Remember when Covid drug developers could do no wrong? The pandemic created instant superstars out of companies that managed to get treatments to market while the virus was still front-page news. But pandemics, as it turns out, don't last forever. When Covid faded, so did investor enthusiasm for these one-hit wonders, leaving former darlings scrambling to find their next act.

Enter Genuine Biotech Ltd., which rode China's first domestically developed oral Covid-19 antiviral drug, Azvudine, to brief stardom. Now the company is back for round three of its Hong Kong IPO attempt, and this time it's not just about growth capital—it's about survival.

The company filed its latest listing application on Nov. 9, marking its third swing at going public after previous attempts in August 2022 and February 2025 both expired without securing approval from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange within the six-month window. This time feels different, though, because the stakes have gotten considerably higher.

From Hero to Zero

Founded in 2012, Genuine Biotech focuses on developing drugs for viral infections, oncology, and cardio-cerebrovascular diseases. Its pipeline includes five drug candidates, with Azvudine leading the pack as the first approved oral Covid-19 treatment in China. The other four remain in preclinical stages—which is to say, years away from generating revenue.

Demand for Azvudine has fallen off a cliff, and the situation got worse when the company's commercialization partnership with Fosun Pharma came to an end. That partnership, established in 2022, gave Fosun Pharma exclusive rights to sell Azvudine in China and provided the bulk of Genuine Biotech's revenue in 2023 and 2024.

When the two companies terminated their agreement in September 2024, Genuine Biotech got the rights back but lost its primary distribution channel. The company pivoted to a distributor-based sales model and signed up 74 distributors by June 30. The results? Not great. Those new distribution channels generated just 9 million yuan in the first half of 2025.

The revenue picture tells the whole story. The company pulled in 344 million yuan in 2023, which dropped to 238 million yuan in 2024. Then came the real collapse: first-half 2025 revenue plummeted 92% year-on-year to a mere 16.53 million yuan, mostly due to the loss of royalty income from the Fosun Pharma partnership.

A Drug on Borrowed Time

Azvudine's problems go beyond just declining demand. The drug received conditional approval from China's drug regulator in July 2022, but it's been dogged by questions about the short duration of its clinical study, lack of data transparency, and uncertain efficacy. Under the terms of that conditional approval, Genuine Biotech must complete confirmatory clinical trials before 2026 and provide sufficient evidence of efficacy and safety to obtain full approval. If it fails, the drug registration certificate gets revoked in 2027, and Azvudine disappears from the market entirely.

The company stated in its prospectus that it expects to complete the required clinical study report by the end of 2025. But even if Azvudine ultimately secures full approval, reversing the revenue decline looks like an uphill battle in a post-pandemic world where demand for Covid therapeutics has essentially evaporated.

Genuine Biotech is now working to develop combination therapies based on Azvudine, hoping to expand its use to treat major diseases like liver cancer, colorectal cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, and HIV. That's a reasonable pivot, but those programs are in early stages and will require significant capital to advance—capital the company doesn't exactly have lying around.

Cash Crunch and Mounting Losses

The financial situation at Genuine Biotech is genuinely concerning. The company recorded a net loss of 784 million yuan in 2023, which improved to 40 million yuan in 2024, before deteriorating again to 165 million yuan in the first half of 2025. That's nearly 1 billion yuan in losses over just two and a half years.

That cash burn has created a severe liquidity crisis. The company had just 50 million yuan in cash at the end of June 2025, down from 138 million yuan at the end of 2024. That's less than half gone in six months, which is not a trajectory you want to be on when you're trying to convince investors to back your IPO.

As financial pressure has mounted, Genuine Biotech has slashed R&D spending. Those expenses fell from 238 million yuan in 2023 to 151 million yuan in 2024, and were just 54 million yuan in the first half of 2025. While understandable given the cash constraints, cutting R&D spending is exactly what you don't want to do when your only revenue-generating product is in decline and you desperately need new drugs to replace it.

As of mid-2025, the company had net current liabilities of 984 million yuan, indicating substantial short-term debt repayment pressure. That's nearly a billion yuan in obligations coming due soon, with only 50 million yuan in the bank.

The VAM Deadline Looms

Among all these challenges, perhaps the most pressing is the ticking clock on Genuine Biotech's value-adjustment mechanism agreement. The company raised 713 million yuan across two financing rounds in 2021 and 2022, both of which included redemption rights for investors. Here's how it works: if the listing application is rejected or if the company fails to complete its IPO within 47 months from its first filing, investors can redeem their preferred shares at an annual interest rate of 10%.

Since Genuine Biotech first filed to list in August 2022, nearly 40 months have passed. That leaves roughly seven months to complete the listing before investors can demand their money back—with interest. Given that the company has only 50 million yuan in cash and nearly 1 billion yuan in net current liabilities, meeting those redemption obligations would likely be impossible without the IPO proceeds.

Genuine Biotech was valued at 3.56 billion yuan following its Series B financing in 2022, back when Azvudine still had promise and Covid was still a major concern. But with revenue from its core product in free fall, its pipeline stuck in early clinical stages requiring substantial capital investment, and its financial condition deteriorating rapidly, sustaining anything close to that valuation seems optimistic at best.

Long Odds for Listing Success

The question now is whether investors will show up for a biotech company with falling revenue, ongoing losses, and rapidly deteriorating liquidity. The answer will likely determine whether Genuine Biotech can pull off this listing or face potentially crippling redemption obligations.

It's a cautionary tale about the risks of being a one-product company, especially when that product depends on a pandemic that turned out to be temporary. Genuine Biotech had its moment in the sun, but unless this third IPO attempt succeeds, the company may find itself running out of both cash and options.