Weilong

Weilong is a snack food firm that was founded in Luohe in Henan in 1999. The company’s main offerings include seasoned noodles, flours, vegetable and soy products. It is best known for its latiao, noodles made from gluten. Weilong pioneered a range of alternative flavourings in the early 2000s and became a favourite for its spicy taste, despite concerns that latiao is unhealthy (the snack is sometimes criticised for its ‘three-highs’ in sodium, sugar and fat).

Weilong was holding about 6% of China’s snack market sales in 2020, easily the largest share in a fragmented market. It has been primed to float on the Hong Kong stock exchange for a while but held back on an IPO last year. Earlier in the year it had completed a pre-IPO financing round of Rmb3.6 billion, which was jointly led by CPE and Hillhouse Capital. Tencent, Yunfeng and Sequoia China were some of the other participants in the fundraising, which was said to have valued Weilong at Rmb70 billion. The founding Liu brothers and their families still hold more than 90% of the company’s shares.

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