Decoding Nongfu Spring's breakthrough beyond 50 billion: the steady "long-distance runner" with double growth in performance

Ask AI · How Does Supply Chain Integration Help Nongfu Spring Achieve Steady Growth?

On March 24, Nongfu Spring released its 2025 full-year financial report: revenue first surpassed the 50 billion yuan mark, reaching 52.553 billion yuan, up about 22.5%; net profit was about 15.868 billion yuan, up more than 30.9%. This is Nongfu Spring’s first complete annual report after the turbulence it went through. With a steady performance of double growth in both revenue and profit, it firmly stepped onto a higher new platform. Nongfu Spring decoded the core logic of surviving across market cycles with hard, real sales data.

Oriental Leaf isn’t “brewed” into success that simply

Outsiders often attribute Oriental Leaf’s “miracle” to only two things: “starting early” and “persevering.” In 2011, it made an ahead-of-its-time plan, slogged through a decade of hardships, and finally exploded overnight in 2021 amid the sugar-free boom. However, “enduring” is only the backdrop; “fighting” is the truth. What truly enabled Oriental Leaf to turn from the “hardest-to-like beverage” into a “phenomenon-level bestseller” was Nongfu Spring’s near-obsessive determination to tackle product issues.

There are no fewer than dozens of jasmine tea brands on the market. Why do most of them only offer a faint “tea flavor,” yet you can’t find any lively “floral aroma”? Only when you open the cap of Oriental Leaf can that fresh, fragrant jasmine scent immediately cut through everything.

This is not a magic trick from the recipe—it is a real technological barrier. Tea leaves, as a typical agricultural product, are born with “non-standard” genes: even slight variations in climate, differences in soil acidity and alkalinity, changes in the angle of sunlight, and even the breeze from different slopes within the same tea garden can make tea flavors vary greatly. This is the underlying dilemma of agriculture: too many variables make it impossible to lock in quality with parameter precision the way industrial assembly lines can. The breakthrough path of Oriental Leaf is to find a maximum of certainty amid extreme uncertainty. It does not settle for just “having a tea flavor,” but relentlessly pursues the ultimate experience of “floral aroma infused into the water,” forcibly pulling agriculture’s “depending on the weather” approach onto an industrial-grade precision track.

Given such a highly uncertain upstream, Nongfu Spring chose the heaviest and most exhausting—and yet the most correct—route: getting directly involved and reshaping the supply chain.

In the deep mountains of Yunnan, Nongfu Spring is no longer simply a buyer of raw materials. Instead, it becomes an “industrial partner.” They help build modern primary processing factories, equip tea farmers with professional equipment, and even send technical teams to stay on site, teaching—step by step—scientific fertilization and green pest control. By integrating and transforming Yunnan’s high-quality but scattered tea resources into a stable, controllable, high-quality industrial-grade supply chain, Nongfu Spring has carved out a standardized passageway across a wasteland of non-standard products.

In an era of uncertainty, only companies willing to continuously “up their game” on quality and to cultivate supply chains in depth can turn occasional success into lasting prosperity.

Not just selling water—this is also “preaching”

The outside world often assumes Nongfu Spring is an “advertising company delayed by selling water.” From “Nongfu Spring has a bit of sweetness,” to “the carrier of nature,” to “the quality of water determines the quality of life,” these slogans have long become collective memories for a generation. However, when people eagerly talk about its inspired moments, they often overlook one core fact: Nongfu Spring’s real identity is that of a devout “water-knowledge preacher.”

This “preacher” has held to a simple yet often overlooked truth for more than two decades: water is utterly different from water. In Nongfu Spring’s belief, the mineral elements in water are crucial to health. Therefore, it is not merely selling a bottle of thirst-quenching liquid; it is also pushing a cognitive revolution about “healthy drinking water.” This kind of day-after-day “rambling,” is not simple repetition—it is the transmission of a belief. Only when consumers truly learn to understand water can they make healthier choices.

When controversies about “Nongfu Spring being surface water” flare up in the market, this “preacher” first clarifies a key concept that the public misunderstands: the natural water source Nongfu Spring draws from is absolutely not the kind of ordinary river or lake water that flows through cities and takes in wastewater, as consumers imagine. She calmly lays out an unassailable “ecological facts list”: Qiandaohu (Thousand-Island Lake), “the finest water under heaven,” with a storage capacity of 17.8 billion cubic meters—equivalent to the water volume of 4 Tai Lakes. The forest coverage rate around it has long remained above 97%; Wanlv Lake: 13.9 billion cubic meters of clear lake water, green year-round, with forest coverage of 98% in the lake area; Danjiangkou Reservoir: storage capacity exceeding 29.0 billion cubic meters, the largest artificial freshwater lake in Asia. As the source of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, this is not only a water source area, but also a key region for national strategic security. This is one kind of surface water, not another. These resounding names are not only geographic coordinates; they are also first-tier water-source protection areas under national key oversight.

In 2025, amid fierce market competition, the growth behind Nongfu Spring was a “vote of trust” cast by countless consumers with their hard-earned money. Nongfu Spring’s “preaching” path may look lonely because it is too meticulous, but it is precisely this commitment to what is real that allows it to pass through market cycles and become the most steady “long-distance runner” in the bottled water sector.