From coffee to draft beer, Guming does not want to only sell milk tea.

Guming is increasingly no longer just a milk tea shop. 

On September 5, a beer machine appeared in a Guming store at Hangzhou Hubin Intime in77, starting the test of serving freshly tapped draft beer; on September 19, Guming opened the country's first "Fresh Experience Store" in Nanjing, launching handmade Gelato. For more than a year before that, Guming also installed coffee machines in its stores on a large scale, and added breakfast service to its operating hours. 

Coffee, breakfast, ice cream and draft beer seem to be four completely different businesses, but in Guming's latest financial report, they point to the same question: when a milk tea brand already has more than 14,000 stores, what else can drive its growth in the next step? 

As of the end of June this year, Guming has owned 14,351 stores, with the store GMV reaching 19.747 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 40.1%. However, the net number of newly added stores in the same period was only 797, significantly lower than the 1,265 in the same period last year, and the net store opening speed slowed down obviously. 

In addition, financial data shows that in the first half of this year, Guming's revenue reached 7.47 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 31.9%, and the net profit attributable to shareholders was 1.571 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 3.4%. However, this was mainly affected by the fair value change gain of convertible preferred shares in the same period last year. Excluding this factor, Guming's adjusted core profit increased by 53.3% year-on-year. 

The net store opening speed has slowed down significantly, but Guming's revenue and adjusted core profit still maintain growth, which indicates that the driving force of its growth is changing. 

In the past few years, Guming focused on replicating 30-square-meter small stores into more than 14,000 stores. After reaching the 10,000-store scale, the new problem facing it is that when it is getting harder to open new stores, how to make the existing stock stores sell more products in more time periods and more consumption scenarios? 

I. Tea Brands Have Entered the Post-10000-Store Era

Store closure rate is one of the important data for observing chain brands. If franchisees cannot make profits, they will close their stores, and the scale of tea brands can only be maintained by continuously recruiting new franchisees. 

In the past year, the store closure speed of the new tea industry has accelerated significantly. According to the statistics of Zhaimen Food Eye, in the past year (from mid-2025 to mid-2026), the number of closed stores exceeded 110,000, and the net reduction of stores expanded to 43,200. In terms of store closure rate, the overall store closure rate of the industry in 2025-2026 is 16.2%, which means that about one in every six stores has ceased operation. 

Guming is a rare exception. In 2025, the closure rate of Guming's franchised stores was about 4.8%, which is at a relatively low level in the industry along with Mixue Ice City.

What is more interesting is that 2025 was exactly the year when Guming opened stores the fastest. In this year, Guming opened 4,292 new stores, and the total number of stores quickly exceeded 13,000 throughout the year. With low store closure rate and high-speed store opening happening at the same time, Guming was still expanding rapidly last year. 

However, after reaching the 10,000-store scale, the situation began to change. 

In the first half of this year, Guming opened 1,318 new stores and closed 521 stores at the same time, with a net increase of 797 stores. In the same period last year, the number of net newly added stores of Guming was 1,265. That is to say, within one year, the number of net stores opened by Guming decreased by nearly 40%.

For a tea brand that has reached the scale of 10,000 stores, the model of continuing to expand through franchising is being tested. 

When the number of stores is small, opening a new store means covering more consumers, as well as the increase of brand revenue and GMV; but when the number of stores has reached tens of thousands, it will be more and more difficult to find suitable locations, and there may also be overlapping customer sources between new stores and old stores.

At this time, the significance of the number of stores itself begins to decline. 

The management of Guming also began to weaken the indicator of "how many stores to open" this year. The company stated at the performance meeting that the net number of newly opened stores is not a mandatory KPI that must be completed, and whether the store has operating value is more important than simply pursuing the number of stores. 

When tea brands have successively broken through the 10,000-store scale, what is really worth paying attention to is the operation data of single store. 

In terms of GMV, in the first half of the year, the average daily GMV of a single Guming store was about 7,800 yuan, a year-on-year increase of about 2.6%; the average daily sales volume of a single store was about 440 cups, which was basically the same as the same period last year. At the same time, the total number of cups increased by 35.9%, reaching about 1.11 billion cups. 

In contrast, other tea brands have experienced declines of varying degrees. Also in the first half of this year, the same-store GMV of Bawangchaji in Greater China in the second quarter decreased by 16.1% year-on-year, and the average daily sales of a single Nayuki store dropped from 7,600 yuan to 7,000 yuan; Mixue Group also disclosed that the average turnover of its main brand stores in the first half of the year recorded a double-digit decline. 

However, the stable GMV of a single store does not mean that there is no operating pressure on the stores. 

In the past year, the industry has experienced fierce price competition and a fierce war of food delivery subsidies. Platform subsidies have brought more orders, but expenses such as delivery and promotion are also increasing, and the money that franchisees actually get has become less instead.

In the third quarter of 2025, food delivery once accounted for 60% of Guming's GMV, and the actual income rate of franchisees also dropped from more than 75% before the subsidy war to about 70%. In the first half of this year, Guming began to adjust the price system on the food delivery side, raising the minimum order value for delivery and product prices, and the actual income rate rebounded to about 78%. According to the calculation of Haitong International, this is equivalent to an increase of 3 to 4 yuan in the price of each food delivery order. 

The operating efficiency of the headquarters has also improved. In the first half of this year, Guming's revenue increased by 31.9% year-on-year, while sales and distribution expenses and administrative expenses increased by 20.8% and 12.4% respectively, both lower than the revenue growth rate; the gross profit margin also increased from 31.5% in the same period last year to 33.4%. 

Although the net profit attributable to shareholders decreased by 3.4% year-on-year to 1.571 billion yuan, this figure was affected by the one-off fair value change gain of financial liabilities in the same period last year. Excluding this factor, the adjusted profit increased by 44.4% year-on-year, and the adjusted core profit increased by 53.3% year-on-year. 

After the store opening speed slows down, how to make the existing 14,000 stores sell more products has become a more realistic growth proposition for Guming. 

II. What Else Can 14,000 Milk Tea Stores Sell? 

When the store scale is still expanding rapidly, there is no obvious decline in the single-store performance of Guming, and coffee is one of the important variables. 

Meng Hailin, CFO of Guming, said at the performance meeting that the company would hardly maintain the growth in the first half of the year without coffee and morning business. As of the end of June, about 13,500 Guming stores have been equipped with coffee machines, with a coverage rate of about 94%. 

The significance of coffee for Guming is also changing from a new category to a part of store operation. 

Guming disclosed that during non-promotion periods, coffee sales have steadily accounted for more than 20% of store sales, and exceeded 25% during event periods. CICC's research report estimates that the current cup volume of Guming's coffee accounts for about 20%.

More importantly, what coffee brings to Guming may not just be additional sales. 

The consumption peak of milk tea is usually concentrated in the afternoon, while coffee naturally corresponds to the consumption scenarios of breakfast, commuting and morning. Guming's deployment of coffee machines in most stores is equivalent to trying to make use of the originally relatively idle morning time period without significantly increasing the number of stores. 

At present, there are roughly two paths for the tea industry to develop coffee business.

One type is to create a separate brand, such as Lucky Coffee under Mixue Group, which already has more than 10,000 stores. The other type is to directly add coffee products in the original tea stores, to which both Nayuki and Guming belong. 

Behind the two paths are two different sets of growth logics. 

Independent brands need to regain consumer awareness and build a store network, but they can have a clearer category positioning; adding coffee directly under the main brand can reuse existing stores, franchisees, supply chains and consumer traffic, and the deployment speed of new categories is also faster. 

It is worth noting that the expansion of independent coffee brands has begun to slow down.

According to data from GeoHey, Lucky Coffee currently has about 7,900 to 8,000 stores, and the number of newly opened stores of Lucky Coffee has slowed down significantly since the beginning of this year, with only 14 new stores added in August, compared with 892 new stores added in August last year. 

At the same time, Mixue also began to further add coffee products to its own Mixue Ice City stores this year. According to its 2026 mid-year report, as of the end of June, Mixue Ice City has deployed freshly ground coffee machines in about 6,000 stores, and upgraded the coffee preparation method from "fresh brew" to "freshly ground". 

From this perspective, coffee does not have to exist as a completely new brand, and it can also become an incremental category in the original store network. Luckin Coffee's expansion into tea business actually follows a similar logic.

In August 2024, Luckin Coffee launched "Light Jasmine Light Milk Tea", and then successively added products such as fruit tea and matcha, and put forward the consumption scenario of "coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon". 

The light milk tea sold more than 44 million cups in the first month. By 2025, Luckin Coffee launched more than 140 new products throughout the year, and the non-coffee drinks accounted for more than 20% of the total cup volume. As of the end of May 2026, the cumulative sales of Luckin Coffee's non-coffee drinks exceeded 20 billion yuan. 

After reaching the 10,000-store scale, both tea and coffee brands have begun to look for increments in each other's business. 

III. Can Draft Beer Become the Next Growth Point?

After the coffee business proved to be successful, Guming began to set its sights on later consumption time periods. 

In September, Guming quietly launched two types of freshly tapped draft beer in a store at Hangzhou Hubin Intime in77, with 500ml priced at about 12 to 15 yuan. This is still a small-scale test at present, and Guming has not announced further national expansion plans. 

This time, Guming still did not create a separate draft beer brand like Mixue Ice City, but directly installed beer machines in the existing milk tea stores. Logically, this is not much different from the coffee business: selling coffee during the day and beer at night, so that the same store can cover more consumption time periods. 

But beer may be more difficult to replicate than coffee.

Coffee has relatively stable consumption connections with scenarios such as breakfast, commuting, and afternoon work, while beer relies more on evening social and dinner scenarios. The fact that consumers are willing to buy a cup of coffee in a milk tea store does not mean that they will also sit down and drink beer in the same store. 

Some tea brands have already paid trial and error costs for this before. 

In 2024, Cha Yan Yue Se launched "Day and Night Poetry, Wine & Tea · Art Pub", trying to enter the night light intoxication consumption scenario through the "tea + alcohol" model. More than two years later, this sub-brand announced that all its stores will be closed before October 31 this year. Cha Yan Yue Se's own explanation is that the relevant business model has not been verified, and the in-store alcohol service and the so-called "third light intoxication space" have not formed a sustainable and healthy cash flow. 

Mixue Group is also trying to enter the beer track. In 2025, Mixue Group acquired 53% equity of the draft beer brand Fulujia and incorporated it into the group system, but Fulujia still maintains an independent brand and independent store network. 

Different brands have chosen different paths. Some turn the alcohol business into an independent space, some acquire mature draft beer brands, while Guming chooses to directly put new categories into its existing stores. For Guming, which has more than 14,000 stores, this is a relatively lightweight trial and error method, which does not need to rebuild the store network, and can first observe whether consumers are willing to pay for this new scenario. 

Behind this cross-border expansion is the fact that the high-speed growth period of new tea is passing.

Data from Red Restaurant Industry Research Institute shows that the growth rate of the new tea market size was 19.3% in 2023, dropped to 8.2% in 2024, and further dropped to 6.4% in 2025. At the same time, the number of stores has also shifted from expansion to contraction. 

Head brands have also begun to slow down their expansion speed. In the first half of 2026, the total revenue of the six listed tea companies increased by about 9% year-on-year, and the total net profit was about 5.373 billion yuan, down more than 2.7% year-on-year. At the same time, the store opening pace of brands such as Guming and Bawangchaji has also slowed down significantly.

When the growth rate of market size slows down and the number of stores also faces pressure, the space to continue to obtain growth by opening new stores is naturally getting more and more limited. As a result, from coffee, baked goods to alcohol, leading tea brands are all trying to expand their business boundaries. 

For Guming, coffee has provided a sample that new categories can use the original stores and supply chain to open up previously underutilized consumption time periods. But whether draft beer can replicate this logic still requires more time to verify. 

After reaching the 10,000-store scale, Guming urgently needs to prove how much new business in its existing stock stores can be truly converted into growth.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Market Value List" (ID: shizhibang2021), written by Xiang Qing; edited by