Huiyuan, China’s biggest fruit juice company, delisted
Huiyuan Juice, famous for its advertising slogan “Only with Huiyuan is it the real Lunar New Year,” won’t have a happy new year in 2021: The company was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Market on January 18.
Huiyuan Juice (汇源果汁 huìyuán guǒzhī), famous for its advertising slogan “Only with Huiyuan is it the real Lunar New Year” (有汇源, 才叫过年呢 yǒu huìyuán, cái jiào guònián ne), won’t have a happy new year in 2021: The company was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Market on January 18.
Huiyuan, China’s largest fruit juice company, was founded in Shandong Province in 1992, and listed in Hong Kong in 2007. Beginning in the 1990s, it successfully branded itself as a premium product and special drink for the Chinese New Year holiday. But Huiyuan has had several troubled years.
Starting from 2009, the company began to take on debt, Huiyuan 2012 and 2016 annual reports show. In 2014 and 2015, Huiyuan reported net losses (in Chinese). By 2016, its debt load was nearly 10 billion yuan ($1.55 billion). In April 2018, Huiyuan was suspended from trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company’s founder and chairman, Zhū Xīnlǐ 朱新礼, was added to a legal blacklist of debt defaulters (in Chinese) in 2019.
Two companies could have changed Huiyuan’s history:
- Coca-Cola wanted to buy Huiyuan in 2009, but China’s Ministry of Commerce nixed the deal (in Chinese) on antitrust grounds.
- In 2019, Tiandi No.1 Beverage 天地壹号, a less-known beverage company in China, tried to establish a joint venture with Huiyuan, but this did not work out (in Chinese).
Meanwhile, other beverage companies have ambitious expansion plans.
- Beijing’s Arctic Ocean 北冰洋, a soft drink brand 13 years older than the People’s Republic of China, is reported (in Chinese) to be seeking a backdoor listing.
- Ice Peak 冰峰, a beverage company in Xi’an, started preparing for an IPO in Shanghai, according to a December 2020 filing (in Chinese).
