Qihoo 360 came home at ¥50.4B, peaked at ¥460B — then lost ¥400B

Qihoo 360 completed its take-private from the US market on 15 July 2016 at $77 per ADS, a valuation of about $9.3 billion — roughly ¥60 billion — five years after listing in New York in March 2011. The stated destination was the A-share market. On the night of 2 November 2017, elevator maker Jiangnan Jiajie published the draft plan: sell off its legacy business, then issue 6.366 billion new shares at ¥7.89 each to buy 100% of Qihoo 360, valued at ¥50.416 billion — a multiple of a business whose net profit had been ¥1.34 billion in 2015 and ¥1.871 billion in 2016.

The market ran far ahead of the business. After the listing, the shares reached a high of ¥66.19 and the market value topped ¥460 billion. Then the fundamentals turned the other way: revenue declined every year from ¥12.841 billion in 2019 to ¥9.055 billion in 2023, and losses arrived — ¥2.204 billion in 2022, ¥492 million in 2023, and a projected loss of ¥770 million to ¥1.15 billion for 2024, the third straight loss year.

By February 2025 the market value stood at about ¥90 billion: a fall of up to 90% from the peak, more than ¥400 billion gone in seven years. The backdoor listing had priced the homecoming in 2017; the frenzy marked it at nine times that; and the business spent the following years shrinking beneath both numbers.