Struggling Shanghai Metersbonwe Fashion and Accessories, one of China’ s biggest home-grown apparel and fashion chains, lost 95 million yuan, or $14.9 million, in the first half of 2015, reversing a profit of 179 million yuan from the first six months of last year, the company said today. Sales dropped 7% during the period to 2.8 billion yuan.
The company, led by billionaire chairman Zhou Chengjian, said it didn’t expect to turn a profit in the near term. Its nine-month loss will be about 250 million yuan, or $39 million, the company said.
Metersbonwe was among an early generation of private-sector Chinese retailers that thrived before the rise of e-commerce and mobile spending became a powerful force among local consumers. Now behind e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, the company is scrambling to catch up.
The company announced a private placement plan in July this year to raise up to 9 billion yuan, or $1.4 billion to support its Internet strategy. Some six billion yuan would be spent on construction of an online to offline platform (OTO), 500 million yuan for big data support and 2.5 billion yuan for industry chain integration, according to a company statement. Zhou, the founder of Metersbonwe who owns 59% of the business together with his daughter Hu Jiajia, wouldn’t buy additional shares in that offering, the statement said.
The company’s Shenzhen-traded shares have more than doubled in the past year in extremely volatile China stock market trading.
Zhou ranked No. 1,173 on the 2015 Forbes Billionaires list with wealth of $1.65 billion.
--with Maggie Chen
--Follow me on Twitter @rflannerychina
