Could 7.95 million yuan bring down an industry leader once hailed as the "King of Breeding Pigs"?

In mid-September, a pre-detention notice from the Heshui County People's Court in Gansu Province dragged the long-silent TIANZOW BREED back into the public eye.

Both Sichuan Tianzow Breeding and Gansu Tianzow Breeding, along with legal representative He Rui, were placed on the pre-detention list.

The total amount involved was merely 7.9549 million yuan.

How did a former top contender for the "first breeding pig stock" fall to such depths?

The Rise of a Breeding Pig Empire

The story of Tianzow, the breeding pig king, begins with a Chongqing native named Yu Ping.

Yu Ping was not originally in the pig farming business.

He had a background in architecture and had once served as the plant manager of Beijing Pepsi-Cola, overseeing industrial enterprise operations at a foreign company.

In the late 1990s, he returned to his hometown to revitalize several farmers' markets in Chongqing, then invested in and acquired designated slaughterhouses, becoming a major shareholder and getting into the pig slaughtering business.

The biggest headache in slaughtering is sourcing pigs.

One day there are plenty, the next there are few; sizes and weights are unpredictable, and quality and safety cannot be guaranteed.

After much deliberation, Yu Ping slapped the table: if the source is unreliable, then farm pigs himself.

In 2004, Sichuan Tianzow Breeding was founded, and Yu Ping plunged headfirst into the breeding pig sector.

At that time, domestic high-performance lean-type core breeding pigs were heavily dependent on overseas imports.

Foreign breeding pig giants held core genetic breeding systems, and many domestic companies merely imported and multiplied stock, reduced to simple breeding pig couriers.

Yu Ping refused to accept this.

He wanted to build China's own breeding pig brand and establish a localized continuous selection and breeding system.

What truly made Tianzow famous was the sensational "chartered plane for pigs" in 2008.

In January of that year, a Boeing 747 departing from Chicago landed at Chengdu Shuangliu Airport after a 17-hour long-haul flight.

On board were 866 purebred Canadian breeding pigs.

Nearly 200 people on the ground participated in support operations, 23 transport vehicles handled the transfer, and police cars escorted the convoy along the route.

On that trip, Yu Ping not only spent heavily to buy breeding pigs, but also paid 2 million US dollars to permanently purchase the license for breeding pig genetic improvement technology in China from FAST Genetic Company under Canada's Hylife.

It was the largest single-batch breeding pig import in China at the time, and Tianzow used it to build a complete Canadian-line breeding pig population.

In 2017, Yu Ping pulled off a similar feat again, importing 975 purebred pigs from France's AXIOM company, completing its French-line breeding pig product line.

In those years, Tianzow was at the height of its power.

Yu Ping proclaimed the goal of building "China's breeding pig supermarket."

The company raced to stake claims across the southwest, northeast, and northwest, building 37 standardized farms, possessing two independent breeding systems for Canadian and French lines, and publicly claiming its purebred pig scale had reached 80,000 head.

In 2019, Tianzow reached the industry pinnacle.

That year, its breeding pig sales ranked first nationwide, and it was dubbed the third pole of the pig farming industry.

At the time, African swine fever was sweeping the country, industry capacity was being drastically reduced, breeding pig prices soared, and Tianzow made a fortune.

The Failed Listing

As early as 2016, Tianzow had already listed on the New Third Board.

By 2019, the company voluntarily delisted, aiming directly for the Hong Kong Stock Exchange main board.

In its prospectus, Tianzow told a beautiful story: China's largest independent breeding pig enterprise, free from foreign genetic dependence, benefiting from the pig cycle dividend, with rapid performance growth.

For a moment, the posture of the "first breeding pig stock" was ready to emerge.

In 2020, Tianzow made a second attempt at a Hong Kong IPO, planning to invest 70% of the raised funds into capacity expansion, with the original listing date set for November 16.

No one expected that with less than a week to go before listing, Tianzow suddenly slammed on the brakes and announced a postponement.

The reason given was official: "in view of current market conditions."

What market conditions?

Everyone in the industry understood: pig prices had fallen, and valuations could no longer hold up.

In the second half of 2020, pork prices, which had been rising for 19 consecutive months, turned downward for the first time, and the hog cycle began to reverse.

Hong Kong investors were not buying the breeding pig story; they only looked at profit expectations.

In a downcycle for pig prices, valuations of pig farming enterprises were directly halved.

This was not Tianzow's first failed attempt at a Hong Kong listing.

The prospectus first submitted in February of that year expired in August.

At the time, many in the industry questioned: the company called itself the "breeding pig king," but except for 2017, breeding pig revenue accounted for less than 30% in all other reporting periods, with more than half of revenue still coming from commercial pig sales.

In essence, it remained a farming enterprise deeply tied to the pig cycle, and the scarcity of its breeding pig business was questionable.

That failed listing became the watershed moment in Tianzow Breeding's fate.

However, the cost of the failed listing went far beyond not getting a sum of money.

The Debt Crisis

Over the years, Tianzow's expansion was entirely supported by leverage.

Building pig farms, introducing breeding stock, and rolling out a nationwide layout—the asset-heavy model burned cash extremely fast.

The company relied on bank loans and financial leasing for funding while viewing a listing as the key to breaking through.

If the IPO succeeded, it could use equity financing to replace debt and continue expanding capacity.

But once the listing window closed, it was as if the main artery of the capital chain had been cut.

What was worse, Tianzow expanded at the very peak of the cycle.

In 2020, at the price peak of the previous pig cycle, the company used debt funds to frantically build farms and expand herds, only to run straight into the cliff of a downcycle.

The length and depth of this downcycle far exceeded everyone's expectations.

After 2021, pig prices entered a long decline.

The breeding pig business was supposed to be a higher-margin sector, theoretically resistant to cycles.

But when the entire industry was losing money and culling sows, who would spend money to buy breeding pigs and update their herds?

Downstream fattening farms were unwilling to even restock piglets, so demand for breeding pigs naturally collapsed.

Tianzow's proud core business became precisely the first link to come under pressure at the bottom of the cycle.

Starting in 2023, Tianzow's debt problems gradually surfaced, and subsidiaries across the country were listed as enforcement targets.

From 2024 onward, pigs at its farms were judicially sold off by courts; by 2026, Heilongjiang Tianzow entered bankruptcy liquidation, and the Gansu Tianzow bankruptcy reorganization case reached its second trial.

As early as November 2023, Yu Ping quietly stepped down from his positions as legal representative and general manager of Sichuan Tianzow, with He Rui taking over.

He Rui is the spouse of Yu Ping's younger sister, and Yu Ping himself still serves as chairman and actual controller of the company.

In the end, a debt of 7.95 million yuan became the last straw that broke the camel's back.

Industry Winter

The collapse of Tianzow Breeding is not an isolated event.

It is a landmark signal of how industry reshuffling is deepening in this super pig cycle.

In the past, when we said the pig cycle had bottomed out, the first to die were small-scale farmers.

A household raising a few dozen pigs would lose money for half a year to a year, and when they could not hold on, they would clear their pens and exit.

But this round is different.

The small-scale farmers who needed to exit have mostly already done so, and the meat grinder has begun devouring mid-tier enterprises.

According to data from Zhuochuang Information, from September 2025 to now, the domestic hog farming industry has been losing money for 12 consecutive months.

The cruelty of this cycle lies in the abnormally slow pace of capacity reduction.

In the past, when pig prices fell, small-scale farmers exited quickly, capacity came down fast, and prices rebounded accordingly.

But now industry concentration has greatly increased, and leading enterprises are all toughing it out.

No one wants to cut production first; everyone wants to outlast their competitors and swallow the exiting capacity themselves.

The result is that everyone is draining together, competing over who has thicker cash flow and stronger financing capacity.

Just last month, northwest pig farming leader Tiankang Biological directly announced the termination of a 430 million yuan, 300,000-head piglet breeding project.

The 117 million yuan already invested went down the drain, and all remaining raised funds were redirected to supplement working capital.

The reason was straightforward: pig prices remain persistently weak, and continued investment is unlikely to achieve expected returns.

Even industry leaders have begun to actively cut off limbs to survive, and the situation for those mid-sized enterprises without listing financing channels, which added leverage to expand in recent years, can only be imagined.

The Cycle Is King

Reviewing the path of Tianzow Breeding's fall, it is actually not new.

Almost every collapse story in a cyclical industry follows a similar script: at the industry peak, confidence soars, leverage is used for aggressive expansion, and one believes they can ride out the cycle.

Then the cycle turns downward, revenue plunges, costs remain rigid, debt matures, the capital chain breaks, and finally the whole thing collapses over what appears to be an insignificant amount.

We often say the cycle is king, but few truly understand this phrase.

The so-called cycle is king does not mean how much you earn at the peak, but whether you can survive at the trough.

Why can Muyuan still hold up in this cold winter?

Because it stockpiled enough cash at the cycle peak, pushed costs to the industry extreme, and always remained vigilant about leverage.

Giants like Wens and New Hope also have other businesses such as feed and poultry to hedge risks.

The problem with Tianzow and others is that they treated the upcycle as the norm and mistook luck for ability.

When expanding, they only calculated the profit account of the upcycle, not the survival account of the downcycle.

Never overestimate your ability to ride out cycles, and never underestimate the length of the cycle bottom.

The pre-detention notice in September temporarily put an ungraceful period at the end of the "breeding pig king" story.

Yu Ping and his Tianzow Breeding ultimately did not fall in competition with multinational breeding pig enterprises, but rather under the leverage they added themselves and the long, cold winter of the cycle.

The cruelty of the business world lies precisely in this: you can win against the cycle countless times, but you only need to lose once to potentially lose everything.