Sold women's clothing for over 20 years, this company suddenly switched to lithium batteries

Listing | Read Business Era

Editor | Li Xiaoyan

On March 11, 2026, a corporate change announcement marked a turning point for Ribo Fashion, a company specializing in high-end women’s clothing for over 20 years. The company announced it would change its name to “Shanghai Puyuan Chemical Materials Group Co., Ltd.” and its stock abbreviation to “Puyuan Materials.” At the same time, the company unveiled a plan to expand lithium battery binder production with an investment of 311 million yuan.

Once a clothing company known for the “broadcast” brand in the urban female market, it now chooses to fully shift into the new energy materials sector. What hidden challenges lie behind this decision?

Public information shows that Ribo Fashion was established in 2002, focusing on the mid-to-high-end women’s clothing market. The “broadcast” brand once gained a stable customer base in China’s mid-to-high-end women’s apparel through its design style and brand tone. However, in recent years, competition in the domestic apparel industry has intensified, coupled with weakening consumer demand, rising raw material and labor costs, leading traditional brands to face growth bottlenecks. Ribo Fashion has not been an exception; its main business growth has stagnated, profitability has declined, and it eventually shifted from profit to loss.

In the context of the traditional clothing sector struggling to regain growth, seeking new growth avenues has become a practical choice for the company. The new controlling shareholder’s layout in the new energy industry chain provides a direction for transformation.

Looking back to May 2023, the family of the original controlling shareholder, Wang Weidong, sold 29.75% of the company’s shares to Liang Feng for about 770 million yuan, making him the new controlling shareholder.

Liang Feng’s background is quite characteristic of the capital market: he was an early star public fund manager, then founded Putailai, a lithium battery material company, and through multiple rounds of industry and capital operations, built it into a leading enterprise in China’s lithium battery anode materials sector. In 2025, Putailai achieved revenue of 15.711 billion yuan, a 16.83% increase year-over-year; net profit attributable to shareholders was 2.359 billion yuan, nearly doubling from the previous year, demonstrating strong industry competitiveness and resilience to industry cycles.

At the April 2025 Ribo Fashion earnings presentation, Liang Feng explicitly stated that he would leverage his experience and resources in the new energy industry chain to support Yindile in product development, customer expansion, and strategic guidance, creating synergy across the industry chain. He mentioned that after the transaction, the company would form a “dual core” pattern of “clothing + lithium battery binder,” with the clothing business being mature and stable, operating independently; simultaneously, Yindile would be fully integrated and managed, with efforts to optimize its management, technical talent, and compensation incentives to effectively merge with the listed company and enhance its sustainable operation.

In response to inquiries from the Shanghai Stock Exchange in November 2025, Liang Feng further clarified his core purpose for gaining control: optimizing the shareholder structure, promoting the company’s transformation into a strategic emerging industry, entering the lithium battery binder sector, building a dual-core platform, and creating a new materials platform to escape the growth stagnation and profit volatility of the original clothing business.

With Liang Feng’s takeover, Ribo Fashion has gradually revealed a clear “capital operation” path. Initially, the company planned to acquire Jinyuan Sheng, a subsidiary of Liang Feng, but the deal was ultimately terminated due to issues involving overseas mineral resources and complex due diligence.

However, this did not alter Liang Feng’s direction of pushing the listed company into the new energy sector. By the end of 2025, Ribo Fashion received approval from the CSRC for its 1.42 billion yuan acquisition of a 71% stake in Yindile, a Sichuan-based company, officially entering the lithium battery materials field.

Yindile is a leading domestic enterprise in PAA-type lithium battery binders, with nearly half of the market share in 2024, holding a significant advantage in the power battery binder segment. Meanwhile, Putailai itself is also a major shareholder of Yindile.

In other words, Liang Feng is gradually injecting high-quality assets from his lithium industry portfolio into Ribo Fashion through capital operations.

From a profitability perspective, Yindile’s performance sharply contrasts with Ribo Fashion’s original clothing business. In 2023 and 2024, Yindile achieved net profits of 181 million yuan and 204 million yuan, respectively; in the first five months of 2025, net profit reached 130 million yuan, showing much higher profitability than the clothing segment. This has become a key support for Ribo Fashion’s transition into the new energy sector.

From equity changes to asset injections, to renaming and capacity expansion, Ribo Fashion’s transformation path is becoming clearer: transforming from a traditional clothing company into a new energy materials platform through acquisitions in lithium battery materials.

However, cross-industry transformation is never an easy path. Mergers and acquisitions, capacity expansion pressures, industry cycle fluctuations, and potential goodwill risks could all pose uncertainties in the future. Whether Ribo Fashion, once a leader in women’s apparel, can reinvent itself in the lithium battery materials field remains a focus for the market.