Revenue surpasses 50 billion yuan—how did Nongfu Spring manage to make a comeback?

How can productism help companies navigate through cycles in an era of consumption differentiation?

On March 24, 2026, Nongfu Spring released its annual performance report for 2025. The data shows that the company’s annual revenue crossed the 50 billion yuan mark for the first time, with a year-on-year net profit growth of over 30.9%.

In 2024, Nongfu Spring faced a brand crisis due to public opinion events, which put pressure on both terminal sales and market sentiment, leading to a phase of performance fluctuation. However, just one year later, the company not only regained growth but also achieved an unexpected rebound.

In an era of consumption differentiation and polarized public opinion, how can a company navigate through cycles? Nongfu Spring provided the answer: return to the product, return to common sense.

1. “Water is different from water”

In 2025, Nongfu Spring’s packaged drinking water business resumed growth. Against the backdrop of the overall packaged drinking water industry entering a phase of stock competition in China, this performance is particularly notable. This recovery did not rely on price wars or channel subsidies, but rather stemmed from the long-term shaping of consumer perception.

The bottled water industry generally follows two paths: one emphasizes “purity,” focusing on industrial standards of production; the other emphasizes “naturalness,” relying on natural water sources. Nongfu Spring has always positioned itself in the latter category.

“Water is different from water”—this is the concept that Nongfu Spring repeatedly emphasizes internally. In the past, this concept reached consumers more through the emotional expression of “Nongfu Spring is a bit sweet.” However, after the public opinion impact in 2024, the company chose to transform it into a more verifiable “fact system.”

In 2025, Nongfu Spring significantly increased the dissemination of content related to its water sources, including images of the water source on bottle labels, open public water source tours, and the distribution of documentary-style content. The core logic is to use visible natural environments and traceable water source paths to counter emotional doubts.

Behind this is a costly yet clearly defined heavy asset strategy. Unlike most competitors who set up factories around urban areas, Nongfu Spring has laid out 16 water source sites nationwide, covering lakes, springs, and underground water systems, and has introduced water to the production end through long-distance pipes.

This model appears “inefficient” in the short term, but creates strong exclusivity in the long term. Once high-quality water sources are occupied, their scarcity is nearly irreplaceable. This resource-based moat enables Nongfu Spring to maintain a differentiated space in an industry characterized by homogenization.

More importantly, this “hard work” aligns with a deeper consumption trend: amid ongoing food safety and health anxieties, consumer trust in “naturalness” is replacing blind trust in “industrial standards.”

In a sense, the resurgence of Nongfu Spring’s water business in 2025 is not just about sales recovery; it is also a cognitive repair regarding “what constitutes good water.”

2. Doing tea well with a “restrained” attitude

In 2025, Nongfu Spring’s core tea beverage brand, Dongfang Shuye, held an absolute advantage in the sugar-free tea segment.

Over the past three years, sugar-free tea has become one of the fastest-growing segments in China’s beverage industry. A large number of brands have entered the market, from traditional beverage companies to new consumer brands, all launching “0 sugar 0 calories” products. However, from market feedback, the brands that have truly achieved scaled repeat purchases and premium pricing are still concentrated among a few leading brands.

A representative phenomenon in 2025 is the collective emergence of “Longjing tea beverages,” with multiple beverage companies intensively launching ready-to-drink tea products featuring Longjing as a selling point, trying to leverage the cognitive dividend of “famous tea” to enter the mid-to-high-end market. However, from market feedback, the true scaled sales and consumer recognition are still concentrated on Dongfang Shuye, with some channels even experiencing sporadic shortages and price fluctuations, exhibiting characteristics similar to “quasi-scarce goods.”

The underlying factor is not simply brand or channel advantages, but a more easily overlooked threshold—the industrialization capability of Longjing tea beverages.

As one of the most representative varieties of Chinese green tea, Longjing has very distinctive flavor characteristics, but it is also highly sensitive: it depends heavily on water temperature and steeping time, reacts significantly to raw material grades and regional differences, and especially the signature “bean flower fragrance” of Longjing is harder to stabilize during industrialization and long-chain distribution processes.

In other words, Longjing is a type of tea that is “suitable for brewing on-site, not easily standardized.” This also explains why for many years, Longjing remained more in the tea consumption scene and struggled to form a stable best-selling product in ready-to-drink beverages.

Nongfu Spring’s success in leading the Longjing ready-to-drink tea market is attributed to its over ten years of accumulation in the tea field.

Even before sugar-free tea became mainstream, Nongfu Spring had already undertaken systematic layouts around tea raw materials. In the financial report, Nongfu Spring’s chairman, Zhong Shanshan, stated that to make good tea, high-quality fresh tea leaves and exquisite tea-making craftsmanship are essential. Therefore, the company strives to extend upstream into the tea raw material industry, introducing standardized industrial production concepts into the management of tea leaves in high-quality tea-producing areas like Yunnan, and investing in modern tea processing factories. This not only boosts local tea farmers’ income and industry upgrades but also ensures a stable supply of high-quality tea raw materials for the company.

Technologically, Nongfu Spring continuously optimizes cold brewing, hot brewing, and compound extraction processes on the processing end, accumulating multiple rounds of formula and process iteration experience in flavor control.

More importantly, Nongfu Spring exhibits “restraint” in its Longjing products.

Although it was the first to introduce Longjing into the ready-to-drink tea system and possesses certain industrialization capabilities, Nongfu Spring does not position it as a year-round flagship product. Instead, they adopt a “seasonal limited” approach, producing and selling on a small scale only during the spring tea window, with cycles often lasting only a few weeks. The rationale behind this is that high-quality Longjing, especially raw materials close to the “pre-Ming” stage, have limited production and a short flavor window; once out of this cycle, its signature “bean flower fragrance” and taste are hard to present stably.

In contrast, some followers choose to position Longjing as an all-year-round product, leaning towards making Longjing a “year-round sellable” product by blending tea leaves, adjusting processes, or sacrificing some flavors in exchange for scalability and supply stability. This path lowers the entry threshold in the short term, but also inadvertently dilutes the flavor recognition of “Longjing.”

In a sense, Nongfu Spring’s choice regarding Longjing reflects a rarer management principle: not producing every possible product, but only selling products that are truly of high quality. This “proactive abandonment of scale” reinforces the binding relationship between brand and quality.

3. “Productism” brings long-term returns

In the context of capital markets, Nongfu Spring is often classified as a “consumer white horse stock.” However, from an operational logic standpoint, it is closer to a typical product-oriented company.

This is particularly evident in its multi-category layout. For example, in the juice sector, Nongfu Spring launched Nongfu Orchard early on, and while the industry generally promoted 10% juice beverages, it was the first to introduce a 30% concentration juice; subsequently, it entered the NFC (not from concentrate) juice market, driving the industry towards higher quality upgrades. In new segments like functional beverages and ready-to-drink coffee, the company also adopts a “slow entry, product-focused” strategy, rather than relying on traffic-driven rapid scaling.

This path often does not hold an advantage in the short term: new products grow slowly, R&D and supply chain investments are high, and it requires greater organizational patience. However, the return lies in the fact that once a product gains market validation, its lifecycle is often longer.

The Chinese beverage industry has undergone multiple rounds of “hit product cycles” over the past decade: from soft drinks to functional beverages, and then to sugar-free tea, many brands have rapidly risen based on single products, only to decline swiftly. In contrast, Nongfu Spring’s core product matrix, such as natural water, Dongfang Shuye, Water-soluble C100, and Scream, has all achieved cross-cycle sustainability. This also serves as an important foundation for its response to external shocks.

The public opinion crisis in 2024 was essentially a “non-product-related shock.” In this context, short-term sales can be swayed by emotions, but long-term repurchase still relies on the product. When consumers return to rational choice, product strength becomes the ultimate “voting mechanism.”

From this perspective, Nongfu Spring’s turnaround in 2025 is not an accidental rebound, but a concentrated payoff of long-term “productism.”

Looking back at Nongfu Spring’s fluctuations over the past two years, two parallel curves can be observed: one driven by public opinion and emotions in the short term, and the other driven by products and industries in the long term. The former is intense and unpredictable; the latter is slow but more certain.

In a consumption environment dominated by traffic and amplified emotions, more and more companies tend to chase attention through marketing, topics, or even controversies. However, Nongfu Spring’s path offers another sample: when emotions recede, what truly remains are the most fundamental business elements—product quality, supply chain depth, and adherence to “common sense.”

“Water is different from water,” this statement sounds simple, but behind it lies decades of continuous investment in water sources, craftsmanship, and branding. Likewise, the popularity of “sugar-free tea” is not merely a marketing concept, but the result of a complete industrial system.

In 2025, Nongfu Spring did not tell a new story. It merely proved an old truth: in the consumption industry, the real moat is never emotion, but the product itself.

Reporting by: Wang Jingjuan, Nandu·Bay Finance社记者