Editor | Yuerhu
Produced by Chaoqi.com “Yu Jian Column”
At six o’clock in the evening, there was another queue at the entrance of Mixue Bingcheng on the county commercial street. Students in school uniforms clutched change while waiting for a four-yuan glass of lemonade, and takeaway riders filled their insulated boxes with bags with Snow King’s smiling face on them.
The same scene is currently being staged on the streets of 17 countries around the world.
At the end of August 2026, Mixue Group handed over another report card after its listing.
The financial report shows that in the first half of this year, the company achieved revenue of 15.22 billion yuan and net profit of 2.32 billion yuan. Including Mixue Ice City, Lucky Coffee, and Fresh Beer Fulujia, the total number of stores worldwide has reached approximately 64,000.
The person who supports this huge beverage empire is an entrepreneur from Zhengzhou, Henan, Zhang Hongchao, founder and chairman of Mixue Bingcheng.
He has spent nearly thirty years proving one thing: to achieve the ultimate in cheapness is a bottomless business in itself.
The supply chain revolution behind a glass of lemonade
Many people are curious as to how Mixue Bingcheng can still make money by selling lemonade for four yuan. The answer is not in stores, but in factories and warehouses that are invisible to consumers.
Zhang Hongchao has figured out something very early on: in the tea industry, what matters in the end is not marketing tricks, but the thickness of the supply chain.
As early as 2012, Mixue Bingcheng was the first in the industry to build its own central factory, taking the production of core raw materials into its own hands.
In the following ten years, this supply chain has continued to deepen and widen. The procurement team has gone deep into the global production areas to directly purchase fruits, tea and milk sources, cutting off the intermediate links layer by layer.
In May this year, Mixue’s Yunnan production base was officially put into operation. The company has built six major production bases in China and achieved 100% independent production of core beverage ingredients. On the logistics side, Mixue has 31 warehouses across the country, and its distribution network covers 33 provincial-level administrative regions and more than 300 prefecture-level cities. The unloading method of domestic stores has been upgraded from handover at the rear of the truck to delivery into the store. Overseas, localized warehousing and distribution systems have been established in 9 countries.
The thickness of the supply chain directly translates into the competitiveness of the product.
In the first half of this year, Mixue Bingcheng continued to promote the upgrade of Zhen Xian Pure. The formula of the classic single product Bangda Fresh Orange was upgraded from jam to cold chain compound juice. The upgraded Bangda Fresh Orange ranked third in sales in a single month in June.
The coffee business is also spreading rapidly. Freshly ground coffee machines have been installed in about 6,000 stores, and consumers can drink freshly ground coffee for a few dollars.
Today’s consumers are becoming more and more picky and want both cheapness and freshness. Mixue simply followed this trend of quality-price ratio and redid the entire industry chain from room-temperature processing to cold-freshness.
Lucky Coffee, its subsidiary, also focuses on fresh milk and fresh beans. Stores across the country use low-temperature fresh milk and 60-day short-lived roasted coffee beans, and also piloted the launch of special blends and hand-brews.
In the back kitchens of stores, smart liquid dispensing machines have been installed in more than 18,000 stores. The machines are used to nail the production standards so that customers in Zhengzhou and Jakarta can drink the same cup of taste.
This is the real moat of Mixue Ice City.
Other brands engage in price wars to cut costs, but Mixue’s low prices are based on savings from the fields. Zhang Hongchao doesn’t like to talk about the limelight. He prefers to talk about the harvest maturity of lemons and the temperature zone of the warehouse. This almost stubborn industrial thinking makes Mixue Bingcheng almost no rival in the price range of less than ten yuan.
The sinking market map woven by 60,000 stores
If the supply chain is the lining of Michelle, then the store network is its most intuitive aspect.
As of June 30, 2026, Mixue Group had 63,987 stores worldwide, including approximately 59,600 stores in mainland China and 4,378 overseas stores. In the mainland market, there are approximately 35,000 stores in third-tier cities and below, accounting for approximately 58%. From the business districts of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen to the crossroads of villages and towns, Snow King’s red signboards are almost everywhere.
In August this year, Mixue Bingcheng announced that its total membership exceeded 500 million. This number means that on average one out of every three Chinese people is a member of Snow King.
Many people attribute Mixue’s success to its cheapness, but cheapness is just an appearance. The real effort lies in using an industrialized approach to reshape the cost structure of a drink, so that low price is no longer synonymous with sacrificing quality.
With such a huge volume, Mixue’s growth pace is changing gears.
The interim financial report showed that revenue in the first half of the year increased by 2.3% year-on-year, and net profit fell by 14.7% year-on-year. The profit curve alone doesn’t seem pretty, but when you take it apart, it’s a different story. The profit decline is mainly due to the company’s initiative to undertake cost increases caused by quality upgrades and supply chain investments, coupled with the high base caused by last year’s takeout subsidy war.
In other words, this is money that is actively spent. After the ebb of takeout subsidies, the entire industry is experiencing pain. Zhang Hongchao’s choice is to invest profits back into raw materials, cold chain and store operations, using short-term book fluctuations to exchange for a quality foundation in the next few years.
There is another detail worth noting in the financial report. Revenue from franchises and related services increased by 10% year-on-year. This shows that the ecology of 60,000 stores is not only stable, but also increasingly sticky.
This kind of choice is very Zhang Hongchao. From the first day of his business, franchisees and ordinary consumers have been prioritized in his ledger.
Michelle’s business model is essentially to act as a back-end housekeeper for 60,000 stores, making money by supplying raw materials, equipment and packaging materials to franchisees. The better the stores live, the more stable the headquarters will make.
Let tens of thousands of franchise owners make money, and let students in the county afford to drink. This simple profit-sharing logic is exactly the confidence that Michelle has to go through one industry cycle after another.
Looking further afield, the consumption upgrade in counties and towns has just begun. The demand of hundreds of millions of small town residents for affordable and delicious drinks is far from being met. The store network that Michelle has reserved in advance still has a lot of room for imagination in the future.
Snow King’s ambitions from the streets of Zhengzhou to the world
Back in 1997, Zhang Hongchao set up a shaved ice stall on the streets of Zhengzhou with only a few thousand yuan in start-up capital.
In the story that followed, he moved stores, changed businesses, and went through countless pitfalls. Finally, he boiled down all his lessons into four words: high quality and affordable price. In March 2025, Mixue Group was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The public offering was heavily subscribed, and the scale of frozen capital broke the Hong Kong stock market record. The shaved ice stand that year officially grew into the largest ready-made beverage company in the world.
The popularity of the capital market did not make Zhang Hongchao feel complacent. After the listing, what he talked about most was still quality, supply chain and franchisees.
Zhang Hongchao’s ambitions obviously extend beyond the country.
In the first half of this year, Mixue Ice City entered three new countries: Mexico, Kyrgyzstan, and Brazil, and its store network covers 17 countries around the world. In Southeast Asia, the company has focused on operational optimization of existing stores in Indonesia and Vietnam, and some stores in Malaysia and Vietnam have even opened up the cold chain system.
Michelle revealed that it is expected to resume a more active store opening pace overseas from 2027, and new store types such as shopping mall stores, gas station stores, and island stores are all being explored. China’s supply chain strategy is being replicated across the world.
The one that became popular all over the world before the store went overseas was the Snow King.
Since its birth in 2018, Snow King has become a phenomenal IP with a magical theme song, and now its content matrix is getting thicker and thicker. In June this year, three volumes of the Snow King Loves China comic were released, and the Snow King Comes 3 series was also launched. From January to July this year, the turnover of Mixue Bingcheng’s cultural and creative peripheral products increased by nearly 200% year-on-year. The brand has opened 27 flagship stores, and the 2,000-square-meter flagship store in Nanjing became a city check-in spot as soon as it opened.
Michelle, who sells lemonade, also started a cultural and creative business. Coupled with Lucky Coffee’s freshly ground coffee and Fresh Beer Fulujia’s new craft beer products, Mixue’s multi-brand matrix has quietly taken shape, and a consumer group focusing on affordable food and drink is about to emerge.
It is worth mentioning that despite having such a huge business footprint, Zhang Hongchao himself is so low-key that he is almost invisible.
He rarely appears in the spotlight and spends many years on the front lines of factories, warehouses and stores, leaving his applause to Snow King and his time to business. This style of making the company bigger and making oneself smaller is particularly rare in the impetuous consumption track.
結語
It took Zhang Hongchao nearly thirty years to go from a small store in an urban village in Zhengzhou to 64,000 stores in 17 countries.
In the past thirty years, the tea beverage industry has undergone numerous changes. Milk caps have become popular, fruit tea has become popular, and co-branded marketing has become popular. Many once-famous brands have now disappeared. However, Mixue Bingcheng has always been doing the same thing, deepening the supply chain inch by inch and making prices solid every minute.
In the business world, smart money is always chasing the next concept, but industrialists like Zhang Hongchao choose to do a stupid thing to the end.
What’s even more commendable is that he turned high quality and low price from a slogan into a set of replicable system capabilities. The raw materials are produced by himself, the logistics is delivered by himself, and standard machines are used to manage it. This is the trump card that Mixue dares to offer low price in any market.
Related Reading
- Original Brokerage firms cut salaries, down to investment banking department2026-10-24
- Hongguo, which has a monthly activity of 368 million, no longer needs “wool users”?2026-10-24
- Behind the five reminders, what calculation did Starbucks make?2026-10-24
- 100 billion, “smashed” at Liang Wenfeng2026-10-24
- U.S. deficit nears $2 trillion as government spending keeps climbing2026-10-17
