China's car king went from ¥100B to delisting — then lost 517 stores

Guanghui Auto Services was China's largest car dealer group — No. 1 in the dealer top-100 revenue ranking thirteen years running, selling 713,500 vehicles in 2023. A backdoor listing put it on the Shanghai exchange; peak market capitalisation passed ¥100 billion. The model was the 4S showroom, weighted toward premium brands: BMW alone generated 40% of group revenue in 2023 and 43% in the first half of 2024. At the start of 2024 the network ran 735 outlets, 695 of them 4S stores. Revenue and profit had been falling off a cliff since 2018; 2022 brought the first net loss since listing.

On August 28, 2024, Guanghui was delisted under the ¥1 face-value rule — twenty consecutive trading days below one yuan. Market capitalisation at the exit was ¥6.471 billion, nearly 94% below the peak. Delisting cut off A-share direct financing while the debt load stayed; bond defaults and equity freezes followed, and by May 2025 the group had dropped out of the dealer top-100. Net assets were estimated at minus ¥7.3 billion or worse by July 2025. Prepaid maintenance packages defaulted across the network — one Yantai BMW store owed 279 owners over ¥4 million of paid-for service.

The network collapsed: by July 2025, 517 outlets — 70.34% of the early-2024 count — had lost authorisation, 287 of them in May–July alone. BMW fell from 37 stores to 4 service points, Cadillac from 17 to 1, Audi from 39 to 13. On March 28, 2025 the group handed the surviving dealerships to a trusteeship firm for three years; by June 2026 about 30 mostly after-sales stores remained, and 500-plus owned showrooms were rented out. Its retired convertible bond was marked down six times to ¥0.1; ¥1.885 billion of principal matures on August 17, 2026, and unrestricted cash cannot cover it.