Qin Yinglin, Chairman of Chinese company Muyuan Foodstuff, made his fortune as the country’s largest pig farmer in the world’s largest pork market.

 Now sitting on a fortune of over $ 23 Bn, who would have thought that pig farming could create wealth on such a scale? 

Qin Yinglin was born in 1965 in Neixiang County in Henan, the most populous province in China. Passionate about agriculture from a young age, the entrepreneur studied animal husbandry at Henan Agricultural University and graduated in the late 1980s, at the start of China’s economic reforms. The leader began his career in a public company but resigned three years later to start his own business. The Muyuan Foods adventure began in 1992, accompanied by his wife Qian Ying. The couple starts off with just 22 piglets, most of which died in a swine disease outbreak.

Almost 30 years later, and in 2019 alone, his farms have raised over 10M pigs.

The company slaughters on average around 5M pigs per year. Muyuan Foods has been listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange since 2014, and has subsidiaries (most of them pig farms) across China. The food giant breeds more than 550,000 sows a year. These impressive figures are mainly due to constant innovation and close collaboration with leading national and international industry experts to accelerate company development. China is the world’s largest consumer of pork (50M tonnes of pork per year).

Pork remains the most popular protein in China.

Demand is often strong, and supply losses due to slaughter or restrictions can cause prices to accelerate rapidly. The swine flu epidemic in 2019 wiped out half of Chinese pigs, pushing prices up 160%. Disaster for some breeders, especially the smaller ones, this crisis was a real opportunity for Qin Yinglin and his company. His empire grew significantly in the year 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic only improved this situation. Muyuan’s profit jumped 260% in the third quarter compared to the same period of 2018. Muyuan Foods’ stock price soared 200%, pushing Qin’s personal fortune to $23Bn.

Muyuan’s strength resides in a high percentage of pigs raised on its own farms, which allows it to better control hygiene and safety.

The company has more independent farms than many of its competitors, which outsource pig farming to much smaller companies. Analysts still expect prices to normalize, and therefore the price of Muyuan Foods and Qin Yinglin’s fortune to decline. Muyuan obtained 436 national patents and was recognized as «the main national agricultural industrialization enterprise», «the national reserve of live pigs» and «the national pork industry technology». The entrepreneur lives in Nanyang, China, with his wife Qian Ying. This latter, who sits on the board of Muyuan, is a new addition to the Forbes list, with a fortune of $1.4Bn. The couple own a 60% stake in Muyuan Foods.