The top title in the beverage industry has changed hands: Nongfu Spring has surpassed Master Kong.
The top player in the beverage industry has a new owner.
According to Nongfu Spring's 2025 financial report, its annual revenue reached 52.553 billion yuan that year, surpassing Master Kong's 50.123 billion yuan (revenue from its beverage business) and firmly taking the top spot in the beverage industry.
(Source: 2025 Annual Report of Nongfu Spring)
The change in sales share also proves this point.
According to data from Maying Win, in terms of ready-to-drink tea sales share, Nongfu Spring rose from 23.7% (Q1 2025) to 31.1% (Q1 2026), while Master Kong's share dropped from 27.4% to 26.8% in the same period.
Here comes the question: Why was Nongfu Spring able to climb to the top? Why did Master Kong slide down the ranking?
Behind this, the era of "sugary iced black tea" centered on Master Kong seems to have come to an end, while Nongfu Spring has turned Oriental Leaf, which was once regarded as "the worst-tasting beverage", into a super blockbuster product.
This is a long-term war in which sugar-free tea replaces sugary beverages.
Tea Beverages Take the Lead
2025 can be said to be an important year for Nongfu Spring's "performance recovery".
After the public opinion crisis in 2024, Nongfu Spring's packaged water business recorded renewed growth in 2025, with revenue rising 17.3% year-on-year to 187.09 billion yuan.
Behind the return to growth, Nongfu Spring has adopted a two-pronged approach both online and offline.
Offline, Nongfu Spring offers promotions to terminal channels, where customers can enjoy "buy two packs get one free" when they purchase a certain quantity of goods.
Online, Nongfu Spring has been strictly controlling the sales proportion of e-commerce channels, maintaining it at around 5% on average to ensure the overall stability of the price system and dealer confidence.
Not only the packaged water business, but tea beverages have played a leading role in Nongfu Spring's first breakthrough of the 50-billion-yuan revenue threshold.
In 2025, Nongfu Spring's tea beverage business generated revenue of 215.96 billion yuan, up 29% year-on-year, accounting for 41% of total revenue, outperforming the packaged water business in both growth rate and revenue proportion.
(Source: 2025 Annual Report of Nongfu Spring)
There is no need for analysis or doubt that this is all the credit of Oriental Leaf.
Fifteen years ago, Oriental Leaf was launched, and once had a very low presence in Nongfu Spring's product portfolio. However, the company kept investing in and promoting this tea beverage, and now it has finally reaped the dividends of the rise of sugar-free beverages.
At the 2025 performance meeting, ZHONG Shanshan, Chairman of Nongfu Spring, also highlighted the tea beverage business:
In the future, Nongfu Spring will continue to inject the supporting force of the real industry into the high-end and localized development of China's tea beverage market, and consolidate its leading position in the tea beverage market.
The four words "leading position" also reveal a 15-year trend change in China's beverage market.
The Counterattack of Sugar-free Tea
In the past year, Nongfu Spring has also made key moves in the sugar-free tea sector.
On the one hand, Oriental Leaf has launched different specifications and flavors, such as the 1.5L package and tangerine peel white tea flavor, to further meet the needs of consumers at different levels.
(Source: Official website of Nongfu Spring)
On the other hand, the exclusive product "Cold Brew Longjing" launched by Oriental Leaf in cooperation with Sam's Club was soon listed, and quickly became one of the beverages with the highest repurchase rate in Sam's Club in the first quarter of this year, filling Nongfu Spring's position in the mid-to-high-end consumer channels.
Behind these strategies, the most important "engine" is the drastic change in tea beverage consumption trends.
Data from Yiou Think Tank shows that 71.4% of consumers prioritize the "sugar-free/sugar-reduced" label when buying iced black tea, and 82.9% of users prefer sugar-reduced formulas.
In the past decade, consumers were willing to pay for that overly sweet and cheap iced black tea, gaining pleasure from the dopamine released by sugar, while the healthiness of beverages was a secondary concern.
Over the past decade, most consumers have been paying more and more attention to health and sugar intake in their diets, and they will check the ingredient list and sugar content first when choosing food and beverages.
It is precisely because the domestic consumption level has gradually improved and materials have been greatly enriched over the past 15 years that most consumers pay more attention to the impact of food and beverages on physical health, and sugar-free tea has just achieved a balance between health and flavor.
Compared with drinking plain water, Oriental Leaf does not taste bland, and its price is lower than that of traditional tea leaves, which is one of its major characteristics.
The trend is changing, but for Master Kong, which is behind the iced black tea business, this is not good news.
Have to Make Changes
In 2025, Master Kong's beverage business performed poorly indeed.
Last year, the revenue of Master Kong's beverage business fell 2.9% year-on-year to 501.23 billion yuan, selling nearly 1.5 billion yuan less than in 2024.
(Source: 2025 Annual Report of Master Kong Holdings)
Among them, the revenue of its core single product tea beverage business fell 5.1% year-on-year to 206 billion yuan, selling nearly 1.1 billion yuan less than in 2024.
More crucially, the large-scale dealer network that Master Kong has built over many years is also shrinking.
By the end of 2025, the number of Master Kong's dealers decreased by 9606 compared with 2024 to 57609, marking the second consecutive year of decline in the number of Master Kong's dealers (a decrease of 9660 in 2024).
The cumulative reduction of nearly 20000 dealers in two consecutive years has caused a direct problem: Master Kong's beverages are appearing less and less on store shelves.
(Source: 2025 Annual Report of Master Kong Holdings)
Nielsen data shows that from the second half of 2024 to the first half of 2025, the number of Master Kong SKUs in convenience stores in first- and second-tier cities decreased by 37%.
The shock wave of consumer trends is reshaping the industry, and Master Kong has no choice but to change.
In fact, since 2021, Master Kong has been exploring sugar-free tea beverages, such as launching "sugar-free iced black tea" and "low-sugar high-fiber flavored iced black tea"; building the sugar-free tea brand "Tea Descendant" that focuses on Chinese health-preserving tea.
However, these strategies have not reversed consumers' inherent impression of Master Kong's "sugary" iced black tea, and the sugar-free product line has not taken the leading role in Master Kong's total revenue of over 70 billion yuan.
It is not difficult to launch dozens of new sugar-free beverages, the hardest part is to change consumers' perception that "iced black tea contains sugar".
Final Notes
If the popular products in the current beverage industry are only several new products with different flavors or specifications, Master Kong can still maintain its brand positioning in consumers' minds through rapid replication and large-scale distribution, and even seize incremental market share.
But what Master Kong is facing now is that the entire consumer trend is leaning towards "sugar-free beverages", which directly goes against the "sugary iced black tea" brand impression that Master Kong established in the past.
Therefore, this not only involves the number of new products and distribution volume, but also the core reshaping of brand value.
In the past, Master Kong's iced black tea left a deep brand impression on consumers; now, Nongfu Spring has led the market with Oriental Leaf. This leaves Master Kong with a difficult problem:
It needs to carry out product innovation while not giving up its core basic market.
Fortunately, Master Kong's instant noodle business returned to growth last year, and it has also cooperated with Sam's Club to launch a number of high-end new products, whose beverage business can also learn from this channel cooperation idea.
Master Kong can make full use of its product capabilities to cooperate with Sam's Club, Pang Donglai, Yonghui and other retailers to build channel-exclusive brands, seize shelf positions first, let consumers "know" the products before they "understand" them in depth, so as to reshape its brand impression.
In short, under the general trend dominated by sugar-free tea, Nongfu Spring may continue to outperform Master Kong for a period of time. Whether the latter can break through the dilemma depends on whether this traditional food and beverage enterprise can show the determination to make drastic reforms.
This article is from WeChat Official Account "Niudao Caijing" (ID: niudaocaijing), written by SHI Jianqiao, authorized for release by 36Kr.