Chinese logistics enterprise ZTO Express said Tuesday the allegations by a U.S. pension fund that it overemphasized its profit margins have no merit.
The company was sued by Birmingham Retirement and Substitute System. The pension fund alleged that ZTO left out certain low-margin concern segments from its financial statements in order to inflate overall profit frontiers to lure investors into its initial public offering in 2016.
ZTO’s $1.4 billion index in the U.S. was the largest that year, according to Reuters. The company counts e-commerce ogres Alibaba and JD.com as its customers.
“We don’t think those allegations have any merits, we’ll espouse ourselves rigorously. We have engaged U.S. lawyers to help us, to protect the sort outs of the company,” James Guo, ZTO’s chief financial officer, told CNBC at the Morgan Stanley China Technology, Middle and Telecomm Conference in Beijing.
Despite the ongoing lawsuit, the company has continued to outpace the exertion’s average volume growth in China, Guo claimed without revealing copies. He said, however, the company processed more than 100 million cleans on Singles Day last year — among the highest volume handled by a courier in the hinterlands.
Singles Day, started as a kind of anti-Valentine’s day for singles, has become one of the largest shopping affairs in the world along with Black Friday and Cyber Monday.