Guangdong CapBio has sued multiple health committees and public hospitals for owing over 300 million yuan in nucleic acid testing fees. However, at the same time, they have become defendants due to owing upstream funds, finding themselves in a financial dilemma at both ends of the chain.
On November 8, Guangdong CapBio Technology Co., Ltd. issued a public announcement stating that the company and its subsidiaries within the consolidated financial statements have filed a total of 69 lawsuits and arbitration cases in the past year as the plaintiff, with 41 cases already concluded involving approximately 39 million yuan in litigation fees. There are still around 300 million yuan remaining in unresolved contract disputes.
These cases mainly involve the period from 2020 to 2022, where health committees or public medical institutions in various regions have delayed payment of company goods or testing service fees. As these institutions owe money to CapBio, CapBio in turn owes money to upstream suppliers. Consequently, CapBio is currently playing the role of both the plaintiff and defendant, caught in a double bind.
CapBio is an enterprise based in Chaozhou, Guangdong, that went public on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in April 2017, primarily focusing on HPV testing. In 2020, CapBio independently developed nucleic acid test kits for COVID-19, conducting tests for over 120 million individuals.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, CapBio experienced three years of booming performance. However, in the first three quarters of 2025, CapBio’s revenue was 486 million yuan, less than one-ninth of the same period in 2022, while its accounts receivable amounted to a staggering 1.864 billion yuan. Among these, the accounts receivable related to providing unconventional testing products and medical examination services from 2020 to 2022 reached 1.253 billion yuan. The large amount of unrecovered accounts has put pressure on CapBio’s cash flow.
Currently, CapBio has listed 11 lawsuits with individual amounts exceeding 10 million yuan, totaling 315 million yuan. The highest amounts are from three lawsuits in the Xi’an area involving Xi’an Cap Medical Laboratory Co., Ltd., with sums of 35.974 million yuan, 74.0239 million yuan, and 46 million yuan. Just in Xi’an alone, the debts exceed 100 million yuan.
CapBio also has outstanding debts in Changsha, Shantou, Nanchang, each exceeding 10 million yuan.
According to the information disclosed by CapBio, the higher amount debts have been gradually entering legal proceedings since August of last year – these debts have been outstanding for at least two years.
The third-quarter report of 2025 showed that the accounts receivable of some enterprises exceeded 1 billion yuan. Moreover, this year has seen numerous reports of a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises experiencing broken funding chains, leading to bankruptcy filings, a situation that is not uncommon.
In January of this year, Lei Haichao, the director of the National Health Commission of the CCP, published an article in the “Party Building” magazine, stating that “we must prudently resolve the long-term debts formed by advance payments for equipment and facilities purchase and nucleic acid testing during the COVID-19 pandemic.” This statement was seen as a policy signal, yet as the year draws to a close, many outstanding debts remain unresolved.
Despite official assurances of “resolving pandemic debts,” the number of lawsuits and amounts involved from the industry’s nucleic acid testing legacy debts continue to plague the entire sector.