Photo/Shetuwang

Apr. 16 (NBD) -- Chinese e-commerce platform Jumei International Holding Ltd ("Jumei", NYSE: JMEI) said on Wednesday that it has completed a merger with founder Chen Ou's fully-owned private company, ending its six-year journey as a public traded company.

As previously agreed, Jumei Investment Holding Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chen Ou's Super ROI Global Holding Ltd, purchased all of Jumei's outstanding shares at 20 U.S. dollars per ADS.

Jumei closed at 19.93 U.S. dollars Tuesday, with a market cap of 228 million U.S. dollars, which was a 95 percent shrinkage from the peak in August 2014.

The transaction marks a bitter failure for the star company and its celebrity founder. Jumei rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in May 2014, only four years after the cosmetics-focused e-commerce platform was established.

At the time 31-year-old Stanford alumni Chen Ou was hailed as the youngest CEO the Exchange had ever welcomed, while his peers, Zhang Yiming of ByteDance and Cheng Wei of Didi Chuxing, just started their enterprises.

Not long after the IPO, however, the trajectory of Jumei's story took the downward direction. Troubled by the issue of fake products, and challenged by e-commerce giants like Alibaba Group and JD.com, which both got listed in the U.S. in 2014, market cap of Jumei had more than halved by the end of that year.

By Q3 2019, Jumei's market share in China's B2C online retailing sector was a meager 0.1 percent, according to data compiled by market research firm Analysys. 

Where could Jumei head after going private? It is widely held that power bank sharing could be one of the major directions.

Jumei acquired a majority interest in power bank rental startup Jiedian in 2017, and to many's surprise, it proved to be quite a profitable business and became an important revenue contributor for Jumei. 

Services and others (Jiedian included) contributed nearly 21.7 percent to the net revenues of Jumei in 2018, much higher from the 3.1 percent in the previous year. In the first half of 2019, Jiedian took a 40.5 percent market share in the sector in China, according to iiMedia Research.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn