China’s biggest online health care platform fires back at short-seller report that labelled the firm ‘Ponzi scheme’
- Ping An Healthcare and Technology tumbled 1.3 per cent in Hong Kong on Thursday, adding to a 5.2 per cent decline on the prior trading day
- The company’s management hosted a conference call with institutional investors on Thursday afternoon; in an exchange filing they called the short-seller report ‘malicious defamation’
China’s biggest online health care platform saw its share price drop for a second successive trading day in Hong Kong on Thursday, after a short-seller report of unknown origin challenged the real value of the company, calling it a “Ponzi scheme”.
Ping An Healthcare and Technology, or better known as Ping An Good Doctor (PAGD), suffered a 1.3 per cent drop on Thursday, ending the session at HK$37.90. The company’s shares fell 5.2 per cent on Tuesday, ahead of a public holiday on Wednesday in Hong Kong.
The report entitled “Ping An Good Doctor: Is it a Ponzi Scheme driven by Counterfeit Data???” raised concerns such as the number of real doctors among the company’s in-house medical staff, whether its registered user data was inflated, and confusion regarding online and offline sales.
Specifically, the report cited interviews with former employees and data collected by web crawler tools to make the case that PAGD inflated gross merchandise volume (GMV) and revenue.
It also attacked the quality of the company’s AI diagnostic technology, saying “we believe it is a chatbot with hardcoded answers”.