The Hong Kong stock market has finally begun to take the elderly care business seriously.
Author | Li Manyu
Source|Investor (ID: touzijias)
The Hong Kong stock market has finally begun to take the elderly care business seriously.
In China's elderly care industry, whether it is Taikang, Jiurucheng, or local leaders in various places, there has never been a truly national listed chain brand. Elderly care is probably one of the last pieces of land in China’s consumer market that has not been seriously measured by capital.
In 2026, someone will take over this "first".
Jinxin Healthcare Industry Group has officially submitted a prospectus to the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The joint sponsors are CICC and GF Securities (Hong Kong). If successful, it will become the first stock in the mainland to combine healthcare and healthcare.
Behind the listing of Jinxin Kangyang is Fan Yulan’s all-or-nothing cross-border gamble.
As the absolute helmsman of Jinxin Reproductive, the “first company in assisted reproduction”, when she established a foothold in the reproductive medical field and became famous, she chose to jump out of her comfort zone and cross-border into the fiercely competitive health care field.
In just over ten years, Jinxin Care has made a counterattack from a cross-industry newcomer to become the absolute leader in the medical and nursing care industry. Its core operating indicators are firmly ranked first in the country, with 38 senior care facilities and three core areas fully covered. It has overwhelming advantages over similar competing products and has become a benchmark that no one can match in the industry.
China's elderly care industry has never lacked demand or stories. But capital has always kept a distance from this business. The reason is simple: heavy assets, slow returns, thin profits, and high risks. Since the 2010s, countless institutions have entered the market one after another and quietly exited.
On the one hand, there is the aura of being "number one in the country", and on the other hand, there is the hidden concern of declining profits. Has this company really succeeded, or has it reached a new intersection?
The first story of elderly care begins with a female doctor.
Fan Yulan is the founder of Jinxin Group and the former director of Chengdu Jinjiang District Maternal and Child Health Hospital. She has a resounding nickname in Chengdu’s medical circle: “Guanyin Guanyin.”
Over the decades, she has helped countless families bring their children into this world. But as time passed, she began to realize that the parents of these children were aging at a rate visible to the naked eye.
Fan Yulan saw a scene that plays out repeatedly in Chinese families: parents are old, sick, and unable to take care of themselves, and their children are helpless.
Sent to a nursing home? After searching the surrounding area, either the environment was so bad that people felt uneasy, or if there was an emergency, there wasn't even a doctor in the hospital who could handle him, so he had to call 120 and take him to a tertiary hospital.
After all this trouble, the old people who finally settle down often fail to recover.
In 2012, Fan Yulan founded Jinxin Healthcare, introducing Jinxin Group’s medical genes into the elderly care field for the first time.
The foundation of Jinxin Group can be traced back to 1951. It was first a district-level maternal and child health care institution. Over the decades, it gradually became market-oriented and slowly developed three major business sectors: reproduction, medical care, and health care.
In 2019, Jinxin Fertility was listed on the Hong Kong stock market, becoming the first capitalized business card of the "Jinxin Group". Health care is the next step for this medical empire.
However, what really put Jinxin Kangyang on the fast track was the joining of another person.
In 2017, Zhong Yong joined Jinxin Health Care and began to fully lead the company's strategic direction. He made a judgment that sounded quite bold at the time: the opportunities in the elderly care industry lie precisely in the part that most people dare not touch.
At that time, China's elderly care market showed a strange imbalance: there were a lot of empty low-end beds, and there were very few institutions with real professional disability care capabilities.
It’s not that there is no demand in the market, but that no one is willing to seriously supply the “difficult to serve” end. Zhong Yong’s logic is: the harder it is, the higher the barriers; only by serving the most difficult people well can real brand trust be established.
He set a goal for Jinxin Health Care: to be a "medical and health care integrated version of Atour".
What is Yaduo? A standardized hotel chain with stores across the country. Its service is well-known. It is neither high-end nor cheap. It relies on a replicable system to win reputation. Zhong Yong wants to follow the same logic in the field of elderly care.
In 2022, Jinxin Health Care and Fuxing Medical Care completed the strategic reorganization, and Jinxin Fuxing Health Care Group was officially born, and its scale and territory suddenly expanded.
At the same time, the company began to systematically build its own medical network, not just a clinic next to a nursing home, but a layered system of geriatric hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, traditional Chinese medicine hospitals, and general hospitals behind it, which can really catch the sudden emergencies of the elderly.
This style of play has also received responses from the financing market. In 2016, Dafeng Investment received its first 60 million Series A round. From 2020 to 2021, two rounds of government industrial capital totaled 80 million yuan.
By 2023, Primavera Capital led the investment, Boao Capital followed the investment, and invested approximately 580 million yuan in one go. This is a signal that top market-oriented capital has officially placed its bet. On the eve of the IPO, OrbiMed, which focuses on the medical field, raised an additional US$40 million.
The pace is getting faster and faster, the money is getting bigger and bigger, pointing to the same end point.
As of September 2025, Jinxin Healthcare operates 38 nursing facilities across the country, manages 8,333 beds and employs more than 4,000 people.
From one person's judgment to a chain organization with more than ten years of accumulation, this road is not fast, but it is very solid.
China’s senior care market has never been short of players.
Taikang is a high-end senior care community, targeting retired middle- and high-income groups, and the occupancy threshold for a bed often starts at one million; Jiurucheng is deeply involved in the Yangtze River Delta and follows an asset-light operation route; there are also a large number of local institutions in various places, relying on government subsidies and local relationships to maintain operations.
This is a market with many competitors but few truly established national brands.
Jinxin Kangyang is taking a different path. It neither competes with Taikang for high-net-worth customers nor relies on policy subsidies to survive. Instead, it focuses specifically on the group of elderly people who are "the most difficult to serve and have the most rigid needs": those over 80 years old, those with limited mobility, and those with chronic diseases or cognitive impairment.
The monthly fee is usually between 4,500 and 5,500 yuan. It focuses on ordinary families with real care needs and is not intended to serve a few wealthy people.
This positioning gives the answer in numbers.
The overall occupancy rate is 84.8%, ranking first in the country in terms of occupancy rate of integrated medical and nursing care facilities; the industry average is only 50%. In institutions in the Sichuan and Chongqing regions, the average length of stay for the elderly exceeds 3 years.
Live in and don't want to leave.
Behind this are several sets of interlocking competition barriers.
The first barrier is the true integration of medical and nursing care.
The "integration of medical care and nursing care" of most institutions on the market remains at the level of "having a clinic and calling 120 in case of an accident." Jinxin's approach is to build a complete medical network behind the institution: geriatric hospital, psychiatric hospital, traditional Chinese medicine hospital, and general hospital, which provide hierarchical treatment and coordinate with each other. The traditional Chinese medicine clinic is also embedded in the community, providing two-way referrals and opening up care channels inside and outside the institution.
The real value of this system is not just "there is a place to send someone if something happens".
An elderly person with cognitive impairment may just be regarded as a "difficult to manage problem" in an ordinary institution; at Jinxin, psychiatrists are involved in formulating care plans, caregivers know how to deal with mood swings, and family members receive professional assessment reports on a regular basis. Medical intervention changes care from "care" to "treatment".
The second barrier is a replicable standardized system.
The most difficult part of chain elderly care is not to open the first one, but to ensure that the service level of the 100th one does not collapse.
Jinxin has an internal approach of "standardized framework + regional adaptation package": the core nursing process is unified and strictly implemented across the country; however, food, entertainment, language communication and other aspects are flexibly localized. The elderly in Shanghai and Chengdu receive the same set of care standards, eat the taste they are familiar with, and hear the dialects they are accustomed to.
This system gives Jinxin a replicable underlying logic for its expansion, instead of having to start from scratch every time it enters a new city.
The third barrier is the expansion space opened by the asset-light model.
The reason why the elderly care industry is important is that most institutions only build and buy their own facilities. Jinxin is taking four paths in parallel: independent development, acquisition, third-party operation of Jinxin, and external management service charging. The latter two are "light" roads. There is no need to bear the cost of infrastructure. The investment return period of a typical project can be compressed to 5 to 6 years, which is much faster than the industry average.
The shortened return cycle is the core reason why capital is really willing to come in.
These three barriers stacked together form Jinxin’s real moat in the industry. It’s not that one point is particularly strong, but that the medical capabilities, service system, and expansion model form a combination that is difficult to replicate at any one point.
Now, Jinxin Healthcare is doing something that has never been done before in China’s senior care industry: becoming the first stock in the mainland to integrate medical and nursing care.
Why now?
The answer may be seen in the pace of financing. Primavera Capital invested 580 million in 2023, and OrbiMed followed suit with an additional US$40 million. These funds are not charity and have exit expectations behind them.
IPO is the moment that top capital is waiting for. The market window, policy environment, and company size are all basically in place at this point. If they don’t conflict, the window will close at any time.
The money raised from the listing also has a clear destination, which is to continue expansion.
In the past two years, Jinxin has made three moves: the Sichuan-Chongqing base camp has stabilized 26 institutions and 5,022 beds, which is the basis for cash flow; from 2024 to 2025, it spent 286 million yuan to acquire Shanghai Guosong Group from Fosun Pharmaceuticals to force its way into the Yangtze River Delta; in the same period, it spent more than HK$100 million to buy a residential care home for the elderly in Hong Kong and enter the Greater Bay Area.
This set of geographical expansion has an inherent logic. Sichuan and Chongqing are the places for verification, and the Yangtze River Delta is the place for replication. Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou have deep aging populations, strong spending power, and high willingness to pay for professional care.
The Greater Bay Area is a longer-term layout. Hong Kong’s nursing home market is mature and its supervision is transparent. Once established, it will help open up the capital and reputation channels between the mainland and Hong Kong.
The map is clear, but the problems are real.
Looking at the prospectus, there are bright spots in the financial aspect, but there are also areas of concern. Revenue will increase from 489 million in 2023 to 605 million in 2024, an increase of 23.8%; net profit in 2024 will be 40.31 million, a year-on-year increase of 49%, and the growth momentum looks good.
But in the first three quarters of 2025, net profit dropped 31% year-on-year, leaving only 26.1 million yuan.
It’s time to pay back the debt of expansion.
At the same time, goodwill surged from almost zero at the end of 2023 to 222 million yuan at the end of the third quarter of 2025, all of which came from the debt left by the acquisition of Shanghai Guosong. The revenue of the Sichuan and Chongqing base camp also declined slightly, from 401 million to 393 million. This detail deserves attention: if the base camp is weak and the newly expanded area is still climbing, and both sides are under pressure, profits will continue to be squeezed.
Hong Kong stock investors will definitely ask about these figures.
The bigger challenge is the link between scale expansion and service quality. Elderly care is not like selling standard products. Every elderly person has different needs. The level of the nursing team directly determines the reputation.
From 38 institutions to a larger scale, how to maintain consistency in talent training, service standards, and cultural transmission will be the most difficult problem for Jinxin to solve next.
This is not a problem that capital can directly solve.
Behind the 320 million elderly people is the same problem that 320 million families are facing or will soon face.
Jinxin Kangyang has spent more than ten years doing something that others find thankless: specifically serving the elderly who are most difficult to serve, and turning the most difficult needs into the hardest barriers.
This is not a story about the wind, but a story about patience.
As for whether those people in their 80s and lying in bed can get better care after it goes on the market, this is the real answer to this matter.
Capital can withdraw, but someone still has to make the bed.
