In 1987, a 17-year-old Deng Hongjiu began working as a porter at Chongqing’s Chaotianmen wharf, then soon began selling tangerines two days a week, before setting up his own fruit stall. In 2002, he and wife Jiang Zongying set up Hongjiu Fruit Products. He made a big bet on the Thai durian market 10 years later, raising 100 million yuan ($14.3 million) to build a factory in the Southeast Asian country.
His visionary move, as China went on to embrace the famously pungent fruit, led many to dub Deng as China’s “durian king,” as he locked in a big slice of the lucrative market through long-term supply contracts with large supermarkets. By 2021, his Chongqing Hongjiu Fruit Co. Ltd. (6689.HK) was China’s largest durian distributor and had branched into other high-end fresh fruits, including dragon fruit, mangosteens, longans, grapes and cherries.
But in a tale of fruity fumbling, Deng’s empire came crashing down over the last two years in a storm of price volatility, faked sales and mismanagement, in a sector where timing is of the essence due to the highly perishable nature of fruit. The colorful story of this slow rise and rapid fall of a fruit magnate reached a symbolic end this week, when the company was forcibly delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.