This episode introduces a business leader: Lei Wenyong, National Model Worker, Standing Committee Member of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Vice Chairman of the Sichuan Association for Science and Technology, Chairman of the Mianyang Federation of Industry and Commerce and President of the Mianyang General Chamber of Commerce, and Chairman of Sichuan Tieqilishi Industrial Group Co., Ltd.!
In 1988, Lei Wenyong was a technician at a feed company under the Mianyang Grain Bureau. While accompanying researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences on a field survey, he saw an old farmer running through the rain bare-chested, wrapping a piglet in his clothes. Puzzled, he asked the farmer, “Aren’t you afraid of catching a cold?” The farmer replied, “It’s a small thing if I get sick, but if anything happens to my pig, I’ll lose the money I need to live on this year.” These words struck Lei Wenyong deeply. At that moment, he realized how hard life was for farmers. So he resolved to establish a business with a social mission, helping farmers and changing their circumstances. 30 years later, the company he founded had grown into a business worth tens of billions. It had invested nearly ten billion yuan across multiple provinces and more than 600 villages nationwide, helping over 10 ten thousand farming households increase their income and prosper!
In 1992 year, after gaining some experience in the industry, he remained true to his original aspirations and resolutely decided to quit his job and start a business. With 3.5 ten thousand yuan borrowed and 5 like-minded partners by his side, he founded TQLS. He derived the company’s name from the Sichuan dialect expression “铁哥们” (“close buddies”), meaning that a group of good friends would come together to do something lasting.
In the early days of the business, they were short-staffed, and everyone wore several hats. Sometimes, when the loaders could not keep up, Lei Wenyong would roll up his sleeves and rush in to help, shouldering bags of feed weighing tens or even hundreds of jin. Through his actions, he showed all his partners that there were no high-and-mighty bosses here—only a group of entrepreneurs working side by side and watering their dreams with sweat.
They charged into the market like an army. They also kept learning, reflecting, and improving through practice, like students at a school without walls. As someone with a technical background, Lei Wenyong knew that product quality was the very foundation of a company’s survival. For a long time, he kept himself “anchored” on the production line, striving for perfection in every feed formula. Production conditions were rudimentary at the time: machines roared and dust filled the air. He often worked alongside the workers, drenched in sweat and covered in dust, adjusting equipment and studying production processes. He pursued product quality almost obsessively, firmly believing that “our products reflect our character, and it is our duty to pursue product excellence and earn our customers’ trust through craftsmanship.”
During the challenging early years of the venture, the beginnings of TQLS’s culture of “one family, one army, one school” took shape. Everyone lived and ate together, sharing both good fortune and hardships, like one warm family!
In 1997, at a marketing conference attended by a thousand people, Lei Wenyong made an unexpected announcement about something that others found very difficult to understand. It would also determine TQLS’s future: he would name the technology center laboratory after Feng Guangde, the deputy general manager in charge of technology. It was the first laboratory in the industry to be named after an individual other than the company’s owner. In the decades that followed, the Feng Guangde Laboratory became the foundation of TQLS’s entire technology system. It also served as a comprehensive experimental station for the national modern industrial technology systems for pigs, laying hens, and waterfowl, and won multiple National Science and Technology Progress Awards!
In 2001, TQLS established its first subsidiary, Chengdu TQLS Feed Co., Ltd., and officially began expanding externally. Around the same time, the company began extending beyond feed production into farming, and started developing its laying-hen industry chain. The “brand + standards + scale” model and the “company + industrial park + farmers” production model gradually took shape.
In 2017, Lei Wenyong made the keen observation: “Future competition will no longer be competition between companies in the same industry, but competition between industrial chains and ecosystems.” He then led the company in its official transition to a full-industry-chain model, with its end-market food business as the driving force, in turn advancing the development of the entire chain, from upstream breeding and farming to feed. TQLS also opened up its core capabilities to ecosystem partners across the industry chain. Using industrial and internet thinking to reshape the traditional food industry, they successfully broke down the barriers between the field and the dining table!
Today, Tieqilishi Group has grown into a large, modern agricultural and food enterprise group integrating feed, animal husbandry, food, and bioengineering. It has established more than 150 branches and subsidiaries nationwide, and owns several well-known food brands, including Sheng Di Le Cun, Maple Leaf Ranch, Tumen Zhao Duck, Daotai Fu, and Tie Kang. Sheng Di Le Cun eggs have also served as egg suppliers for major international events, including the G20, the APEC Summit, the Boao Forum, the Davos Forum, and the Military World Games. Every year, at least 5 hundred million families create egg-based culinary experiences with Sheng Di Le Cun. The company also owns two new pig breeds, “Tianfu Meat Pig” and “Sichuan-Tibet Black Pig,” which are known as the “two chips” for revitalizing Sichuan’s pig industry. It also led the development of the industry standard for “Tianfu Meat Pig”!
What mattered most to Lei Wenyong was never just how much money his own company made. On the display wall at Tieqilishi, “One person’s prosperity is not prosperity; prosperity for everyone is true prosperity” is given the most prominent position. This is not just a slogan. Jike Ahong, an ethnic Yi man from Xide County, Liangshan Prefecture, was still registered as a poor household in 2018. Tieqilishi provided piglets, technical support, and feed, and guaranteed to buy back the pigs. He set up a pig-raising operation, and just over a year later, his net profit exceeded 40 ten thousand yuan. He lifted himself out of poverty and helped his neighbors do the same. Jike Ahong said to Lei Wenyong, “You are as dear to me as my parents.”
This model has been promoted from Xide to Heilongjiang, Guizhou, Jiangxi, Yunnan and other places, helping a total of 10 ten thousand farming households increase their income and shifting farmers from “living off the weather” to “building wealth through industry.” TQLS was also honored with numerous prestigious titles, including “National Model Collective for Ethnic Unity and Progress” and “National Advanced Collective for Poverty Alleviation.” Here is another admirable fact: while pursuing his PhD at Singapore Management University, Lei Wenyong wrote his doctoral dissertation on “Research on Extreme Poverty Governance Based on Social Network Analysis”—he truly treats helping farmers make money as a field of study!