Pan Wei

Be sensitive to the market. See clearly the trends of market development, then adjust your products and business model accordingly. In one phrase: change as circumstances change.

A migrant with no degree and no safety net #

Pan left Shanxi for Hong Kong in 1988, straight out of high school, with no university education and no capital behind her. Her parents made the move together; there was no family business waiting on the other side, no network of contacts, nothing but the decision itself. Her first job was in the accounts department of a food-trading firm. She quit after roughly three months, having spent her evenings teaching herself finance and English, convinced she could trade on her own rather than keep someone else’s books.

What followed was nearly a decade running an Asian-foodstuffs export business — processing goods in Shenzhen, shipping them through Hong Kong to buyers in the US, Canada, and UK. It was a trade built on patience rather than product: payment terms stretched 40 to 90 days, and she later described the entire industry as “a vicious circle of competition revolving around who could survive longest waiting on receivables.” There was no single crisis in those years, just the slow attrition of cash flow that never quite caught up with itself — a buyer paying late in one country while a supplier demanded payment on time in another, with Pan absorbing the gap in the middle every time. It left her with something more durable than profit from any one shipment: an instinct for exactly where a supply chain breaks, and what it costs to hold one together regardless of who is late paying whom.

The break came on a Hong Kong trade delegation to Japan in 1994. In Kumamoto, she ate a bowl of Ajisen (味千拉面) ramen and the broth pulled her straight back to childhood — her mother, in Shanxi, simmering discarded pig bones into broth on a coal stove, following instructions passed down from Pan’s own Cantonese father. It was not a dish either of her parents had grown up eating; it was one her father had insisted on regardless, a Cantonese habit transplanted into a Shanxi kitchen because he believed in it, and the child who grew up eating it thousands of miles from Guangdong carried the taste forward without knowing where, or whether, it would ever matter again. “When I ate noodles in the Ajisen noodle shop in Japan, that childhood taste and memory came back,” she said later. She didn’t stop at the bowl. She toured the factory behind it — roughly 100 mu of industrial cauldrons — and left with a plan that, for the moment, had nothing to do with opening a restaurant at all. It was a plan about the kitchen, not the dining room: whatever she built next would have to reproduce that one bowl reliably, at scale, for customers who had never tasted her mother’s version and had no reason to trust a stranger’s promise that it was authentic.

Betting everything on infrastructure first #

In 1995, Pan secured permanent PRC, Hong Kong, and Macao licensing rights to the Ajisen name from its Japanese owner, Shigemitsu Industry Co. Most operators in her position would have opened a store as fast as possible, while the trade-tour memory was still fresh. She did the opposite: she built a factory first, converting a Shenzhen warehouse into a central kitchen capable of producing standardized broth at volume. It meant no revenue for over a year while she assembled a supply chain that no restaurant yet existed to serve. The bet was that a chain built on someone else’s inconsistent kitchens would fail the moment it tried to scale — and that the only way to avoid that fate was to remove the kitchen’s inconsistency before opening day.

The first Ajisen store didn’t open until July 1996, in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, running on exactly the central-kitchen model she’d insisted on from the start — a decision that meant the Hong Kong launch looked, from the outside, indistinguishable from any other noodle shop opening that year, when in fact it was the visible tip of a factory investment few competitors had matched.

The mainland entry tested that model directly and personally, not just financially. In 1997, at a cart trial in Shenzhen’s Window of the World, Pan plated garnishes herself, night after night, until her finger joints blistered — earning more than ¥200,000 in eight days and proving the concept could survive contact with a mainland market that had never encountered a standardized noodle chain before. She was not delegating the proof of concept to staff; she was standing behind the cart herself, testing whether a stranger in Shenzhen would pay for a bowl built on a Japanese recipe and a Shanxi memory. The first mainland restaurant opened that same year on Huaqiang North Road. By 2003, keeping the supply chain ahead of the store count had become a business in its own right: she founded Leading Food (Shanghai) Development Co., Ltd. purely to scale the infrastructure the growing chain now depended on, formalizing what had, until then, been built one converted warehouse at a time.

Listing, then losing what the listing was supposed to prove #

On 30 March 2007, Ajisen (China) Holdings Ltd listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange — the first mainland-China-based catering chain to do so — 192 times oversubscribed. It was the kind of validation an export trader waiting on 90-day invoices could never have imagined a decade earlier. Pan topped the Hurun Food & Beverage Rich List for four consecutive years starting in 2008, reaching an estimated ¥3.5 billion at her peak. In 2010 she announced a thousand-store target for the following five years; the chain never got there, its footprint eventually peaking near 799 stores nearly a decade later.

The reckoning arrived in July 2011. Chinese media exposed what became known as “bone-soup gate” (骨汤门) — the fresh-simmered bone broth Ajisen advertised in every store was, in fact, reconstituted factory concentrate, its calcium claims exaggerated well beyond anything the product actually delivered. The stock fell roughly 45% over three weeks; over two weeks, the scandal erased an estimated HK$6.5 billion in market value and around HK$3.3 billion of Pan’s own wealth on the 51.86% stake she held at the time. Shanghai regulators confirmed a ¥200,000 false-advertising fine that November, closing the regulatory chapter of the scandal even as the reputational one continued.

In her first full televised interview after the scandal, on NetEase Finance’s 网易财经会客厅 program, she didn’t reach for a communications strategy or a legal defense. “I used to have a mistaken idea,” she said, “that as a listed company we were already a transparent, public company… That was wrong. What we learned is that going forward transparency must not come only from financial data but also from your products and your factory processes.” It was a striking admission for someone who had spent 16 years building her authority on exactly that claim — that the factory, not the marketing, was where the truth of the business lived. The scandal hadn’t disproven the instinct. It had proven she hadn’t lived up to it, and the interview was the closest thing to a public reckoning with that gap that a Chinese executive in her position had reason to give.

A long climb that hasn’t finished #

The years after the scandal tested whether that instinct still held under pressure, and not every test was one she passed cleanly. A US$60 million bet on the delivery platform Baidu Waimai in 2015 was meant to give the chain a second growth engine as dine-in traffic plateaued; it was later written down, and 2017 brought a net loss near ¥487 million, much of it traceable to that single investment. In 2019, as the store count peaked around 799, a former CFO was disclosed to have misappropriated roughly HK$23.6 million between 2012 and 2018 — a second credibility wound landing on top of the first, and one she had no personal hand in creating, but one that still fell on the chairman who had promised transparency from the factory floor up. That same year marked her last Hurun appearance, at ¥2.3 billion, down more than 60% from her 2008 peak. A 2024 net loss of ¥20.224 million followed, as mainland consumer spending softened across the sector and squeezed every mid-market chain competing for the same shrinking wallet — a downturn with no scandal behind it at all, just the ordinary difficulty of running a restaurant chain through a weak economy.

None of it removed her from the chairman’s seat. By the first half of 2025, the chain had returned to profit — ¥24.2 million in net income across 608 stores — with Pan still chairman, chief executive, and, by media citation, controlling shareholder at roughly 47.55% through Favor Choice Ltd and the Anmi Trust. In 2021, she described to The CEO Magazine the same philosophy that had carried her through both the scandal and the years of losses since — reading the market’s direction early and adjusting before it forced her hand, rather than defending a plan that had already stopped working. It is advice she has now had to take twice over — once to build a chain no one in mainland China had scaled before, and once to survive the exact failure of the credibility claim the whole chain had been built on.

The habit that outlasted the scandal #

What survived bone-soup gate wasn’t the advertising claim — that was gone for good, and rightly so. What survived was the underlying habit that had built the company in the first place: when something is wrong, go to the factory floor and fix the process, not the messaging around it. Pan’s career runs on that same instinct in both directions, for better and for worse. It is the instinct that made her convert a warehouse before opening a store in 1995, that had her personally plating garnishes until her hands blistered in 1997, and that put her in front of a television camera in 2011 admitting the company’s own claim to transparency had been hollow. It is also the instinct that kept her in the chairman’s seat through a written-down investment, a CFO’s fraud, and a year of consumption-downgrade losses that had nothing to do with any decision she personally made — because the alternative to staying and fixing it was never one she seriously considered.

Decades into the business, she has never stopped being the person who tours the factory herself. The recognition she has spent a career earning wasn’t built on a listing document or a rich-list ranking — both have moved against her before, sometimes sharply — but on a habit that predates either one: when the story about the product stops matching the product itself, go and fix the product.

Последнее обновление: 10 октября 2026

Исследовано 17 источников на английском и китайском языках.