On January 28, 2026, Busy Ming Group was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the first discount snack chain to debut on HKEX. The IPO attracted more than ten global cornerstone investors, including Tencent, Temasek, BlackRock, and Fidelity. Shares jumped 80% on debut, lifting the company’s market capitalization to over HK$90 billion.
Busy Ming Group was formed through the merger of Busy for You and Super Ming, announced in November 2023. Prior to the merger, BA Capital was the sole financial investor in Super Ming, leading its initial investment round in early 2023 and participating in multiple follow-on rounds. Since the merger, BA Capital has remained closely involved, both witnessing and actively supporting the restructuring of the retail value chain.
This article is published on the day of Busy Ming Group’s listing.
Today, Busy Ming operates over 21,000 stores across 28 provinces in China, supported by more than 9,500 franchisees and serving a cumulative 2.1 billion customer visits. Its footprint spans tier-one to tier-five cities and 1,341 counties, demonstrating the scale and diversity of the consumer base it reaches.
We believe the ultimate value any consumer company delivers lies in helping people feel better about their lives—happier and more fulfilled. There are two primary paths to creating this value: experience and efficiency. Busy Ming exemplifies the latter.
From its inception, Busy Ming has been a company with genuine public value. By relentlessly improving efficiency, it has delivered quality and abundance at affordable prices to China’s most fundamental markets.
In early 2023, we invested in Super Ming, a core brand under Busy Ming. Our first visit to one of its stores took place in a small county town in Jiangxi province. Three years later, we returned to observe real consumer experiences inside Busy Ming stores. While the number of stores and customers has grown significantly, the genuine joy on people’s faces remains unchanged. In these real retail settings, customers are parents shopping with children, children accompanying elderly family members, groups of friends, and young workers picking up snacks to reward themselves after a day’s work.
For the first time, a company has used business model innovation to deliver better and more abundant products at prices roughly 25% lower than traditional channels—to everyone, whether in a top-tier city or a small county town in Jiangxi.
Historically, China’s retail development was regional, often concentrated in higher-tier cities. Through franchising—a powerful social lever—Busy Ming opened new possibilities for chain retail. By enabling franchisees to operate profitably, the company built scale, leveraged purchasing power, and ultimately passed price advantages to consumers.
From the very beginning, this has been a business guided by an altruistic mindset. In our many conversations with founders Yan Zhou and Zhao Ding, we saw this principle deeply embedded in their approach.
Over the past three years, each visit to Changsha involved four to five hours of in-depth discussions with Yan Zhou. Franchisees often dropped by, many preparing to open a second store. Yan Zhou patiently reviewed operational details, discussing site selection and staff management. This approach remains unchanged to this day.
Early on, Super Ming required franchise applicants to visit at least 15 stores and submit a detailed field report. This rigorous screening ensured alignment of values and guaranteed franchisees could achieve tangible returns. On one business trip to Yichun, the city was suddenly scheduled for lockdown. Zhao Ding immediately drove the entire management team—and us—to a neighboring city overnight. To minimize costs, two people shared modest hotel rooms. This decisiveness, efficiency, and cost awareness reinforced our confidence that they would succeed.
The merger between Busy for You and Super Ming in November 2023 was founded on deep mutual trust and shared values between the two founding teams.
Looking back, we witnessed the growth of the discount snack sector. Beyond multiple rounds of investment, we were closely involved throughout Busy Ming’s transformation into a nationwide chain. Together, we worked on expansion strategies, supported industry development, and guided post-merger integration and team alignment.
We are sincerely grateful for the founders’ trust. Without it, meaningful post-investment support would not have been possible. Through Busy Ming, we also gained a deeper understanding of what efficiency truly means—and how it serves people.
At its core, retail is about efficiency, and efficiency is driven by scale. Only with an extensive store network and procurement scale can a retailer achieve sustained cost advantages, a resilient supply chain, and broad consumer recognition. In retail, customer loyalty is built through scale. Scale is the foundation of social impact. Yet all large numbers ultimately serve a single goal: enabling the broadest population to enjoy better products and more joyful consumption experiences.
This is the cornerstone of Busy Ming’s business. Its public value comes from serving China’s broadest consumer base, and its future growth will continue to be shared with the public.
On the day of its listing, we are reminded of where this story began. In 2021, we conducted an in-depth study of China’s county-level markets. That research began with a simple reflection: although China is vast, our lives in top-tier cities had created an echo chamber, limiting our view of the country’s full reality. We have always believed that investment should help create a better life—and that life should be accessible to everyone.
This conviction led us to discover Busy Ming and to support its journey in turning the idea of “a better life for everyone” into a real, everyday consumer experience—across every store, every community.
Congratulations to Busy Ming on its successful listing. We believe this endeavor will go even further—continuing to create value for the broadest user base and making everyday happiness accessible to more people. It is a journey of profound meaning, carrying both responsibility and purpose.
