Wen?|?Li Yifan

Something happened to Lifan again.

Last night, *ST Lifan announced that on October 13, the company received a notice from its controlling shareholder Lifan Holdings and the company’s actual controllers Yin Mingshan, Chen Qiaofeng, Yin Xidi, and Yin Suowei. On October 12 and 13, we received the "Investigation Notice" issued by the China Securities Regulatory Commission respectively. Because Lifan Holdings, Yin Mingshan, Chen Qiaofeng, Yin Xidi, and Yin Suowei were suspected of violating laws and regulations in information disclosure, the China Securities Regulatory Commission decided to file a case against them. investigation.

At this time when Lifan is on the verge of bankruptcy and is about to be reorganized and acquired by Geely, it is difficult to say whether Lifan is in trouble or a good thing.

However, no matter what, Yin Mingshan, the business wizard who started Lifan from scratch, has been in Hexi for ten years and has not escaped the fate.

Since this year, *ST Lifan has been affected by the news of bankruptcy and reorganization many times, and its stock price has risen sharply. At that time, there was a voice that judged whether the major shareholders had deliberately said that the company was about to go bankrupt. They are acquired by industry leaders, and then use large sums of money to buy their own stocks, raising the stock price, "inducing" retail investors to join, and major shareholders to withdraw at high levels.

We don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but judging from yesterday’s announcement, this possibility does exist.

We don’t defend Yin Mingshan, but perhaps seeing the tall building he built collapse and be razed to the ground was the hero’s final helplessness in his later years.

Lifan was once the business card of Chongqing, and Yin Mingshan was once the richest man in Chongqing. Some radical Chongqing people would even say: The past of Yin Mingshan and Lifan is half of the development history of Chongqing——

The lonely old man Yin Mingshan

Old illness attacks the mouth from the south, and the kindness of the king looks to the heart from the north.

I have been suffering for hundreds of years, but I have never found a close friend.

As 2017 is coming to an end, Lifan Motors has ushered in a historic moment - Chongqing Kuaijian purchased no less than 10,000 new energy vehicles from Lifan Motors. This is the largest order in the history of Lifan New Energy Vehicles.

Yin Mingshan, who is retired at home, must be very happy to see this scene.

Since more than ten years ago, Lifan has started and grown together with a number of independent brands. However, in the years when independent brands have exploded, Lifan has always stayed at its original position. The tone is tepid and silent.

Although there are tens of thousands of employees living together on Jinkai Avenue and Jiade Avenue in Chongqing, trying hard to get rid of Lifan’s 350,000-square-meter factory land from lifelessness, but to no avail; even though the once empty Lifan parking lot has been The park has been full of SUVs for several months, but sales have been deteriorating. No one can stop the unsaleable products.

However, in the eyes of many Chongqing people, Lifan is still Lifan - after all, it is the first corporate manufacturer to bring a top professional league team and a private automobile factory to Chongqing.

The name of Lifan founder Yin Mingshan has become a household name in Chongqing.

On October 31, 2017, 79-year-old Yin Mingshan officially "abdicated" as chairman of Lifan and passed the baton to 47-year-old Mou Gang.

That day, the white-haired Yin Mingshan was wearing a Chinese tunic suit and was in high spirits. “When Lifan went public seven years ago, I had some white hair, so I wore this Chinese tunic suit. Now my hair is all white. , It’s still the Chinese tunic suit from back then. “It has a special flavor of Yin Mingshan.

I think, at least in the early mornings of those days, when he woke up from his restless sleep, he saw the overwhelming media questioning "The subsidy was canceled for defrauding Bu Lifan? Why is there another 20 million subsidy?" At that time, it should not be so troublesome and heartbreaking.

Every time I saw news about Lifan in the past, I felt a sense of sadness in my heart, for Lifan and for Yin Mingshan.

If I were asked to use one word to understand Yin Mingshan's half-life, I would think it is - loneliness. Those with excellent spirits are destined to be lonely.

Yin Mingshan lost his father when he was young. At the age of 12, he began to sell steel needles on the streets in the countryside. Later, he was admitted to the best middle school in Chongqing. When he was only one step away from the university life he dreamed of, he was first labeled as a rightist because his family was a landowner, and then he was convicted of "counterrevolutionary" and imprisoned. That’s a whole 18 years.

When Yin Mingshan was rehabilitated in 1979, he was already 41 years old and had missed the most glorious time in his life.

During the lonely years in prison, Yin Mingshan never gave up studying and reading. Therefore, when Chongqing Publishing House openly recruited editors from the public that year, Yin Mingshan stood out from many applicants and entered the publishing industry. Club, he was promoted to vice president in just one year.

However, in that era when overseas business was just starting to heat up, Yin Mingshan, who was sensitive to the times, was also swept away by the wave. He saw that more and more young people were wealthy, but his monthly salary was only enough. He was unwilling to buy a ticket from Chongqing to Beijing. Soon, in 1985, 47-year-old Yin Mingshan decided to resign and start a business. He founded Chongqing Vocational Education Book Club and became a Confucian businessman.

At that time, he was the oldest among the first generation of Chinese private entrepreneurs such as Mou Zhongzhong, Lu Guanqiu, Liu Chuanzhi, and Cao Dewang.

It seems that such appearance BGM and time point are destined to play the role of a tragic late hero in the drama of life.

His book career went smoothly. In 1992, Yin Mingshan had become the largest private bookseller in Chongqing. However, the monopoly and "suppression" of Xinhua Bookstore made this Chinese dreamer The young man was unwilling to give up, and he began to seek the next transformation.

While repairing a car, Yin Mingshan was chatting with the person in charge of the motorcycle factory and discovered that the factory needed hundreds of motorcycle engines every month, which were either imported from Japan and were extremely expensive. , or purchased from Henan, the price is cheap but the quality is extremely poor, which made the keen Yin Mingshan discover business opportunities again.

It just so happened that Chongqing in the early 1990s had already become a national motorcycle production base. There were not only famous motorcycle companies such as "Jialing" and "Jianshe", but also many companies that produced and sold motorcycle parts. As a small business, Chongqing’s “Motorcycle Gang” is a name that is well known across the country.

So that year, 54-year-old Yin Mingshan plunged into the popular field of motorcycles. He rented a 40-square-meter room in rural Chongqing as a workshop and established the Chongqing Hongda Vehicle Parts Research Institute with a registered capital of 200,000 yuan. With 9 employees, he began to manufacture motorcycle accessories, and he arrogantly stated, "I must create an engine that is unique in China and the world." Later, they switched from the production of accessories to the production of motorcycles. This is the predecessor of Lifan Group.

In 2003, Lifan had become the largest motorcycle manufacturer in China. In the same year, Yin Mingshan acquired 80% of the shares of Chongqing Special Purpose Vehicle Manufacturing Plant, and later increased his stake to 95%. The trademark was completely changed to "Lifan", and he began to build a sedan production base in Beibei.

He couldn't help but move towards his dream of stepping from motorcycles to the car industry, determined to make a Chinese brand of cars. Just as he said many years ago: "If I was carried forward by the tide of life before, now it is time for me to do my real career, hold a spear, and challenge the windmill of fate."

We would take it for granted that suffering destroyed Yin Mingshan's first half of his life, but made his second half more tenacious and exciting. He has been challenging fate all his life. The more he fights, the braver he becomes, and the battles become bigger and bigger.

However, in fact, Yin Mingshan's post-transformation era was just the beginning of his loneliness.

"On the eve of the Normandy landings in 1944, Allied Commander-in-Chief Eisenhower held the auspicious silver coins brought back from the offensive in North Africa and Sicily, and repeatedly walked on the cinder road next to the camp. Wandering, he asked himself over and over which day he should choose as the landing date. Everyone could feel the pressure on him from the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the future of the entire Western Europe, but no one could help him. " < /p>

This is very similar to Yin Mingshan who was getting older after 2000.

That year, he purchased the Chongqing Loncin Huandao team for 55.8 million yuan, and Chongqing football officially entered the "Lifan Era". In the same year, he made up his mind to enter the automotive field and determined to make Chinese cars. Football is Yin Mingshan's greatest pleasure after his career. He hopes to develop football in Chongqing. He also hopes that by getting involved in football, he can enhance Lifan's reputation, achieve corporate brand transfer, and increase his capital for communication and even gaming with the government.

In 2000, just after buying the team, Chongqing Lifan defeated Beijing Guoan 4-1 in the final of the Chinese Football Association Cup, winning not only the first championship in Chongqing football history, but also the first championship in the history of Chongqing football. It was also Western Football's first national championship.

In 2001, in order to open up the sales of Lifan Motorcycles in the Vietnamese market, Yin Mingshan specially introduced Li Xuande from Vietnamese players, and specially gave Li Xuande a penalty kick in a key game against Shenhua. Since that year, Lifan has filled the streets and alleys of Vietnam, from cities to rural areas, and has become the largest motorcycle company in Vietnam.

From 2000 to 2017, President Yin Mingshan invested a total of 804 million yuan in Chongqing Lifan in 17 years, most of which were personal investments. In the eyes of many Chengdu sports media, "the only difference in football between Chengdu and Chongqing is Yin Mingshan." Both are in the western region, Sichuan football has been in trouble since Quanxing withdrew, while Chongqing has always remained in the team and has a reputation despite stumbling in the Chinese Super League.

However, after a wonderful start, Yin Mingshan still lacked a free and independent football environment and a happy and proud rising disciple.

The G7 incident that shocked the football world, the Solidarity system that dominates the football world, and the gambling and match-fixing that is promoted but not played, slowly burned away Mr. Yin's excessive enthusiasm. He once stood on the front line of the anti-gambling and anti-criminal campaign in football, held high the banner of anti-Germanism, and denounced the match-fixing and gambling that resulted from it. He even launched the "Player Parents Meeting" in 2004, hoping to use this method to educate, To save the team members who were involved in match-fixing, they just refused to do what Wang Jianlin did when he gave up on Dalian Wanda. He directly cursed "Chinese football environment is bad" and then threw them away.

Sports Weekly reporter Bin Yan even commented on Yin Mingshan: "Those who kept Chinese football alive should never be forgotten. Yin Mingshan was a hot symbol in the most difficult period of Chinese football."

But year after year of persistence, Yin Mingshan realized that it is too difficult to be a clean person in Chinese football. He felt increasingly powerless.

Especially after the rise of the "arms race" in the Chinese Super League in the next few years, the starting price of relegation was at least 100 million yuan. To a certain extent, football became Yin Mingshan's burden - "When I profit 3 When it was more than 100 million, it was a small thing to take 30 million. But now when my profit is only 400 to 500 million, the burden would be too heavy to take 200 million to 300 million. It’s not that I don’t like football anymore. I really feel that my abilities are not commensurate with it.”

The investment increased every year, which led to Yin Mingshan’s financial resources and the club’s operations were stretched. Even Lifan's motorcycles, which used football to dominate Vietnam, slowly fell into decline due to vicious competition from local Vietnamese motorcycles and other Chinese companies. Lifan eventually became more of a supplier of engines to Vietnamese motorcycle factories.

At the same time, Yin Mingshan is getting older, but no one in the family is as passionate about football and Lifan as he is, and his left and right arms are not strong enough.

His son Yin Xidi successively served as the general manager and chairman of Chongqing Lifan Football Club, but he was indifferent to football. Occasionally when he went to the company, he was stopped by the old gatekeeper of the club and recognized him. Not out of him. At the end of August 2009, against the background of the Lifan Club's tightening of finances, Yin Xidi also spent 30 million to purchase a Bugatti Veyron, which also attracted a lot of criticism from fans - the money spent on buying Bugatti is better than the money spent on Lifan buying foreign aid. I don’t know how many times more money there is.

At that time, the car Yin Mingshan was sitting on was a 520 built by Lifan. Later, the Lifan 520 was replaced by the Lifan X60, and the X60 was later replaced by the 820. What remains unchanged is that Yin Mingshan's car will always be Lifan.

After similar things happened again and again, this private enterprise owner who seemed extremely lonely both in football and in his family finally chose to let go. On January 5, 2017, Yin Mingshan sold 90% of the shares of Lifan Club to Wuhan Contemporary Technology Industry Group Co., Ltd. He was reluctant to leave, and his only hope was that Lifan would not leave Chongqing.

"I was only 62 years old when I took over Chongqing Football. I was not old at that time. But now I am old, already 80 years old. My family members are not very enthusiastic about football. If I If I continue to insist, Chongqing football may continue to age like me.”

Similar to Yin Mingshan’s football, there is also his Lifan Motors.

Lifan Motors also had a brilliant start. On January 19, 2006, the first Lifan Motors Lifan 520 was launched simultaneously globally. In less than a month, Yin Mingshan signed sales orders for Lifan 520 with more than ten countries and regions including Russia, Nigeria, and Albania. In the next three years, Lifan launched the Lifan 320 and Lifan 620. In the fourth year, 2010, Lifan was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, becoming China's first privately-owned car company to be listed, earlier than Geely and BYD.

Unfortunately, Lifan’s development seems to have stalled in 2010.

Before Lifan Maiwei and X80 were launched successively, even though Lifan worked hard in the automobile industry, its results were not in line with ideals. No amazing products were born, and model naming and product styling continued to be inconsistent. The old routine, actual sales volume and market position are very marginal.

Even so, Yin Mingshan is still passionate. He calls himself an "unswerving national industrial practitioner" who is determined to develop technology and brand for the country.

In 2015, Lifan Co., Ltd. announced the "largest in history" capital increase plan totaling 5.2 billion yuan, hoping to start from scratch and shift to new energy. Including the transfer of Chongqing Lifan Club, which has been planned since 2014, in the final analysis it is to focus more energy and funds on cars and revitalize Lifan.

However, this time, the elderly Yin Mingshan still lacks a reliable successor. He has found himself out of touch with his time, but there is nothing he can do about it. Lu Guanqiu has his son Lu Weiding, Zong Qinghou has his daughter Zong Fuli, Ren Zhengfei has his daughter Meng Wanzhou, and Li Shufu has his son Li Xingxing. These second-generation private entrepreneurs are all their father's right-hand assistants, plus many of the company's many Senior executives, Ren Zhengfei even once worried that "Huawei has too many successors, not too few."

Yin Mingshan is the complete opposite. Yin Mingshan's spare time life is very simple. He doesn't smoke or drink, and he has no pursuit of good food. He eats more than 100 meals of tomato and egg noodles in his top-floor office in Zhangjiawan Lifan Building, Shangqiao, Chongqing throughout the year.

But his Yin Xidi seldom shared his father's worries, spent money lavishly, and was obsessed with all kinds of supercars. Yin Xidi's Weibo certification is still the "Founder of CQSCC Super Car Club". Although Yin Mingshan had handed over Lifan's real estate business, futures business, and automobile sales business to Yin Xidi, Yin Xidi still had no intention of taking over, and Yin Mingshan himself was not satisfied with his son's management ability.

He clearly expressed his helplessness: "If there is no capable person in the family, then we should learn from Ford and choose the chairman and president from outside the family." But we have never heard of Lifan. There are the same "Four King Kongs" and "Eight Great Arhats" as other companies. How to choose?

At the "Lifan Night" brand ceremony on June 8, 2015, Yin Mingshan actually held the hands of Shang You, then president of Lifan Group, and Chen Wei, chief scientist and chief engineer of Lifan Group. , announced that the generals standing next to him would be Lifan’s future successors. Who would have thought that just two months after the event, President Shangyou could not bear the pressure and chose to resign. At the same time, Lifan began to undergo frequent personnel changes, both in the management and in the workshops.

On the one hand, sales continued to fall, production difficulties gradually emerged, and funds became increasingly difficult. On the other hand, there was a shortage of manpower, and the family's huge business was difficult to support. Yin Mingshan suffered a lot. After all, Yin Mingshan is a businessman after all, so in 2016, the Lifan New Energy subsidy fraud incident broke out, and he was disqualified from the 2016 central government subsidy fund pre-allocation, involving an amount of 114 million yuan.

Lifan's financial pressure suddenly increased sharply. With its own development strategy unclear, the overseas export environment deteriorating, and the development of electrification not going smoothly, Lifan Motors was actually on the verge of market marginalization.

Lifan’s fall makes me feel hateful and pitiful from the bottom of my heart.

Facing the decline of Lifan, Yin Mingshan, who built the country with his own hands and served as chairman for 25 years, did not want to watch his car dream drift away. He finally stopped hesitating and decided. He officially retired and gave way to Mou Gang, a younger generation who has grown up in Lifan for 19 years. Yes, it's not Yin Xidi, it's not Shang You, and it's not Chen Wei. Yin Mingshan's loneliness is evident.

From selling books to starting a business in his later years, from motorcycles to football, from football to cars, the 82-year-old Yin Mingshan has made many important decisions in his life, and almost every decision has been a failure. A retreat gamble.

Having the courage and taking risks made Yin Mingshan what he was and what Lifan was like back then. It's a pity that he is a lone entrepreneur, but lacks a lone corporate team. He has always been a one-man fighter through and through.

As time went by, Yin Mingshan became more and more like a hungry wolf running on the vast grassland. There was no team to follow, no prey to capture, and no enemies to chase him behind. There was only dead silence all around. The lingering sound of the weeds when the night wind blows.

Perhaps after switching to a professional manager system, everything at Lifan will slowly get better.

Anyway, the old man’s loneliness no longer seems so lonely. Only one month after leaving the chairman's seat, Yin Mingshan went to Da Nang, Vietnam, to attend APEC-related meetings, and to Hechuan, Chongqing, where he enjoyed the maple leaves in late autumn. He also listened to music for an hour every day and sat in his room. Poems, songs, arrangements, and self-singing.

Yin Mingshan, who had been "lonely" for the first half of his life, could finally live the retirement life he had dreamed of, practicing martial arts, forgetting about mountains and rivers, and regaining the purest happiness for football and cars.

However, who knows how much regret he still has in his heart.

"Children are holding melons and willows under the shed, and dogs are chasing butterflies and willows in the alley. The world is prosperous and full of laughter, but I have only two spare hairs." Maybe this is the true portrayal of Mr. Yin's heart. .

This article comes from the author of Autohome Chejiahao and does not represent the views and positions of Autohome.