The tale of Ai Luming is a cautionary one, a stark reminder that unchecked ambition can lead to ruin. Once hailed as China’s “fentanyl king,” Ai transformed a small urine-based drug startup into a vast empire that encompassed pharmaceuticals, real estate, and finance. But by 2025, his empire crumbled under the weight of staggering debt and corrosive mismanagement.
In 1988, Ai rejected a government job to launch a biotech firm with fellow scholars from Wuhan University. His initial success came from urokinase, extracted from urine, which paved the way for a deeper dive into medicine. By the late 1990s, his company, Humanwell Healthcare, became public and captured an astounding 90% of China’s opioid painkiller market.
Under the banner of Dangdai Group, Ai aggressively expanded into various sectors. He acquired six publicly traded companies, all while banking on heavily regulated industries that he believed held the most promise for private sector growth.
But ambition clouded Ai’s judgment. By 2017, Dangdai was drowning under a mountain of 30 billion yuan in debt. Financial engineering and reckless expansion became the group’s modus operandi, leading to stalled real estate projects and defaults on fixed-income products. Thousands of retail investors were left holding the bag, victims of Ai’s speculation.
One significant blunder was Dangdai’s foray into finance. After acquiring Tianfeng Securities in 2002, Ai believed that owning a financial institution would bolster industrial growth. He was wrong. Internal loans and circular funding spiraled into a dangerous debt trap, signaling a catastrophic miscalculation.
By 2019, Dangdai’s liabilities soared past 60 billion yuan. The situation worsened in 2020 when Yu Lei, Ai’s protégé, was detained, exposing over 5 billion yuan in dubious transactional activities. In a desperate last bid for recovery, Ai stepped back into the fray, but by 2023, the group was staring down 800 billion yuan in claims against a meager 11 billion in assets.
“The debt was insurmountable,” Ai admitted, recalling the despair of his team. The only viable asset left was Humanwell, which was eventually salvaged through a court restructuring led by China Merchants Group, involving an unprecedented investment for a Chinese pharmaceutical bankruptcy.
Despite his monumental fall from grace, Ai remains undeterred. He is still contemplating new ventures in tourism and animal health. But as one former partner astutely noted, “This is no longer the 1990s — and Ai may be the only one who hasn’t realized it.”
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