(Yicai) Feb. 26 -- Zong Qinghou, one of China’s first generation of private entrepreneurs and the founder and chairman of bottled water giant Wahaha Group, has died. He was 79.

Zong died from an undisclosed illness, Wahaha announced yesterday after confirming media reports on Feb. 22 that he had been admitted to hospital for health reasons, noting that his condition was stable.

Zong set up Hangzhou-based Wahaha from scratch, turning it into one of China’s largest beverage companies. Forbes ranked him as the Chinese mainland’s richest person in 2010, 2012, and 2013.

Zong was born in November 1945 in the city of Xuzhou in Jiangsu province. He was aged 79 at the time of his death in line with with Chinese tradition, which increases the age of a person by a year.

He joined the school enterprise distribution department of Hangzhou‘s Shangcheng district in 1987 and started his business by riding a tricycle to sell soda, popsicles, and stationery before getting loans to set up a food factory in the July of that year. The company had an output value of CNY4.4 million (USD611,300) and a net profit of CNY222,000 (USD30,850) by the May of the following year.

Zong developed his first product, the Wahaha children’s nutritional drink, in 1988. His company was later renamed Wahaha Nutritional Food Factory and had an annual output value of CNY100 million (USD13.9 million) and a net profit of CNY22.2 million (USD3.1 million) in 1990.

Wahaha Nutritional Food Factory merged with state-owned Hangzhou Canned Food Factory in a deal worth more than CNY80 million in 1991 and turned the canned food factory’s loss of more than CNY40 million into a profit after just three months.

Editor: Martin Kadiev