Planning to rename to "Times Digital," does the loss-making GCL New Energy want to "restructure"?

Why does AI ask—Why does GCL New Energy view losses as a necessary cost of transformation?

21st Century Business Herald reporter Cao Enhui

As one of four listed companies under GCL Group, GCL New Energy (00451.HK) has not been having an easy time in recent years.

Losses are the most direct manifestation. According to the company’s recent earnings announcement, its net loss for full-year 2025 was 1.148 billion yuan, expanding from the loss in the previous year. An insider at GCL New Energy told 21st Century Business Herald that behind the company’s losses, on the surface, the result is the combined effect of factors such as power plant compliance issues and industry price wars. “But at a deeper level, this loss is also the price the company pays in order to advance its ‘light-asset transformation + digital intelligence upgrade.’”

GCL New Energy, which once was the world’s second-largest photovoltaic power plant company, has, in recent years, firmly pursued a light-asset transformation route. The most direct sign is its “massive divestment” of photovoltaic power plant assets—at its peak in 2018, GCL New Energy owned more than 7GW of photovoltaic power plants; by the end of 2025, the company has only 50MW left.

Looking back at GCL New Energy’s transformation path, it directly targets a deep restructuring of the photovoltaic industry’s value chain. Over the past decade, domestic photovoltaic companies relied on a strategy of “scale expansion + cost leadership” to seize the global market. However, as the industry entered a mature stage, the traditional model characterized by heavy assets and high investment became unsustainable, and refined, service-oriented competition has become the new core. After nearly two years of groundwork, GCL New Energy has indeed shifted from being an “investor” in power plants to an “operator.” By the end of 2025, the company’s operating technology companies have provided intelligent operation and maintenance services for nearly 20GW of photovoltaic power plants.

It is worth noting that, besides the shift in its core photovoltaic business, GCL New Energy has also pushed its natural gas business to the forefront. In 2025, the company’s natural gas business began to see some gains. According to the financial report, during the reporting period, its sales revenue generated through the operation of LNG (liquefied natural gas) and related products was 673 million yuan, and it signed trading contracts worth 2.95 billion yuan per month.

So why did GCL New Energy’s losses in 2025 expand? 21st Century Business Herald reporter noticed that the reason lies in the company’s full-year compensation provision total for 2025 increasing significantly to about 900 million yuan.

The company said that this part of the provisions mainly stems from two aspects of historical legacy issues—first, the policy for land use tax and land occupation tax related to photovoltaic power plants is unclear, triggering an increase of about 278 million yuan in tax compensation provisions; second, for a photovoltaic power plant in Inner Mongolia that has already been sold, due to compliance issues, the company needs to compensate the buyer for the loss of electricity sales income of about 326 million yuan. “This short-term pain is a process that transformation must go through, and it is also a necessary choice to proactively optimize the asset structure.” An insider at GCL New Energy told the reporter that, over the past year, it truly needed to “clear historical baggage.”

Currently, the digital economy has become the core driving force behind global economic growth, and computing power, as a key production factor of the digital economy, being deeply integrated with energy has become an inevitable trend. For GCL New Energy, if light-asset transformation is “subtraction,” then “digital intelligence upgrade” is the “multiplication” it is betting on. To this end, the company even has to “change its face.”

On the evening of March 30, GCL New Energy announced that it plans to rename itself as “Times Digital Holdings Limited.” The reason is: it will actively follow the development trend of integrating the digital economy with the new energy industry, and deeply integrate AI large-model and Web3.0 technologies.

In March 2026, GCL New Energy announced that it had signed a subscription and investment agreement with Pharos Network Technology. Through the issuance of 183 million shares, it obtained an investment of $24.74 million. Pharos is a Layer 1 public chain focused on building application scenarios for tokenized institutional-level assets. According to the agreement, GCL New Energy will not only have the right to obtain Pharos shares in the future, but also has the right to purchase any blockchain tokens created, issued, or managed by Pharos or its affiliates by exercising at the agreed exercise price. In other words, it is “tokenizing” the revenue rights of physical energy assets such as photovoltaic power plants, energy storage facilities, and charging piles through blockchain technology, giving them attributes of being divisible, tradable, and transferable.

“ The essence of tokenization is to make heavy assets that were originally dormant on the balance sheet gain liquidity.” An insider at GCL New Energy told 21st Century Business Herald, “When the revenue rights of a photovoltaic power plant are divided into countless tokens, it is no longer a fixed asset that can only be held for 20 years; it becomes a financial asset that can be traded at any time and quickly monetized.”

This is GCL New Energy’s a “reconstruction”: turning the revenue rights of energy assets into a string of code, and redefining the boundaries of traditional energy finance.

But it is also a transformation the company has no choice but to make. In the short term, GCL New Energy needs to bear the cost of revenue decline and profit pressure, and seizing the opportunities of the digital economy era may be its real life-saving straw.