The jewelry tycoon collapsed amid the gold bull market, and the higher the gold price rises, the harder it is for gold stores to survive.

With gold prices staying high, the jewelry capital market has hit its darkest hour.

In recent years, multiple listed jewelry companies have encountered successive operational crises. Jinzhou Cihang, a giant in gold processing and retail that once owned a hundred-billion-yuan gold supply chain landscape, announced its withdrawal from the capital market as its share price stayed consistently below its par value.

Time-honored brand Cuihua Jewelry landed on the A-share market in 2014. It made several attempts to achieve breakthroughs through cross-border transformation, but eventually got trapped by ineffective internal control. It triggered multiple delisting red lines due to issues including failure to disclose financial reports on schedule and alleged financial fraud, with its market value shrinking to less than 200 million yuan. A similar scenario also played out on the NEEQ: as the benchmark in the light luxury track, Kingee Jewelry saw frequent abnormal trading fluctuations, with its delisting risk alarm fully activated.

Since early September this year, a wave of negative public opinions about the company has broken out intensively: first, the actual controllers Lin Mingjie and Gao Xiaosong were out of contact, then labor disputes and delayed salary payment to employees were exposed. On October 8, Beijing Kingee Jewelry Co., Ltd. was added with a new person subject to execution, with the execution target being more than 18.14 million yuan.

Its financial situation is even more severe. In the first half of 2026, Kingee Jewelry only had 930,000 yuan in cash on its books. Although it holds gold and jewelry inventory worth more than 1.5 billion yuan, it will take more than 3 years to fully realize all the inventory. Before this huge inventory can be fully converted into cash, Kingee Jewelry may have already disappeared from the stock market.

Cash flow and inventory status of Kingee Jewelry Source: 2026 semi-annual report of Kingee Jewelry

A star jewelry brand whose market value once exceeded 2.7 billion yuan, why can't it even afford to pay its store clerks' salaries now? As jewelry brands collapse one after another, what path can gold jewelry stores take to move forward?

The most valuable asset of Kingee Jewelry is its light luxury brand positioning

In 2001, Lin Mingjie, together with his wife Gao Xiaosong and sister Lin Huixian, founded Kingee Jewelry in Beijing.

Different from time-honored brands that rely on wedding gold ornaments and pricing by gram weight, Kingee Jewelry bypassed the old path of traditional gold stores, targeted young middle-class groups in first- and second-tier cities, and positioned itself as a design-driven light luxury jewelry brand.

"Design-driven" is not an empty slogan. The core competitiveness of traditional jewelry brands lies in channels and supply chains, where designers usually serve product lines rather than act as the soul of the brand.

From the very beginning, Kingee placed design at the top of the value chain. With the concept of "elegance, romance, tenderness and agility", it introduced avant-garde designers from Paris, Italy and other regions, focusing on unique design of diamond jewelry, as well as craft innovation and stylization of new-style gold products.

In other words, what Kingee sells is not only gold and diamonds, but also international fashion aesthetics, which makes it stand out remarkably among a large number of traditional gold counters that mainly focus on wedding scenarios and adopt gram-weight pricing. The turning point for the brand's rise came around 2010, when the consumption upgrading of residents drove the outbreak of domestic jewelry demand. The structural change of this round of growth lies in: liberating jewelry from the counters of the "three golds" for weddings, and turning it into accessories that young people can wear in daily life.

Kingee seized this dividend to accelerate expansion. In September 2010, the company announced that it would open 30 new branches simultaneously in 8 core cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Xiamen, and planned to open more outlets in first-tier cities.

Standard store model of early Kingee Jewelry in first-tier cities Source: Sina Finance

Different from veteran players such as Chow Tai Fook and Lao Fengxiang that focus on franchising, Kingee preferred direct operation, which made it easier to control product quality, service and brand premium.

Relying on the steady direct operation system, Kingee successfully established close cooperation with mid-to-high-end shopping mall groups such as New World Department Store, Grand Ocean Department Store, Far Eastern Department Store and Paris Printemps, quickly securing positions and expanding steadily in high-end business districts of core cities.

In 2012, Kingee had more than 180 directly-operated stores, with annual sales exceeding 1 billion yuan.

By the end of May 2015, the total number of Kingee Jewelry's stores across the country reached 240, including 233 self-operated stores and only 7 franchised stores, with the self-operation ratio as high as 97%. Its sales network covered more than 40 first- and second-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Fuzhou and Wuhan.

Operating performance of Kingee Jewelry in 2015 Source: Kingee Jewelry prospectus

In October of the same year, Kingee Jewelry officially landed on the NEEQ, becoming a representative listed company in China's jewelry track, and was elected as the vice president unit of the China Jewelry & Jade Jewelry Association. In the listing year, the company achieved revenue of 1.113 billion yuan, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 70.84 million yuan.

At this time, Kingee's brand awareness had not reached its peak, and what really made it widely known was a high-stakes bet on brand spokesperson.

In the third quarter of 2015, the company signed Hollywood star Anne Hathaway as its brand spokesperson, and officially announced the news in early 2016.

Poster of Kingee Jewelry announcing its international spokesperson Source: Global Jewelry Network

For a local brand that had rarely invested in advertising before, inviting an Oscar-level top Hollywood actress was extremely rare in the jewelry circle at that time. The signal released by Kingee was very clear: "It does not want to simply be a jewelry reseller, but to take the international light luxury route." Since that year, Kingee's products have repeatedly appeared in New York Fashion Week, continuously consolidating its brand image of "international light luxury jewelry". This narrative got a response in the capital market. On July 20, 2017, the closing price of Kingee Jewelry's share hit a peak of 25 yuan per share, with a total market value of 2.76 billion yuan. For the whole year of 2017, the company's revenue reached 1.357 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 17.65%, and the net profit attributable to shareholders was 94.28 million yuan, a year-on-year surge of 60.70%.

In the following two or three years, the revenue scale of this jewelry company remained at around 1 billion yuan, and in 2019, its directly-operated counters were opened in more than 60 first- and second-tier cities across the country. Growing from a local Beijing jewelry merchant to a national light luxury jewelry brand, Kingee Jewelry had an extremely smooth start.

But just when the outside world thought this star jewelry brand would keep developing well, the brand's story took a completely opposite turn.

Direct operation cannot be sustained, and franchising cannot take over the business

In 2021, Kingee Jewelry began to vigorously develop the franchising model, which was also the starting point for the brand's decline.

Due to the decline of passenger flow in mid-to-high-end shopping malls and the persistently high rent costs, a large number of directly-operated stores continued to lose money, so the brand could only close its directly-operated stores in shopping malls and switch to franchising business.

The number of directly-operated stores in shopping malls dropped to 123 in 2021, while the number of franchised stores increased from dozens to more than 120. In 2022, the number of offline self-operated stores dropped to 52, halved to 21 in 2023, and only 1 remained in 2024, almost shifting all the pressure to franchisees.

But franchisees are also having a hard time. The number of franchised stores shrank from 124 at the end of 2023 to 95 at the end of 2024, among which 17 new stores were opened and 46 stores were closed in 2024, with a net decrease of 29 stores. After 2025, the company even stopped disclosing the data of franchised stores, and a large number of franchisees chose to terminate cooperation. Media field visits found that many franchised stores of Kingee Jewelry started clearance sales at that time, and after clearing the inventory, they switched to selling gold and jewelry of other brands, and quite a few of them changed their brand names.

Offline stores were no longer reliable. Taking advantage of the rise of live streaming e-commerce, Kingee Jewelry tried to develop the online market. When it first started doing Taobao live streaming in 2022, the sales of the official live streaming room only accounted for 5% of the total transaction volume of the brand on Taobao and Tmall. During the Double 11 period in 2023, the penetration rate of store live streaming increased to 38.9%, and the transaction volume of the official live streaming room exceeded 100 million yuan, becoming the first brand live streaming room exceeding 100 million yuan in the jewelry industry of Taobao and Tmall.

In 2024, the company further promoted strategic transformation, focusing on the development of e-commerce business, which contributed 528 million yuan to the company, accounting for nearly 70% of the total revenue, and has become the main source of income for the brand.

E-commerce revenue of Kingee Jewelry in 2024 Source: 2024 annual report of Kingee Jewelry

But no one expected that the online market, which was originally highly expected, took a sharp downturn after only one year of prosperity.

In 2025, Kingee Jewelry's revenue almost halved to 438 million yuan, and its e-commerce revenue shrank to 292 million yuan, down 44.64% year on year.

In the first half of 2026, e-commerce revenue further dropped to 19.63 million yuan, plummeting 89.75% year on year, and its proportion in revenue fell to only 9%.

The offline operating gap cannot be filled, and the second growth curve also failed, leaving Kingee Jewelry almost losing all profitable opportunities.

The collapse of revenue is not the worst situation. The continuous deterioration of inventory turnover has greatly weakened its realization capacity.

The company's inventory turnover rate dropped from 0.45 times in 2024 to 0.23 times in 2025, and further fell to 0.12 times in the first half of 2026. The inventory clearance cycle is getting longer and longer, among which the inventory with an age of more than 3 years accounts for nearly half.

Inventory turnover of Kingee Jewelry in the first half of 2026 Source: 2026 semi-annual report of Kingee Jewelry

Goods cannot be sold, money cannot be recovered, and the liquidity of assets has basically stagnated.

Unable to make money both online and offline, and facing the red light of inventory realization, the problems accumulated inside the company can no longer be suppressed. The first signal that lit up was equity pledge. Since March 2025, Lin Mingjie has been intensively pledging shares of Kingee Jewelry. By the end of June this year, among the 30.43% shares he held personally, 15.88% were in the pledged state, with a personal pledge ratio of 52.19%.

Then the problem of delayed salary payment was exposed. According to the report of Jiemian News, more than 60 Kingee Jewelry employees have filed rights protection applications, and most of them have applied for labor arbitration.

The last straw that crushed the camel was the disconnection of the actual controllers Lin Mingjie and Gao Xiaosong. On the evening of September 10, the sponsoring securities firm Northeast Securities announced that it could not get in touch with the two through various means, and the reason was unknown.

Northeast Securities issued a risk warning for Kingee Jewelry

Market rumors say the disconnection may be related to debt. Now the company only has 930,000 yuan in cash on its books, but its total liabilities are as high as 290 million yuan, which is far from enough to pay off the debt.

After the release of a series of negative news, Kingee Jewelry's share price plummeted by more than 64% in the two trading days of September 10 and September 11, with the total market value remaining only 47.48 million yuan, and the brand value shrank by 98% compared with its peak period. Looking back, the decline of Kingee Jewelry was caused by multiple factors. The first is the misjudgment of channel decision-making. In the early stage, it relied on direct operation, with strong product quality control and service, but lacked experience in franchise management. The