The hydration beverage segment has lost its growth momentum, is Dongpeng Beverage now setting its sights on Nongfu Spring?

The growth of electrolyte beverages is slowing down, and new tea beverage products are quickly filling the gap.

I went to the convenience store to buy Dongpeng Guozhicha. I only brought money for one bottle when I entered, but came out with several bottles. Why is that?

This is because you may win a prize when opening Dongpeng Guozhicha, and the prize is one extra free bottle. Some primary school students with extreme luck have fallen into an infinite loop of redemption.

However, this kind of Dongpeng Guozhicha that makes people drink more and more has also caused widespread concern among many parents due to its high sugar content and other characteristics.

Dongpeng uses an ultra-high winning rate to promote Guozhicha, which is largely because the growth of its electrolyte beverage Bushuila has been sluggish due to increasing competitors and mismatched consumer groups.

After Nongfu Spring successfully transformed its growth curve with tea beverages such as Oriental Leaf, Dongpeng also began to learn from Nongfu Spring and gradually make efforts in tea beverage products.

However, for Dongpeng, the low gross profit margin of tea beverages, excessive promotion and marketing costs, and slowing growth of sales terminals are all thorny problems for its future development.

Dongpeng Beverage may need to put in more effort when learning from Nongfu Spring.

Frequent Winning Prizes with Guozhicha

Recently, Dongpeng Guozhicha in offline stores has become the favorite of primary school students. It is not because it tastes particularly good, but because it is easy to win a prize.

For example, some netizens only bought it twice and got more than ten bottles of Guozhicha; some netizens only spent money for one bottle and finally got 9 bottles of the beverage.

This kind of sweet drink that tests luck makes many young people eager to try. In order to increase the winning probability of the beverage, some people even developed special "tricks".

Among them, the "perspective school" pinches the bottle mouth flat with hands, then rotates the bottle body appropriately, so that they can see the prize redemption QR code under the bottle cap.

The "code school" increases the winning probability by checking the code on the outer side of the bottle cap; some netizens say that the product with the suffix "QP" or the middle number "004" has the highest winning probability.

In fact, even if consumers do not use those tricks, the winning probability of Guozhicha is already very high.

Pan Ge learned that the comprehensive winning rate of Dongpeng Guozhicha's free enjoy activity is 20%, but a supermarket clerk told Pan Ge: "The winning rate in our store is about 90%", and another merchant said: "The winning probability is about 80%."

With such a high winning rate of Dongpeng Guozhicha, are store merchants likely to lose money?

In this regard, Xiaofeng, a convenience store owner, told Pan Ge: "For the 500ml Guozhicha, it is a free enjoy activity, which means that when a customer wins a prize, the merchant gets 0.8 to 1 yuan, and Dongpeng returns one more bottle to us. For the 1L Guozhicha, it is a 1-yuan redemption activity, which means that we merchants get 1 yuan by scanning the code, and Dongpeng returns one more bottle to us."

Xiaofeng also told Pan Ge: "We prefer customers to win prizes, the only problems are that the redemption will be slow when we are too busy, and we need to restock very frequently."

On the other side, another store owner showed Pan Ge the purchase backend of Dongpeng Beverage, which shows that for 72 cases of Guozhicha, 24 bottles per case, the total prize amount reached 530 yuan. Calculated at 1 yuan per bottle, the winning rate exceeds 30%.

The super high winning rate of Dongpeng Guozhicha has made many primary and secondary students crazy about it. Especially the mechanism that the store owner can scan the code to redeem the prize exactly solves the pain point that many students do not have mobile phones.

In order to test their luck, students spend about 3 yuan to buy a 500ml bottle of Guozhicha, and it is possible to get unlimited free drinks. Some students keep redeeming prizes in the store and have too many bottles to carry.

However, the super high winning rate of Guozhicha has also caused concerns among some parents: if their children win seven or eight bottles of drinks in a row, will their sugar intake exceed the standard?

Pan Ge found that a 500ml bottle of Dongpeng Guozhicha contains about 32g of carbohydrates, with a total calorie of more than 130 kcal.

Why Is Bushuila No Longer Popular?

Dongpeng Guozhicha, which is extremely popular among primary school students, is regarded as unhealthy by many parents. The electrolyte beverage that Dongpeng previously launched specifically for health-conscious people is now facing a growth bottleneck.

During the 2026 World Cup, the electrolyte beverage Dongpeng Bushuila endorsed by football star Mbappé appeared frequently during the breaks of the matches, but this almost all-round advertising promotion did not seem to have much impact on its sales.

According to the financial report of Dongpeng Beverage, in the first half of 2026, the company's revenue from electrolyte beverages reached 1.67 billion yuan, an increase of 12% compared with 1.49 billion yuan in the same period of 2025, accounting for 13.45% of the company's total revenue.

However, in 2024 and 2025, Dongpeng's electrolyte beverage Bushuila achieved revenue of 1.495 billion yuan and 3.274 billion yuan respectively, with revenue growth rates of 280% and 119% respectively, accounting for 9.45% and 15.7% of the company's total revenue respectively.

It can be seen that Dongpeng's electrolyte beverage Bushuila was once regarded as the second growth driver of the company after Dongpeng Special Drink. But after two consecutive years of triple-digit growth, the revenue growth rate of Bushuila has dropped significantly now. What is the reason for this?

Compared with Dongpeng Special Drink, the core flagship product, the sluggish growth of Dongpeng Bushuila seems to come from two aspects:

First, there are more and more competitors in the industry.

Compared with the energy drink market of Dongpeng Special Drink, when Dongpeng Bushuila entered the electrolyte beverage industry, Pocari Sweat from Japan and Genki Forest's Alien had already been operating in the industry for many years and accumulated a certain consumer base.

In addition, with the expansion of the market scale, brands such as Nongfu Spring, Mengniu, and Three Squirrels have also entered the electrolyte beverage track across sectors, further intensifying industry competition.

Data from Zhiyan Consulting shows that in 2020, the market size of China's electrolyte beverage industry was 900 million yuan; by 2025, the market size reached 15.6 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 76.9%.

Second, it does not match the brand tone of Dongpeng.

As the flagship product of Dongpeng Beverage, Dongpeng Special Drink is known as the "holy drink at construction sites", which is very popular among manual workers and firmly binds the brand with this consumer group.

In the electrolyte beverage market, Dongpeng's past mainstream consumer groups, manual workers, are mostly not the target customers of electrolyte beverages, so the brand needs to build awareness among new consumer groups.

From the perspective of product price, the price of competing products Pocari Sweat and Alien is generally around 4 yuan, while the price of Dongpeng Bushuila of the same specification is about 3 yuan. Although low prices are easier to boost sales, for many health-conscious people, low-priced products often make them more cautious.

Is Tea Beverage a Good Business?

Perhaps it is precisely because of the sluggish growth of Dongpeng Bushuila that Dongpeng has increased the winning rate of Guozhicha, trying to open up the market with this marketing method.

In addition to the Guozhicha product, Dongpeng Beverage has also prepared other tea beverage products for health-conscious consumers to choose from.

Previously, Dongpeng launched the Shangcha series of drinks, which are 0-sugar, 0-fat and 0-calorie; this year, it launched the Beichaoha series, which has two flavors of Phoenix Dancong and Jasmine Oolong, both of which are sugar-free tea drinks.

From easy-to-win sweet drinks to healthier sugar-free tea, Dongpeng seems to want to cover more consumer groups through tea beverages. From Bushuila to various tea beverages, Dongpeng also seems to have shifted its learning target from Genki Forest to Nongfu Spring.

According to Nongfu Spring's financial report, in the whole year of 2025, the revenue of tea beverages reached 21.596 billion yuan, accounting for 41.1% of the total revenue, which for the first time exceeded the proportion of packaged water products. Among them, the revenue of the Oriental Leaf series exceeded 11.7 billion yuan, accounting for 75% of the sugar-free tea beverage market.

It can be seen that tea beverages, as the second growth curve of Nongfu Spring, have now become the company's first growth curve. This success seems to have reminded Dongpeng Beverage to start making efforts in related products.

However, for Dongpeng Beverage, although the tea beverage market has promising prospects, there are some problems in its development:

First, the gross profit margin of products is relatively low.

The financial report shows that in the first half of 2026, Dongpeng Beverage achieved revenue of 12.443 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 15.89%; the net profit reached 2.867 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.72%.

Among the three major product sectors, the gross profit margin of tea beverages is 23.66%, which is far lower than 54.67% of energy beverages and 40.59% of electrolyte beverages.

Second, the promotion cost remains high.

In the first half of 2026, Dongpeng's sales expenses reached 2.148 billion yuan, an increase of 27.8% compared with 1.682 billion yuan in the same period of last year. Among them, channel promotion expenses were 945 million yuan, an increase of nearly 40% compared with 676 million yuan in the same period of last year.

Judging from the super high winning rate of Guozhicha mentioned earlier, a large part of the promotion expenses may be spent on the unlimited prize redemption.

Finally, the growth of sales channels is slow.

In the first half of 2026, the total number of Dongpeng Beverage's sales terminals across the country reached 4.6 million, an increase of 100,000 compared with the end of 2025.

However, at the end of 2023 and the end of 2024, the number of Dongpeng Beverage's sales terminals was 3.4 million and 4 million respectively. Although the number of sales terminals is still growing, the growth rate has declined.

It can be seen that for Dongpeng, which is focusing on tea beverages, the above three problems must be solved if it wants to achieve performance growth through tea beverages. Otherwise, Dongpeng Beverage, which is trying to learn from Nongfu Spring, may end up in an awkward situation where it fails to achieve its goals.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Zinc Consumption Research Center", the author is Pan Ge, and it is published with authorization from 36Kr.