Abruptly stopped.

Investor Network, Cai Jun

Just before the Dragon Boat Festival, the Sinopharm Group terminated a major transaction.

This deal was expected to become the largest capital transaction in the health industry this year, but it has abruptly stopped and become history. However, the stories before and after the transaction, as well as discussions on the fluctuation cycles of blood products, will not cease.

The 4.7 billion Sinopharm acquisition was abruptly terminated

In June, PLBIO announced the formal end of a significant control transfer transaction that had lasted nearly a year.

According to the announcement, China National Pharmaceutical Group's China Biologic reached an agreement with the controlling shareholder Shengbang Yinghao to terminate the share transfer agreement valued at 4.699 billion yuan. After the termination of the transaction, Shengbang Yinghao remains the largest shareholder, and the actual control position of Shaanxi State-owned Assets remains unchanged, marking a "parting of ways" after a year-long capital marriage.

Looking back at the entire process of advancing the transaction, the market once regarded the completion of this acquisition as a certainty. In 2025, PLBIO suspended trading to disclose its control change plan, with the Shaanxi state-owned assets platform intending to sell 21.03% of its shares. Once the transfer was completed, China Biologic would become the controlling shareholder of PLBIO, and Sinopharm Group would simultaneously gain actual control.

In September of the same year, both parties signed a formal transfer agreement, and by the end of the year, China Biologic fully paid 30% of the transaction amount while submitting a complete set of approval materials to state-owned assets and antitrust regulatory agencies, extending the delivery deadline to June 30, 2026. The market speculated that the fundamental reversal of the industry’s fundamentals was the core external reason for Sinopharm's decision to withdraw.

Earlier, the scarcity of plasma station licenses and the scale of plasma collection determined industry discourse power, with industrial capital such as Sinopharm, China Resources, and Haier aggressively acquiring listed companies and crazily expanding plasma station capacity. PLBIO also increased its production capacity, with the second phase of production for Guangdong Shuanglin and Picefico coming online successively, continuing to break through overall annual production capacity.

However, later on, the clinical demand for blood products declined, and the concentrated release of finished products faced a continuously weakening demand side. Multiple policies, including medical insurance cost control, DRG payment reform, and clinical medication management, led hospitals to significantly tighten the standards for albumin use; overseas blood product import approvals were relaxed, and low-priced competing products continued to squeeze the market space for domestic companies, completely reversing the supply-demand pattern in the industry.

In simple terms, the earlier expansion dividends quickly transformed into inventory crises, with the growth rate of plasma collection in the industry declining and the profits of leading companies collectively sliding.

In 2025, the net profit of BTBP fell nearly 30% year-on-year; during the same period, PLBIO's revenue only slightly decreased by 0.83%, while its net profit attributable to the parent company dropped by 43.75%.

At this point, the industry faces a structurally unsolvable problem: a single plasma can be split into more than a dozen products, with high inventory of albumin, but there remains stable demand for clotting factors and specific immunoglobulins, making it impossible for companies to simply reduce production. At the same time, plasma stations are core scarce resources, and actively reducing plasma collection is equivalent to relinquishing market share, leaving the industry in a dilemma of "daring not to reduce production, with high inventory." Essentially, Sinopharm's abandonment of a large-scale acquisition worth nearly 4.7 billion yuan marks a significant signal of the industry's strategic shift, officially ending the era of extensive expansion relying on mergers and acquisitions.

Years of ups and downs

After being listed for many years, PLBIO has changed its actual controlling entity multiple times, transitioning from Zhejiang Min Investment to Shaanxi State-owned Assets, and now to a proposed handover to Sinopharm, with frequent changes in the controlling party.

In 2023, after Shaanxi State-owned Assets took over, it promoted a complete re-election of the board of directors. Fu Shaolan temporarily exited the core management team, and subsequently, to balance the interests of all parties, the company added a co-chairman position to reintroduce Fu Shaolan. Her daughter Yang Li and grandson Yan Lei successively joined the board of directors and the executive team, forming a unique structure of co-governance between state-owned shareholders and the founding family.

In 2025, co-chairman Fu Shaolan, along with two generations of relatives, joined two independent directors and a deputy general manager to collectively cast a dissenting vote on PLBIO's 2025 annual report.

The core of the conflict between the two parties lies in the goodwill left over from the acquisition of Picefco. In 2025, the company made a goodwill impairment provision for this asset, which directly significantly eroded the current net profit. Fu Shaolan's side raised doubts, arguing that this impairment provision lacked sufficient factual basis, the pre-tax discount rate was significantly higher than industry peers, and there were obvious flaws in the impairment testing process, with doubts about the independence of the third-party evaluation agency.

In response, PLBIO's management stated that the entire impairment calculation strictly followed enterprise accounting standards, and the discount rate and calculation parameters remained consistent with historical standards, with the process being fully compliant.

At the subsequent shareholders' meeting, although all proposals such as the annual report and financial statements were smoothly passed, when faced with questions from investors on-site, PLBIO's secretary of the board stated that the differences only stemmed from differing positions and would not interfere with daily operations.

Now that the acquisition has been terminated, the destocking cycle in the blood products industry has yet to reach its bottom. The dual pressure from medical insurance and imported competing products continues to exist, and the high depreciation brought about by capacity expansion will drag down profits for a long time, making it difficult to restore cash flow and inventory pressure in the short term.

Looking at the entire blood products industry, PLBIO's failed acquisition holds significant indicative meaning for the industry. The phase of capital frantically acquiring resources to seize plasma stations has passed, and industrial capital is beginning to rationally assess the merger and acquisition return cycle. The focus of industry competition is gradually shifting towards optimizing product structure, refined cost control, and developing specialized sub-products.

Do you believe the blood products sector can emerge from its low point? Feel free to leave comments and discuss in the comment section. (Produced by Siwei Finance)