Shein reveals slowing profits and a quarterly loss ahead of Hong Kong IPO

Shein has finally shown investors the numbers. In a draft prospectus filed on July 26, the fast-fashion retailer disclosed annual revenue of $41.8 billion for 2025, up roughly 8% on the year before, alongside a net profit that fell 38.7% to $2.064 billion. Growth, of a sort, bought at a visibly thinner margin.

The document, cleared by China’s securities regulator on July 10, is the fullest look at the group’s accounts since it passed its Hong Kong listing hearing earlier this month.

It also lands while Shein is still pursuing Temu through London’s High Court over what it calls industrial-scale copyright theft, a reminder that the company is fighting on several fronts at once.

The trajectory is the story. Revenue climbed from $32.1 billion in 2023 to $38.7 billion in 2024 and then to $41.8 billion last year, a steady but decelerating line.

Profit moved the other way. Net income of $3.365 billion in 2024 shrank to $2.064 billion in 2025, and in the first quarter of 2026 the picture darkened further.

For those three months, Shein swung to a net loss of $99 million, against a $395 million profit in the same quarter a year earlier. Revenue barely moved, edging up 1.1% to $9.05 billion from $8.95 billion.

The company said the quarterly loss included $328 million in fair-value losses on convertible redeemable preferred shares, an accounting charge rather than an operating one, though the direction of travel is hard to miss.

Shein was candid about the cause. The prospectus points to the removal of the US “de minimis” exemption in May 2025, which had let parcels worth under $800 enter the country duty-free.

Its withdrawal left China-origin goods sold by Shein or through its marketplace facing import tariffs of between 10% and 87.5%. The European Union scrapped its own €150 threshold on July 1, closing the other loophole that made ultra-cheap cross-border shipping work.

That is the mechanism behind the squeeze. A business built on posting individual low-value packages directly to shoppers is precisely the model these rule changes were written to catch.

What the filing does not say is almost as telling. Shein did not disclose the price of the offering, the number of shares on sale, the sum it hopes to raise, or a listing timetable. It gave no gross merchandise value figure and no target valuation.

Earlier reporting had pointed to a listing as soon as September or October, though the prospectus itself commits to nothing on that front. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan are named as joint sponsors, and Sky Yangtian Xu, the group’s reclusive founder, is listed as chairman and chief executive.

The valuation gap sits underneath all of it. Shein was worth around $100 billion in a 2022 funding round. People familiar with the Hong Kong deal have put the likely figure below $50 billion, roughly half that peak, with some shareholders said to be braced for less. The company has not confirmed any of those numbers.

Getting even this far took years. Shein filed confidentially in New York in 2023, then pivoted to London, where the listing stalled amid scrutiny of its supply chain and regulatory hesitancy on both sides.

Hong Kong is the third venue, and the first that Beijing was always likely to prefer, a market it controls for a company it was never going to let list somewhere it did not.

The company now joins a crowded Hong Kong pipeline. The exchange has hosted a run of large listings this year, from Apple supplier Luxshare to a queue of chip and AI names, and Shein would be among the most closely watched given its size and its politics.

For a company that has spent years keeping its accounts to itself, the prospectus is a rare moment of disclosure.

It shows a retailer still growing its top line while its profits thin and its costs climb, walking into a public market at a fraction of the value it once commanded. Whether investors read $41.8 billion in revenue or a $99 million quarterly loss as the headline will shape what happens next.