After several brands completed their IPO listings early this year, the "tea beverage wars" entered a new chapter. Among the six listed fresh tea beverage companies, four completed their public offerings this year, with the industry showing clear tier differentiation.
Mixue and Guming both achieved nearly 40% year-over-year revenue growth in the first half, maintaining net profit margins around 20%, continuing to lead the industry's first tier. CHABAIDAO and Auntie Shanghai occupy the middle tier, with adjusted net profit margins of 13.6% and 13.4% respectively.
NAYUKI, currently the only player primarily operating under a direct-store model, remains in losses despite store contraction, but its losses narrowed by over 70% year-over-year, showing signs of stabilization. Chagee Holdings Limited, listed on US markets, leads with a 19.4% net profit margin, ahead of Mixue and Guming in profitability efficiency. However, due to limited participation in the current delivery subsidy wars and high base effects from last year, Q2 same-store GMV declined over 20% year-over-year, with profits dropping 30%, appearing to lag in this subsidy-driven growth wave.
To some extent, this round of delivery subsidy battles is not only reshaping brand competition rhythms but also serving as a unique lens for observing the tea beverage industry's direction.
As the peak period of intensive store openings and IPO rushes concludes, the fresh tea beverage industry's leading effects become increasingly prominent. Differences in strategic positioning and operational models among brands are becoming clearer. Capital market focus on profit certainty and quality is forcing companies to more rationally control expansion pace, prudently invest in subsidies, and steadily advance product innovation.
The industry seems to be deeply recognizing that short-term traffic benefits from subsidies are unsustainable, especially after marketing events like "autumn's first milk tea" end, and the traditional peak consumption season for tea beverages gradually approaches its conclusion. When the clamor of delivery subsidies gradually subsides, the tea beverage industry may welcome its true "autumn" amid cooling and rationality.
**Who Benefited from Subsidies**
Summer has traditionally been the peak sales season for the tea beverage industry and the most intensely price-competitive period. Unlike previous years, the entire industry welcomed "flood-like" delivery platform subsidies in Q2 this year. External forces' intervention significantly lowered consumer barriers and stimulated industry demand.
This directly manifested in increased average store revenue driven by cup volume growth. In the first half, Guming's average daily cups sold per store increased from 374 to 439, growing 17.4% year-over-year, with daily average GMV per store rising 1,400 yuan to 7,600 yuan.
Under store contraction and performance pressure, NAYUKI's direct-store delivery order sales grew 7.5% against the trend, with average daily orders per store increasing 11.4% year-over-year, and daily average GMV rising 300 yuan to 7,600 yuan.
Since the industry generally uses "product face value + delivery fee original price" metrics to calculate GMV, Q2's increased delivery sales proportion inflated GMV indicators to some extent.
For brands already on the edge of growth stagnation, delivery subsidies injected new momentum. In Q2, CHABAIDAO's daily average GMV per store reached its highest quarterly level in nearly a year, improving approximately 15% quarter-over-quarter; overall revenue growth shifted from -13.8% in 2024 to 4.3% positive growth. Auntie Shanghai, which had flat performance last year, also achieved nearly 10% growth in the first half.
However, traffic benefits from delivery subsidies were unevenly distributed among brands. From a pricing perspective, low-price brands saw consumption barriers further reduced with subsidies, benefiting significantly. Meanwhile, massive order volumes demand extremely high capacity and supply chain responsiveness, which currently only leading companies can handle. Therefore, platforms concentrate more subsidy resources toward leading brands for service stability during peak periods.
Among leading brands, Chagee Holdings Limited, with higher unit prices and "non-participation in short-term discount activities," saw significant customer diversion. In Q2, Chagee's active members dropped substantially, declining 14% quarter-over-quarter to 38.6 million. Previously, Chagee maintained over 42 million active members for four consecutive quarters. Monthly average GMV per store was 404,400 yuan, declining 24.8% year-over-year. This marks six consecutive quarters of same-store GMV decline.
July saw the peak of industry delivery subsidies, with massive "zero-yuan beverage vouchers" releases pushing the industry into a true order explosion in Q3. Markets widely worry whether the industry can maintain same-store growth next year under high base pressure. How to effectively convert short-term subsidy traffic into sustained repurchases and customer loyalty has become a key challenge affecting brand operational stability in the next phase.
**Franchise Partner Pressure**
In the process of platform flood-like subsidies flowing through tea beverage brands to consumers, stores directly bearing order explosion pressure earn the smallest profits. This is because paying commissions and delivery fees to platforms means increased delivery sales proportions often translate to decreased actual collection rates for franchise partners.
As Guming CFO Meng Hailing noted, in delivery wars, most franchise partners see declining profit margins, masked only by operational leverage from increased order volumes.
This phenomenon is evident in NAYUKI, which primarily operates direct stores. In the first half, NAYUKI's delivery order revenue proportion rose from 40.6% last year to 48.1%. Fees paid to third-party delivery service providers increased 18% year-over-year to 200 million yuan, with revenue proportion rising from 6.7% to 9.2%.
While total order volumes grew, third-party delivery platforms' siphoning effect on private domain orders was also obvious. In the first half, third-party platform orders contributed 44.2% to NAYUKI's direct-store delivery revenue structure, up 8 percentage points from 2024. Meanwhile, self-platform delivery order revenue proportion slid from 5.2% to 3.9%.
Delivery subsidies aim to reshape consumer habits. After subsidy withdrawal, changes in front-end franchise store profit margins will become a new variable. The franchise model adopted by the fresh tea beverage industry essentially transfers some operational risks forward to franchise partners. This means once brand popularity declines, impacts first manifest as front-end store growth weakness.
In some sense, channel-end sales performance, store closures, and franchise partner turnover data often reflect brand operational conditions earlier and more truthfully than financial statements.
Many brands' franchise partner attrition rates continue exceeding store closure rates. This may indicate some veteran franchise partners are exiting after capturing early dividends, while new partners fill the gaps.
CHABAIDAO closed 418 franchise stores in the first half, with a 5% closure rate and 8.8% franchise partner attrition rate. Auntie Shanghai's situation is more pronounced: closing 645 stores in the first half with a 7% closure rate, losing 531 franchise partners representing 9.7% of initial totals, further rising from 9% full-year 2024 attrition.
These performances may already reflect results supported by delivery subsidies. Large-scale subsidies' order increases actually provided buffers for some operationally weak stores, somewhat delaying market tail-end brand clearing processes.
As subsidies recede and same-store growth faces renewed pressure, the industry will re-enter integration and clearing trajectories. Long-term, if franchise stores continue exiting due to profitability difficulties and inadequate investment returns, this will weaken brands' channel expansion capabilities, regional penetration depth, and market competitiveness. Brand investments to maintain front-end franchise store business will further drag overall profitability efficiency.
**Different Directions**
The fresh tea beverage industry's investment value remains tied to sustainable revenue and profit growth. Current over-dense stores trigger intensifying homogeneous competition, combined with platform-led price wars' continued spread, putting same-store revenue growth under universal pressure. Whether brands can maintain steady store expansion pace still largely determines growth momentum and valuation expectations.
Coffee business, lower-tier markets, and overseas expansion have become the industry's main growth themes. But based on market positioning and core capability differences, different brands' core growth directions vary.
Since early this year, both Mixue Ice City and Guming stock prices achieved double gains. Both brands' commonality lies in validating profitability models and operational capabilities in lower-tier markets through large-scale practice, achieving stable store growth.
As the only two fresh tea beverage brands exceeding 10,000 stores, Mixue Ice City and Guming maintained double-digit store growth rates of 16.1% and 12.8% respectively in the first half.
Among Mixue Ice City's over 48,000 stores in mainland China, nearly 28,000 are located in third-tier and lower cities, accounting for 57.6%, while first-tier city stores represent only 4.9%. About 52% of Guming's stores are in third-tier and lower cities, with first-tier cities accounting for only 3%.
Both brands have different future expansion plans. Guming adopts a key-scale province entry strategy, still not entering core cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Nanjing, considered to have developed only "half of China," with penetration rate improvement space remaining in multiple provincial markets.
With over 40,000 stores, Mixue Ice City has tightened main brand approvals, replacing this with Lucky Coffee and overseas expansion. Lucky Coffee, a coffee brand cultivated within Mixue's system for nearly five years, announced large subsidy policies for new and existing franchise partners this summer, launching attacks on first-tier cities.
As of July, Lucky Coffee's contracted store total exceeded 7,000, achieving leap-forward growth from 4,000 at year-start. Lucky Coffee China Regional CEO Pan Guofei emphasized that Lucky Coffee focuses on professional freshly ground coffee while Mixue Coffee emphasizes simplified operations - they're complementary. With procurement cost advantages from Mixue's system of over 50,000 stores, Lucky Coffee is considered capable of competing with Luckin and Cotti in the affordable coffee sector.
In contrast, Chagee Holdings Limited, with higher upfront investment thresholds and unit prices, focuses expansion on overseas markets seeking new growth paths. Chagee has opened 208 stores across five major markets including Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and the United States, adding 52 stores in the first half.
In Q2, Chagee's overseas market GMV reached 235.2 million yuan, growing 77.4% year-over-year and 31.8% quarter-over-quarter.
CHABAIDAO and Auntie Shanghai, both approaching 10,000 stores, still emphasize domestic market penetration improvement. The difference is that CHABAIDAO, which saw both revenue and profit declines last year, emphasized "strengthening cost control and risk management." Meanwhile, Auntie Shanghai prepares to "further strengthen cooperation with third-party online platforms" to explore more digital operation methods and optimize product supply and marketing strategies.
Among the six listed fresh tea beverage companies, only NAYUKI explicitly expressed contraction attitudes: continuing to optimize existing stores, constantly improving store models for new formats like "NAYUKI green" launched in the first half, "improving single-store revenue through diversified product matrices and precise brand marketing strategies."
Short-term benefits from delivery subsidies will eventually dissipate. Under growth deceleration and intensified competition, new rounds of elimination battles will be inevitable. As major tests approach, only brands finding unique survival paths can weather the cycles.