Why is it getting increasingly difficult for Liangmianzhen to win and fulfill hotel orders?
This article is from the WeChat official account "Space Explorer", written by Wu Shuang, and published with authorization from 36Kr.
Recently, Liangmianzhen, a time-honored brand that has supplied toothpaste and toothbrushes to hotels for 40 years, released its financial report, stating that its revenue declined in the first half of this year with a net loss of 4.68 million yuan, followed immediately by the resignation of its general manager and a major reshuffle of the board of directors. More notably, the company listed the contraction of its hotel supplies business as a key reason for its performance pressure. Why have the hotel supplies that once supported Liangmianzhen's performance now become a drag on its development?
01
Sold 700 million tubes of toothpaste, yet lost 4.68 million yuan
The recently released semi-annual report of Liangmianzhen shows that in the first half of 2026, the company's operating revenue reached 474 million yuan, down 9.22% year on year; the attributable net loss to shareholders was 4.6812 million yuan, and the non-recurring profit and loss deducted net loss was 6.6022 million yuan, while the same period last year recorded a profit of 4.81 million yuan in the non-recurring profit and loss deducted net profit, marking a direct turn from profit to loss.
What is more noteworthy is that the company attributed one of the reasons for its performance pressure to the hotel supplies business. The company stated that the performance decline is mainly due to the shrinking scale of the hotel supplies business of its subsidiary Liangmianzhen (Jiangsu) Industrial Co., Ltd., which is affected by factors such as declining market demand and intensifying industry competition. As the main operating entity of Liangmianzhen's hotel supplies business, Jiangsu Industrial achieved operating revenue of 341 million yuan in the first half of the year, but recorded an operating loss of 3.3508 million yuan and a net loss of 3.1908 million yuan.
Along with the pressure on financial performance, obvious changes have taken place in Liangmianzhen's personnel arrangement. On August 26, the company's general manager Gong Huiquan stepped down and was succeeded by Liu Caifu. On September 2, the company further announced that 6 people including Zhou Yunxiang (Chairman), Gong Huiquan (Vice Chairman), Xiong Jianfeng (Director), Liu Gui (Director), Sun Xuedong (Director) and Yang Ling (Vice President) collectively resigned on September 1 due to the change of controlling shareholder and work adjustment.
This round of management adjustment did not come without warning. In March this year, Liuzhou Industrial Investment and Development Group, the original controlling shareholder of Liangmianzhen, transferred its 28% stake to Guangxi State Control Capital Operation Group Co., Ltd. After the transaction is completed, the actual controller of the company changed from the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Liuzhou to the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
The decline in performance superimposed on the management adjustment has once again put this time-honored domestic brand under the spotlight. In 1978, Liangmianzhen launched China's first Chinese herbal toothpaste, and quickly opened up the market with its differentiated positioning of "Chinese herbal medicine for gum protection". From 1986 to 2001, Liangmianzhen toothpaste ranked first in the production and sales volume of domestic toothpaste for many consecutive years, with the annual production and sales volume exceeding 400 million tubes in 2001. In 2004, Liangmianzhen was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, becoming the first enterprise in China's toothpaste industry to go public with its own brand, and thus won the aura of "the first share of toothpaste".
At that time, Liangmianzhen was a truly national brand. In 2003, on the eve of its listing, Liangmianzhen's toothpaste business revenue reached 442 million yuan, accounting for the majority of the company's total annual revenue. Subsequently, foreign brands accelerated their entry into the market and competition in the local market intensified, leading to a continuous decline in Liangmianzhen's household toothpaste business. The sales revenue of toothpaste in 2004 had dropped to about 292 million yuan, and continued to shrink afterwards.
After the toothpaste business encountered bottlenecks, Liangmianzhen began to look for new growth space, and hotel supplies became one of the most important paths. Liangmianzhen's hotel business first started with "travel-sized toothpaste". According to the annual reports over the years, the company's travel toothpaste business started in 2004, achieving revenue of about 18 million yuan that year with a gross profit margin of about 28.5%. Since then, travel-sized toothpaste has gradually become the entry point for Liangmianzhen to enter the hotel supply chain, and its products have expanded from toothpaste to disposable hotel supplies such as toothbrushes, combs, slippers and soap. This transformation was once quite successful: in 2015, the sales volume of Liangmianzhen's travel-sized toothpaste reached 980 million tubes, and further approached 1.6 billion tubes by 2024.
In particular, its subsidiary Liangmianzhen (Jiangsu) Industrial Co., Ltd. has gradually become the core carrier of the hotel supplies business. This business line once performed very well. In 2023, Jiangsu Industrial achieved operating revenue of 696 million yuan, up 65.54% year on year, accounting for 69.95% of the total revenue; its net profit reached 17.788 million yuan, contributing as high as 78% to the net profit of the listed company, and it became a supplier for hotel brands such as Home Inn, Atour and Echeng. That year, Liangmianzhen turned its attributable net profit from loss to profit relying on the substantial growth of its hotel supplies business.
By 2024, the importance of this business further increased. Jiangsu Industrial achieved operating revenue of 761 million yuan, accounting for 72.27% of Liangmianzhen's annual revenue, with a gross profit margin of 7.69%. In contrast, the parent company's household toothpaste business revenue was only 180 million yuan. In other words, today's Liangmianzhen is no longer a company that mainly makes money by selling household toothpaste. Hotel supplies have instead become the real pillar of its revenue. In this process, Liangmianzhen has transformed itself from a C-end-oriented toothpaste brand to a B-end-oriented hotel consumables supplier.
Beneath the surface of rising volume and price lies the real fatal flaw of this business: price. In the first half of this year, Liangmianzhen sold 712 million tubes of travel-sized toothpaste, with operating revenue of only 61.0462 million yuan, equivalent to about 8.6 cents per tube, and such a "stable" selling price has been maintained for nearly ten years. Over the past decade, sales volume has risen from single digit to 1.6 billion tubes, while the unit price has not increased at all. In contrast, the average transaction price of mainstream toothpaste on e-commerce platforms is generally between 25 yuan and 50 yuan, and brands such as Canban even sell their products at 50 yuan to 75 yuan.
A word from Lan Jin, General Manager of Liangmianzhen (Jiangsu) Industrial, fully illustrates this situation: as hotel industry clients grow larger and more concentrated, the profit of factories is getting lower and lower, "we are almost reduced to the status of porters. The sales volume is getting larger and larger, but there is hardly any profit."
From "life-saving straw" to "performance pressure", it only took a few years. Is it that Liangmianzhen's own hotel supplies business has problems, or is the hotel supplies business itself undergoing changes?
02
Why are Liangmianzhen's hotel orders getting harder to get?
If only Liangmianzhen's hotel supplies business is declining, it may be attributed to the enterprise's own operational problems. But looking at a broader perspective, we will find that similar pressure is spreading along the hotel supplies industry chain.
For example, Ming Fai International, a professional hotel supplies supplier, recorded revenue of about HK$1.882 billion from its travel supplies business in 2025, down 2.5% year on year, accounting for 84% of the group's total revenue. More notably, the pre-tax profit of this business decreased by 34.8% year on year, and the overall gross profit margin also dropped from 25.1% to 21.6%. That is to say, hotel supplies are not unsalable, but it is getting harder and harder to make profits.
Looking at the disposable slippers market which is closer to the domestic hotel market, in 2024, many slipper factories faced insufficient orders and declining operating rates, and some manufacturers that expanded production earlier even withdrew from the market. Hanji Town in Yangzhou, known as "China's Capital of Toothbrushes" and "China's Capital of Hotel Daily Necessities", gathers more than 4,000 toothbrush enterprises with annual sales exceeding 30 billion yuan. However, local industrial and commercial information shows that since 2026, many hotel supplies enterprises including Yangzhou Yunbao Hotel Supplies Co., Ltd. have been deregistered for "dissolution by resolution".
This actually shows that the old business logic of the hotel supplies industry that "hotels have demands and suppliers get orders" is loosening.
First, the centralization of hotel group supply chains has reduced suppliers to "porters". After the chain rate increases, hotel procurement becomes more and more concentrated, and the bargaining power of hotel groups is also getting stronger. In the past, suppliers only needed to win over one property owner or one hotel, but under the current supply chain system of hotel groups, a large number of suppliers compete with each other in price, quality and technology, and they want to win these "large orders" from leading hotel groups even if they earn less. For suppliers, there is no need for overwhelming advertisements. What they compete for is who can produce qualified products and ensure continuous supply at the lowest cost.
For hotels, this means higher procurement efficiency and lower cost per room; but for suppliers, as clients grow larger and orders increase, profits do not necessarily get thicker. In 2024, Liangmianzhen already admitted in its reply to regulatory inquiries that although hotel daily necessities contribute most of the revenue, their gross profit margin is very low. Since it mainly serves large clients such as hotel groups and chain hotels, the bargaining space in business negotiations is limited. In addition, some products need to be purchased externally for supporting use, which further reduces the gross profit margin. The company also clearly mentioned that enterprises in this industry are scattered with low concentration. It is essentially a TOB business with weak bargaining power over downstream clients.
This is also the reason why the hotel supplies revenue of Liangmianzhen's Jiangsu subsidiary can grow from 696 million yuan in 2023 to 761 million yuan in 2024, but the gross profit margin is only 7.69%. The scale can be expanded, but the price is getting harder and harder to negotiate. What hotel groups need is a stable, large-scale and cost-controllable supply chain, while what suppliers want is higher profits. The goals of the two sides are not completely consistent. As the supply chain system of hotel groups becomes more and more mature, the traditional growth model of hotel supplies enterprises relying on "large clients and large orders" is increasingly difficult to form a real profit barrier.
Second, at the consumer end, washing and care products have changed from "sanitary products" to "experience props". In the past, hotel washing and care products were the most inconspicuous things in the room, and no one cared what brand they were as long as they could be used. But now, some people stay in hotels just to "get high-end washing and care products for free", and they will search the entire network for the same style of comfortable slippers and good-smelling shampoo... Even the author has searched the entire network for the hotel's "same style" body lotion.
Opening social platforms, the "check-out ceremony at Bulgari Hotels" has become a hot topic from time to time. Young people specially bring sub-packaging bottles to high-end hotels to "get free amenities", and posts complaining about hotel washing and care products can be seen everywhere, such as "shampoo makes hair as dry as straw" and "body wash smells like dish soap". At the same time, washing and care products with good experience can also make users take the initiative to post recommendations. A set of washing and care products is becoming a selling point of hotel rooms.
Ordinary washing and care products can no longer meet the demand. Some hotels have begun to rethink the value of these items. In the practice of transforming washing and care products from "consumables" to "brand assets", several ways of operating washing and care products have been derived. First, directly purchase high-end international washing and care brands. Luxury hotels such as Waldorf Astoria, The Rosewood, InterContinental, Conrad and Mandarin Oriental generally adopt amenities of brands such as Aesop, Le Labo, Byredo and Atelier Cologne, using mature brand assets to directly endorse the guest room experience.
Second, launch co-branded customized products with washing and care brands. The EDITION Hotel under Marriott gave up general amenities, and Le Labo exclusively developed a signature fragrance for it, which later became one of the brand's identification symbols. The HUALUXE Hotels and Resorts under InterContinental cooperated with the oriental lifestyle brand "Shang Xia" to launch a co-branded washing and care series. This year, BTG Homeinns reached a strategic cooperation with CHANDO Group, and the first batch of customized washing and care products entered the stores of mid-to-high-end brands such as Jianguo Puyin and Homeinns Plus. CHANDO revealed its logic: exposing well-known brand logos in guest rooms can enhance guest experience and create differentiated memory points, "the incremental cost of brand washing and care products is negligible, which can be described as 'small investment, large return'".
Third, hotel groups cultivate their own washing and care brands. Banyan Tree uses its own brand Banyan Tree in all its hotels, forming differentiation with natural raw materials and destination styles, and has extended its business to retail channels.
Hotels are still purchasing washing and care products, but they are no longer only considering price and supply stability. They begin to care about whether the product is easy to use, what the smell is like, whether it can reflect the brand tonality, and even whether it can be remembered by guests.
Third, the green transformation of the hotel industry. In the past, toothbrushes, toothpaste, combs, razors and other items were standard configurations in guest rooms. Hotels purchased according to the number of rooms and placed them there no matter whether guests used them or not. As the "plastic restriction" requirements gradually cover the accommodation industry, and the environmental awareness of consumers and hotels awakens, the disposable supplies that were previously placed by default in guest rooms are changing from "standard configuration" to "provided on demand".
In its reply to the 2024 annual report inquiry, Liangmianzhen has already listed "enhanced consumer environmental awareness and increased demand for environmentally friendly hotel supplies" as one of the industry changes. For hotels, reducing the use of disposable supplies is not only an environmental protection requirement, but also a real business accounting. According to actual industry operation cases, a mid-range chain hotel with 325 rooms can indeed save about 60,000 yuan in procurement costs every year after removing the standard configuration of "six small items" such as toothbrushes and combs in guest rooms.
Now more and more hotels are reducing the fixed placement of disposable supplies, turning to providing them on demand and collecting them centrally. More and more washing and care products are using large packages, wall-mounted dispensers and refills. For traditional hotel supplies enterprises, the impact is very direct: the incremental space of traditional categories that are highly dependent on one-time consumption and rely on large volume shipments is being compressed little by little.
Fourth, OEM factories directly intercept the market and seize the "cheap substitute" business at lower costs. There are more and more professional and cheaper OEM and ODM factories in the industry. Now hotels can put forward their own product requirements, customize the formula, fragrance and packaging, and then hand them over to the mature supply chain for production. For hotels, it is not necessary to look for a hotel supplies brand with a long history. As long as the products meet the requirements, the price is appropriate and the supply is stable, they can become suppliers.
Recently, hotels under an international hotel group were complained by consumers that the washing and care products were "substituted". It was claimed that the designated British brand thisworks was replaced by FORMETRUE with a highly similar appearance. The hotel duty manager even admitted that the product was "counterfeit" and was generally provided to group guests. The company behind FORMETRUE was only registered in 2023.
This is not an isolated case. As early as in an undercover media investigation in 2018, some suppliers said directly that for hotel washing and care products, "the packaging is more expensive than the content", and if you want the smell of any big brand, you can solve it by "deploying the flavor according to the demand". OEM factories like FORMETRUE have overwhelming advantages over large-scale enterprises in quotation and flexibility. For example, the 8-cent unit price of Liangmianzhen includes the cost of brand, quality control and listed company, while OEM factories can remove all these costs.
Are there still opportunities for traditional hotel supplies?