Story

The Full Story

In four years as a public company, Helens has told three different stories. The IPO story (Sept 2021) was a fast-growing self-operated bar chain for Gen-Z; by end-2022 that story had cratered under COVID into a RMB 1.6B reported loss and a 40% cut to the bar base. Management then pivoted hard to an asset-light "HiBeer Partnership" franchise model, reframed 2023's 22% revenue decline as "strategic transformation," and has spent every subsequent year shrinking the top line while protecting a modest adjusted profit. The current story — a platform company extending into Japan, Singapore and Vietnam, with a Singapore secondary listing — is structurally different from the IPO story. Credibility is mixed: the pivot restored profitability, but same-store sales have declined every year since listing, and the key promise of 2023 (that HiBeer was the right model for the market) is now being quietly walked back as HiBeer's own per-bar sales fall.

All figures below are converted from RMB at roughly 7.1 RMB/USD for readability. Source data is RMB; conversion is for illustrative scale only.

1. The Narrative Arc

The arc is unambiguous: revenue has fallen every year since the 2021 IPO peak, from roughly $258M to $76M — a 71% decline over four years. Bars peaked at 782 in late-2021, collapsed to 479 by end-2023 during the self-op wind-down, and stabilised near 576 under the franchise-heavy mix. What moved alongside the shrink is the composition: self-operated bars fell from essentially 100% of the network pre-pivot to only 19% by end-2025 (108 of 576), with HiBeer Partnership bars now 74% of the base.

2. What Management Emphasized — and Then Stopped Emphasizing

Picked up and held: HiBeer Partnership, platform/asset-light model, supply chain integration, overseas footprint. These are the load-bearing beams of the current story.

Picked up and dropped: The Singapore secondary listing was emphasised heavily in 2024 (execution done July 2024) and then barely mentioned once the expenses fell away in 2025. COVID language exited cleanly by 2024 — appropriately.

Quietly de-emphasised: "Young customers aged 18–28," "Helen's beer" as a hero product, and the headline bar count as a growth metric. The IPO prospectus promised a self-operated chain scaling to dominate a young-consumer niche; that framing is gone. Helen's-branded beer revenue fell from RMB 281M in 2022 to RMB 35M in 2025 — an 88% drop — without a dedicated explanation in any annual letter.

Never acknowledged as dropped: Management has never explicitly said "we have stopped being a self-operated chain." They describe the shift as "strategic transformation" and "re-engage in a long-term market layout" — language that frames an 85% reduction in self-op bars (from ~760 to 108) as a feature.

3. Risk Evolution

The risk register has rotated meaningfully:

• COVID is gone. Appropriately. By 2024 the language was retired and has not returned.
• Consumer softness has replaced it as the dominant risk. In 2024 and 2025, "weak consumer market" / "complex and volatile domestic economic market" is the reason cited for every revenue decline and every same-store miss. The wording is almost identical year-to-year.
• New risk in 2024 — HQ building impairment. The company owns a headquarters property in Wuhan that it wrote down by RMB 59M in 2024 because of the PRC real-estate downturn. This was not contemplated in the IPO narrative and is material relative to current profit.
• Franchisee credit quality is a new line item. Net impairment losses on trade receivables from franchisees jumped from RMB 0.2M in 2023 to RMB 16.7M in 2024 as some franchised bars closed. This is a direct financial consequence of the pivot that was never pre-framed as a risk.
• HiBeer unit economics are quietly deteriorating. Average daily sales per HiBeer bar fell from RMB 7.1K in 2023 to RMB 5.0K in 2024 to RMB 4.1K in 2025 — a 42% decline in two years. This risk is visible in the tables but never called out in the Chairman's Statement.

4. How They Handled Bad News

Helens has a consistent playbook for bad news: acknowledge the number, attribute it to external conditions or to "strategic transformation," and re-affirm the long-term direction. There is no quarter in the record where management said "we were wrong" about a strategic decision.

Three episodes illustrate the pattern.

Episode 1 — The FY2022 implosion (RMB 1.6B reported loss, 194 bars closed). The 2022 Chairman's Statement opens with "In 2022, the repeated COVID-19 pandemic in various regions of China had an impact on the operation of our bars" and frames the closures as "strategic adjustments." It does not acknowledge that the company had been over-expanding in 2021 (opening 179 bars in 2022 while closing 194) or that the IPO proceeds had been deployed into a model that needed to be unwound less than a year after listing. The "losses from bars optimization and adjustment" of RMB 853M — mostly non-cash impairments — were surfaced as an adjustment to get to an adjusted net loss of "only" RMB 245M. This adjusted-out framing has persisted in every subsequent year.

Episode 2 — The FY2023 revenue decline (-22.5%). A 22.5% revenue decline was presented in the Chairman's Statement as the natural result of "strategic transformation of the Company towards a light-asset model." Same-store sales declined 8.5% but the letter emphasised that "our bars have gradually resumed normal operation." Bar count fell from 767 to 479 — a 38% reduction — described as the company "proactively adjusting its existing bar network." The word "shrank" does not appear.

Episode 3 — FY2024 and FY2025 consumer-demand misses. In both years the cause is given in near-identical language — "the complex and volatile domestic economic market" / "weak performance of the consumer market." Same-store sales declined 21.3% in 2024 and 18.4% in 2025. The proposed remedies are the same in both letters: launch more products, refine incentives, enhance brand. The repetition suggests the playbook is not producing the expected turn.

The pattern is not dishonest — the adjustments they exclude are disclosed, and the external headwinds are real — but it is consistently protective. No miss has ever been called a miss.

5. Guidance Track Record

Helens does not issue specific numerical revenue or EBITDA guidance in the HKEX filing format. The promises that matter are strategic commitments, paced through Chairman's Statements and the MD&A. Here is the scorecard on the ones that were load-bearing for the valuation case:

Credibility: 5/10. Management delivered what it said it would on execution items — the Singapore listing happened on schedule, the HiBeer bar count grew, adjusted profitability was restored. But on quality-of-business promises — same-store sales, HiBeer unit economics, the break-even claim of the single-bar model — the delivery has been weak and the language has been reused verbatim across multiple years without adjustment. The new 2025 promise to "consolidate and expand our self-operated bar network" is also a de-facto reversal of the 2023 pivot framing, presented without acknowledging the change.

6. What the Story Is Now

What the current story is. Helens is now a roughly RMB 540M / $76M revenue, adjusted-profitable platform operator of youth-oriented bars, dominated (74%) by a franchised single-bar "HiBeer" format, with a small self-op core, a property asset in Wuhan, a dual HK/SGX listing, and a token international footprint (5 bars outside Mainland China). Management's go-forward pitch is built on "supply chain integration" plus "space design" as the two strengths, with a new "third space" concept emerging.

What has been de-risked.

• Solvency: total liabilities of RMB 251M against RMB 875M equity and RMB 730M current assets — the balance sheet is clean and cash-heavy.
• COVID: operationally closed.
• Reported profitability: three consecutive years of adjusted net profit after the 2022 crash.
• Listing overhang / HK-only concentration: the SGX secondary listing is done.

What is still stretched.

• Top-line trend: revenue has fallen every year since IPO, and the drop rate has not stabilised. FY25 revenue down 28% YoY.
• Same-store sales: three straight years of double-digit declines on a rolling basis. The remedies named in 2023 are the same remedies named in 2025, and the results are worse.
• HiBeer per-bar sales: falling 20–40% per year across all store sizes. If the partner economics fail, the franchise flywheel stalls.
• The "third space" pitch: no disclosed unit economics; reads as marketing.
• Governance of the self-op reversal: the 2025 plan to "consolidate and expand self-operated bars" contradicts the 2023 pivot without acknowledgement.

What the reader should believe vs discount.

• Believe: the balance sheet, the cost discipline, the execution of the Singapore listing, and the fact that Helens can run profitably at its current scale.
• Discount: implicit claims that the HiBeer model is working at the store level, that same-store performance will recover through the measures listed, and that the overseas footprint is a meaningful growth lever at five bars. Also discount the neat narrative continuity — this is a company that has materially changed shape three times in four years, and its next chapter may not be the one currently being described.