Producer
Yili Group
China's largest dairy company and top-5 globally by revenue (RMB 110B in 2024); 24.4% domestic market share. Primarily a domestic processor; also acquiring NZ and EU dairy assets. Key brands: Satine, Ambpomial, Anmuxi. Increasingly integrating upstream into raw milk collection from Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.
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Inputs supplied
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Goods downstream
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Facilities
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Stories
What they make
1 input Yili Group supplies
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Goods downstream
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What else they do
Business segments
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Liquid Milk (Consumer)
40%Infant Formula & Nutrition
20%Ice Cream & Frozen
20%Dairy Ingredients & Cheese
12%Cold Chain & Yogurt
8%
Intelligence
What's known
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Did you know2024
Yili Group is simultaneously: China's largest milk brand (Satine UHT milk in Chinese supermarkets); one of China's largest ice cream companies (Magnum in China is a Yili-licensed Unilever product); a significant infant formula company (with domestic-origin and NZ-origin formula lines for different trust tiers); and the owner of New Zealand's Westland Milk Products (which exports dairy ingredients globally). The same Inner Mongolia milk supply chain that goes into a Chinese family's daily milk consumption also produces the whey protein in a Chinese sports supplement and the lactose in the infant formula of a Chinese parent who bought NZ-origin formula specifically to avoid Chinese-origin dairy. Yili's corporate structure reflects China's bifurcated dairy trust landscape: domestic milk trusted for commodity use, foreign-origin dairy commanding premium pricing for sensitive applications (infant formula) — Yili participates in both simultaneously.
Yili Group ↗Origin2023
Yili Group was founded in 1956 as the Hohhot Huimin Dairy Factory (Huimin meaning "benefiting the people") — a state-owned enterprise in the capital of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Hohhot's location on the edge of the Mongolian steppe gave it access to traditionally nomadic dairy farming communities whose cattle and dairy traditions extend centuries. Yili was privatized and listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 1993 as part of China's state enterprise reform. The company's growth from a regional Inner Mongolia dairy into China's largest dairy company by revenue tracks directly with China's rising middle class dairy consumption — from ~1 kg per capita in the 1980s to ~36 kg by 2020. Yili's 2019 acquisition of New Zealand's Westland Milk Products (for NZD 588M) represented Chinese dairy capital investing in non-Chinese dairy production specifically to source ingredients for Chinese infant formula — Chinese consumer distrust of domestically-produced dairy ingredients drove Chinese dairy companies to buy the foreign sources their consumers trusted.
Yili Group ↗