Jumei went from a $379 share to a founder's buyout below its IPO price

Jumei IPO'd on the NYSE in 2014 as China's leading online cosmetics retailer, and for one August its shares traded at $379.90. The fall started with trust: reports that third-party sellers on the platform were shipping counterfeit cosmetics did what every apology and authentication programme only slowed — an irreversible dent in a business whose entire proposition was that the cream was genuine.

Rather than spend its way back into trust, Jumei spent its way into everything else. Founder and CEO Chen Ou — famous in China for fronting the company's own ads — pushed into shared power-bank rentals and smartphones, diversifications that consumed capital and management while the core marketplace kept shrinking. The revenue base that had justified a multibillion-dollar listing eroded to the point where the company's market value on its final trading day was $227 million.

On 14 April 2020 Jumei traded for the last time, at $19.93 — below its $22 IPO price — after Chen Ou's consortium took it private at $20 a share. Six years earlier the market had priced it as the future of Chinese beauty retail; at the end it was bought by its own founder for less than strangers had paid at the listing. The counterfeit problem was never solved; it was simply outlived by the exit.