Two consecutive years of losses, with the number of stores only 12% of Guming's, and investors no longer trust Nayuki Tea.

Ask AI · Why Has Nayuki’s Premium Model Failed in a Price War?

Blue Whale News, March 31 (Reporter Hao Yan) After Chinese tea drink brands such as Gu Ming, Mixue Bingcheng, and Hushang Ayi have all entered the “10,000-store club,” Nayuki’s Tea—the “original internet celebrity”—has already long exited the top-tier battle for dominance: its store count has been shrinking continuously, and it currently has only 1,646 stores…

From the once-glorious “No. 1 tea beverage company in the category,” to a market value that has evaporated by more than 95% from its peak, Nayuki’s Tea has experienced a long downward cycle. How did the once “original internet celebrity” brand Nayuki’s Tea end up at where it is today?

Two consecutive years of losses, stores not increasing but decreasing—Nayuki’s Tea withdraws from “top-tier competition”

On the evening of March 26, Nayuki’s Tea released its 2025 full-year performance announcement. The financial report shows that the company achieved revenue of RMB 4.331 billion, down 12.0% year over year, and recorded a net loss of RMB 239 million during the year. This is the second consecutive year that Nayuki’s Tea has posted losses. In 2024, its losses widened to RMB 926 million; in 2025, although losses narrowed somewhat, the downward trend in revenue was not reversed.

Even more attention from the market than the losses is the shrinking store footprint. In the new tea beverage industry, where “scale effects” are used to dilute supply-chain costs, Nayuki has fallen behind noticeably. In 2025, the total number of Nayuki tea shops decreased from 1,798 to 1,646, a net reduction of 152 stores. Compared with Gu Ming’s expansion in 2025—over 13,000 stores, with a net gain of 3,640—and Hushang Ayi’s net gain of 2,273, Nayuki is not just stalled.

In the new tea beverage franchising track, franchisees “vote with their feet,” and franchise enthusiasm largely reflects a brand’s profitability. However, as of the end of 2025, Nayuki’s franchised stores increased only slightly—from 345 at the end of 2024 to 358. A full-year net increase of just 13 stores—against an industry where new tea beverage brands often open hundreds or even thousands of stores annually—makes Nayuki’s Tea hard to describe as especially appealing.

Against the backdrop of an overall contraction in store size, operational metrics for Nayuki’s company-operated stores have shown some partial recovery in certain areas.

During the reporting period, same-store sales at company-operated stores grew 6.3% year over year. Average daily sales per store increased from 7,300 yuan to 7,700 yuan. Daily average order volume grew 15.7% year over year to 313 orders, but this was built on a foundation of price cuts. In recent years, Nayuki’s average sales value per order has continued to decline; in 2025 it fell to 24.4 yuan. Compared with the early peak of 43 yuan, the ticket price is nearly “cut in half.” At present, this strategy of “trading price for volume” does not appear to fundamentally reverse the overall trend of revenue decline.

Hard to go down the premium road

The current scale-growth bottleneck facing Nayuki stems, to a certain extent, from limitations of its early business model under today’s conditions.

As a representative premium brand in the industry, Nayuki became an “original internet celebrity” in its early days thanks to a third-space model of “150–300 square meters big stores + tea beverages + baking.”

According to a report by Economic Information Daily, in July 2023 Nayuki opened franchising. This franchising policy was once dubbed the “strictest-ever” partner program in the new tea beverage industry. At that time, Nayuki’s Tea required franchised store areas of 90–170 square meters. In terms of funding requirements, franchisees were required to provide verification proof of liquid funds of 1.5 million yuan or more (or other asset proof) for single-store cooperation; for regional cooperation, verification proof of liquid funds of 4.5 million yuan or more (or other asset proof) was required. And based on its disclosed investment budget, opening a Nayuki’s Tea franchise shop—excluding costs such as rent and labor—required an initial investment of about 1 million yuan.

The big-store model not only means a relatively high initial investment, but also comes with relatively high rent and labor costs. Meanwhile, this model that integrates multiple formats such as baking and coffee is difficult to replicate in lower-tier markets. When competing brands in the industry rapidly expanded into lower-tier markets by adjusting their pricing systems and opening franchising in a light-asset small-shop model, Nayuki’s big-store strategy caused it to miss the golden window for scaling via franchise expansion.

It was not until 2024 that Nayuki adjusted its franchising policy, setting the investment amount for a single franchised store at 580,000 yuan and above—but from the perspective of the entire industry, this is still far above the average level.

For franchisees, the high initial investment costs objectively extend the payback period. Meanwhile, the financial reports show that Nayuki’s takeout delivery share is increasing continuously. In 2025, the share of delivery revenue from company-operated stores first broke 50% to reach 52.6%, with third-party platform order share at 49.1%, while in-store ordering and pickup orders both declined year over year. Under this trend, the experience premium of the offline third-space setup has been partially eroded. The high rent and high labor costs brought by the big-store model have become a heavy burden. And given Nayuki’s current pace of franchising development and its scale, it is also inevitably unable to use this approach to help the brand share costs and achieve scale effects.

The other side of the “premium narrative” is consumers. Data from Narrow Gate Restaurant Eye shows that current milk tea customers’ average ticket prices mainly fall within the 10–20 yuan range and the under-10 yuan range. Nayuki’s ticket price of around 24 yuan is neither in the category of a premium experience nor does it establish a price-to-value advantage in lower-tier markets. As a result, it finds itself in the awkward situation of “too high to meet, yet too low to satisfy.”

The disappearing signature features, and the ever-changing logo—where does Nayuki stand?

Under the dual pressure of performance volatility and industry-wide price wars, Nayuki’s Tea has made a series of adjustments in brand strategy and product structure, but it has also exposed a degree of wavering.

Frequent changes to brand visuals are a direct reflection of its strategic adjustments.

In May 2025, new logos resembling snowflakes began appearing one after another on social platforms as Nayuki’s new stores were launched. The brand name was streamlined from “Nayuki’s Tea” to “Nayuki,” and the pinyin identifier changed from “NAIXUE” to “Naìsnow.” And this was not long after the last brand rebranding. In November 2022, Nayuki had changed “Nayukiの Tea” with Japanese elements to “Nayuki’s Tea,” and its English name from “NAYUKI” to the pinyin “NAIXUE.” High-frequency changes to brand names and identifiers, to some extent, reflect Nayuki’s uncertainty in its positioning.

At the same time, the product characteristics that were most distinctive in Nayuki’s early days are also being gradually weakened as business adjustments unfold. “Good tea in one bite, soft European-style bread in one bite—when you meet Nayuki, you get two kinds of beauty,” a slogan created by Nayuki founder Peng Xin, was once Nayuki’s core differentiation tool for opening the market—and it even once drove the soft European-style bread boom in the baking industry.

But from the financial model of a single store, on-site baking operations pose extremely great challenges to cost control, with very high requirements for rent and labor. More importantly, baked products are short-shelf-life items. Any that are not sold out on the same day must all be discarded, and the high spoilage rate directly eats into single-store profits.

Facing cost pressure, Nayuki fully rolled out the PRO store format in 2022, greatly cutting the on-site baking area in stores, and unified tea and snack items by switching them to be pre-made and delivered from a central kitchen. Although this move optimized store area and labor costs, it also effectively stripped away its most distinctive “freshly baked European-style bread” label, weakening its appeal to some consumers.

This adjustment is especially evident in the financial statements. In 2025, Nayuki’s revenue from baked goods was only 352 million yuan, and its revenue share dropped from 10.7% in 2024 to 8.1%. Nayuki’s former differentiated product line is quietly fading.

In March 2026, Nayuki opened its first “Xian·Studio” store in Shenzhen, launching a Low GI, multi-fiber series of products, attempting to find a new story in the healthy tea beverage track.

But judging from the response from the capital market, this new story seems hard to convince investors.

According to Wind data, since Nayuki’s Tea went public in June 2021, its share price has fallen from a historical high of 18.98 Hong Kong dollars to 0.8 Hong Kong dollars at the end of March 2026, and its market value has fallen below 1.5 billion Hong Kong dollars.