1998, Danyang City, Jiangsu Province. A young man named Wu Guangming stood on his fishing boat and looked into the distance, and he had a bold idea in his heart - to start his own business and establish a medical device company.
At first, Wu Guangming only made a living by selling several veterinary syringes. But he has a big blueprint in mind: to make his company have a place in the national medical device industry.
To this end, he worked day and night, running around to visit, and finally slowly opened up the situation, and the company gradually expanded.
Time flies, and in the blink of an eye, it is 2008. After a series of complex gray transactions, Wu Guangming finally got his wish, and Yuyue Medical, which he had worked so hard to establish, successfully landed on the stock exchange, realizing a gorgeous transformation from a small micro enterprise to a listed company.
After going public, Wu Guangming immediately adopted a merger and acquisition strategy of eating small fish with big fish. He attacked from all sides, acquired competitors at high prices, and rapidly expanded Yuyue Medical's business territory.
By 2010, Yuyue Medical had grown into a leader in the household medical device industry. What was once a small fisherman is now a giant in the capital market.
While expanding rapidly, the quality and safety of Yuyue Medical's products are becoming more and more concerning. One of the reasons is that Wu Guangming spent a lot of money on acquisitions after the merger, and rarely invested in product research and development and quality control.
Driven by interests, some links are skipped intentionally or unintentionally, and hidden dangers are buried.
In 2014, the Jiangxi Provincial Food and Drug Administration failed to pass the spot check on a thermometer product of Yuyue Medical. This is just the prelude, and the regulatory authorities have issued "red cards" one after another.
The following year, a number of provincial and municipal drug regulatory departments jointly carried out special rectification of Yuyue Medical, and found that many products such as nebulizers and oximeters had design defects and misleading publicity.
While being forced to rectify and pay fines, the negative news of Yuyue Medical continues to ferment. In 2017 and 2018, it was notified many times due to product problems, and the social evaluation fell to the bottom.
For Wu Guangming, the credibility that Yuyue Medical has accumulated so hard is losing at a rate he can't imagine.
In 2020, the pandemic broke out across the country. For Yuyue Medical, this is a crisis and a turning point. It seized the opportunity of epidemic prevention products and rapidly expanded the production and sales of anti-epidemic related products.
For a time, oximeters, electronic thermometers, etc. were selling well and became a lifesaver.
Within a few months, the sales of Yuyue Medical's epidemic prevention products achieved a booming growth that had not been seen in several years. In the first half of 2021, its oximeters and other products perfectly completed three times the sales target of the past five years.
However, the good times were short-lived. After the epidemic entered a relatively flat period in 2022, the growth of Yuyue Medical slowed down immediately. The performance in the third quarter plummeted, which made Wu Guangming feel pressure.
Just after the prevention and control policy was further relaxed in early December, Wu Guangming saw that the profits were about to fail, and in anger and shame, he desperately squeezed consumers and frantically increased the price of many products.
Yuyue Medical's crazy price increase soon caused an uproar in society. Public opinion was in an uproar, and a large number of netizens collectively boycotted, condemning its shameless behavior of "making it difficult to get rich" and "taking advantage of the fire to rob".
"Are you killing people intentionally?" Many users were emotional and denounced Yuyue Medical's bloody acts. There are also more consumers who have complained that Yuyue Medical has broken contracts and forced refunds during the epidemic, which is simply treacherous.
In the face of doubts from all sides, Yuyue Medical's public relations staff were helpless. At first, they also tried to blame the "temporary worker for making mistakes", but this ridiculous joke was regarded as a perfect example of their "self-deception".
Subsequently, Yuyue Medical chose to remain silent. Under the irresistible pressure of public opinion, the social evaluation of Yuyue Medical fell to the freezing point. On major review websites, the praise of the past is gone, and countless negative reviews are flooded in them.
As a result of the collapse of trust, word-of-mouth hit the street and the image fell to the bottom. Once upon a time, it was also bathed in the dazzling halo of "anti-epidemic heroes".
In this public relations crisis, Yuyue Medical has paid a heavy price. Its reputation and social influence, which it accumulated during the special period, disappeared without a trace in just one month.
At present, a number of government departments have intervened in the investigation, and Yuyue Medical is facing the test of many uncertainties. What is even more worrying is that the rapid growth it once achieved during the pandemic is inherently very fragile.
Once the prevention and control situation improves, this growth is bound to shrink. So, can Yuyue Medical re-establish social trust and restore its brand image?
The answer is hard. After all, the trauma it brings to consumers and society is deeply indelible. Repairing a broken chain of trust is no easy task.
No matter what the final result is, returning to the road to glory will be extremely difficult for Yuyue Medical.