BingEx Ltd, the Chinese on-demand courier network branded FlashEx, delivered its third straight quarter of falling revenue, and management now wants investors to believe the drone story outweighs the decline. The second quarter top line came in roughly 8% below the prior-year figure, the latest in a run of soft prints that began the year. The company is shrinking even as it pushes into low-altitude logistics, so the market is being asked to pay up for a growth story that has not yet touched the income statement.
The share price says the market already knows something the drone narrative does not. The ADS closed at $1.96, near the bottom of its fifty-two week range, and that price implies a valuation of roughly $143 million. That level is doing a lot of work: it prices in years of further order decline while crediting management only a sliver of value for a drone network that has logged about 2,900 flights. The company holds RMB853.4 million of cash and short-term investments, roughly three times the equity value the market ascribes to the whole business.
The case for owning FLX is the balance sheet, not the quarter. Management cut selling and marketing spend by 24% in the same period. It also bought back 3.9 million ADSs for about $11.8 million. The case against it is simple: competition from batched, app-based delivery networks keeps eroding order volume and average price, and the drone operation is measured in thousands of orders, not millions. The quarter that matters is not this one; it is the one where low-altitude routes stop being a press release and start being a revenue line for the company.