Zhang Jindong’s $5.2 billion acquisition of Carrefour only sold for $2 million

When fate aligns, all forces act in concert; when fate turns, heroes are powerless.
Once the tycoon who ruled the business world, Zhang Jindong has now entered a “darkest hour.” Just as his personal assets were recently “cleared out,” Suning has also released an announcement: it will sell its Carrefour China business for a price of 2 million to a company registered in Hong Kong.
To be clear, when Zhang Jindong acquired Carrefour in 2019, he paid 5.2 billion—meaning Suning lost 4.998 billion. Add to that the operating losses from 2019 to 2025, and the total expected loss is nearly one hundred billion.
Zhang Jindong is an entrepreneur who refuses to sit still. When the internet wave rose, he actively sought change: he partnered with Alibaba, launched Suning’s e-commerce platform, and opened as many as 5,000 Suning small stores in one go. When the outside world questioned whether Suning’s losses from doing so were too great, Zhang Jindong responded boldly: “Putting money into Suning’s small stores isn’t 1 billion or 2 billion—it’s 10 billion or 20 billion!”
Buying sports teams, getting into esports, acquiring Carrefour, Dragon Ball streaming, Wanjia Department Stores, Redbaby, and daily express delivery...... Suning chased almost every bandwagon, but in the end, none of them made money. Now the massive enterprise has been fractured and sold off—some items sold, others lost.
Did Zhang Jindong get it wrong? Based on the context at the time, he recognized the coming crisis earlier than most traditional offline giants, and he also demonstrated shocking transformation drive. But Suning’s tragedy lies precisely in trying to use the chain-supremacy thinking of one era to forcefully attack the fortress of the internet’s second half.
A group of retail backbones used to making money from entry fees, differences in payment terms, and prime offline locations can hardly rebuild their minds overnight to truly understand the internet logic of high-frequency traffic and refined user operations.
This kind of silent collapse is, in truth, more despairing than simply “going off course.”
Sometimes, an enterprise—or a person—from the peak to being mercilessly discarded by the times isn’t because they made some great mistake, nor because they didn’t work hard or didn’t innovate. It’s just that they’re too old.
If you’re old, you should step down and let the young take over. Don’t have the mindset of parents—thinking young people are frivolous and impatient and can’t get things done. In today’s hottest AI industry, most of the backbone are post-90s and post-00s.
To remove “taste for status,” trust young people—only then can an enterprise and a society stay full of vitality and keep moving forward.$BNB
#gStocksTokenizedStocksLive