At the 2013 Zhejiang Merchants Awards Ceremony, the 72-year-old Supor founder Su Zengfu, known as the king of cookware, won the special award. The organizing committee wrote in the award speech to him:
He is admirable It is not just about making a pressure cooker the best in China and deducing the splendor of Made in China, it is also an entrepreneurial temperament that runs through life and is unwilling to be mediocre. When he started a business again at the age of seventy, he turned his stable wealth into reinvestment in the future. His dream at seventy was as strong as his ambition in middle age. Let us applaud this endless entrepreneurial spirit !
Winning the Special Award is not easy. It took Su Zengfu 12 years to turn a small dilapidated factory with a debt of 3 million yuan into a group enterprise with a market value of 1.6 billion yuan, and he cashed out 7 billion yuan and left the market.
Just when the outside world thought that Su Zengfu had reached the peak of his life and it was time to retire and enjoy his old age, he later created a second Supor at the age of 66. In 2019, the 78-year-old Su Zengfu was shortlisted with a wealth of 6.8 billion. Listed on Hurun Global Rich List, China Home Furnishing Rich List.
Su Zengfu’s experience along the way can be described as “unbelievable”.
Kill the old pot king
In the middle of the 17th century, a young Frenchman named Denis Papin invented the pressure cooker, but it was already the middle of the 20th century when it was introduced to China.
At that time, pressure cookers were still a blank market in China. In 1956, Shenyang Shuangxi was officially established.
After 8 years of hard work, Shuangxi developed China's first pressure cooker, and at the same time established its leading position in the domestic cookware industry.
Until 1994, Shuangxi had always been at the top of the domestic cookware industry.
It was this year that 53-year-old Su Zengfu founded Supor.
Su Zengfu’s founding of Supor has a clear imprint of the times. At that time, at the beginning of reform and opening up, the state vigorously supported township enterprises and encouraged state-owned enterprises to subcontract some businesses to township enterprises in the form of contracting or joint ventures.
At that time, Su Zengfu was the director of the Yuhuan County Pressure Cooker Factory. He was born in a poor peasant family. He served in the Navy for 8 years and also worked as an educated youth. After he retired, he became a salesman at an agricultural machinery factory. With his full energy and outstanding With his business ability, he gradually became the factory director.
How to make a small indebted factory bigger is a question Su Zengfu has been thinking about. He decided to start by working for Shuangxi. In the 1980s, Double Happiness's market share exceeded 70% and it was the undisputed king in the industry.
Su Zengfu, through his joint venture with Shuangxi, allowed Yuhuan Pressure Cooker Factory to obtain stable parts production orders.
But Su Zengfu is not a contented person who is willing to just make accessories. He sees clearly that the difficulty of producing accessories is low, and even if his family fortune becomes stronger, the prospects are still worrying. But since we can produce all the accessories, why can’t we produce the entire pot ourselves?
When he proposed this idea, it was no surprise that he was strongly opposed by everyone around him. The reason given for the objection was also very simple: the orders were enough to maintain the survival of the factory, and there was no need to take risks.
In the face of opposition, Su Zengfu still insisted on his own ideas. He always believed that the only way out was to do the whole thing.
"I asked the county finance bureau to borrow 50,000 yuan, but no one wanted to borrow it. Instead, they asked me, a farmer, why are you borrowing money?"
Su Zengfu faced the risk of being dismissed by the town leaders and went to Shanghai to find a bank loan for 2 million yuan. After looking for villagers door to door and gathering them bit by bit, we introduced a production line and prepared to go it alone.
In the context of the planned economy, the prices for state-owned enterprises and private enterprises to buy production materials are different. The Yuhuan Factory buys a ton of aluminum ingots for 16,000 yuan, while Shenyang Double Happiness costs less than 3,000 yuan. Although the pots are produced, But the profit was very small, and the money was not as easy to make as Su Zengfu imagined.
This situation lasted until the beginning of 1992. With the advancement of market economy , private enterprises had the same treatment as state-owned enterprises.
The cost of raw materials dropped significantly, and output and profits began to soar. Su Zengfu saw hope of turning around.He followed the advice of his son Su Xianze and secretly marked "Yuhuan" on the product's origin information in an attempt to create his own brand.
By 1994, the annual output value of Yuhuan Shuangxi reached 180 million yuan, and its output reached 2.3 million mouths, which was twice as much as the parent factory Shenyang Shuangxi!
Shuangxi quit now and decided to terminate the cooperation and asked Su Zengfu to stop using the "Double Happiness" trademark.
On December 25, 1994, Su Zengfu hurriedly took his son and two vice presidents to Shenyang for negotiation, but it was useless. The Shenyang General Factory was worried about the danger of raising tigers, so it still refused. By the time Su Zengfu returned to Zhejiang, it was already the end of the year.
Su Zengfu, who was forced to go to jail, understood that he must rely on his own strength to build a brand in the future.
Supor was born.
Unsurprisingly, Supor could not compete with the old pot Wang Shuangxi, and its performance was extremely dismal.
After thinking about it, Su Zengfu decided to use the new national standards as a breakthrough. He decided to take the lead in fully and strictly implementing the new national standards at any cost.
After the birth of the new pressure cooker, it instantly became popular in the market. This was the second year after Supor was founded, and its market share jumped to 40%, surpassing the old pot king Shenyang Shuangxi in one fell swoop and becoming the new pot king.
sold, sold
Supor's fate turned around one day in 2002, when 61-year-old Su Zengfu went to South Korea for inspection.
He found that the Korean cookware industry had lost its competitiveness due to high raw material and labor costs. This shocked him greatly, and he couldn't help but wonder whether Supor would face the same problem in the future.
After killing Shenyang Shuangxi, Supor occupied most of the market share and became the well-deserved king of pots. In the following years, Su Zengfu focused on rice cookers, woks, and non-stick pans, developing in-depth into the cookware industry. In 2004, Supor was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. , becoming the first listed company in China's cookware industry.
The cookware business was booming, but Su Zengfu had the idea of selling the pressure cooker business.
Four years later, Su Zengfu successively transferred 71% of Supor Cookware's shares to the French SEB Company, the world's largest manufacturer of cookware and small household appliances. As a result, Supor Group lost its controlling stake in Supor Cookware.
Suddenly, the news of "The King of Pots Selling Pots" caused an uproar.
People still can't understand why Su Zengfu spent his whole life to expand the cooking utensils business and why he casually sold it to a foreign company.
Su Zengfu insisted on selling pots and had a tough attitude. When faced with doubts, he only said one sentence: "I am good at calculating."
In fact, at this time, the labor and cost of the cookware industry had already conflicted. Su Zengfu also felt that in the face of There is a huge gap between us and international leaders, so it is better to withdraw proactively.
Subsequently, Su Zengfu sold his shares twice, cashed out his bonus of 7 billion and left the market gracefully. Only then did everyone react and had to applaud Su Zengfu's decision.
Su Zengfu lived the life of an ordinary old man with the title of chairman. He only did four things every day: read books, read corporate information, read national policies, and read stocks. Soon, Su Zengfu and Supor began to slowly fade out of the public eye.
Rebuilding a Supor
However, Su Zengfu, who is over sixty years old, is not willing to really live a retired life.
In 2007, a supplier in Yuhuan County who produced stainless steel accessories for Supor was chatting with Su Zengfu. He said that Yuhuan County, as one of the faucet production bases in China, could not produce a decent stainless steel faucet .
These words caught Su Zengfu’s attention.
Su Zengfu found that the output value of the entire domestic cookware industry is about 25 billion, but the bathroom industry has at least 250 billion, and the market share of stainless steel faucets is only about 3%.
This is a big market, and Su Zengfu’s desire to start a business was ignited again.
At that time, tap water from copper faucets was not drinkable directly. An important reason was that copper faucets generally contained excessive amounts of lead and mercury.
"Copper faucets contain lead. Lead dissolves in water and is poisonous.It has little impact on adults. Children under five years old may be at risk of developing dementia if they absorb too much. "
Su Zengfu believes that stainless steel is indeed a good choice. As an internationally recognized healthy material, stainless steel does not contain lead, is acid-resistant, alkali-resistant, corrosion-resistant, and does not release harmful substances.

But the faucet is a very demanding one. The industry, especially stainless steel faucets, has complex casting processes and high research and development costs, and the market is basically monopolized by imported products.
At the age of 66, Su Zengfu resolutely entered the bathroom industry, but not everyone is optimistic about Su Zengfu and his stainless steel faucets. His son Su Xianze did not support him, believing that his father had already reached the age of retirement and should no longer take risks.
Collective opposition could not extinguish Su Zengfu's desire to start a business. In 2009, Supor Sanitary Ware Company was established.
In order to develop stainless steel faucets, Su Zengfu worked hard every day. Squatting on the production line, he led the team to study how to achieve large-scale mechanized production of stainless steel faucets. After several eliminations, he replaced three sets of assembly lines in four years and produced 1 million faucets. None of them were satisfactory, and none of them were sold. Hundreds of millions of dozen were sold.
Supor’s R&D investment, trial production investment and fixed investment in the construction of the two bases have reached nearly 1 billion yuan, including more than 700 million yuan in land, factory buildings and equipment, 100 million yuan in R&D, and 200 million yuan. The trial production products have been piled in the warehouse because they were defective, and Su Zengfu refused to sell them.
The turning point came in 2014, when the country changed the lead content in faucet water from recommended standards to mandatory standards, requiring lead content per liter. No more than 0.5 micrograms.
The entire faucet industry has undergone a major reshuffle in an instant. The spring of high-standard stainless steel faucets is here.
Just like making pots in the past, Su Zengfu made plans in advance and started with high standards when there was a lack of leading companies.
It was this year that Su Zengfu decided to donate stainless steel faucets to 10,000 kindergartens across the country for free within three years to improve the safety of drinking water for infants and young children.
In 2017, Supor invested 44.3 billion yuan. Its market value and revenue of RMB 17.8 billion rank first in Chinese cookware.
Until now, some people still ask Su Zengfu why he dared to invest RMB 1 billion to build infrastructure instead of stopping losses in time. Su Zengfu just said, "I will not judge. Going the right way or the wrong way is like walking a tightrope in the air. Halfway through, there is no way to retreat, because the risk of you moving forward or retreating is the same. "
