(Yicai Global) July 30 -- Shares in Suning.com jumped as much as 6 percent today after the ailing Chinese retailing giant announced that it had appointed the former chairman of hypermarket operator Sun Art Retail Group, and the force behind the success of the RT Mart chain, as its new chairman.

Suning.com’s share price [SHE:002024] was trading up 1.38 percent at CNY5.89 (USD0.91) at 2 p.m. China time today. Earlier in the day it had reached CNY6.15. Yesterday the firm’s stock soared by the exchange-imposed limit of 10 percent.

Peter Huang replaces founder Zhang Jindong after Zhang stepped down as chairman earlier this month when local government entities bought a 17 percent stake to bail out the retailer, which has racked up debts of CNY124.6 billion (USD19.3 billion), paving the way for a major management reshuffle.

Taiwan-born Huang has extensive experience in the retail business. As Sun Art chairman, he was behind the establishment of the first RT-Mart in Taiwan in 1997 and its successful introduction onto the mainland. Huang was quick to find a solution when online sales began to challenge the bricks-and-mortar retail model. He brought in Alibaba as a strategic investor in 2017 to lead the digitization of its stores. Huang left Hong Kong-based Sun Art last December.

Nanjing-based Suning is likely to collaborate more with Alibaba now that Huang is at the helm, a market insider said.

As part of the reshuffle, Vice President Ren Jun was promoted to president and Liu Peng joined Suning from e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding as director.

Suning has been loss making for seven consecutive years largely due to overaggressive expansion – the firm bought an 80 percent stake in hypermarket chain Carrefour China in September 2019 – and the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic which greatly reduced footfall to its brick-and-mortar outlets. The company is expecting losses to widen by as much as 19 times in the first half from the same period last year to CNY3.2 billion (USD495 million), according to its latest earnings forecast.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor