GF Fund's Star-Making Flop! Post-90s Top Influencer Zheng Chengran Withdraws, Multiple Products Suffer Huge Losses

Ask AI · What dilemmas in the public mutual fund industry are reflected by Zheng Chengran stepping down?

Written by丨Yishi Finance  Dongyang

Edited by | Gaoshan

On March 18, 2025, GF Fund announced that, due to work arrangements, Zheng Chengran, a post-90s star fund manager, stepped down from his position as fund manager of the GF Growth Momentum Three-Year Holding Period Hybrid Fund. The fund is managed solely by Su Wenjie.

After this resignation, the number of GF public mutual funds under Zheng Chengran’s management decreased from 8 to 7. According to GF Fund’s 2025 annual report and Wind Financial Terminal data, his latest assets under management remain at RMB 12.86 billion, down more than 73% from the historical peak of RMB 48.235 billion at the end of Q1 2021. From the “genius boy” who rose to fame in one battle during the new energy bull market, to deep losses in multiple products and stepping down from core products, Zheng Chengran’s career trajectory is a typical example of “success is also due to the sector, and failure is also due to the sector,” and it further reflects the underlying dilemma of the public mutual fund industry’s “star culturing + single-sector” model.

I. The core of the resignation: a bleak performance report that cannot be avoided

GF Growth Momentum is the first three-year holding period product issued at the peak of Zheng Chengran’s career. It was established on July 26, 2022. Benefiting from his top-tier “star” effect at the time, the initial fund-raising size reached RMB 3.578 billion. Zheng Chengran served as the fund manager from the product’s launch until he stepped down on March 18, 2026. His tenure lasted 3 years and 236 days, during which he only co-managed with Su Wenjie starting July 2, 2025.

But this product, which was placed high hopes on, ultimately performed far worse than expected. Wind data shows that, prior to the last trading day before his resignation (March 17, 2026), during Zheng Chengran’s tenure, the cumulative return of the GF Growth Momentum A shares was -39.11%, and that of the C shares was -40.21%. Over the same period, the performance benchmark (HSI stock index return × 60% + Hang Seng Index return in RMB × 25% + ChinaBond—New Comprehensive Wealth (Total Value) Index return × 15%) had a cumulative return of 17.21%. The product significantly lagged the benchmark by 56.32 percentage points, placing it in the bottom 1% tail range among more than 6,000 similar funds in the entire market.

During his tenure, the fund’s maximum drawdown reached 49.54%, far above the 34.25% level of the average of its peers. The net asset value was nearly halved. The three-year holding period arrangement prevents holders from stopping the loss through redemption; they can only passively endure the losses.

Changes in fund size reflect holders’ attitudes even more directly. When the fund’s three-year holding period expired and redemptions were opened in November 2024, as of the end of 2024, the fund size fell from RMB 2.044 billion at the end of Q3 2024 to RMB 1.308 billion, with quarterly redemption volume exceeding 36%. By the end of 2025, the fund size still remained at RMB 1.308 billion, down more than 63% from the RMB 3.578 billion at its launch. The vast majority of holders chose to cut their losses and exit. Even though the product suffered massive losses and its size continued to shrink, it still brought the fund company stable management-fee income. According to the fund’s periodic reports, its management fee rate is 1.2% per year. From its establishment in July 2022 to the end of 2025, the fund accrued management fees of approximately RMB 120 million in total. Of this, management fees accrued from the second half of 2022 to the first half of 2025 totaled RMB 91.4857 million. Meanwhile, during the same period, the combined different share classes of the product recorded total losses of RMB 1.954 billion. The contrast between “management fees are collected regardless of drought or flood” and investors’ huge losses has also become a core focus of industry controversy.

Aside from GF Growth Momentum, multiple products managed by Zheng Chengran that were launched in the 2020–2021 new energy high period also experienced deep losses. As of March 17, 2026, the return for the GF Xingcheng A launched in January 2021 was -50.82%. The GF Chengxiang A launched in the same period had a return of -48.11%. The GF Growth New Momentum A launched in December 2021 recorded a return of -19.52%.

In stark contrast, its products issued at low points in the new energy cycle performed better. The GF Carbon Neutral Thematic A established on June 12, 2024, was managed by Zheng Chengran from inception. As of March 2026, the return since launch reached 76.26%, but the fund’s size was only RMB 0.33 billion, making it a small-scale product. This extreme divergence in performance is essentially the result of an “ultra-focused sector investment” resonating with the market cycle, rather than a sudden change in the fund manager’s investment ability.

II. From star culturing to downfall: the rise and fall of sector faith

Zheng Chengran’s public mutual fund career is a condensed history of “sector star culturing.” Born in 1991, he holds a bachelor’s degree in microelectronics from Peking University, a double major in economics, and a master’s degree in finance. He joined GF Fund in 2015 and focused on research in the power equipment and new energy industry. In May 2020, at age 29, Zheng Chengran formally became a fund manager. That year, he quickly became famous with a single defining win driven by his precise bet on the new energy sector: the full-year return of the GF High-End Manufacturing A he managed reached 133.83%, ranking among the top 3 in the whole market for equity-oriented hybrid funds. The full-year return of the GF Xinxing Hybrid was also above 100%.

2020 was exactly the year when the new energy sector erupted. With the rollout of “carbon neutrality” policies, sub-sectors such as photovoltaic and lithium batteries experienced the Davis double-kick of both earnings and valuation. Zheng Chengran, leveraging his deep research on the supply-demand pattern of the new energy industry chain, captured this round of opportunities accurately and quickly became the market’s sought-after “photovoltaic banner carrier.”

The market’s热捧 directly boosted his assets under management. By the end of 2020, his AUM was only RMB 3.546 billion. By the end of Q1 2021, just 9 months later, it exceeded RMB 48 billion, making him one of the most watched new-generation top-tier star fund managers in the market. And GF Growth Momentum was launched at the peak of its scale—when market enthusiasm for new energy was at its highest—laying the groundwork for the subsequent collapse in performance.

Zheng Chengran’s investment framework relied heavily on highly favorable, high-growth sectors. His holdings were highly concentrated in the new energy industry chain, and his style became rigid. The annual regular reports of GF Growth Momentum show that its top ten heavy-holding stocks have consistently been new energy targets such as photovoltaics, energy storage, and lithium batteries. The allocation to the new energy sector has long been kept at over 70%. Among the top ten heavy-holding stocks in 2023, there were 7–8 photovoltaic equipment stocks, accounting for nearly 85% of the holdings, forming an “ultra-sector” allocation.

This kind of extreme concentration could rapidly magnify returns during the sector upcycle, but completely eliminated its ability to withstand risks during downturns. After 2022, the new energy industry entered an adjustment period lasting more than three years. Problems such as excess capacity, price wars, and overseas trade barriers集中爆发, and core links in the photovoltaic industry chain saw their prices fall by half from the 2021 peak or even lower. From July 2022 to March 2026, the CSI New Energy Index recorded cumulative losses of more than 45%, closely matching the performance decline of GF Growth Momentum.

Facing sustained performance pressure, Zheng Chengran began a difficult transition in 2025. The portfolio structure of GF Growth Momentum changed significantly: photovoltaic equipment stocks fell to 2, while the top ten heavy-holding stocks expanded to multiple industries such as medical services, grid equipment, communications, and non-ferrous metals. The concentration of holdings declined to 48.05%.

In the 2025 fourth-quarter report, he stated that he had adopted a “more diversified allocation approach,” and he was optimistic about overseas energy storage, upstream resources, and opportunities for a reversal in the livestock-raising cycle. This transition was both a response to past performance and aligned with the requirements of the May 2025 CSRC 《Plan of Action to Promote the High-Quality Development of Public Mutual Funds》. The plan explicitly states that for fund managers whose performance in products with more than three years exceeds the performance benchmark by more than 10 percentage points, their performance-based compensation should decline significantly.

III. The Zheng Chengran phenomenon: the dilemma of the public fund star-making model and its transition

Zheng Chengran’s stepping down is by no means an isolated individual event; it is a concentrated outbreak of the drawbacks of the “star culturing” model in the public mutual fund industry over the past few years.

In recent years, the public mutual fund industry has formed a mature star-making logic: in the bull-market window, packaging bets on a single sector into young fund managers, building “star IP,” and using popularity to densely issue new products at sector market peaks—thereby quickly growing assets under management and earning stable management-fee income. But once the bull cycle passes and the sector enters a downturn, when star fund managers’ performance collapses, all risks are ultimately borne by the holders.

The core contradiction of this model is the conflict of interests between the fund companies and the holders. For fund companies, scale is the core source of management-fee income, and star culturing is the most efficient way to quickly grow scale. But for holders, buying a star fund manager’s new product at the peak of a sector cycle often means having to bear the subsequent risk of a cyclical downturn. In Zheng Chengran’s case, multiple products issued at high levels lost more than 40%, yet the fund company still collected management fees totaling over RMB 100 million. This is precisely the concentration of that contradiction.

In addition, the “scale curse” also becomes a bottleneck that star fund managers find difficult to break through. The market capacity of a single sector is limited. When management scale expands from tens of billions to several hundreds of billions, the fund manager’s operational flexibility drops sharply. They can only overweight the sector’s leading stocks, creating the dilemma of a “big ship that cannot turn around easily.” Once the sector enters a downcycle, there is no way to avoid risks through rebalancing. The performance of Zheng Chengran’s small-scale products is clearly better than that of his large-scale products, which is a direct manifestation of the scale curse.

Zheng Chengran’s case also reflects the profound transition the public mutual fund industry is currently undergoing. From February 2025 to March 2026, GF Fund has seen 5 fund managers step down, including the senior veteran Fu Youxing, who stepped down in a “clear-the-portfolio” manner on March 13, 2026 and had more than 24 years of experience. The trend toward accelerated talent iteration in the public mutual fund industry is becoming increasingly obvious. At the same time, regulators continue to guide the industry back to its core purpose of “managing someone else’s money on someone’s behalf,” through policies such as compensation constraints and building research and investment (投研) systems, thereby diluting reliance on individual star fund managers, strengthening teamwork, and encouraging long-term steady investing.

For investors, Zheng Chengran’s case also offers profound lessons: chasing star fund managers should remain rational, especially when their success highly depends on a single sector. Fund investing should focus more on long-term performance stability, risk-control capability, and the reasonableness of asset allocation, rather than short-term rankings and star effects.

As of March 2026, Zheng Chengran still manages 7 public mutual fund products. Behind the RMB 12.86 billion management scale is the trust of hundreds of thousands of holders. This resignation is an important turning point in his career and a snapshot of the retreat of the public mutual fund industry’s star-culturing movement. In capital markets, there is no sector myth that will last forever—only the continuous cycle of boom and bust. For the public mutual fund industry, only by truly putting holders’ interests first and getting rid of reliance on the star-culturing model can it achieve long-term healthy development.

Author’s statement: personal views, for reference only