Maoye's department stores went 19 years without a loss — then lost ¥246M in one

Maoye Commercial ran department stores across several Chinese cities — Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hohhot, Baotou among them — and had not posted an annual net loss since 2007, a 19-year run of profitability through multiple downturns in Chinese retail.

That run ended in the 2025 annual report, released March 27, 2026. Revenue fell 12.84% to ¥2.367 billion. Net profit, ¥37.15 million in 2024, swung to a net loss of ¥246.1 million — a 761.74% decline. The core department store segment's revenue fell 18.10%. Every regional market declined: Baotou fell 39.55%, Hohhot 18.98%, Shenzhen 16.87%, and even Chengdu, the best performer, still fell 6.99%.

The loss was compounded by two non-operating hits: a ¥198 million fair-value loss on investment property, and ¥75 million in asset impairments, including ¥60 million in goodwill write-downs. Even stripping those out, the underlying non-GAAP result was still a loss of ¥86.8 million. Hotel and real estate, the company's diversification away from department stores, grew 4.18% but remained only 11% of total revenue — too small to offset the core business's decline.

The company paid no dividend for 2025. A department store operator that had weathered two decades of Chinese retail cycles without a losing year found that this particular downturn — spread evenly across every city it operated in, not concentrated in one weak market — was the one it couldn't outrun.