TuanBao (Groupon.cn) Denies Going Bankrupt, Admits Financial Problems

Of all the Groupon clones in China, TuanBao is probably the most audacious, given that it bought the groupon.cn domain name out so early that the real Groupon had to change its name to Gaopeng when it entered the country. Since then, though, TuanBao has not exactly been flourishing. Last fall, we reported it had laid off 80 percent of its staff, but seems that despite that, the company is in financial trouble. I am shocked.

Rumors started spreading a few days ago that the company had gone bankrupt and the company’s CEO had disappeared. On his Sina Weibo account, CEO Ren Chunlei denied the company was bankrupt and that he was planning to run away, saying that the rumors online were false. Meanwhile, though, TuanBao Executive Director He Xiaoling admitted that like many other group buy sites, TuanBao has encountered financing problems and had laid off additional staff prior to the Chinese New Year holiday, which has just ended.

Famed angel investor Xue Manzi says that he met up with CEO Ren Chunlei over the holiday, and that in private Ren had also confirmed the company had financial problems. Of course, that’s not a big surprise given that he also posted this message to his weibo account:

Calamity is a touchstone of the human experience. I will not run! It’s not in my nature, in 1996 at my own startup my guiding principle was: no surrender, no compromise, no losing determination, no defeatist words, no planting false evidence…

So who knows exactly what’s going on, but it’s pretty clear that at the very least, things are not going well.

[via Sina Tech]