Silkworm Baby Is Going Public Too! Mosang High-Tech's Pursuit of A-shares: The Expansion Boundaries and the Truth About Growth of a Single Silkworm Cocoon

Ask AI · Why Moutai Yagoer is betting on the scarce track of factory-based silkworm farming?

The world’s first factory-based silkworm farming company to clear the capital markets gate—why is Moutai Yagoer making a major bet?

Investor Network (《投资者网》) Zhang Jincheng

Inside a fully enclosed intelligent workshop in Shengzhou, Zhejiang, there are no mulberry trees or busy planting seasons. Tens of millions of silkworm babies grow in an orderly way in a temperature-, humidity-, and sterile-controlled environment, relying on formulated feed to spin out silk cocoons continuously all year round. This Mosan Hi-Tech, which rewrites the thousand-year history of silkworm farming, has officially submitted an application to list on the A-share market, and could become the world’s first listed company in the global capital markets with factory-based silkworm farming as its primary business.

From farming and breeding to industrial mass production, this seemingly traditional business has risen onto the capital market’s growth wave. But the key question immediately follows: With factory-based silkworm farming that has extremely high requirements for the environment, can it be replicated elsewhere and expanded nationwide? With no benchmark and no mature pathway, where exactly is the growth space for this “one-of-a-kind company”? We take a dual perspective of both industry and capital to restore the true quality of this distinctive enterprise.

1. Silkworm cocoons raised from a bowl of feed: How the founder cracked the raw-material bottleneck, and spent a decade forging a disruptive model

Mosan Hi-Tech was born from founder Jin Yao’s decisive breakout against pain points in the silk industry. As the helm of the Babe Group, Jin Yao has long focused on manufacturing high-end silk and ties, but has always been constrained by the upstream supply chain: traditional silkworm farming depends on the weather; it raises only three to four seasons per year; quality fluctuates significantly; labor costs have surged; and the country’s supply of genuine silk raw materials has long relied on outsourcing purchases—meaning price swings directly eat away at manufacturing profits.

In 2012, after learning that artificial feed silkworm farming technology was still at the laboratory stage, Jin Yao immediately decided to pour in hundreds of millions of yuan, assembling research forces to take on industrialization.

Over the past decade, the team worked jointly with institutions including the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Zhejiang University. They sifted and domesticated suitable silkworm strains among hundreds of varieties, and conducted over a thousand rounds of formula trials, ultimately overcoming four world-class challenges: silkworm strain suitability, artificial feed, intelligent environments, and disease prevention and control.

In 2019, the project achieved large-scale production. In 2020, it was fully implemented—turning agriculture that “lives off the weather” into a manufacturing industry that runs nonstop all year round.

Today, the company produces nearly 30,000 tons of silkworm cocoons annually. That equals the production capacity of hundreds of thousands of rural households. Space utilization has improved by about 500 times; per-capita output has risen by several hundred times; and product quality has met stable targets. In 2024, revenue reached 1.445 billion yuan and net profit broke 200 million yuan. Gross margin continues to rise, making it the only company globally to achieve large-scale industrialization of this technology.

2. Moutai Yagoer crowds into the game: Full breakdown of valuation, pricing, and industrial synergy

As the only factory-based silkworm farming company in the world, Mosan Hi-Tech naturally has scarcity value in the capital markets, and in the Pre-IPO stage attracts top-tier industrial capital in dense numbers.

In December 2023, Yagoer invested about 200 million yuan at 27.93 yuan per share, holding 4.73%, corresponding to a pre-IPO valuation of about 4.22 billion yuan. In July 2025, the Moutai Foundation transferred shares at 30.52 yuan per share for 100 million yuan, holding 2.17%, corresponding to a pre-IPO valuation of about 4.567 billion yuan. In addition, industrial chain capital such as Taihu Xue and Zhenze Investment also participated. The actual controller Jin Yao’s family collectively controls 56.27% of the shares, and the equity structure is concentrated yet stable.

The entry by institutions is clearly not just a simple financial investment; the synergy logic is easy to see. Yagoer locks in a high-end mulberry-silk fabric supply chain, strengthening the core competitiveness of silk apparel. Moutai invests in biological materials, natural proteins, and high-end packaging raw materials, expanding its map of health and bio-manufacturing. Both sides use strategic shareholding to lock in scarce upstream resources, achieving a deep linkage of “brand + raw materials + technology.”

This IPO fundraising will mainly go to capacity expansion, R&D upgrades, and high-value application of silk proteins, helping extend silkworm cocoons from textile raw materials to medical aesthetics, medical-grade, and food-grade material applications. Based on the uniqueness of the track and steady profitability, the market expects that the post-listing valuation will be significantly higher than that of traditional agricultural companies. The growth premium comes from value reconfiguration rather than scale expansion.

3. Can cross-regional expansion work? The technology is replicable, but growth doesn’t lie in raising more silkworms—it lies in breaking out beyond the niche

What the market cares about most is this: can such a factory-based model that is highly dependent on the environment be moved to other provinces and replicated quickly?

The answer is clear: the technology can be replicated in a modular way, but there are strict constraints for implementation—expansion is not something that can bloom everywhere. Mosan Hi-Tech’s workshop is a complete system: temperature and humidity control, sterile purification, automated feeding, and disease prevention and control for the entire process. The equipment, processes, and environmental parameters are highly standardized, and in theory can be deployed nationwide. The company has already carried out technology cooperation and base discussions with places including Sichuan, Yunnan, and Shaanxi, trying to move toward nationwide coverage.

But real constraints are equally obvious. First, it is heavy-asset and requires high investment: investment for a single base can run into hundreds of millions; it demands high requirements for land, energy consumption, and supporting facilities. Second, biosecurity risk is extremely high: with high-density breeding, once disease appears, it can easily lead to major losses, and the difficulty of managing operations in other locations rises sharply. Third, it relies on talent and the supply chain: the core technical team, feed formulas, and equipment maintenance operations are highly concentrated. Cross-regional expansion must simultaneously export the management system.

This means that Mosan Hi-Tech’s expansion will be carried out cautiously and in an orderly manner, with optimized selection of regions, rather than quickly “staking out territory.” It can be copied, but slowly; it can expand, but with heavy emphasis on quality.

As a unique global target, Mosan Hi-Tech is often questioned: without benchmarks, with a niche track, where does its growth potential come from? The answer is not “raising more silkworms,” but value reconfiguration and breaking out across scenarios. Demand growth for traditional silk may be steady but not explosive, yet silk protein is a natural polymer material with wide applications, including medical aesthetic dressings, wound repair, food preservation, high-end textiles, and beauty and skincare products. This is the long-term space that capital truly values—shifting from a raw-material supplier to a bio-material platform-type company.

But risks cannot be ignored either: management and biosecurity risks from cross-regional expansion, the long incubation period for cultivating silk fibroin protein business, fluctuations in downstream demand and bargaining power, and pressure from feed costs and energy consumption—all of these will directly affect how and when growth is realized.

From mulberry fields to workshops, from agricultural products to industrial goods, Mosan Hi-Tech’s IPO is a signature exploratory step in the industrial technological transformation of traditional agriculture. It has technology barriers that are difficult to replicate, solid financial fundamentals, and backing from top-tier industrial capital, and it occupies a scarce global track. But the pace of expansion, growth quality, and risk control will be the longest-term tests for it in the capital markets. Whether this “first silkworm baby stock” can emerge from its cocoon into a butterfly depends not only on how many silkworms it can raise, but also on how much value it can make from a single silkworm cocoon—and how high and how far it can go.