Dissecting the 2025 Financial Reports of Four Leading New Tea Beverage Companies: Who's Surging Ahead

Recently, several leading companies in China’s new-style tea beverage sector—Mixue Group (Mixue Ice Cream & Tea Co., Ltd.), Guming, Tea Bai Dao, and Nayuki Tea—have successively released their 2025 “report cards.” Four “report cards” of different quality levels show the “icy and fiery two-sided reality” of the tea beverage industry.

Mixue Ice Cream & Tea earned nearly RMB 6 billion in net profit in a year; Guming’s net profit doubled; Tea Bai Dao delivered a major recovery in net profit despite slowing revenue growth; while Nayuki Tea is still struggling through losses and starting to shrink its store footprint.

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Selling a cup of milk tea is the same for all four companies, yet their 2025 financial reports offer sharply different “answers.” Behind the divergence in revenue, net profit, and store data are differences in brand strategy. This year, with a direct-operation DNA, Nayuki Tea struggled between building a “third place” and opening up to franchisees and made choices accordingly; while other tea beverage brands that grew in lower-tier markets and relied mainly on franchising, wearing new-style tea beverage’s “outerwear,” evolved into efficient, high-functioning supply-chain giants.

“Icy and fiery two-sided reality” in revenue and net profit

The 2025 financial report data show that among the “three giants” rushing aggressively into lower-tier markets and Nayuki Tea, there is a bottomless gulf in revenue and net profit.

In 2025, Mixue Ice Cream & Tea and Guming’s revenues were RMB 33.56 billion and RMB 12.91 billion, respectively—both exceeding the RMB 10 billion scale. Net profits were RMB 5.927 billion and RMB 3.115 billion, respectively. Mixue Ice Cream & Tea earned nearly RMB 6 billion in net profit in a year thanks to its network of nearly 60,000 stores worldwide. Guming’s net profit surged year over year by an astonishing 108.6%. According to the financial reports, Guming’s growth engine comes from deeply cultivating lower-tier markets, where the share of its township stores has already risen to 44%. Similarly, Tea Bai Dao, another franchise-focused milk tea brand, recorded RMB 821 million in net profit in 2025, up more than 70% year over year.

In 2025, when Mixue Ice Cream & Tea, Guming, and Tea Bai Dao were raking in money day after day, Nayuki Tea was “crossing a tribulation” in pain.

In 2025, Nayuki Tea’s revenue fell 12% year over year to RMB 4.331 billion. Not only did it post a net loss of RMB 243 million, its store scale also shrank along with revenue. In 2025, the total number of Nayuki Tea stores dropped from 1,798 to 1,646. During this year, Nayuki Tea proactively entered a period of store closures and adjustments, tightening the franchise policies that had previously been expected to deliver strongly. By the end of 2025, Nayuki Tea’s franchised stores totaled only 358, a slight net increase of 13 stores over the whole year.

From the financial reports, in 2025, the entire industry shared the common pattern of customer spend continuously hitting new lows while the rate of cups served surged wildly. Guming’s average daily cups sold per store rose from 384 cups in 2024 to 456 cups in 2025. Over the same period, Nayuki Tea’s average daily orders per store also increased from 270.5 orders to 313 orders, but the average sales value per order fell from RMB 26.7 to RMB 24.4.

Profits largely come from franchisees

Judging from the revenue structure of Guming, Tea Bai Dao, and Mixue Ice Cream & Tea, their main share of profitability comes from franchisees. A franchise-focused tea beverage brand is more like a B2B (business-to-business) supply-chain company wearing the “new-style tea beverage” outfit.

With the same revenue model, Guming and Tea Bai Dao keep their gross margin at nearly the same level: in 2025, Guming’s gross margin was 33.0%, and Tea Bai Dao’s gross margin was 32.5%.

On March 30, Lin Yue, Chief Consultant and an analyst in the catering and fast-consumer-goods industry at Lingyan Management Consulting, told a reporter from The Economic Daily: “The gross margin of a franchise brand business is jointly determined by the brand’s profit expectations and the franchisees’ survival bottom line. Perhaps this gross-margin spread of about 30% is the subtle balance point between the brand and the franchisees.”

The difference is that revenues derived from franchisees vary among the companies. Over 90% of Mixue Ice Cream & Tea and Tea Bai Dao’s revenue comes from selling goods and equipment to franchisees; while for Guming, sales of goods and equipment account for 79% of revenue. It also has as much as 20.35%, over RMB 2.6 billion of revenue from franchise management services—focusing on operational services may be the core reason why its net profit performance is impressive.

By contrast, franchise-focused tea beverage brands are all strong in their supply chains and continue to deepen their efforts.

A disclosure item strongly tied to supply-chain spending is cost of sales. Mixue Ice Cream & Tea, Tea Bai Dao, and Guming’s cost of sales were RMB 23.108 billion, RMB 3.641 billion, and RMB 8.651 billion, respectively, accounting for 68.8%, 67.5%, and 67.0% of total revenue.

Mixue Ice Cream & Tea has already achieved 100% self-produced core beverage ingredients. It has five production bases and 28 warehouses. The financial report shows that Mixue Ice Cream & Tea continues to increase capital expenditures on fixed assets, with about RMB 301 million in its capital contribution mainly used to build factory premises and purchase equipment. Guming has 24 warehouses. Seventy-five percent of its stores are located within a 150-kilometer range of warehouses, and 98% of its stores achieve “delivery in two days per replenishment.” With this extremely high physical density, Guming compresses delivery costs from warehouse to store to below 1% of GMV (gross merchandise value). Tea Bai Dao, meanwhile, has set up 26 warehousing-and-delivery centers nationwide, and about 93.7% of its stores deliver by the next day after orders are placed.

By comparison, without economies of scale, Nayuki Tea’s “blood loss” is related to higher supply-chain costs and the increase in takeout orders. According to disclosures in its financial report, in 2025, Nayuki Tea’s material costs reached RMB 1.47 billion, accounting for 34.0% of total proceeds. With high spoilage driven by high-quality fresh fruit and fresh milk, and with only just over 1,000 stores, it simply cannot spread costs the way 10,000-store brands can.

In 2025, among the revenue of Nayuki Tea’s直营 (company-operated) stores, the share of takeout orders was as high as 52.6% (RMB 2.009 billion), while orders placed on-site at stores dropped to 9.3%. The rise in takeout orders is not good news for Nayuki Tea, which emphasizes “third place” offline experiences. This also led the company to pay as much as RMB 462 million in delivery service fees to third-party platforms, accounting for 10.7% of total proceeds.

Where did the money from the “cash cow” go?

New-style tea giants with exceptionally strong overall operating capabilities have long turned into well-funded “cash cows.” In this 2025 “report card,” all four companies have a sizable amount of cash on their balance sheets. Mixue Ice Cream & Tea’s cash and cash equivalents, time deposits, restricted cash, and financial assets measured at fair value with changes recorded in profit or loss totaled RMB 19.99 billion. Guming’s cash and cash equivalents, time deposits, and large-denomination certificates of deposit on its books totaled more than RMB 10 billion. Tea Bai Dao’s cash and cash equivalents reached RMB 3.071 billion. Nayuki Tea’s cash and cash equivalents, time deposits, and large-denomination certificates of deposit were more than RMB 2.6 billion.

Although they all have ample cash, different companies have taken completely different paths.

Besides deeply focusing on the supply chain, Mixue Ice Cream & Tea hopes to replicate its supply-chain capabilities across other categories. In its 2025 financial report, Mixue Ice Cream & Tea disclosed a transaction: it acquired the fresh beer brand Fulu Family and merged with its 1,354 stores. Lin Yue told reporters that Mixue Ice Cream & Tea’s acquisition of Fulu Family is an integration like “moving assets from the left pocket to the right pocket,” with the goal of empowering each other on the supply chain—for example, sharing production facilities, using common warehousing and cold-chain logistics systems, and expanding purchasing advantages. At the same time, Mixue Ice Cream & Tea is also vigorously promoting intelligent dispensing machines in its stores, freeing up more labor through automation equipment and improving efficiency. Currently, intelligent dispensing machines have covered more than 13,000 stores.

Guming, meanwhile, in early 2026 in its Hangzhou headquarters area, plans to spend RMB 455 million to acquire a parcel of land and build a new operations headquarters building. Industry insiders believe that after sprinting toward a 10,000-store scale, Guming urgently needs a physical space to carry its operational command center—further concentrating its digital control of franchisees and its supply-chain scheduling. As for Tea Bai Dao, its cash is used more to maintain on-balance-sheet liquidity and for refined fixes to its supply chain.

In its financial report, Tea Bai Dao emphasized “AI (artificial intelligence) automated inspection” and an “intelligent replenishment and intelligent preparation system” covering 8,000 stores. Entering 2026, Tea Bai Dao stores in certain cities have piloted the rollout and started launching a coffee category.

Behind the cup of milk tea that consumers hold, giants are competing based on supply-chain and other assets. When the number of domestic stores is nearing the ceiling, how much expansion pressure can the large franchisee system still bear? Clearly, new challenges are only just beginning.

(Editor-in-charge: Zhang Yang HN080)

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