Once a home-appliance giant, Konka now has one foot in the ICU. This company, which topped China’s color TV sales rankings for many consecutive years, has been pushed to the brink of insolvency.
Recently, Shanghai-listed Konka released its 2025 earnings guidance, estimating 2025 revenue at RMB 9.0–10.5 billion, down 5.53%–19% year over year. It also expected a net loss attributable to shareholders of RMB 12.581–15.57 billion, a 3.8x–4.7x expansion versus the RMB 3.296 billion loss in the same period a year earlier.
The guidance triggered a strong reaction in the capital markets. On the next trading day, Konka A shares hit consecutive “one-line” limit-down moves. As of the time of writing, the stock was down more than 27% from before the guidance was released.
More concerning still, Konka simultaneously issued a risk announcement that its shares could be designated *ST. According to the announcement, the company expected its net assets attributable to the parent at the end of 2025 to potentially be negative, putting it at risk of delisting.
In recent years, the home-appliance industry has undergone wave after wave of upheaval: Sony sold off its TV business; Skyworth took its TV business private and pivoted to photovoltaics. One former “TV titan” after another has exited the stage, leaving many observers sighing with regret.
It also raises an unavoidable question: when the tides of the era come crashing in, do the once-dominant giants really have nowhere to run? And if a company wants to “survive,” what price must it pay?
A single-quarter loss could reach tens of billions of yuan
It didn’t turn cold overnight. A “chill” in the home-appliance industry has long been a familiar refrain.
Konka’s performance in recent years already offered clues. Over the past decade, its revenue growth kept slowing; starting in 2020, revenue turned negative year over year. From 2022 onward, revenue began to shrink sharply. In 2024, it posted revenue of RMB 11.115 billion—down more than 80% from its peak in 2019.
As revenue fell, profits offered little to cheer about. Starting in 2022, the company slipped into losses, with cumulative losses nearing RMB 7.0 billion—and the deficit continuing to widen.
In response, Konka had previously stated in its financial reports that the decline in performance was mainly due to intensifying competition in the color TV industry. Coupled with factors such as heightened supply-chain volatility and limited room left to cut expenses, Konka admitted that it would be difficult to reverse the downturn in its color TV business in the short term.
The market and consumers have felt this as well. A new generation of consumers is more inclined to access content anytime and anywhere through smart devices such as smartphones and tablets, and the traditional TV is gradually slipping from being the center of home entertainment to becoming “background furniture.”
Market data also lays bare this harsh reality. Starting in 2019, TV shipments in China began a sustained decline, and in 2025, shipments of branded TV sets in the Chinese market hit the lowest level in nearly 16 years.
But a sluggish home-appliance sector alone still doesn’t explain why Konka suddenly posted a loss exceeding RMB 10 billion in 2025.
According to its financial reports, Konka’s net loss in 2024 was RMB 3.296 billion; over the first three quarters of 2025, its net loss was RMB 982 million, narrowing by 38.89% year on year. This also means that in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, Konka recorded losses of more than RMB 10 billion—an outright cliff-like plunge.
As for the expected loss, Konka explained that it made impairment provisions for inventory, accounts receivable, equity investments, financial assistance, and underperforming or non-performing assets, among others. The main reason behind the sudden blowup in Konka’s results still lay within the company itself.
Since 2019, Konka has been making large-scale asset impairment provisions, and as of 2024, the cumulative amount of newly recognized asset impairment reached RMB 7.378 billion.
Therefore, when we compare the asset impairment provisions made before 2024 with those made in 2025, everything prior to 2024 could be described as mere “drizzle.” The more-than-10-billion-yuan asset impairment provision disclosed this time is the “bomb” that had been hidden underneath.
This provision looks more like Konka’s sweeping reckoning with a decade’s worth of accumulated financial problems. But with this kind of “scraping poison from the bone,” Konka may not be able to withstand the pain.
According to an announcement released by Konka, the company’s net assets attributable to shareholders in 2025 were expected to range from -5.334 billion yuan to -8.001 billion yuan. But as of the end of September 2025, the company’s total liabilities had already reached 28.269 billion yuan, with a debt ratio as high as 96.78%. Now, with its 2025 net assets attributable to shareholders at risk of turning negative, that would mean that even if it liquidated all of its assets, it still wouldn’t be enough to pay off its debts.
For Konka, losses of more than 10 billion yuan and heavy debt are not merely financial figures—they are a report card for its more than 40 years of development. How did a former “TV giant” fall from grace?
A TV giant defeated by the times
Turning the clock back to the 1980s, Konka—formerly Guangdong Guangming Overseas Chinese Electronic Industry Co.—was officially established in 1980. As China’s first Sino-foreign joint-venture electronics company founded after reform and opening-up, Konka rode the wave of the era and grew rapidly.
In 1992, Konka officially listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. After that, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, Konka quickly grew into a leading player in China’s TV industry, and together with Changhong and TCL was dubbed the “Big Three” of domestic TV brands.
After entering the 2000s, like most major home-appliance giants, Konka also began extending upstream and midstream along the TV industry chain—such as developing in-house the first microcontroller chip in China’s TV industry and investing in the Kunshan LCD module base.
At the same time, it began expanding into white goods such as refrigerators and washing machines, and in 2000 it also tried to enter the mobile phone market. At its peak, in 2003, Konka’s annual mobile phone sales reached 5 million units, ranking among the top domestic brands.
But in terms of revenue scale, Konka’s string of diversified home-appliance businesses does not seem to have delivered any meaningful income growth. On the contrary, its core TV business has come under increasing pressure.
Before 2010, Konka’s share of the TV market basically hovered around 14%, consistently ranking among the industry leaders. According to ChinaIOL statistics, as of the end of November 2009, Konka’s overall market share in TV products stood at 13.64%, ranking first; in the CRT TV segment, its market share was as high as 26.62%.
But after 2010, as LCD TV costs fell and technologies advanced, Konka’s market share was gradually overtaken by competitors with stronger technological innovation capabilities (Hisense, Changhong, TCL, etc.), and it slipped out of the top tier.
According to AVC Revo data, in 2024, Konka had fallen to fifth in China’s TV market retail unit ranking, with a 7.2% share, behind Hisense, TCL, Xiaomi, and Skyworth; its share in the premium segment had already dropped to less than 1%.
Therefore, simply blaming Konka’s decline on “the times” seems somewhat unfair.
Although demand for TV consumption has continued to contract over the past decade, many peers shifted their focus to the premium market and overseas markets—and achieved solid results. For instance, in 2024, TCL TV’s global shipments reached 29 million units, up 14.8% year on year.
So Konka’s problems lie more in its strategic positioning: wanting everything, it often ends up doing nothing well. On the surface, against the backdrop of a weakening TV business, Konka’s push into major appliances—and even its cross-industry attempts to cultivate a second growth curve—was not illogical.
But a closer look at Konka’s business moves in recent years suggests they have been too numerous, too scattered, and too rushed——too many cross-sector bets with limited relevance to its core business, and, most importantly, too little strategic staying power, with pivots coming too quickly.
A glance through its annual reports is genuinely dizzying: from environmental protection to semiconductors, from new materials to industrial real estate parks, and it even jumped on hot trends like autonomous driving.
Around 2018, Konka successively moved into the environmental protection and semiconductor sectors, and set a strategic goal of “entering the top tier of international semiconductor companies within 5–10 years.” In just two years, Konka’s environmental protection business grew to RMB 7.079 billion in revenue, accounting for 12.84% of its total revenue.
But starting in 2019, Konka’s environmental protection business began to slide. In fact, businesses like environmental protection are highly sensitive to policy shifts in the market. Coupled with the tightness of local public finances in recent years, project advance payments can also easily squeeze a company’s cash flow. Ultimately, in its 2023 annual report, Konka said it would gradually exit its industrial-and-trading and environmental protection businesses, and focus its resources on its two core businesses: consumer electronics and semiconductors.
That said, while the outlook for semiconductors is clear, it is a heavy-investment, long-cycle business model. In its financial reports, Konka noted that its semiconductor business was still in the early stage of industrialization, had yet to achieve scaled and efficiency-driven output, and was weighing on the company’s overall profitability.
Meanwhile, Konka’s real estate business once brought it substantial gains—for example, in 2017 it earned about RMB 6.35 billion by transferring a 70% stake in its subsidiary Kangqiaojiacheng Property.
But as the real estate sector entered a deep adjustment phase, problems such as the fading of land dividends and difficulty in clearing inventory followed one after another. Konka’s loans to, or guarantees for, its holding subsidiaries or investee companies also quickly turned into a drag from mounting debt.
Last December, Konka issued two consecutive announcements about overdue shareholder loans. Among them, Chuzhou Kangxin provided shareholder loans of about RMB 807 million. Konka said the progress of the Chuzhou elderly-care project fell short of expectations and that it was actively negotiating with the government on a plan to push the project forward.
Frequent changes to management team cost it the golden window
Looking back over Konka’s more than 40 years of development, it once rode the waves of its era and even reached the top as the “king of color TVs.” Yet at critical junctures in industrial transformation, it repeatedly lost momentum and failed to seize the shift in the prevailing tailwinds in time.
Behind this, the revolving-door management team was also a key reason the company lacked strategic staying power. From 2013 to 2015, over just three years, Konka replaced its president at least four times.
Every transfer of power is often accompanied by a dramatic swing in business priorities. And when management is rotated so frequently, it’s hard not to question whether those in charge are running the company with a “just get through today” mindset.
According to a report by Wai Can Finance, an engineer inside Konka revealed: “The R&D department has long since become an appendage of sales. The company evaluates us by the number of patents, but never asks about the technical substance. Leaders even say we can pad the numbers with design patents—low cost, and it’s good for publicity.”
On the Black Cat complaints platform, there are more than 5,900 complaints about Konka, most of them alleging poor product quality that requires frequent repairs, as well as after-sales service marked by shirking responsibility and passing the buck.
It is also worth noting that, as Konka issued a warning that it expected a loss for its 2025 results, its former vice chairman Zhou Bin and former vice president Li Hongtao were also officially named in a notice for suspected serious disciplinary and legal violations.
Among them, Zhou Bin began serving as Konka’s president in 2017. In April last year, Zhu Xinming—the second-largest shareholder of Konka subsidiary Jiangxi Konka New Materials Technology Co., Ltd.—filed a real-name report, accusing Zhou Bin of allegedly inflating performance figures and misappropriating state-owned assets.
Although Konka said the allegations were seriously untrue, Shenzhen’s securities regulators still issued the company a warning letter, pointing out problems in its information disclosure and urging it to make corrections.
Behind Konka’s more-than-10-billion-yuan loss, long-standing internal problems had already piled up like a mountain. In April last year, Konka’s controlling shareholder OCT Group transferred all of its Konka shares to China Resources Group free of charge. With China Resources—a central state-owned enterprise—tasked with driving optimization, the move also raised hopes among outside observers.
After China Resources formally became the controlling shareholder, it gradually brought to light the debt “time bombs” that had previously been kept hidden. For Konka as it stood, that was a good thing. After all, simply avoiding the issues would never truly solve them.
Beyond that, China Resources has gradually strengthened Konka’s cash liquidity through measures such as providing financing guarantees, extending the maturities of debts at investee companies, offering shareholder loan quotas, and selling equity stakes in investment companies. At the same time, it has leveraged China Resources’ resources to reactivate certain existing assets—for example, renovating Konka’s old factory buildings in Dongguan and leasing them out again.
In addition, semiconductors—currently Konka’s most promising business—accounted for only 1.53% of total revenue last year, but it remains possible that the business will form closer linkages in the future with China Resources’ microelectronics operations.
That said, even with many potential directions, China Resources’ rescue effort remains extremely challenging.
For Konka, burdened with a heavy historical legacy, what it needs is not merely an injection of capital or a clearer direction, but a top-to-bottom overhaul. Only by tearing down the past can it truly face the future.
