In early March 2026, XIABUXIABU Catering Management (China) Holdings Co., Ltd., the "first listed hot pot chain" on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, released its annual performance forecast for 2025. Against a complex consumer backdrop, this report card illustrates the typical trajectory of an established catering company seeking transformation amidst growing pains.
Data shows that XIABUXIABU is expected to achieve revenue of approximately 3.8 billion yuan in 2025, a decrease of about 20% year-on-year. The net loss is forecast to be between 290 million and 310 million yuan, narrowing the loss by 22.2% to 27.2% compared to the 398 million yuan loss in 2024. This combination of declining revenue and narrowing losses reveals both an abrupt halt to the company's scale expansion and the initial success of its internal cost-cutting reforms. As the catering industry enters a phase of intensive, refined operations, XIABUXIABU is attempting to regain its growth momentum through structural optimization, multi-brand exploration, and supply chain deepening.
**Decoding the Financials: The Logic of Proactive Contraction and Loss Reduction** For XIABUXIABU, 2025 was a year of strategic "subtraction." The 20% year-on-year revenue drop to 3.8 billion yuan might seem concerning at first glance, but a detailed analysis of the announcement indicates this was a deliberate strategic adjustment.
The core driver was "store closures for cost reduction." Faced with changing consumer demand and declining profitability at some locations, XIABUXIABU took decisive action in 2025—focusing on regional operations and systematically closing underperforming and loss-making restaurants. This drastic pruning of the store network, while directly leading to an overall shrinkage in revenue scale, significantly lightened the company's financial burden. The announcement explicitly stated that, due to the closure of loss-making stores, the impairment loss provision for closed and persistently loss-making restaurants in 2025 is expected to decrease by approximately 51.4% compared to the same period in 2024. This is the most direct reason for the narrowing losses, signifying that the "bleeding points" from the rapid expansion in previous years are being effectively contained.
Furthermore, meticulous cost management played a key role. In 2025, the group comprehensively promoted the digital reform of its supply chain, achieving online management of purchase orders, omnichannel inventory, and restaurant replenishment. By leveraging a centralized supply chain platform to coordinate national resources, this "centralized control + regionalized operation" model not only improved logistics efficiency but also unlocked profit margins through direct sourcing and optimized inventory turnover. Against the backdrop of industry-wide pressure from fluctuating raw material prices, this internal focus on efficiency provided the group with a valuable buffer.
From a financial perspective, XIABUXIABU in 2025 is in the bottoming-out phase of an "L-shaped" recovery. Although revenue has not yet rebounded, the significant narrowing of losses indicates the company has halted the deteriorating trend and is clearing risks from its balance sheet. For investors, an improvement in profitability is often a more positive signal than blind revenue expansion. This also validates Chairman He Guangqi's statement: "The group's long-term profitability goal is clearly visible."
**Strategic Focus: "Slimming Down" via Store Closures and "Strengthening Muscles" via Supply Chain** Behind the 2025 performance lies a profound shift in XIABUXIABU's operating philosophy—a complete move away from a focus on scale towards prioritizing operational health and survival quality.
Over the past year, XIABUXIABU has been exceptionally cautious in its store opening strategy, keeping the total number of stores largely stable and focusing its main efforts on renovating and optimizing existing locations. This "subtraction" stems from management's clear-eyed recognition of consumer market trends. As consumer habits change, the model of relying solely on store count to drive sales is no longer sustainable. By decisively closing stores in non-core business districts, those with outdated formats, or unprofitable single-store economic models, XIABUXIABU concentrated limited resources on more promising regions and stronger-performing stores. While this "stop the bleeding" operation caused short-term pain and revenue decline, it improved the health of the asset structure, laying a foundation for a lighter, more agile future.
If store closures are the "symptomatic treatment," then the deep transformation of the supply chain is the "root cause solution." In 2025, XIABUXIABU's proprietary supply chain system achieved a qualitative leap forward. Leveraging nearly three decades of industry experience, the group not only implemented full-chain digital management but also built significant barriers in core ingredients. For instance, in Xilingol League, Inner Mongolia, XIABUXIABU owns a 161,000-mu organic pasture and a supporting beef and lamb slaughtering and processing plant. This "farm-to-table" control over the entire industry chain is rare within the sector.
The strategic value of this layout was fully demonstrated in 2025. It not only ensured consistent quality of core ingredients for brands with different positioning, such as Coucou, XIABUXIABU, and XIABU Ranch, but, more crucially, created a cost advantage. Through direct sourcing and centralized processing, the company can effectively hedge against market price fluctuations for beef and lamb, thereby gaining more flexibility in final pricing. In an era where consumers increasingly seek "quality-to-price ratio," this capability allows XIABUXIABU to maintain quality standards while offering more competitive pricing, securing an advantage in intense market competition.
Beyond the visible stores and supply chain, XIABUXIABU invested heavily in the "invisible" aspect of digital member operations in 2025. Through refined management of its membership system and the strategic issuance of gift cards, the group significantly boosted the registration conversion rate for new members and the spending share of existing members. This approach to enhancing user loyalty via digital means represents a key shift from a traffic-acquisition mindset to a "retention" mindset for catering businesses. During an economic downturn, deeply mining the value of existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.
**Innovation Driven: Multi-Brand Matrix and "Partnership" Mechanism** If optimizing existing operations is about "surviving," then seeking new growth is about "thriving." In 2025, despite performance pressures, XIABUXIABU did not become conservative; instead, it embarked on bold explorations in brand innovation and organizational change, revealing another facet of its strategy to navigate cycles.
Responding to trends for high quality and diversification in consumer demand, XIABUXIABU launched two strategically significant new brands in 2025: "XIABU Ranch" and "XIABU Steak."
"XIABU Ranch" can be seen as an upgraded or complementary version of the main XIABUXIABU brand. It targets the social dining scenes of younger demographics, promoting a self-select mini hot pot format that combines "high quality with affordable prices." The launch of this brand is clearly aimed at competing with the rise of numerous budget hot pot rivals, aiming to defend its position in the mass-market hot pot segment with more fashionable décor and superior ingredients.
More imaginative is the cross-category brand "XIABU Steak." This brand completely steps outside the hot pot arena, innovatively introducing a business model of "Taiwanese-style handmade steak + 158 types of free fusion Chinese-Western dishes + unlimited afternoon tea drinks." This "steak + all-you-can-eat" model precisely targets current consumer demand for "high-value combo meals" and "rich experiential dining." Offering an all-you-can-eat experience with 158 dishes at a price point around 100 yuan represents a disruptive business model that would be impossible without strong supply chain cost control capabilities. This is precisely where XIABUXIABU's years of accumulated experience in global procurement and supply chain management pay off. Through "XIABU Steak," the company successfully replicates its capabilities from the hot pot sector into the broader Western dining market, opening up new growth potential for the group.
Beyond product innovation, XIABUXIABU took a critical step in organizational management in 2025—launching the "Phoenix Return" partnership plan. By the end of 2025, 13 stores had implemented this plan, with over 50 individuals joining as internal partners. Stores operating under the partnership plan achieved a profit margin as high as 30%.
This data is highly significant. It demonstrates that, beyond the traditional directly-operated management model, incentivizing store managers by turning employees into "business partners" can greatly enhance single-store operational efficiency and profitability. The partnership model, by decentralizing management authority and optimizing profit-sharing mechanisms, instills an "owner's mindset" in frontline managers, leading to more flexible decisions regarding food waste control, staff allocation, and community marketing. This is not only an effective way to cope with rising labor costs but also a crucial measure for XIABUXIABU to cultivate management talent for future scaled development. In the catering industry, the human element often determines service warmth and brand depth, and the "Phoenix Return" plan represents a significant strengthening of XIABUXIABU's organizational capabilities.
**Looking Ahead** Reviewing XIABUXIABU's 2025, it appears more as a year of deep "reconditioning" than aggressive advancement. By closing underperforming stores, optimizing the supply chain, and boosting digital efforts, the company successfully curbed the expansion of losses, achieving marginal improvement in financial metrics. By launching "XIABU Ranch" and "XIABU Steak" and implementing the partnership mechanism, it injected new dynamism into product innovation and organizational vitality.
Looking forward, XIABUXIABU still faces significant challenges. On one hand, macroeconomic pressures persist, and the recovery of consumer willingness and frequency for dining out remains a key variable constraining the overall rebound of the catering industry. On the other hand, competition in the hot pot sector is fierce, with established rivals like Haidilao and a constant stream of trendy brands diverting customer traffic. Although the new brand "XIABU Steak" has an innovative model, cross-category operation means facing new competitors and operational logics; its market validation and scaled replication will require time.
However, at least from this 2025 performance forecast, we see a mature company's pragmatism and decisiveness in the face of adversity. As He Guangqi stated, the catering industry has entered a critical stage of refined operations and upgrade transformation. Through the "trade-offs" of this past year, XIABUXIABU is striving to shed the burdens of the past and move forward with a lighter load. For investors and consumers, cautious observation is warranted: if its new brands can successfully validate their models in 2026 and the core brand can stabilize its foundation, then 2025 might indeed become the turning point where XIABUXIABU emerges from its trough and regains an upward trajectory.