This Week's Lead Pan Wei 🇨🇳 China · Founder Before Pan Wei opened a single restaurant, she built a factory. In 1994, on a Hong Kong trade delegation to Kumamoto, Japan, a bowl of Ajisen ramen brought back the bone-broth noodles of her childhood. In Shanxi, where families of the era threw away pig bones, her mother had collected them and, at the instruction of her Guangdong-born father, simmered them overnight on a coal stove into a rich white broth. Pan didn't stop at the bowl. She toured the factory behind it and was struck by the scale behind a small bowl of soup. In 1995 she secured permanent licensing rights to the Ajisen name across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao. She built a central kitchen first: a Shenzhen warehouse converted before any restaurant had opened. The first store opened in July 1996, in Hong Kong. The mainland test came the following year, at a food cart in Shenzhen's Window of the World, where Pan plated garnishes herself until her finger joints blistered. By 2007, Ajisen (China) Holdings listed on the Hong Kong exchange, 192 times oversubscribed. In 2008 she ranked first on the Hurun food and beverage rich list. Then, in July 2011, Chinese media exposed "bone-soup gate": the fresh-simmered broth Ajisen had marketed was reconstituted from factory concentrate. Ajisen acknowledged the concentrate use on 26 July. Within two weeks, an estimated HK$6.5 billion (~$830M USD) of market value was gone, including around HK$3.3 billion (~$420M USD) of Pan's own wealth. In her first full interview afterward, with NetEase Finance, she didn't reach for a defense. "I used to have a mistaken idea," she said, in translation from the Chinese, "that as a listed company we were already a transparent, public company." She said transparency now had to reach beyond financial data to products and factory processes. She remains chairman. ~HK$6.5 billion (~$830M USD) — market value erased within two weeks when the broth claim behind the brand was exposed |
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