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Qudian

FintechChina
New to Unitard
πŸ“‰ Public < $1B
PeakΒ $8 BillionRecorded estimate
~-92%
from peak
  1. πŸ¦„
    Became a unicorn
    2017
  2. πŸ“ˆ
    Peak valuation
    $8 Billion ’17
  3. πŸ’”
    Became a Unitard
    2019
  4. πŸ’Έ
    Last valuation estimate
    ~$640M
Current status
Listed on the NYSE (QD); affected by China's crackdown on consumer micro-lending

The rise & fall

6 moments Β· 2014–2024

The key moments.

2014
Founded as Qufenqi
Luo Min starts out lending small sums to Chinese college students, installment by installment.
Wikipedia
Oct 2017
The peak: one of the year's splashiest IPOs$8B
The NYSE debut values the micro-lender near $7.9B β€” and day-one trading briefly pushes it toward $10B.
CNBC
2017
Beijing cracks down
Weeks after the IPO, regulators move against online consumer and payday lending; the core business never recovers.
CNBC
2019
Slips out of the club
The crackdown-battered stock drifts below a $1B market cap.
Seeking Alpha
2019–24
Serial pivots in search of a business
Budget cars, education, ready-made food, cross-border e-commerce β€” none stick, and the company settles into life as a cash-rich shell periodically flirting with delisting.
TechNode

How it happened

Qudian was a Chinese consumer micro-lending company, backed by Ant Group, that grew explosively by extending small short-term loans β€” initially to college students. Its October 2017 NYSE IPO was one of the year's splashiest, valuing it near $7.9B and briefly pushing it toward $10B on its first day.

Almost immediately, Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown on online consumer and payday lending that hammered Qudian's core business and forced repeated pivots. The stock fell roughly 92% from its IPO, leaving the company a sub-$1B shell sitting on cash, periodically flirting with delisting.

Source: CNBC / TechNode / Seeking Alpha (Ant-backed Chinese consumer micro-lender that began with campus loans; Oct 2017 NYSE IPO at a ~$7.9B valuation, touched ~$10B on day one; China's crackdown on online consumer lending gutted the business; market cap ~$0.7B, down ~92% from the IPO)

Founder

  • Min Luo
    Founder, Chairman & CEO
    No public profile matched

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