In recent years, Yonghui Supermarket Co., Ltd., once regarded as a benchmark enterprise in China’s fresh food retail industry, has been facing ongoing operational pressures and is still deeply immersed in a loss quagmire.
The latest performance report released by Yonghui Supermarket shows that in 2025, it achieved a total operating income of 53.508 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 20.82%. The net profit attributable to shareholders was a loss of 2.55 billion yuan, and adjusted for non-recurring gains and losses, the loss was 3.399 billion yuan, with the loss margin significantly expanding compared to the previous year. The fourth quarter alone recorded a loss of 1.84 billion yuan, serving as a major drag on the annual performance.
Yonghui Supermarket is a company listed on the A-share market of Shanghai Stock Exchange, with over a thousand chain supermarkets in China. Public information indicates that Yonghui Supermarket has been in a declining trend for years. Since 2021, the company’s revenue has dropped from 91 billion yuan to 53.5 billion yuan in 2025, almost halving in size. The net profit has been negative for five consecutive years, with a cumulative loss of nearly 12.05 billion yuan from 2021 to 2025, making it one of the most severely loss-making enterprises in the A-share retail sector.
Industry insiders generally believe that traditional large-scale supermarket models have been impacted in recent years by the rapid development of e-commerce platforms, community group purchases, and changes in consumer structures, leading to a more challenging operating environment overall. Against this backdrop, including Yonghui, many chain supermarket enterprises are facing pressure to transform.
It is noteworthy that despite Yonghui’s advancement of the “Pang Daolai Mode Transformation” in the past two years, known as “Pang Gai,” the performance downturn has not been reversed.
To change course, in May 2024, Yonghui sought the assistance of Pang Daolai, the founder of another supermarket, and his team to learn from Pang Daolai’s self-operated model adjustment and implemented adjustment strategies across all national stores.
To cope with operational pressures, in 2025, Yonghui closed 381 low-performing stores and implemented extensive adjustments to over 300 stores simultaneously. According to a report by “21st Century Business Herald,” the one-time expenditures arising from this surpassed 1.2 billion yuan, directly consuming the current profits. Among these, the one-time cost of store adjustments reached 0.84 billion yuan, and the pre-tax loss from closures reached 0.333 billion yuan, totaling an impact of nearly 1.174 billion yuan on pre-tax profits.
Even more severe is the continuous deterioration of the asset-liability structure. By the end of the third quarter of 2025, Yonghui’s asset-liability ratio had climbed to 88.96%, with total debts nearing 28.13 billion yuan.
Fresh foods, as Yonghui’s core competitive category, have gradually lost competitiveness in recent years.
Online subsidies, industry price wars, and inadequate supply chain efficiency have collectively squeezed the company’s profit margins, leading to a continuous decline in gross profit margins and a significant contraction in gross profits. Meanwhile, fixed costs such as rent, labor, and logistics remain high, with the online business investments failing to generate effective scale effects, ultimately resulting in a passive situation of struggling to increase revenue and reduce losses.
Despite the “Pang Gai” initiative, the company’s overall profit model has not fundamentally improved, and the high investment transformation measures have not translated into a sustained increase in same-store sales and profitability. Instead, they have further raised costs, creating a cycle of “more changes, more losses.”
Since the official launch of “Pang Gai” in May 2024, according to the company’s plan, Yonghui will significantly reduce its adjustment efforts in 2026, expecting to close about 25 stores and adjust about 50 stores. The impact of closures and adjustments on profits is projected to decrease sharply from nearly 1.2 billion yuan in 2025 to around 170 million yuan.