From Campus Lab to Global Top Three: ECUST Alumnus Eyes Hong Kong IPO

Shuguang Fang, who enrolled as a PhD student in Biochemical Engineering at ECUST in 2002 and graduated in 2007, has committed himself to the probiotics industry for two decades. Under his leadership, WeCare Probiotics has become the third-largest probiotics company globally and Asia’s largest producer of raw probiotic powder, and has officially filed for listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

During his doctoral studies, Fang acquired solid expertise in strain screening and high-density fermentation supported by the university’s strong academic foundation. He was determined to advance homegrown alternatives in the probiotics sector, which was at that time entirely monopolized by international giants. Chinese companies were largely confined to low-end original equipment manufacturing (OEM) operations, relying entirely on imported core strains and technologies.

Turning down well-paid offers from multinational enterprises and public sector institutional jobs, he launched his first startup in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Pharma Valley in 2009. He chose to focus on upstream strain research and in-house production rather than the quickly profitable OEM business, but the venture shut down three years later amid market pressures and funding constraints.

In 2013, he restarted his business in Wujiang, Suzhou. Faced with a small team, funding shortages, and a lack of manufacturing infrastructure, his team traveled across Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Sichuan to collect natural strains and build an exclusive strain library. They also overcame financial pressure to construct intelligent production bases and broke through technical bottlenecks in large-scale production of high-viability probiotics.

The year 2025 stood out as a landmark. The company’s self-developed strain, Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis BLa80, became the first homegrown probiotic strain approved in the Chinese mainland for use in foods for infants and children under the age of three, breaking the long-standing dependence on imported probiotic strains. With two intelligent bases put into operation, the company boasts an annual capacity of 700 tons, making it the largest probiotic production base in Asia.

With a North American subsidiary and overseas offices, the company reported revenue of 701 million yuan in 2025, with overseas revenue accounting for 40.2%. It plans to expand its strain library from over 40,000 to 100,000-150,000 strains via Hong Kong IPO, to further expand its R&D capabilities and support the globalization and self-reliance of China’s probiotics industry.