Nov 11, 2024

Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash 08 November, 2024 Fresh Life Style Supply Chain Management, a cold-chain logistics unicorn incubated by Chinese agriculture and food company New Hope Group, has completed an extension round to bring its overall Series B financing to nearly 900 million yuan ($125.8 million). In a Tuesday post on its official WeChat account, Fresh Life Style said that it raised “hundreds of millions of yuan” in the Series B extension round from several domestic investors. The new transaction came over two-and-a-half years after Fresh Life Style completed the main tranche of its Series B round in March 2022 and entered the unicorn club at a valuation of 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion). CITIC Construction Investment, China’s state-owned Guiyang Venture Capital; and Hong Kong-listed Chinese conglomerate Far East Horizon were among the investors of the Series B main tranche. The new investment will allow Fresh Life Style to further expand its market share in China, where the unicorn has already served over 5,000 corporate clients and 1.08 million shops through its 100-plus branches nationwide. The industry of cold-chain logistics — which is essentially a supply chain that deals with perishable, temperature-sensitive goods like fresh produce, meat, and pharmaceuticals — has experienced accelerated growth in China amid rising per capita disposable income. Its growth momentum has continued in a post-pandemic era, as consumers have become better adapted to online purchases, especially thanks to the country’s mature infrastructure around e-commerce, online payments, and deliveries. A June report by the China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing (CFLP), a logistics industry association, estimates that the Chinese cold-chain logistics industry has grown to $73.3 billion in 2023, accounting for about 25% of the market globally. Fresh Life Style, founded in 2016 in southwestern China’s Chengdu City, operates as a business-to-business (B2B) platform providing one-stop cold-chain logistics services to restaurant chains as well as fresh produce farms and retailers. Its businesses also cover the operation of intelligent logistics warehouses and the development of supply-chain technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT). Meanwhile, it works with automakers in the R&D and commercialisation of cold chain logistics vehicles. The Chinese unicorn started working on its overseas expansion plan in May 2022, targeting to create “a new business growth engine.” In January, it signed an equity partnership agreement with a logistics provider in Singapore to make the city-state its first stop outside of China. Before its Series B deals, Fresh Life Style closed a Series A round at 600 million yuan ($83.9 million) from investors including Longfor Capital, CICC Capital, and Far East Horizon in January 2021.