A short video of Zong Qinghou taking the flight without assistants accompanying went viral on TikTok  recently. “An honorable entrepreneur who impacts a generation”, “humble and respectful”...... Such praises demonstrated how much the Internet was moved by the contrast between his huge success as the founder of the Hangzhou Wahaha Group, the leading beverage company in China, and the low profile he humbly keeps.

Few days later, the household name of Wahaha, Zong’s business legend, also hit the Internet. Wahaha surprised the media again by its distinguished employee return rate of 97% and its successful recruitment of 426 employees after the Spring Festival, including over 300 operators. Compared to the widespread problem of labour shortage and recruitment difficulty, the close knit between Wahaha and its employees evokes public’s curiosity. 

To find out the mystery behind the figures, several employees were randomly chosen to receive the interview from Zhejiang News on March 6, and Li Rui was one of them. When asked about the occupation choice, he said, “When hunting for a job, I prioritize the welfare, development opportunities and entrepreneurial culture. Thus, my emotional attachment and sense of belonging to Wahaha derives from my satisfaction with the good working experiences here.”

The good working experiences are contributed by diverse factors, including the effectiveness and efficiency of Wahaha’s salary and reward system, labour guarantee system, talents training and entrepreneurial culture. For example, in 2018, Wahaha carried out a reform to encourage the motivated employees with higher salary and opportunities of cross-level promotion. In addition, Wahaha offers a comprehensive set of welfare and amenities for employees, including canteens, dormitory, shuttles, even public bathrooms and gyms.

Such an employee-friendly system and strong emotional bond within the company are motivated by the ‘family culture’ that Zong Qinghou has always emphasized. The tradition for Zong Qinghou to invite all the employees staying in Hangzhou during the Spring Festival to dinner has continued for 32 years. Every year, two days before the New Year’s Eve, the Junjie storehouse of Wahaha turns to the Junjie grand hotel. In 2019, Zong Qinghou encouraged employees to maintain the spirit by allocating the annual bonus of over 600 million yuan to celebrate the satisfactory growth rate of the average annual income of over 10%. 

Cai Guinyu, who is going to retire from Wahaha this year, expressed her gratitude to the family culture in Wahaha “The tradition of the annual dinner and rich annual bonus before New Year’s Eve has accompanied me for over thirty years in Wahaha”. For Yu Banlong, who acquainted his wife in Wahaha, this company has also become his family.

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In retrospect, the journey of establishing Wahaha, a huge family, is full of hardships. Zong is a native of Zhejiang, who received little formal education. After graduating from secondary school, Zong initially worked at the Zhoushan salt farm, then became a menial worker at a local school. In 1987, he targeted a mini grocery in a school in Shangcheng District, Hangzhou, to sell milk. It is in this mini grocery that the embryonic business of Wahaha started with an initial capital of CNY 140,000 and only two teachers as Zong’s business partners. 

In the following two years, Wahaha expanded its business into processing liquid nutrient and the Hangzhou Wahaha Nutritional Food Factory was developed. Based on the traditional Chinese medicine concept of "food therapy" to help solve the problem of children's picky eating and the household advertisement "Drinking Wahaha brings good appetite", the product became a hit nationwide. In 1990, the output value of Wahaha exceeded 100 million yuan. The economic miracle that occurred in the primary school campus evoked attention from the society and governments at all levels.

With his workaholic ethic, in 1996, Wahaha obtained independence from an early government partner in the WHH joint venture with Groupe Danone, a world leading food company, and successfully introduced a foreign investment of over 45 million dollars. Now, Wahaha has roughly 150 subsidiary companies, 60 manufacturing bases and a huge annual revenue of over 55 billion yuan. It ranks the biggest food and beverage company in China and the fifth biggest worldwide.

In a recent interview with Zhejiang Daily, Zong Qinghou expressed his wishes with his attainment experiences, “It is never too late to start chasing your dream, and life brings surprise as long as you keep running. Everyone is a dream chaser, and for me, it is through contribution to the common prosperity that can Wahaha be respected by the whole society. We will continuously chase the entrepreneurial dreams in a more profound sense, to help realize the national dream of prosperity.”

(Executive Editor: Yongliu HE)