Taking over for more than ten years, Liu Chang has driven New Dairy's Hong Kong stock listing attempt

Ask AI · How does Liu Chang’s grassroots training empower New Dairy’s journey to the Hong Kong stock market?

By / Zero Degree

Source / Node Finance

A few years ago, Yu Minhong asked Liu Yonghao in a dialogue: “If one day she (Liu Chang) were to invest one billion yuan into a project, would you think this decision is abrupt?” Liu Yonghao replied with a calm smile: “Over the past two years, her-led companies have invested four or five hundred billion yuan, all by her. If she thinks it’s a good bet, she just goes ahead and invests; if she’s not sure, she comes to ask me.”

Now, after this second-generation heiress takes over, she is about to secure an IPO.

Just recently, New Hope Dairy Co., Ltd. (abbreviated as “New Dairy”) issued an announcement stating that the company plans to issue overseas listed foreign-capital shares (H shares) and list on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Liu Chang, leading New Dairy, is accelerating its move toward HKEX.

New Hope’s “empire” is about to run out an IPO

For years, New Hope has been a perennial green-tree in China’s business world. Founded more than 40 years ago, New Hope has become one of the largest integrated suppliers of meat, eggs, and dairy products in the domestic market. Based on core businesses in modern agriculture, animal husbandry, and food industries—from hog breeding and feed production capacity to meat processing capabilities—New Hope continues to extend upstream and downstream, forming an industry synergy pattern spanning agriculture and animal husbandry, dairy fast-moving consumer goods, and smart rural and urban areas.

In 2024, its revenue was 103.1 billion yuan and net profit attributable to shareholders was 4.74 billion yuan; in the first three quarters of 2025, revenue was 80.5 billion yuan and net profit attributable to shareholders was 0.76 billion yuan, with performance remaining steady.

Not only that, the capital matrix of the New Hope Group includes five listed companies. Public information shows that Liu Yonghao is the actual controller of New Hope, Feima International, and Huarong Chemical; and he jointly controls New Dairy and New Hope Services together with Liu Chang.

According to the “2026 Hurun Global Rich List” released on March 5, the Liu Yonghao family has 77 billion yuan in wealth, ranking 299th globally.

And this official announcement of the move to the Hong Kong stock market is the dairy segment under New Hope—New Dairy.

New Dairy was established in 2006. At first, it was the dairy segment within the New Hope Group. It was spun off in 2011 and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2019, achieving an independent listing. As a professional dairy products company, its main businesses include liquid milk, dairy beverages, and milk powder, among others.

On the evening of March 11, New Dairy announced that its board of directors has decided to hire KPMG Huazhen as the auditing institution for this issuance and listing.

In fact, as early as January 2019, New Dairy had already successfully listed on the A-share market. In terms of performance, in the first three quarters of 2025, the company’s operating revenue was 8.434 billion yuan, up 3.49% year over year; net profit attributable to shareholders was 0.623 billion yuan, up 31.48% year over year; and non-recurring-profit net profit attributable to shareholders was 0.647 billion yuan, up 27.62% year over year.

But behind the impressive performance lies a hidden worry in its balance sheet.

From 2022 to 2024, New Dairy’s total liabilities decreased year by year—6.825 billion yuan, 6.299 billion yuan, and 5.736 billion yuan, respectively. Among them, current liabilities were 4.261 billion yuan, 4.018 billion yuan, and 3.731 billion yuan, respectively, and the scale is still on the high side.

Although the asset-liability ratio has continued to decline—from 71.91% in 2022 to 64.61% in 2024—by the end of September 2025, it further dropped to 59.98%. Although it has improved, it is still at a relatively high level.

In Node Finance’s view, this plan to go to Hong Kong for an IPO is both an important step for New Dairy to push forward internationalization and a must-have option to improve its asset-liability structure.

And as the biggest driver of New Dairy’s rush to HKEX, Liu Chang is also playing a more important role in this Hong Kong IPO push.

A full-scale takeover by the second-generation leadership

According to public career information, Liu Chang was born in 1980, has Singapore citizenship, and holds an EMBA degree. From an early age, she received strict training from her father, Liu Yonghao. At 16, she went to the United States to study, and in 2002 she entered the New Hope Group, starting from grassroots positions.

Today, she has been steering this trillion-yuan industrial empire for her 13th year.

Even though she is the successor of the New Hope Group, Liu Chang’s path to succession was not achieved overnight; instead, it involved more than a decade of accumulation and grassroots grinding.

In her early years, she used the alias “Li Tianmei” to enter the dairy business unit of New Hope, serving as the director of the general office. As one of the founders of that department, she took part in the company’s early mergers and acquisitions and integration of 11 local dairy enterprises nationwide. This experience laid the groundwork for her to take over and lead New Dairy today.

After that, Liu Chang briefly left the group. In Chengdu’s Chunxi Road, she ran a jewelry accessories store, and she also worked at an advertising company. This experience is widely believed to be to strengthen her capabilities in sensing consumer endpoints and in marketing.

After returning to the New Hope Group, Liu Chang successively held positions such as deputy general manager of the real estate business division and director of New Hope Liuhe, among others, beginning to engage in core business decision-making.

Around 2013, Liu Yonghao stepped down as chairman of New Hope Liuhe, and Liu Chang officially came to the front to take over. Under her leadership, New Hope Liuhe completed the transformation from a single feed processing business into an “agriculture and animal husbandry full industrial chain,” and it built the food segment (such as popular items like xiao su rou and other best-selling products) into a new growth engine.

In the subsequent decade, Liu Yonghao further delegated power, and Liu Chang began formally managing the family investment platform (Grassroots Capital, New Hope Investment Group).

During Liu Chang’s tenure as the leader, she endowed New Dairy with more “internet genes” and social attributes, making it more like a trend-oriented consumer products company.

For example, in terms of cross-industry experimentation and hit products, she promoted the rollout of ready-to-drink tea beverage channels such as “one sour yogurt cow,” and developed functional products targeting young professionals, such as “Huo Run” and “Burnt Yogurt.”

And in the area of aesthetics upgrades, under Liu Chang’s influence, New Dairy bid farewell to the traditional visual design of conventional dairy enterprises—steady but slightly old-fashioned. New Dairy’s product packaging and marketing activities are more design-forward and interactive, allowing it to successfully tap into the Z-generation consumer circle.

At present, with succession already completed, Liu Chang is pushing New Dairy to list in Hong Kong, further expanding the footprint of family capital.

Liu Chang’s “advancement war”

Amid the standoff between Yili and Mengniu, New Dairy under Liu Chang has never hidden its sense of crisis and ambition.

In Node Finance’s view, New Dairy’s push to HKEX is by no means a simple financing move. It looks more like a “second evolution” that Liu Chang, the second-generation successor of New Hope, is trying to lead the company through in the era of competition with limited incremental opportunities.

Behind the move to list in Hong Kong, there are two core games being played:

First, valuation and leverage: why choose Hong Kong?

New Dairy has been listed on the A-share market for five years already. At this stage, seeking both A-share and H-share financing platforms, the core logic lies in breaking through funding bottlenecks and seeking international backing. For a long time, New Dairy has achieved leapfrog growth through “M&A expansion,” but this model also drives up its liabilities ratio. Although valuations on Hong Kong stocks are currently more rational, as an international financial hub, Hong Kong’s flexibility can provide a more convenient channel for New Dairy’s future cross-border M&A and foreign-currency financing.

Industry insiders told Node Finance that on the A-share market, New Dairy is defined as a domestic-demand growth stock; while on the Hong Kong stock market, it will be directly compared with industry giants such as Mengniu and China Feihe. This move is not only for fundraising, but also to take the opportunity to introduce overseas sovereign wealth funds or long-term institutional investors, optimizing the shareholder structure.

Second, the capital map logic of “Grassroots Capital”

New Dairy’s underlying support is the “Grassroots Capital” group that Liu Yonghao and his daughter have cultivated for years. As New Hope’s industrial investment platform, Grassroots Capital has long been incubating tracks such as cold-chain logistics, condiments, and pet food. New Dairy’s move to Hong Kong can be seen as a concentrated showcase of the platform’s staged achievements.

In Node Finance’s view, this involves two layers of considerations. First is ecosystem integration. After listing in Hong Kong, New Dairy and cold-chain logistics resources under Grassroots Capital (such as Fresh Life) will generate tighter synergy. Second is brand premium. A Hong Kong listing is an “international passport” for expanding into overseas markets such as Southeast Asia; it is strategically meaningful for enhancing the international recognition of the “New Hope” brand.

Dancing in the era of shrinking trading volume

The dairy products industry today is caught in a double squeeze of consumption transformation and falling birth rates. As the vanguard deeply rooted in the consumer space, Liu Chang must answer how New Dairy will respond to market contraction.

In the context of China’s dairy industry entering “shrinking-volume competition,” endogenous growth has increasingly shown limitations. Through the Hong Kong platform, Liu Chang can obtain more flexible equity incentive tools to attract top-tier talent, and leverage international capital to build out global high-quality milk sources and cutting-edge biotechnology.

If Yili and Mengniu are pursuing “giant aircraft carriers” that cover massive scale, then New Dairy under Liu Chang is more like a “digital fast-boat flotilla.”

In an era of shrinking trading volume, New Dairy’s strategic focus is shifting from “making bigger scale” to “making thicker profits”—that is, increasing value per customer, optimizing supply chain turnover, and adding technology-driven premium. The true purpose of listing in Hong Kong is to find, on a global scale, a foothold to hedge against volatility in the domestic market.

The current difficulty is that Hong Kong stock investors have nearly stringent requirements for the growth of dairy companies. If New Dairy cannot prove its penetration capabilities in high-value markets such as East China and South China, then relying solely on reported growth supported by acquisitions will likely not earn high valuation premiums from the market.

But opportunities often hide behind challenges. As a female leader, Liu Chang’s sensitivity to consumer endpoints is more nuanced. This gives New Dairy an early advantage in digital transformation and private-domain operations, and also provides the confidence to tell Hong Kong investors the story of a “technology-driven dairy business.”

Node Finance believes that what Liu Chang is about to gain is not only an IPO, but also a major exam of her independent leadership over the past decade. Whether New Dairy can use this opportunity to tear off the label of “a regional dairy enterprise” and truly step up into a national heavyweight is what the market is watching closely.

Cover image generated by AI