Li Rucheng

Li Rucheng is the founder of the Youngor Group and long served as the company’s chairman, setting out Youngor’s development strategy and business philosophy each year in a “Letter to Shareholders” in the annual report. Youngor was established as a joint-stock enterprise in 1993 and listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 1998. According to his review in the 2018 annual report, Youngor was founded around 1979 and by 2018 had been in business for forty years, the same year also marking the twentieth anniversary of the company’s listing; over the twenty years since listing, the company raised 7.1 billion yuan in the capital market, paid 15 billion yuan in dividends and 25 billion yuan in taxes, and its net assets grew from 1 billion yuan to nearly 30 billion yuan.

At the strategic level, Li Rucheng drove Youngor’s gradual shift from diversified operations to a focus on the fashion industry. In 2019, on the fortieth anniversary of Youngor’s founding, the company set the goal of building Youngor into a world-class fashion group through thirty years of effort, and advanced its work around the six-character guideline of “relocation, transformation, succession”: production centers were largely relocated to lower-cost regions, transformation focused on smart manufacturing and smart marketing, and succession concentrated on promoting people born in the 1980s to leadership positions at all levels and gradually placing those born in the 1990s in trial roles. In 2020, the company set the strategy of “building Youngor into a world-class fashion group through thirty years of striving”, and in his letter to shareholders Li Rucheng proposed three major changes: integration and trade-offs among diversified industries, transformation from traditional models to digitalisation and intelligence, and succession of the first generation’s enterprise to the second generation. In 2021, the company implemented a multi-brand strategy, spinning off its brands to operate independently and bringing sports and streetwear brands such as HH and UND into its scope of cooperation. In 2022, the company adjusted its sixth five-year plan, making the building of a world-class fashion group its main development goal; it optimised and upgraded the high-end men’s luxury brand MAYOR, positioned HSM and HANP as an urban casual brand and a health and eco-friendly brand respectively, and pushed UND and HH onto the market against the downturn; in the same year it invested 2 billion yuan in building Youngor fashion experience centers in core cities nationwide, while scaling back investment in property development. In 2023, the company increased its investment in the fashion industry and cut investment in other unrelated industries, the fashion experience centers were gradually completed, and generational succession was made part of its institutional work.

2024 marked the 45th anniversary of Youngor’s founding and was also a year in which the company entered a deep adjustment. In his letter to shareholders, Li Rucheng said that the company had exited the real estate industry in which it had operated for more than thirty years and was devoting itself fully to developing the fashion industry, strengthening investment in and upgrading of the Youngor brand while digesting and expanding the brands it had brought in; he admitted that these investments had not yet produced returns. He also said that the company would draw up a new five-year plan in 2025 and continue to advance toward its fashion industry goals.

On April 24, 2026, in his letter to shareholders in Youngor’s 2025 annual report, Li Rucheng recalled that since the company was established as a joint-stock enterprise in 1993 and listed in 1998, it had gone through eleven boards of directors and had made attempts at diversified operations such as real estate development and industrial investment. He said that after this board election, a new generation would be responsible for running Youngor, the younger generation having gradually matured after years of tempering; he thanked shareholders for their trust over the years during his tenure as chairman and hoped that shareholders would, as always, care for, nurture and be tolerant of the work of the new board.