuliangye urgently seeks the second growth curve.

As we all know, new energy is one of the most certain tracks in this era. Ren Zeping, a well-known economist, once said, "If you don’t invest in new energy now, it’s like not buying a house 20 years ago". Wuliangye, which has sufficient cash flow, will naturally not miss this opportunity to enter the market-in the dividend period when national policies support new energy, the new and old industries will keep pace.

Further, Wuliangye has a greater historical background by investing in new energy sources.

As a key state-owned enterprise under the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Yibin City, Wuliangye also shoulders the heavy responsibility of revitalizing local industries. In 2022, Wuliangye Group’s revenue scale of 150 billion yuan contributed nearly half of Yibin’s GDP.

But it is not a good thing to rely too much on liquor and traditional industries. Yibin is also aware of this, so in the latest development ideas of Yibin, new energy and smart car industry are mentioned in front of liquor industry. Vigorously developing photovoltaics was also written into the government work report of Yibin City in 2023. This not only overlaps with the timeline of Wuliangye’s cross-border investment, but also coincides with the direction in which it is heavily invested.

"Yibin’s investment promotion is very energetic, and the docking team knows the industry very well." A VC partner from the coast once said to the investment community. When he talked with relevant personnel in Yibin, he mentioned a new energy unicorn that was hidden at first sight. I didn’t expect the other party to take over the words and be as familiar as investors.

Not only that, Yibin also ran around the country to attract investment and took out real money to support the industry. In just a few years, Yibin has brought hundreds of power battery enterprises and dozens of photovoltaic enterprises headed by Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited, with a total investment of more than 300 billion, and a new energy capital is emerging.

The hottest sideline of liquor bosses: investing money in hard technology

Following the footsteps of Wuliangye, we found that many liquor bosses appeared in the primary market this year.

The most embarrassing thing is Maotai. On May 19th, Kweichow Moutai announced that it planned to contribute to the establishment of two industrial development funds-Maotai Zhaohua (Guizhou) Industrial Development Fund and Maotai Jinshi (Guizhou) Industrial Development Fund, with a subscription of 5 billion yuan respectively and a cumulative contribution of 10 billion yuan. Among them, the partners of the two funds are China Merchants Capital and Jinshi Investment respectively.

Different from the previous biased consumption, Maotai’s investment direction mainly focuses on investment opportunities in the fields of new generation information technology, biotechnology, new energy, new materials, high-end equipment and large consumption. It can be simply summarized as follows: Kweichow Moutai used its own funds to set up a fund to invest in high-tech that it was not familiar with.

Looking at the present, traditional entrepreneurs with tens of billions and hundreds of billions of assets have a strong demand for asset allocation, and they are increasingly active in VC/PE circles. Among them, the most typical is a group of liquor bosses with strong financial resources.

In January this year, Jiangsu Jinshiyuan Wine Industry announced that it planned to invest 150 million yuan to join Nanjing Huatai Jinsui Biomedical Venture Capital Partnership (Limited Partnership). In the last two years, Jinshiyuan has set foot in the fields of new energy, intelligent equipment and medical health by investing in Yida Capital and Nanjing Huatai Jinsrui Biomedical Venture Capital Partnership.

In May this year, LU ZHOU LAO JIAO CO.,LTD and Guotai Junan held a signing ceremony of the strategic cooperation agreement. According to the agreement, in the future, the two sides will actively practice the concepts of "financial service to the country" and "industry service to the country" and jointly explore the joint construction of industrial funds and M&A funds. Among them, LU ZHOU LAO JIAO CO.,LTD will be the main investor.

We will enlarge the scope. In 2019, the daily chemical giant Naes participated in the fund of CPE Yuanfeng and broke into the medical and health field; This year, Naes also invested in Gaoling, one of which is semiconductor. There are Yanghe shares, and Huatai Yanghe Parent Fund was established, and Jinpu Investment and Yunfeng Fund were invested. …..

It is not difficult to find a phenomenon-in the past, most of these liquor tycoons invested in the consumption field related to their main business. Today, their investment tentacles are not limited to consumption. Coincidentally, the direction of the funds they invest in frequently mentions hard technology fields such as new energy, semiconductors and intelligent manufacturing.

Once upon a time, this was not within the scope of their investment. A person in charge of an intermediary told the investment community in 2018, "We serve the family of a real estate tycoon. They once recommended a semiconductor fund, but the other party reported that his boss still likes to invest in real estate."

But now the situation is just the opposite. With the change of industries, established consumer companies have also begun to lay out emerging industries. They are not short of money, but both the founders and the business scope are still unfamiliar with the hard technology field with high threshold. In this case, either incarnate LP and give the money to professional people; Either form a team and go off in person.

China’s science and technology wave is vast, and tens of thousands of entrepreneurs participate in it in different ways. This not only provides the VC/PE institutions with difficult fund-raising with an incremental source of living water, but also provides a steady stream of bullets for China’s scientific and technological competition. Of course, such efforts will also share the fruits of the rise of science and technology in China.