Qian Da Ma, the once‑scrappy community meat stall that built a national fresh‑food chain on an uncompromising promise — “no overnight meat” — has filed to list in Hong Kong, marking a high‑stakes bid to finance a strategic reset. The company, founded by siblings Feng Jisheng and Feng Weihua, told investors it now operates 2,938 stores across 14 provinces and special administrative regions and posted CNY 14.8 billion in fresh‑product GMV in 2024. The filing frames the IPO as a push to translate market leadership in southern China into sustainable growth beyond a business model that has hit its limits.
The narrative that took Qian Da Ma from a single pork stall in Dongguan to a household name in community fresh retail is straightforward: an innovation in pricing and loss control. In 2012 the brothers introduced a step‑discount “daily‑clearance” rule — a 10% discount at 7pm followed by another 10 percentage points every 30 minutes until unsold items are given away at 23:30 — to eliminate overnight waste and guarantee freshness. The tactic crystallised the brand’s promise, spurred heavy evening footfall and accelerated early expansion, but it also trained customers to wait for cuts and compressed full‑price revenue.
Behind the promise is a heavy investment in supply chain control. Under Feng Weihua’s operational leadership the group spent heavily to build 16 centralized warehouses (over 220,000 sq.m.), contracts with 120 logistics providers and a fleet of cold‑chain vehicles, aiming to deliver produce from farms to store shelves within 24 hours and pork from slaughterhouse to shop in six hours. That efficiency drove inventory turn and kept losses under 5% — well below the industry norm — and helped Qian Da Ma scale rapidly through a franchise model that now accounts for nearly all of its outlets.
But scale has exposed structural weaknesses. The company’s gross margin remains low — 9.8% in 2023, 10.2% in 2024 and 11.3% for the first three quarters of 2025 — well below the 15–25% typical of supermarkets. Single‑store daily sales fell from CNY 12,000 in 2023 to CNY 9,000 in 2025, and the chain has closed hundreds of shops since peaking at more than 3,700 in mid‑2021. Franchisees, dependent on thin margins and predictable discount behaviour among customers, have struggled; attrition and slower openings have halted the breakneck roll‑out that once defined the company.
Geography compounds the problem. Qian Da Ma remains heavily concentrated in South China: 68.6% of stores sit in its home turf and that region contributes roughly two‑thirds of revenue. Attempts to transplant the daily‑clearance model to colder northern markets — notably a brief and expensive foray into Beijing — ended in withdrawal. At the same time, the competitive landscape has intensified: instant‑delivery platforms and deep‑pocketed supermarkets are racing to offer half‑hour to one‑hour fresh delivery, eroding the community niche Qian Da Ma once dominated.
Financially the filing reveals why the company needs capital: growth has stalled and the balance sheet is stretched. Revenue was essentially flat between 2023 and 2024 at about CNY 11.8 billion, and the first nine months of 2025 showed a 4.2% decline versus the prior year. Total assets stood at CNY 1.8 billion against liabilities of CNY 3.53 billion at the end of September 2025, producing an asset‑to‑liability ratio that prompts short‑term solvency concerns.
The IPO proceeds are pitched as a pragmatic rescue plan: fund measured geographic expansion (the prospectus targets 1,300 new franchise stores and 100 self‑operated stores over five years), enrich product assortment, upgrade warehouses and logistics and accelerate digitalisation. Management says the strategy is to “stop wild expansion and do deep, disciplined penetration” in the South while building operation and supply‑chain capacity before moving into East, Central and Southwest China and piloting Hong Kong and Macau as an ‘outbound’ testbed.
Qian Da Ma’s listing will be a test of investor appetite for margin‑squeezed, asset‑heavy retail in China’s hypercompetitive fresh‑food market. The company can point to distinctive assets — a recognisable brand in community neighbourhoods, an unusually tight cold chain and a playbook for franchise roll‑out — but it must also persuade markets that it can change customer behaviour, improve unit economics and de‑risk a heavily franchised model at scale. The next chapter for the so‑called “pork queen” will be about converting operational leadership into durable profitability in the face of aggressive instant‑retail players and changing consumer habits.