Tongwei Brand Guidelines: Fish Feed, Polysilicon & a 2013 Hefei Cell Plant

A feed business that added silicon.

Tongwei is a Chinese group with two very different businesses under one name: aquatic feed and solar power. The group describes itself as a transnational conglomerate working in “green agriculture” and “green energy,” with more than 400 branches and subsidiaries and more than 60,000 employees, and it names three core industries: aquatic feed, high-purity crystalline silicon and high-efficiency solar cells. Its listed company is Tongwei Co., Ltd., which trades under the stock code 600438.

The company tells its origin story in a few words. It says it hails from Meishan, in Sichuan province, and grew in Chengdu, the provincial capital, where the group’s headquarters, the Tongwei International Center, now stands. On its English website, updated in 2026, it speaks of “the past 44 years” of steady growth, which by its own count places the start in the early 1980s. The group is chaired by Liu Hanyuan, whom the company names as chairman of the board of directors of Tongwei Group.

For much of that time the name meant feed. A profile from the China Economic Times, republished on Tongwei’s website and citing the group’s 2011 results, described Tongwei Co., Ltd. as a large aquafeed and livestock-feed maker that, it said, had led China’s aquafeed market for 19 years in a row. The same profile listed honours for the name in the feed trade: the title of China Well-known Trademark for the Tongwei trademark in September 2004, and Chinese Brand Name titles for its livestock and poultry feed in 2006 and for its aquafeed range in 2007. It also described heavy investment in polycrystalline silicon, the base material of crystalline solar cells, running alongside the feed and aquaculture business.

Silicon, cells and a 2013 purchase.

Tongwei’s solar business began upstream, with silicon. Its polysilicon is made by Yongxiang Co., Ltd., which the company says has four production bases: Leshan and Guangyuan in Sichuan, Baotou in Inner Mongolia and Baoshan in Yunnan. By 2013 the trade magazine pv magazine was describing Tongwei Group simply as a polysilicon manufacturer.

That year it added cells and modules. On 17 September 2013 pv magazine, citing a Bloomberg report on a statement from the Hefei government’s bidding centre, reported that Tongwei Group had bought LDK Solar Hi-Tech (Hefei), a cell and module maker that had belonged to LDK Solar and had been taken over by an affiliate of the Hefei city government five months earlier. The magazine noted that the purchase meant Tongwei could make solar cells and modules from its own polysilicon. Writing in February 2026, the analyst Johannes Bernreuter of Bernreuter Research said the Hefei purchase “laid the ground” for Tongwei to become one of the largest solar cell manufacturers.

The solar side now has a name of its own. The company calls its cell and module business TW Solar and lists cell subsidiaries in Chengdu, Meishan, Jintang, Tonghe, Pengshan and Zhongwei. It describes the group as vertically integrated: high-purity silicon upstream, cells and modules in the middle, and the building and running of solar power stations downstream. It says its modules are sold in more than 90 countries and regions and are used on home rooftops, on commercial and industrial buildings and in large ground-mounted plants. The company also says it has built what it calls the first “Lighthouse Factory” in solar cell manufacturing.

Design and documentation.

Solar panel makers sell a product that looks much the same from a distance: a dark rectangle of glass divided into a grid of cells. Their visual identities work around that sameness. Company websites and brochures return again and again to a few scenes — black or blue module grids on house roofs, long rows of panels across desert or farmland at utility-scale plants, and close-ups of individual cells, where the fine lines of the metal contacts, or their absence, become the detail that sets one technology apart from another.

The factory is the second stage set. Makers show clean production lines, robotic handling and testing laboratories, and they name their cell technologies — TOPCon, heterojunction, back contact — the way other industries name materials. Product families are given short, branded names, and colour is used sparingly: a corporate blue, green or orange against white, with the dark face of the module doing most of the visual work.

Because most panels reach homes and businesses through others, makers also speak to installers. Partner programmes, installer training, distributor networks and warranty pages appear prominently on their websites, addressed to the people who specify and fit the panels.

Trade fairs are where the industry shows itself in public. Intersolar Europe at the Messe München and SNEC in Shanghai draw module makers from China, Europe, North America and elsewhere, who use large booths to launch new module families, storage systems and inverters side by side. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — where it began, who owns it, and what it makes — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Fish ponds, solar arrays and a short line.

One idea links the two halves of the business. Tongwei calls it “Fishery-Solar Integration,” or the “Integration of Fishery and PV”: solar arrays built over fish ponds, so that the same water serves aquaculture and power generation. The company says it was the first in the world to create the model and that it has built 56 such bases in provinces and cities across China.

The group’s English line is “for a better life,” which runs with the Tongwei name across its website, and it describes its purpose as “pursuing excellence and contributing to society.” The company says Tongwei has been on the Fortune Global 500 list every year from 2023 to 2026.

The industry around it has been through a hard stretch. Yicai, the Chinese financial publication, reported in July 2025 that China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Lecheng, had met executives from 14 leading solar firms, among them Tongwei Group, GCL Group and LONGi, on 3 July and urged them to end disorderly price cuts, improve quality and phase out outdated production lines. In February 2026 Bernreuter Research reported that Tongwei planned to acquire all of Qinghai Lihao, another polysilicon maker, after a 2024 plan to buy a majority of Runergy had ended without agreement on terms.

For a design guide, Tongwei shows a single company name carried across fish feed, polysilicon, solar cells and power stations, with a short English line, “for a better life,” at its centre. Compare LONGi, another Chinese solar maker, and JinkoSolar. For this guide we use pond blue, silicon silver and reed green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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