Ba Wang Tea Princess's net profit in Q4 2025 decreased by 95.3%, with founder Zhang Junjie receiving a dividend of 670 million yuan.

Ask AI · How do high dividends affect franchisee confidence?

Produced by | Pai Finance

Text | Zhao Fangji

On March 31, Bawang Chaji announced its first annual financial report since going public.

In 2025, the company’s GMV was 31.58 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 7.2%; revenue was 12.91 billion yuan, up 4% year-on-year; net profit attributable to shareholders was 1.17B yuan, down 53.5% year-on-year. By the end of 2025, Bawang Chaji had a total of 7,453 global stores, an increase of 15.7% compared to the previous year.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, several core indicators for Bawang Chaji declined. Quarterly revenue was 2.97 billion yuan, down 10.8% year-on-year; operating profit was -35.5 million yuan, compared to 640 million yuan in the same period last year; net profit attributable to shareholders was 28.54M yuan, a plunge of 95.3% year-on-year.

From the perspective of single-store operation efficiency, overall same-store GMV in the fourth quarter decreased by 25.5%, with the average monthly GMV per store in Greater China dropping from 456k yuan to 337k yuan.

On April 1, Zhang Junjie, founder, chairman, and global CEO of Bawang Chaji, publicly apologized during a conference call for the performance decline.

Zhang Junjie stated that the company underestimated the level of “involution” in the market in 2025, as well as the impact of the “takeout war” on offline tea consumption from instant retail platforms. The response strategies were not sufficient, and the response efficiency was lacking, causing the company to miss many opportunities.

Furthermore, during July and August 2025, which was the peak period of price wars on takeout platforms, Zhang Junjie repeatedly publicly stated that Bawang Chaji was one of the few brands firmly refusing to participate in the “takeout war.” He believed that short-term subsidy-driven competition was unsustainable.

Looking back, Bawang Chaji paid the price of its high standards with a decline in performance.

In the fourth quarter of performance decline, in November 2025, Bawang Chaji’s management announced a shareholder dividend of $177 million (about 1.25 billion yuan).

Based on the shareholding ratio, it is expected that about 670 million yuan will be distributed to Zhang Junjie himself.

The founder received a substantial dividend, but according to LatePost, one Bawang Chaji franchisee operated for 7 months and lost 2 million yuan; another franchisee exited with a loss of 4 million yuan.

Regarding the performance guidance for 2026, Zhang Junjie said that 2026 will not pursue rapid growth solely, but will prioritize restoring same-store sales as the primary KPI, expecting total revenue and profit for the year to be roughly the same as 2025.

As of the close on April 2, Bawang Chaji’s stock price was $10.09 per share, a collapse of 75.9% from the all-time high of $41.8. The market value shrank from $7.6 billion to $1.92 billion.