【Epoch Times, January 22, 2025】
National Electronics Group founder Huang Guangyu has been back for four years, but the group has shown no signs of improvement. Over the past four years, its retail branch, Guomei Retail, has incurred losses of nearly 40 billion yuan.
According to a report by Southern Metropolis Daily on January 21st, from 2021 to 2023, Guomei Retail’s operating income was 46.48 billion yuan, 17.44 billion yuan, and 0.64 billion yuan respectively. Every year saw a significant decline, with net profits of -4.402 billion yuan, -19.96 billion yuan, and -10.06 billion yuan respectively.
In the first half of 2024, Guomei Retail’s revenue was 0.169 billion yuan, a 59.27% decrease from the previous year, with a net profit of -4.432 billion yuan. In less than four years, cumulative losses have reached 38.854 billion yuan. The stock price of Guomei Retail has plummeted by nearly 99.3% from its peak.
Guomei Retail is a subsidiary of National Electronics Group Limited, founded by Huang Guangyu.
After his release from prison on February 16, 2021, facing the struggling Guomei, Huang Guangyu expressed his determination to restore the company’s market position within the next 18 months during a high-level executive meeting on February 18.
In an attempt to regain lost market share, on January 12, 2021, Guomei launched the “True Happiness” APP, an entertainment-oriented social retail platform aimed at re-establishing its presence in the e-commerce market. In December 2020, in preparation for the launch of the True Happiness APP, Guomei registered new companies such as “Aiyo Wei”, “Happy Box”, and “True Happiness” to create an atmosphere of “entertainment shopping”. However, despite these efforts, Guomei Retail’s performance did not improve and continued to decline. On January 10, 2023, the “True Happiness” APP was rebranded as “Guomei”.
As Guomei Retail’s performance continues to decline, Guomei has also ventured into the online lending sector with unsatisfactory results in areas such as traffic (Guomei), platforms (Mei Borrow Money), capital (Xiao Dui), and guarantees (Bo Sheng An Rong).
According to the report by Southern Metropolis Daily, while Guomei’s online lending business seems to be developing well, there are issues with mismanagement, conflicting information, and a series of complaints from borrowers including “information leakage, excessively high interest rates, binding memberships, and aggressive debt collection”. Platforms like Bird Complaint and Black Cat Complaint show that some borrowers have stated that the comprehensive interest rate on loans from Mei Borrow Money (Guomei Yika) is close to 36% when including service fees and collateral fees.
Tencent user drnn6hl lamented, “Old Huang went to prison just when Guomei needed him the most. The market economy changes every day, the business world is like a battlefield, timing is critical, and winning the comeback battle is not easy.”
National Electronics Group Limited (National Electronics Group) owns five listed companies including Guomei Retail, Guomei Financial Technology, Pull Closer Entertainment, Zhongguancun Technology, and Guomei Communications.
On the evening of January 10th, Guomei Communications announced that the company’s stock had received a notice from the Shanghai Stock Exchange to terminate the listing due to the company’s market value reaching the delisting threshold. The company’s stock has been suspended from trading since January 13th.