Nongfu Spring

With August's arrival, summer is halfway through. The surge in popularity of unsweetened ready-to-drink (RTD) tea has led to a rapid increase in market supply. At the back end, brand products; at the mid-end, distribution and marketing; and at the front end, retail displays – all are working at full capacity to provide the market with unsweetened teas, hoping to gain a share of the growth. Image Source: Weibo @Suntory Beverages, Guozi Shule (Unsweetened Tea), Dongfang Shuye (Oriental Leaf Tea) However, the market composed of consumers, both physical space defined by geography and business types and virtual space shaped by consumer willingness, cannot grow indefinitely. At this point, most players have played their cards and are beginning to experience diminishing marginal returns or even outright failure. This week, we will continue our specialized research on unsweetened RTD tea categories. This week’s focus will be on overall trends, price analysis, and in-depth studies of typical “star products.” The data used in this article is sourced from CT Brand by MaxWin. CT Brand by MaxWin covers cities of all levels above the county level across China, with business formats including hypermarkets, supermarkets, small supermarkets, convenience stores, and grocery stores. MaxWin uses AI…

"Elon Musk is doing something earth-shattering; I'm not that great. But I've maintained a normal income for farmers, which is my contribution, and I am proud of it." On the evening of August 10th, during the CCTV program "Dialogue," Zhong Shanshan addressed issues such as being China's richest man, online attacks, internet traffic, slowness, competition, and succession for the first time in a systematic manner. This statement perhaps best represents Zhong Shanshan's mindset. Moving from selling water downstream to farming upstream, whether it's Gan'nan navel oranges or Yili apples, Nongfu Spring's investments have been unprofitable so far, but Zhong Shanshan remains content. Even though Oriental Leaf has become a super hit, he is still committed to entering the tea industry. Zhong Shanshan sees all this as "strategic losses," but after more than a decade of such losses, it is difficult to explain them solely through commercial logic. The true reason lies within Zhong Shanshan's heart, where there resides an "idealistic madman." The Seven-Year Loss of Oriental Leaf "Our tea has been around since 2012, 2013, and for over a decade, we didn't make any profit for the first six years, but by 2021, our growth curve started to rise." In…