Monster Charge goes private at $325M, trapping Hillhouse, Alibaba, and Xiaomi
What's the deal? Monster Charge (Nasdaq: EM), China's largest power bank sharing company, has completed a management-led buyout and delisted from Nasdaq. The buyer group — led by chairman and chief executive officer Cai Guangyuan, president Xu Peifeng, chief marketing officer Zhang Yaoyu, and chief financial officer Xin Yi — acquired all outstanding shares at $1.25 per ADS, valuing the company at roughly $325M.
That's an 85% drop from Monster Charge's $2.1B market cap at its April 2021 IPO, when it priced shares at $8.50 and raised $150M. The delisting happened quietly — just five years after the company debuted as the "first shared charging stock."
Why now? Monster Charge's business has been under pressure. Revenue fell from 2.96B yuan in 2023 to 1.89B yuan ($259M) in 2024, and the company swung to a net loss of 13.5M yuan. Its share price had languished for years, stripping the listed entity of any real fundraising power.
At the same time, its market cap sat well below the value of its assets. As of December 31, 2024, total assets were $565M — including $108M in cash and $292M in short-term investments — against total liabilities of $200M, leaving shareholders' equity at $364M. Put simply, the buyout group paid less than the company's book value.
What could go wrong? The deal has already angered major shareholders. Alibaba (15.1% stake), Hillhouse Capital (12.3%), Xiaomi (12.3%), Shunwei Capital (8.3%), and SoftBank Asia (7.1%) all failed to exit at a profit during Monster Charge's five years on the market.
Hillhouse, which backed Monster Charge from its angel round through six consecutive funding rounds, fought back. In October 2025, it offered $1.77 per share — a significant premium to management's $1.25 bid. But the company's dual-class share structure gave management 64.8% of voting rights with just 18.7% of equity, while Hillhouse held only 2.3% of votes. Monster Charge rejected the higher bid, sparking questions about minority shareholder protections.
The signal: Monster Charge's fire-sale delisting is a stark illustration of how far sentiment has swung against China's shared-economy cohort. Management's ability to push through a below-book-value buyout — paying roughly $325M for a company with $364M in shareholders' equity — underscores the governance risks inherent in dual-class structures, where founders controlling 64.8% of votes on 18.7% of equity can override even deep-pocketed backers like Hillhouse. With Chinese IPO volumes on US exchanges at virtually zero and investor capital pivoting to AI and semiconductors, the episode may mark the definitive end of the consumer internet listing playbook that defined the late 2010s.
Read more: 36kr.com
