Zong Fuli, daughter of the late Hangzhou Wahaha Group founder Zong Qinghou, has stepped down as the privately held beverage giant’s chairman and CEO only a year after taking over.
The 43-year-old, who is also known by her English name Kelly, resigned on September 12, a Wahaha spokesperson told Forbes. The company declined to comment further.
The younger Zong’s resignation was first reported by local economic journal Caixin. Citing anonymous sources, the publication reported last Friday that Kelly decided to build her own beverage brand amid an escalating rift with other shareholders over the right to use the Wahaha brand. She continues to hold a 29.4% stake in the Hangzhou-based company, according to China’s Qichacha corporate information system.
Kelly inherited the stake last September, after her father, once China’s richest person, passed away several months earlier in the same year. The elder Zong grew Wahaha into a sprawling beverage behemoth with billions of dollars in annual sales by painstakingly building a nationwide distributing network, which sold Wahaha’s signature purified water and milk-based beverages. But Kelly, who became a billionaire due to the inheritance, by no means had a smooth sailing.
She already resigned once from the helm in 2024, before being reinstated months later as chairman and CEO after achieving an amicable solution to an unspecified shareholder dispute at the time. Wahaha’s other shareholders include an investment arm of the Hangzhou government, which has a 46% stake, according to Qichacha. An employee union owns 24.6% of the company, Qichacha shows.
Kelly, in the meantime, faces challenges on other fronts. A Hong Kong court froze in August a HSBC bank account that has $1.8 billion worth of assets, after three plaintiffs who claim to be her half siblings sued her amid an inheritance feud. The plaintiffs request that Kelly, who had long been thought of as the late Zong’s only child, to honor the father’s will and set up trusts for them using money from the bank account. The Wahaha spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.