In recent years, the mainland self-heating hotpot industry has encountered a downturn, with the once highly valued self-heating hotpot giant brand “Zi Hai Guo” facing a bankruptcy crisis.
According to Ai Qi Cha App, on February 5th, “Zi Hai Guo’s” affiliate company Hangzhou Jinlingyang Enterprise Management Consulting Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Hangzhou Jinlingyang) added a bankruptcy review case, with Ma Mou as the applicant and the Hangzhou Yuhang District Court as the handling court.
Reported by “Red Star Capital Bureau,” Zi Hai Guo is a self-heating convenient hotpot brand founded by founder Cai Hongliang in 2018. Subsequently, “Zi Hai Guo” quickly became the leading brand in the market at that time with its market positioning of “single dining” and “lazy economy.”
In 2020, due to the surge in demand for home consumption during the epidemic, Zi Hai Guo’s sales skyrocketed, setting a record of selling 5 million buckets in 10 minutes. Its Tmall flagship store also achieved a sales amount exceeding one billion yuan in just 21 minutes during the “Double Eleven” event that year.
With this momentum, Hangzhou Jinlingyang successfully completed five rounds of financing from 2018 to 2021, with a total financing amount exceeding 550 million yuan, including well-known investment institutions such as China Golden, Vertex Ventures, CMC Capital, Gaorong Capital, and others, with the valuation soaring to 7.5 billion yuan at one point. Hangzhou Jinlingyang revealed in a media interview that it had built 15 factories nationwide after 2021.
However, with the comprehensive lifting of epidemic control measures across China in 2022, the demand for “staying at home” sharply decreased, causing Zi Hai Guo’s sales to plummet. Coupled with the abandonment of the Lotus Health acquisition and the loss of key capital support, Zi Hai Guo began to default on advertising fees. In 2024, due to defaulting on 11.25 million yuan owed to Focus Media, Hangzhou Jinlingyang was forced into execution, and Cai Hongliang was restricted from high consumption by the court.
Information from Tianyancha shows that as of now, Hangzhou Jinlingyang has a total of 6 enforced person information with an amount exceeding 140 million yuan; 16 historical enforced person information with an amount exceeding 320 million yuan; 9 discredited enforced person information with a total amount involved of over 58.79 million yuan. Additionally, there are 26 pieces of equity freeze information.
It is worth noting that not only “Zi Hai Guo” alone, the entire self-heating hotpot industry in mainland China has been experiencing a cold winter in recent years. According to data from the market research institution “Win as Soon,” in the fourth quarter of 2024, the market growth rate of self-heating hotpot was only 0.78%, a decrease of 25.05 percentage points year-on-year, with sales volume and sales amount dropping by 29.18% and 32.67%, respectively.
To cope with the industry’s cold winter, other leading companies have also begun to reduce production capacity. For instance, Yihai International pointed out in its 2023 performance report that due to changes in market demand, the planned production capacity of its convenient fast food products has been adjusted to 28,000 tons, cutting about 66% of the previously planned capacity. In addition, some companies have already abandoned the self-heating hotpot business, such as China’s Unilever Group, which removed the “Cooking Time” self-heating hotpot in 2022; Weilong’s self-heating hotpot brands “Beige Hero” and “Self-Edible” spicy snack hotpot have also disappeared from e-commerce platforms.