The 2025 financial report for So Young paints a picture of a company in the difficult throes of transformation: its traditional business is in steep decline, while its aggressive expansion into new areas brings significant compliance risks and heavy costs.
Core Business in Sharp Decline
The company's foundational information and reservation service revenue plummeted by 32.2% in 2025, following a 19.3% drop the previous year. This segment, which once constituted 100% of revenue, now accounts for just 32.8% of the total. The decline is attributed to a decrease in subscribing medical service providers, as competitors like Xiaohongshu, Douyin, and Meituan leverage their massive user bases and capital to disrupt the medical aesthetics information space, drawing advertising budgets away from So Young.
Heavy-Asset Pivot and Its Costs
In response, So Young has pivoted from a light-asset online platform to a heavy-asset operator of offline medical aesthetic clinics. This strategy has shifted the revenue mix, with the offline chain business generating 6.75 billion yuan in 2025, a surge of 298.7% year-over-year, now representing 44% of total revenue and surpassing the traditional online segment. However, this growth is costly. Expenses for this service line soared 294.2%, driven by store expansion, rent, and staffing. While some individual clinics are profitable, the overall chain remains loss-making.
Mounting Compliance and Reputational Crises
The offline expansion has been accompanied by a series of serious compliance issues. During a major national consumer rights television broadcast, So Young was publicly criticized for listing unapproved exosome beauty treatments on its platform, damaging its brand and exposing compliance weaknesses.
Furthermore, its low-price strategy for its own clinics disrupted industry pricing, leading major suppliers to sever ties and accuse the company of unauthorized procurement. This has created supply chain instability and alienated traditional industry partners.
Content-related risks have also surfaced. The company faced a lawsuit from a celebrity over an inappropriate article title published on its official account, which it later apologized for, citing an "audit mechanism loophole." This incident highlights a broader pattern of prioritizing sensational, traffic-driven content in a context that demands medical seriousness.
Comments