SharkNinja’s Billionaire Chinese Backer on Building an American Success Story
· Time
Many self-made billionaires conceal their humble beginnings. CJ Wang has put his front and center of his penthouse Hong Kong office: a small stone mill for grinding soybeans.
Mao Zedong’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution was just winding down when Wang started school in what is today Yantai city of China’s eastern Shandong province. (Where, incidentally, TIME founder Henry Luce was born in 1898.)
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Like most neighborhood kids, Wang was obliged to help with household chores after class, especially churning soymilk by endlessly hauling his uncle’s giant stone mill around. It was labor that made the young Wang’s arms ache, though the eventual payoff would be a business empire worth tens of billions of dollars.
After graduating in electrical engineering from Beijing Jiaotong University, Wang became a teacher like his parents. “It was what my family did so I just naturally fell into teaching,” he says, gazing out at sweeping views of Victoria Harbour. “But I always wanted to do something bigger and carve my own path.”
In 1994, as Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping’s market liberalization unleashed a heady entrepreneurial spirit across the People’s Republic, Wang quit his job at a vocational college and invented the world’s first automatic soymilk maker. “It was far from perfect, and wasn't an ideal product, but it was already a huge leap forward,” Wang says.
That same year Wang founded Joyoung, which soon became a household name in China for low-cost, dependable consumer products from blenders to rice cookers. While Americans may not recognize Joyoung, they are probably familiar with Wang’s other major venture: SharkNinja, which he acquired in 2017 and today serves as chairman, having transformed the Massachusetts-based firm into a $26 billion trailblazer for disruptive household appliances.
“I really saw SharkNinja as an American version of Joyoung,” he says. “I really felt like I understood the business.”
In our interview, Wang’s first ever with international media, he comes across as shy and softly spoken, betraying none of the performative bravado of many billionaire founders. He is, he confesses, a very private person, whose few passions outside of work include Macallan whisky and golf. (He has a 15 handicap). So why has he decided to chat today?
“I just want to be ahead of the curve to proactively tell my story to mitigate any speculation,” he says. “Because there's just not much out there about me.”
In an age of relentless scrutiny, even immense wealth offers no refuge from the public eye. The elephant in the room is the dire state of U.S.-China relations, with tariffs and export restrictions casting a pall on what had once been a synergistic business climate. Chinese investment into the U.S. grew steadily until peaking at $46.5 billion in 2016, with Chinese investors hoovering up everything from Smithfield Foods and AMC Theatres to New York City’s Waldorf Astoria hotel.
However, re-tightened capital controls in China and expanded CFIUS regulatory reviews in the U.S. dovetailed to bring the honeymoon to an end. Last year, Chinese foreign direct investment into the U.S. was just $2.5 billion—down 94% from its peak—with the investment climate further chastened by ongoing geopolitical friction, supply chain reshoring, and tit-for-tat import duties.
U.S. lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have increasingly framed capital flows from China into U.S. farmland, manufacturing, and technology as national security vulnerabilities rather than economic opportunities. Last year, President Donald Trump promised “new rules” to “stop China from buying up America.”
In today’s febrile political environment, the risk Wang faces is that his Chinese background and natural introversion could be misinterpreted as shadowy or even sinister—a notion he is at pains to dispel.
“SharkNinja is a very American company,” says Wang. “But people just start making assumptions. I want people to know who I am and my motivations for the good of the company, so there's no speculation about that.”
If today’s political climate is problematic, popular culture hasn’t been much kinder. The 2019 Netflix documentary American Factory relished in the culture-clash antagonisms between American workers and Chinese managers of the Fuyao auto-glass factory in Dayton, Oh., which took over a long-shuttered GM plant.
Then there is Chinese fast-fashion phenomenon Shein, whose direct-to-consumer sales have been blamed for decimating high streets and sparked protests and legal objections across Europe and North America over its alleged labor abuses and environmental footprint.
However, Wang argues the experience of SharkNinja—the Shark half produces household appliances and beauty products; Ninja does kitchen gadgets—offers a stark counterpoint as an example of a successful “refounding” to clarify and reenergise a company’s mission statement and propel it to new heights.
A Shark vacuum on a store display. —Roberto Machado Noa—LightRocket/Getty ImagesA view of the Ninja DualBrew at Irving Farm in New York City on Sept. 23, 2021. —Noam Galai—Getty Images for SharkNinjaAfter more than two decades of building Joyoung into a trusted brand in China—as well as establishing an eponymous philanthropic foundation—Wang started to cast his eyes overseas. However, Joyoung was virtually unknown in the West. Rather than spend years building recognition abroad, he chose a faster route: buy an established player.
Wang looked at several options but was captivated by SharkNinja. After a quick trip to Boston, he saw a company that felt reassuringly familiar: strong products, entrepreneurial leadership, and plenty of room to grow. Wang was especially impressed by CEO Mark Barrocas, whom he asked to remain after the acquisition—a condition that helped smooth the deal. (Original founder Mark Rosenzweig also still regularly consults for the company.)
Given that Barrocas is renowned for micromanagement, Wang’s hands off style led to a very amicable partnership. One manager told TIME that Wang turns up at the firm's U.S. headquarters with such little fanfare that it takes baffled reception staff a few minutes to work out that the guy in front signs all their paychecks.
“My role is always from a very high-level, strategic standpoint,” says Wang. “All the day-to-day stuff is the American team. I’ve had a really good working relationship with Mark from the very beginning.”
But SharkNinja also had clear weaknesses. Its product range was narrow: Shark depended heavily on vacuums, while Ninja relied largely on blenders. Its sales model leaned on fading television infomercials, with little social-media presence or diversified distribution. And its manufacturing was concentrated among only a few Chinese suppliers, limiting flexibility and innovation.
Wang believed Joyoung’s experience could unlock the company’s potential. His plan centered on three moves: broaden the product portfolio, strengthen the supply chain, and modernize sales channels. Today, the company funnels around 10% of revenue into advertising, including celebrity endorsements from the likes of Tom Brady and Kevin Hart.
Imaginative marketing is very close to Wang’s heart. After debuting his first soymilk maker, Wang personally hawked his fledgling creation in markets and malls. But then a friend who worked in the media suggested he publish an article about how people can now make soy milk in a matter of minutes in their own home. “That gained a lot of attention, and I realized the power of marketing to sell your products,” Wang recalls. That friend, meanwhile, “became my wife,” he grins.
Wang also wanted SharkNinja to adopt his passion for engineering by building its own R&D capabilities. At the time of the acquisition, SharkNinja’s innovation model was thin. Its leaders could identify product opportunities, but design and engineering were largely outsourced to a small group of Chinese suppliers, who had a “stranglehold” on development, says Wang. The company had little in-house industrial design or research capability—and therefore limited control over how quickly ideas became products.
Wang had the manufacturing chops and contacts to change that. Today, SharkNinja employs roughly 1,200 R&D staff across Boston, London, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou. That investment has helped expand the business from a handful of core appliances into more than 40 product categories, with two or three added each year. Shark moved beyond vacuums into beauty and broader home-care products; Ninja grew from blenders into a full kitchen portfolio.
Behind those products is a simple discipline: start with consumer frustration. SharkNinja mines reviews and complaints to find friction, then engineers around it. Innovation does not end at launch. Teams keep refining cleaning, convenience and usability—turning each solved problem into a better product, and each better product into another platform for growth.
The hits followed. The Foodi combined pressure cooking and air frying in one appliance. The CREAMi brought homemade ice cream into the home while sparking a viral “Can it CREAMi?” craze of TikTok stars competing to produce ever more wacky recipes, featuring Dr Pepper, dill pickles, and even tomato soup. The Ninja SLUSHi was a similar sensation for frozen drinks, selling out 10 times in the U.S., with a global waitlist of over 170,000. A post featuring the Shark TurboBlade fan, meanwhile, received more than 75 million views on TikTok and Instagram.
“One of the keys to success is innovation,” says Joe Derochowski, vice president of home and home improvement for market research firm Circana. “The second key is you’ve got to tell people about that innovation in their language—how it fits into their lives.”
There have been setbacks, of course. SharkNinja recently settled lawsuits with competitors Dyson and iRobot over alleged patent infringements. Over 1.8 million Foodi units were recalled last year after a malfunction led to 106 reports of burn injuries and multiple lawsuits. In November 2024, short seller Grizzly Research accused Wang of “taking advantage of the company to the detriment of public shareholders” and presiding over “some of the worst practices of old-school China hustle stock.” The market didn’t buy it, however, and the firm’s value has more than doubled since.
“He's been an absolutely extraordinary partner for the business over the last nine years,” Barrocas says of Wang. “He’s very thoughtful, asks a lot of questions, very strategic, and takes a very long-term view of things. He wants to build a sustainable, lasting business.
Barrocas’s praise of his boss is, of course, unsurprising. Not least when Barrocas—who retains a 1% stake in SharkNinja—just last week took advantage of its stellar stock performance to net himself over $100 million pretax by divesting nearly 600,000 shares.
Still, an objective case for Wang’s positive influence doesn’t want for evidence. Today, SharkNinja has over 4,100 employees centered on the U.S. but also spanning the globe—up fourfold from when Wang took over. Annual revenue, meanwhile, has soared from $1.3 billion to $6.4 billion over the same period.
Wang hopes that SharkNinja will continue to ease American consumer friction long into the future, and that his Chinese nationality won’t be a hitch. “Nobody wants to see U.S.-China relations improve more than me,” he says.
Recent signs haven’t been hopeful. In June, the U.S. designated several more Chinese firms including BYD—the world’s top EV maker—as “Chinese military companies.” The accusation rests on alleged links to Chinese industrial-policy agencies and a military-civil-fusion industrial zone. No evidence was provided that BYD directly supplies the People’s Liberation Army.
While BYD is also primarily a consumer-focused firm, Wang is quick to draw a distinction with SharkNinja, which, despite his 36.9% controlling stake, is both listed and headquartered in the U.S. “I don't think we’ll suffer much from trade restrictions, or become a blacklisted company,” says Wang. “But we always remain diligent and continue to adapt the business to make sure that everything is smooth.”
But like any responsible business leader, Wang is preparing for the worst: nearly all of SharkNinja’s U.S. inventory is now sourced outside China, principally from Southeast Asia. “The company is diversifying to make sure we can continually supply consumers with products at the right price and right quality to keep up with shifting political trade restrictions,” says Wang.
Not that extricating supply chains from China is sufficient in today’s nativist political climate. Following Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement in April last year, which imposed a 10% baseline tariff on nearly all imports and proposed steeper levies on major trading partners,
SharkNinja’s stock plunged more than 20% as even its diversified supply chain faces a barrage of new import duties.
The following month, Barrocas revealed the firm was scouting a U.S. factory to produce certain low-labor products, such as coolers and certain vacuum cleaners, though February’s Supreme Court striking down of Trump’s emergency tariffs has reduced the imperative of reshoring.
“The risk for SharkNinja is not existential as it is for companies like Shein that are impacted by tariffs in a big way,” says Ravi Dhar, a professor at the Yale School of Management. “[Because] the product is more than manufacturing—it is design, deep consumer insights into pain points and unmet needs and that will remain valuable.”
Trump has nevertheless offered conflicting signals. In January, he welcomed Chinese companies willing to build U.S. plants and hire American workers. “If they want to come in and build a plant and hire you and hire your friends and your neighbors, that's great,” Trump told the Detroit Economic Club. In May, he separately defended Chinese investment in American farmland, provoking a backlash from his MAGA base.
Wang can only hope that this tentative embrace of collaboration sticks. “SharkNinja has experienced tremendous growth, which I see as the power of Chinese and U.S. business cultures coming together to create a company that plays on the strengths of both countries,” says Wang. “It's a very positive story of the combination of China and the U.S.”