Mixue Blooming and Bawang Tea Ji are losing momentum; new tea beverage brands are undergoing differentiation.

Ask AI · After the delivery subsidies fade, what does Mixue rely on to keep its growth momentum?

Produced by | Damo Finance

As the annual report season arrives, Mixue Group has become the first listed company in the fresh tea beverage industry to disclose its 2025 performance.

On March 24 at midday, Mixue Group (2097.HK) released its 2025 annual results announcement. In 2025, Mixue Group recorded operating revenue of RMB 33.56 billion, up 35.2% year over year; net profit attributable to shareholders was RMB 5.89 billion, up 32.7% year over year.

In 2025, Mixue Group’s store count continued to grow at a rapid pace. By year-end, the company had 59,800 stores under its umbrella, a net increase of 13,300 stores over the previous year, including 1,354 stores added through the acquisition of Fresh Beer Fulu Deer.

On the same day it released its 2025 performance, Mixue Group also officially announced major executive personnel changes. The announcement showed that the company’s founder, Zhang Hongfu, would take up the role of co-chairman of the board, stepping down as CEO. The new CEO of Mixue Group is Zhang Yuan, the company’s former deputy general manager and chief financial officer; Cui Haijing, the former chairman of the company’s board of supervisors, took over as the person in charge of finance.

Zhang Yuan, Mixue Group’s newly appointed CEO, is a “post-90s” executive who is 35 years old this year. Previously, he worked at well-known financial institutions such as BofA Securities and Hillhouse Investments. In 2023, Zhang Yuan joined Mixue Group and successively held positions such as chief financial officer and executive vice president.

Mixue Group stated that this adjustment is a forward-looking strategic upgrade for the next stage of its “multi-brand, globalization, and digital intelligence” development blueprint. It aims to optimize the corporate governance structure, improve management efficiency, and strengthen the construction of a leadership talent pipeline. In the future, Zhang Hongfu will continue to participate in major group decisions and play a leadership role in areas such as strategy, culture, public welfare, and innovation.

After the financial report was released, Mixue Group’s stock price rose as well. As of the close on March 24, Mixue Group’s share price was HK$341.80 per share, up 5.95%, and its total market capitalization reached RMB 129.8 billion.

With multiple internal and external factors at play, including the delivery battle and strategic decision-making, differentiation has already emerged among six domestic listed fresh tea beverage companies.

Mixue Group is a clear leader in both scale and market value, while Bawang Chaji (CHA.O)—once dubbed the “Eastern Starbucks”—has fallen into a growth slowdown. In the first half of 2025, Bawang Chaji was the only company among the six fresh tea beverage companies whose net profit declined year over year, leaving it slightly behind in the race.

Mixue moves upward, Bawang Chaji loses speed

Among domestic fresh tea beverage brands, Mixue Group occupies a unique ecosystem niche: “value pricing.” As Mixue Bingcheng stated in its annual report: the company focuses on offering consumers high-quality value-priced made-to-order fruit drinks, tea drinks, iced coffee, and freshly brewed fresh beer, with products priced at around RMB 6 per unit.

With its value-pricing advantage, Mixue Group has expanded rapidly in lower-tier markets. By the end of 2025, the company had 32,100 stores in third-tier cities and below, accounting for 58%. Meanwhile, stores in first-tier and new first-tier cities accounted for only 4.8% and 18.1%, respectively. In 2025, the company’s store count increased net by 13,300, further accelerating compared with 8,900 net additions in 2024.

Rapid growth in store numbers has become the main driver behind Mixue Group’s performance improvement. At present, the dominant business model in China’s fresh tea beverage brands is franchise-based. Performance mainly comes from selling goods and equipment to franchisees, and Mixue Group is no exception. In 2025, Mixue Group’s sales revenue of goods and equipment grew 35.3% year over year to RMB 32.77 billion, accounting for 97.6% of total revenue.

It is worth noting that the 2025 delivery battle was an important external catalyst for Mixue Group’s performance growth.

As early as the performance meeting during last year’s interim report, Mixue Group said it has been closely monitoring the impact of the delivery battle. By jointly seizing this opportunity with franchisees, it directly drove an increase in domestic average store revenue for the group, and incremental orders also significantly improved store profitability.

From an industry perspective, it is not just Mixue Group that benefited from the delivery battle. Tea brands such as Hushang Ayi and Guming also achieved rapid growth during the delivery battle period. Performance results in the first half of 2025 show that Guming’s growth rate outpaced the overall level in 2024. Even Tea Bai Dao and Hushang Ayi—whose performance declined in 2024—returned to growth in the first half of 2025. Although Nayuki’s tea is still loss-making, the extent of losses has already narrowed.

However, Bawang Chaji—once dubbed the “Eastern Starbucks”—did not participate deeply in the delivery battle. Previously, Bawang Chaji’s global CFO, Huang Hongfei, said the company did not take part in short-term discount-oriented activities, which caused some customer traffic to be temporarily diverted and affected sales performance. As a result, in the first three quarters, the company’s revenue only grew 9.50% year over year, while net profit attributable to shareholders fell 37.60% year over year.

As the delivery battle fades, tea beverage brands that saw large year-on-year growth last year also need to find new development paths. At the latest performance meeting, Mixue Group also discussed its response measures after the delivery subsidies withdrew. The company said it will improve operational capabilities through upgrades to product strength, digital operations, brand promotion and related investment. The company said that subsidy cuts are a challenge in the short term, but they can expose weaknesses and are beneficial for healthy business development in the long run.

Strategic divergence

After years of development, the industry paradigm for fresh tea beverages has basically taken shape. At present, the core of competition among fresh tea beverage brands lies in the scale effects brought by supply chains and standardization; fundamentally, the business is about leveraging the flywheel effect created by the supply chain.

“Value pricing” has always been Mixue Group’s foundation, backed by its supply chain capabilities. Mixue Group is currently the largest lemon purchaser in China; its procurement costs are more than 20% lower than the industry average. In addition, the company also has strong scale effects, which provide advantages in procurement costs for other product categories as well, and even show up in large-ticket commodities where prices are relatively transparent.

Thanks to deep investment in its supply chain, Mixue Bingcheng has been able to roll out new products frequently. According to the financial report, throughout 2025 the company gradually launched a series of ice creams featuring sweet potatoes and also multiple new items such as blueberry, green grape, and apple-flavored beverages.

Compared with Mixue Group, Bawang Chaji, due to its relatively single product range, also emphasizes an “ultra-minimal” supply chain. In 2021, Bawang Chaji shifted from a multi-category strategy to a “single big product” strategy: the company’s founder, Zhang Junjie, cut most of the fruit teas from the menu and only kept light dairy tea. This change enabled the company to develop quickly.

But after a brief surge, Bawang Chaji’s “single big product” strategy began to face challenges. On the one hand, competitors including Luckin Coffee entered the light dairy tea segment. On the other hand, as consumers’ freshness for single big products like “Bo Ya Jue Xian” waned, the company failed to launch differentiated new products in time to “hand off” the momentum. According to data from 窄门餐眼, from January to November 2025, Bawang Chaji launched only 10 new products, of which 5 were light-factor versions of existing products.

Added to its insufficient participation in the delivery battle, Bawang Chaji saw a steep decline in 2025 performance, and its GMV per store also continued to fall. From the fourth quarter of 2024 to the third quarter of 2025, Bawang Chaji’s GMV per store declined for four consecutive quarters, and in the third quarter of 2025 its year-over-year decline reached 27.8%.

With such differences in performance, investors have been voting with their feet. As of March 24, Bawang Chaji’s stock price closed at $10.16 per ADS, down by more than 60% from the issue price. By comparison, although Mixue Group’s stock price fell 16.59% during the year, it still had a 68.79% increase versus the issue price.

Guming, which also went public last year, became the “stock-price dark horse” in the fresh tea beverage industry. As of March 24, the company’s share price closed at HK$28.52 per share, with a total market capitalization of HK$67.8 billion. Guming is the only fresh tea beverage brand whose stock price increased in 2026; currently, its share price is up by nearly 2 times versus the issue price.