Mingming is very busy and still missing a "bonus question" on growth.

Author | Liu Yichen Editor | Songhe

Mingming Busy was very busy, delivering its first annual performance report after listing in Hong Kong: its store footprint is nearing 22,000 locations, and GMV is heading toward 93.6 billion yuan—heralding the official formation of a retail-track retailing giant.

In 2025, Mingming Busy achieved revenue of 66.17 billion yuan, up 68.2% year over year; its adjusted net profit reached 2.692 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth rate as high as 194.9%.

In terms of scale and volume, it has already initially pulled ahead of competitor Wancheng Group.

Over the past year, the company opened 7,813 new franchise stores; the number of newly opened stores was 1.66 times that of Wancheng Group. Its overall store footprint is larger by 3,600 stores. Its overall revenue scale is 1.29 times that of Wancheng.

However, at the peak moment of performance, market doubts are actually becoming even clearer: when simple “linear extrapolation” no longer works for predicting the future, who will take over Mingming Busy’s growth momentum?

Should it continue to search for the final gaps in the vast sinking markets, or launch a northward push to attack high-tier cities? Should it stick to the snack-focused vertical track, or evolve into a full-category discount supermarket?

Before these major questions have settled, Mingming Busy is at a crossroads. For it, although the ceiling has not been reached yet, the path to the end is still being explored through the fog.

I

Space Still Exists

From the industry lifecycle perspective, the expansion logic of the bulk snack retail track has not ended.

In 2025, backed by continued support from the capital market, the “two oligarchs” still maintain high growth rates. Mingming Busy and Wancheng Group’s store growth rates reached 52.5% and 29%, respectively, jointly supporting a narrative logic centered on store expansion.

Leading companies are accelerating their encroachment into the long-tail markets and continuously replacing some traditional convenience store formats, and market concentration is expected to rise further. A Goldman Sachs research report estimates that by 2028, the combined market share of Mingming Busy and Wancheng Group may approach 80%.

Although their scale is already large enough, the regional structure remains uneven, and the logic for horizontal expansion still holds.

An analyst at Huatai Securities, Deng Xin, pointed out that Mingming Busy has completed an initial layout in new first-tier and second-tier cities. The average population covered per store is about 68,000, which is basically on par with comprehensive supermarkets.

Given that bulk snack retail has a higher consumption frequency than supermarkets, Deng Xin believes there is still room for densification in second-tier cities. Additionally, stores in fifth-tier cities account for 12.3%, and the average coverage population is about 76,000, also indicating development potential.

“Misalignment” at the regional level is a key reason why competition remains relatively rational.

At present, the two oligarchs are not engaged in direct head-to-head battles; they are in a phase of “each making a bigger cake on its own.” Mingming Busy is working to make up historical shortcomings in regions such as East China and North China, while Wancheng is extending southwest from its base in East China.

Goldman Sachs tracking data shows that among the new stores opened by Wancheng from July to November 2025, its share of layout in Central China and South China is still in the low single digits. It has not yet entered Mingming Busy’s core hinterland on a large scale.

This favorable expansion environment directly feeds back into financial performance.

In 2025, Mingming Busy cut new store subsidies sharply from 120,000 yuan in 2024 to 36,000 yuan, and basically canceled competitive special subsidies.

Combined with the continued release of scale effects, Mingming Busy’s gross margin increased by 2.2 percentage points year over year to 9.8%, and its adjusted net profit margin also rose to 4.1%.

“Space Still Exists” does not mean growth and returns can be linearly sustained.

In the first half of 2025, Mingming Busy’s annualized revenue per store was 3.61 million yuan, down 3.8% year over year; but at the same time, Mingming Busy’s average daily orders per store rose from 385 in 2022 to 458.

At the earnings meeting, CFO Wang Yutong candidly responded that the pressure on same-store GMV came from previously overemphasizing store-opening speed and subsidy competition, which resulted in accumulated operating capability failing to keep pace with expansion.

To address this, the company initiated an organizational restructuring in the second half of 2024: power was delegated to regional branches to respond quickly to frontline demand, while headquarters shifted toward delivering process-based and standardized capabilities.

Wang Yutong said that entering the second half of 2025, especially the fourth quarter, Mingming Busy’s performance at same stores has shown signs of recovery.

However, the company’s guidance for 2026 remains restrained: it only emphasizes “improvement year over year,” rather than encouraging the market to apply linear extrapolation.

Structural challenges still exist. The consequences of high-speed expansion require time to digest, and even setting aside density issues, the competitive environment ahead will be more complex.

A notable change is that snack bulk stores are now moving aggressively into the core areas of first-tier cities, no longer just “outside the Fifth Ring Road.” Most of these stores are located in core commercial districts or communities with dense foot traffic; rental costs are higher, posing greater tests for per-store operating capabilities.

At present, Mingming Busy is still in the “one-thousand-store template” stage and has not yet made differentiated matching for segmented scenarios such as communities, schools, and office buildings. Faced with “folded” but diversified consumption demand within first-tier cities, precise site selection and refined operations have become mandatory lessons.

II

Path Not Set

From a long-term perspective, the channel’s scale growth for bulk snack retail will ultimately return to rationality.

As the marginal revenue effect driven by “opening stores” continues to decline, for leading players represented by Mingming Busy, their long-term value is shifting from “expansion speed” to “profitability depth” and “model iteration.”

Differences in underlying logic determine a single store’s operational margin of error.

According to the standard model disclosed by Mingming Busy: investment per store is about 800,000 to 1,000,000 yuan, with a payback period of roughly 2 years. Compared with high-gross-margin tracks like bubble tea, its store gross margin is only about 19%; the franchisees’ net profit margin is between 8% and 10%.

This intuitive profit spread clearly shows that bulk snack retail has never been a business supported by product profits alone. It is an extreme high-turnover game that uses circulation efficiency to dilute fixed costs.

From this, the breakthrough for growth will first occur at the operational level—specifically, an upgrade in per-store sales efficiency (sales productivity per area).

In the past two years, Mingming Busy has actively promoted transformations of its new-generation store formats. It has introduced daily necessities, fresh food, low-temperature frozen products, and made-to-order freshly baked items, extending from “snack specialty stores” to “high-frequency discount retail.” By broadening its product moat, it aims to raise the upper limit of revenue.

This expansion remains cautious.

Although the group requires each store to maintain at least 1,800 SKUs, external statistics show that snack categories still account for 40% to 50%.

A long-term observer investor in the consumer sector told Tech: on a high-turnover model, consumption frequency comes first above all else. If full-category expansion is pursued rashly, it will not only dilute the consumption mindshare anchor of “bulk snack retail,” but also easily reduce overall turnover efficiency due to inventory buildup in long-tail products, thereby eroding the foundation of the entire business model.

Supply chain cooperation methods also remain along the original route.

In 2025, although Mingming Busy launched its own brand system of the “Red Label” focusing on price-performance and the “Gold Label” emphasizing quality, it did not treat these as the core lever for extracting profits.

Management’s explanation is: in traditional retail, building private labels is to obtain pricing power and high gross margins, because its products overlap heavily with external ones. In contrast, Mingming Busy’s products are already differentiated. The company more hopes to build stores into a “showcase window” for outstanding Chinese food manufacturers, rather than turning them into nothing more than a pure OEM factory.

Behind this restraint lies another reason: compared with front-end expansion, optimizing the limits of middle-and-back-end efficiency is the more certain, more urgent, and higher-return focus for now.

By the end of 2025, although the number of Mingming stores is about 3,000 more than that of Wancheng Group and revenue is higher by about 15 billion yuan, their net profit levels are basically on par. Wancheng’s net profit margin is higher by nearly 2 percentage points.

In a retail industry where profit is as thin as a razor blade, this reflects a clear management gap.

To this end, the company is trying to use digital means to move from “experience-driven” to “prediction-driven” management. This covers in-house developed site selection, AI store patrols, and intelligent ordering systems, aiming to make up for the shortfall in management premium.

On the supply chain side, at the earnings meeting, Yan Zhou pointed out that the company will systematically advance the building of hot-food and cold-chain capabilities: hot food includes instant-consumption products such as sausages and egg tarts; cold chain covers refrigerated and frozen storage, with a focus on trends toward fewer additives, shorter shelf life, and health.

Short shelf-life foods impose higher requirements on warehouse environments and turnover speed. Algorithm prediction errors or logistics delays could lead to inventory write-downs or food safety risks.

Currently, Mingming Busy has 56 warehouses in total, and more than half of them rely on third-party operations. Its Hong Kong IPO prospectus discloses that the company plans to use part of the raised funds to focus on building smart warehouses and cold storage, while also improving its cold-chain distribution system.

Meanwhile, Mingming Busy seems to have quietly started exploring “new species.”

Market rumors suggest that the “You·Recommend” launched in Wuhan at the beginning of the year is** its**** attempt to test a new fresh-snack track, but this information has not been officially confirmed to date.**

A Huatai Securities research report shows that this project plans to adopt a “mostly direct operation, supplemented by joint operations” model, with a layout of about 800 stores nationwide. In 2026, the core goal will be to “run on scale,” focusing on core commercial districts in high-tier cities, and expanding its service radius by leveraging instant retail.

The same research report also notes that on the supply chain side, the company has built an end-to-end model of “central factory + cold-chain logistics + in-store freshly made.” Wuhan plans to build a 10,000-square-meter central factory, of which 5,000 square meters have already been put into operation. Core categories are controlled by its own factories, while other categories are benchmarked against Sam’s Club production line standards.

With store format expansion, efficiency optimization, and deeper supply-chain integration building on each other, together they form the upside potential of Mingming Busy’s per-store model.

For the company, the real key is not how many paths are available, but rather when it can crystallize a replicable, scalable, and certain model—so as to open up new room for imagination for growth before the pace of scale growth slows down.