Chinese consumer companies still budget a livestream discount as a marketing cost confined to one evening and one audience. In a business that also sells through distributors and shops, that price travels, and the CFO should set its floor.
Chinese food and dairy companies extend credit to distributors as a sales tool and record it as an ordinary receivable. It is a lending business, and it deserves a credit policy, a price and a loss estimate that a banker would recognise.
Many mainland companies have sought a second listing in Hong Kong over the past year. For a consumer company that earns and spends almost entirely in renminbi, the case rests on needing foreign currency or foreign shareholders, and the costs should be counted before the prestige.
Fresh milk lasts nine days and our distributors used to pay in sixty, so I treat a dairy's credit book with the same care as its cold chain.
I am chief financial officer of Cuiling Dairy Company Limited, a fictional Hangzhou dairy listed in Shanghai, whose largest shareholder is a municipal state-owned investment group. We earned RMB 8.62 billion of revenue in 2025. A little over half came from chilled milk and yoghurt with a shelf life measured in days, a third from ambient milk drinks that keep for months, and the rest from milk powder, cheese and cream sold to tea shops and bakeries. About 44 per cent of sales still pass through 1,140 distributors; the rest go to retail chains, e-commerce, foodservice and households who take fresh milk at the door.
I have spent twenty-eight years in consumer finance, most of them in dairy: audit in Shanghai, a European co-operative's China subsidiary through the 2008 swing to imported formula, a beverage company in Xiamen whose Hong Kong listing we prepared and withdrew, and Cuiling since 2016, as CFO since April 2021.
The work I am proudest of has made reported numbers smaller before it made them sounder. We shortened distributor credit to something closer to the life of the milk, stepped back from the largest livestream anchors, kept faith with our contract farms through a raw-milk surplus and advised the board to defer a Hong Kong listing it had wanted. Each choice had a sales or shareholder cost that I set out before the board decided. I think that is the job: to put a price on what the channel, the farm and the shareholder are each being asked to carry.
Distributor credit cut to the life of the product
Distributor receivables fell from RMB 820 million in March 2021 to RMB 270 million in December 2023, and receivable days from 71 to 27. Balances more than ninety days overdue fell from RMB 214 million to RMB 29 million. We lost 240 distributors on the way.
E-commerce returned to profit
We ended fixed placement fees for livestream anchors in 2023 and built our own studio. E-commerce moved from a RMB 96 million contribution loss in 2022 to a RMB 58 million profit in 2025; distributors' price-support claims fell from RMB 37 million to RMB 4 million.
Forty-four of forty-six contract farms renewed
We honoured volume commitments to 46 contract farms through the raw-milk surplus, at a cost of about RMB 210 million against spot, and cut imported powder from 18,000 to 5,500 tonnes. In 2025, 44 farms renewed on index-linked prices.
Chilled cabinets that pay for their electricity
As deputy CFO in 2019 I built economics for each of our 31,400 branded chilled cabinets. We moved 4,600 and withdrew 3,300; annual sales per cabinet rose from RMB 38,000 to RMB 52,000 by 2021.
Current focus
I am preparing the first annual capital-structure review that the board asked for when it deferred the Hong Kong listing in August 2025; it comes to the board with the 2027 budget in December. I am also working with our ranch subsidiary on whether a 40,000-tonne increase in own-farm milk would cost less over a cycle than buying the same volume from contract farms.
Conversations I welcome
I am not looking to leave Cuiling. I would consider one independent directorship at a company listed in Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong, in consumer goods or retail outside dairy and beverages, joining its audit committee and, once I know the business, chairing it. I can give about twenty-five days a year, subject to our board's consent and a conflicts review. I also accept a few speaking invitations a year.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Cuiling Ranch Company LimitedDirector of the wholly owned ranch subsidiary, in an executive capacity · 2021–present
Formation
Bachelor of Economics in accountingWeixi Institute of Finance and Commerce · 1998
Certified public accountant, qualified during audit practiceJiaheng Certified Public Accountants · 2001
Executive MBAPuhai Business School · 2014
Qing's papers to the Audit Committee start with the estimate she is least sure of. Her rebate accrual at the end of 2021 cost the sales team their bonuses and cost her some goodwill, and she explained it to us before the auditors had to. I have chaired committees where the CFO defended the number. She defends the method.
Yanping GuFictional independent director and Audit Committee chair, Cuiling Dairy Company LimitedThe full record ↗
Contact
I am not looking to leave Cuiling. I would consider one independent directorship at a company listed in Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong, in consumer goods or retail outside dairy and beverages, joining its audit committee and, once I know the business, chairing it. I can give about twenty-five days a year, subject to our board's consent and a conflicts review. I also accept a few speaking invitations a year.
