Chai Xiu exits Milkground as Mengniu takes full control, ending the marketing myth of the cheese track.
When Chai Xiu submitted her resignation from all positions to the board of directors of Milkground, the power transfer between the founder and the hundred-billion dairy giant that had lasted for years finally reached its physical end.This is by no means an ordinary retirement after a successful career, but a complete reckoning by capital against the old high-profile marketing approach amid the cruel meat grinder of a shrinking children's snack market and endless cheese price wars.
The narrative of high-margin cheese sticks, once built on overwhelming brainwashing advertisements and middle-class parenting anxiety, has gone bankrupt. After enduring a long period of performance pain, the takeover party Mengniu can only choose to dismantle the last personnel barrier of corporate governance and take over this heavy-asset shell with the coldest logic of industrial integration.
The Underlying Logic of Equity Changes and Power Transfer
Through the changes in underlying commercial registration, this capital game of host and guest swapping positions appears extremely cold-blooded and precise. According to Tianyancha business data, as early as January this year, Chai Xiu had already been removed from core operating positions such as vice chairwoman, general manager, and legal representative, and the company's legal representative smoothly transitioned to Kuai Yulong, who has a pure Mengniu background.As of now, Mengniu holds 37.77% of the shares and firmly remains the largest shareholder, while Chai Xiu and her concert party Jilin Province Dongxiu Trading Co., Ltd. together hold 16.01%.
Under this set of cold equity confrontation disclosed by Tianyancha, Chai Xiu's resignation from the non-independent director and special committee member positions this time marks her passive reset at the management level. The remaining 16% equity in her hands is no longer a bargaining chip for contesting corporate control, but merely a financial shackle used to cover unfinished performance commitments and pledged debts.
The End of the Marketing Arbitrage Era
The underlying logic of Chai Xiu's exit is the complete end of the era in which Milkground relied on marketing arbitrage. In the early years, Milkground was able to rise abruptly, essentially by exploiting the category information gap in the domestic dairy market and packaging processed cheese with no technical barriers as a high-end nutritional product.However, the moat of cheese sticks is astonishingly shallow.
When Yili, Bel, and even white-label brands across major channels entered the freezer with the same OEM capacity and lower prices, the huge sales expenses that Milkground had originally used to maintain its high-end brand image instantly became a black hole devouring net profit. In the current major cycle of weakening consumer expectations, parents' willingness to pay for highly premium children's snacks has fallen off a cliff. The old operating approach of continuing to spend money to buy traffic and aggressively push high-end new products can no longer bring real cash flow recovery to the listed company.
Mengniu's Defensive War and Integration Logic
For Mengniu, which now fully steers the ship, completely absorbing Milkground is a defensive war it cannot afford to lose. When Mengniu initially entered with huge capital, what it sought was to use cheese, a high-value-added category, to boost its own profit center beyond ambient liquid milk. But as Milkground's performance changed, this former profit enclave instead became a bleeding point dragging down the group's financial statements.
Removing a management team strongly marked by the founder's personal imprint is a precondition for Mengniu to forcibly connect Milkground to its own vast liquid milk distribution network and global raw milk procurement supply chain.What Mengniu needs is no longer a star internet-famous brand advertising in elevators all day, but a dairy deep-processing workshop that can deeply coordinate with the group's underlying raw milk capacity and squeeze out a few cents of profit through an extreme supply chain.
The Fall of the Single-Product Marketing Myth
This founder exit drama in early autumn declares to the entire fast-moving consumer goods sector the fall of the single-product marketing myth.Consumer goods without underlying core technology or control over exclusive raw materials can certainly blow up a tens-of-billions market value bubble under the leverage of capital, but when the tide recedes and giants enter to harvest, the founder can ultimately only hand over the keys to the commercial empire along with an uncompleted bet agreement.