The home appliance industry is experiencing a harsh winter, while coffee makers are quietly seizing the overlooked market gaps.

The explosion of a product category sometimes does not necessarily stem from its own strong competitiveness, but from competitors that have paved the way for it in advance.

Before Luckin and Cotti launched the 9.9-yuan price war, China's automatic coffee machine market had been developing for more than 20 years, but it had always been a negligible presence in the home appliance market. It was not until chain coffee brands spent several years cultivating consumers' habits of drinking coffee daily that freshly made coffee became a rigid demand in people's lives.

Against this backdrop, people who drink coffee every day start to do the math: the daily cost starts at 9.9 yuan, which adds up to more than 3,600 yuan a year. It is more cost-effective to buy a coffee machine and make coffee at home. As a result, the demand squeezed out by the price war spills over to the coffee machine market.

Data from AVC shows that in 2025, the cumulative sales of coffee machines through online channels reached about 4.137 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36.75%; the sales volume was 2.23 million units, a year-on-year increase of 36.42%. It is worth noting that almost no other home appliance category can achieve such performance in the existing saturated market.

Players like Luckin never expected that after years of price wars with real money, they would end up making a wedding dress for the coffee machine industry.

01

Luckin "Plants Trees", Coffee Machines "Enjoy the Shade"

Before Luckin and its peers launched the 9.9-yuan price war, China's freshly made coffee market had long been a consumer product for social currency and the third space: represented by Starbucks, it was priced at around 30 yuan, focusing on scenarios such as high-end office buildings and core business districts in first- and second-tier cities.

For ordinary consumers, they either get used to drinking instant coffee, or treat freshly made coffee as a "luxury expense" to reward themselves occasionally.

After the rise of local brands such as Luckin, the threshold for freshly made coffee has been rapidly lowered. The biggest contribution of the 9.9-yuan price war is not just lowering the price, but completing the habit education of "drinking coffee daily" in several years. The expansion of chain stores makes buying coffee as easy as walking into a convenience store downstairs.

According to the *China Urban Coffee Development Report*, before the full outbreak of the price war in 2023, the per capita annual consumption of coffee in China was about 12 cups, and this figure has grown to nearly 30 cups by 2025.

Up to now, 9.9-yuan coffee drinks can still be seen everywhere. However, more and more consumers who are loyal fans of freshly made coffee begin to feel the pinch after doing a simple calculation.

Taking a 9.9-yuan coffee drink per day as an example, it costs about 3,600 yuan a year, which is more than the price of many high-end automatic coffee machines. Therefore, for these consumers who have developed the habit of drinking freshly made coffee and cannot go back to instant coffee, if they do not want to pay at least 9.9 yuan for coffee every day, the only way out seems to be to move a coffee machine into their own kitchen.

Data from AVC shows that in 2025, the cumulative sales of coffee machines through online channels reached about 4.137 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36.75%; the sales volume was 2.23 million units, a year-on-year increase of 36.42%. Coffee machine brand De'Longhi also revealed in an interview that the proportion of young consumer groups buying automatic coffee machines in the domestic market increased significantly in 2025. Even if they are still renting houses at present, more and more people are willing to make space on the countertop for coffee machines.

Offline chain coffee meets the functional demand for refreshing, while household coffee machines have an additional layer of emotional value. Every morning, you make a cup of coffee with a coffee machine in your own kitchen, enjoying the "one-tap coffee output" as well as the exclusive sense of ritual.

On social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu, automatic coffee machines have become hit products that create a cozy home atmosphere.

However, the sense of ritual is only the result after buying a coffee machine, not the core driving factor. The real influencing factor is that consumers shift from 9.9-yuan per cup to 3-yuan per cup: they cannot live without freshly made coffee but do not want to pay 9.9 yuan every day.

Compared with 9.9-yuan freshly made coffee, even considering the coffee beans you need to buy yourself, a thousands-of-yuan automatic coffee machine can usually "pay back the cost" in about a year. But how many consumers who buy coffee machines place orders after figuring out all the bills? In fact, after the coffee machine industry takes over the spillover demand from the 9.9-yuan price war, the differentiation trend of the industry is more unexpected.

02

High-end Segment Rises, Entry-level Models Disappear

The coffee machine category is growing against the trend. But for the conventional consumer market, usually the wealthy people buy expensive products, and cautious people buy cheap entry-level products. The reality does not seem to be the case.

Data from AVC shows that the sales proportion of coffee machine products priced at around 100 yuan is only 0.21%, showing a year-on-year downward trend; the sales volume of entry-level main products priced between 500 yuan and 2000 yuan dropped by 2.75%. In contrast, in the price range of 5000 yuan to 8000 yuan, sales increased by 4.04% year on year; the top models priced above 8000 yuan even show an overall upward trend.

In short, low-end coffee machine products are ignored, the mid-end market is also shrinking, and only the high-end series is developing rapidly.

Why does the coffee machine market form such a situation? Essentially, this is not a simple consumption stratification, but a rational analysis of the change of reference frame.

First look at the consumer group that tends to choose lower-priced products. For entry-level automatic coffee machines in the price range of 500 yuan to 2000 yuan, the problem faced by consumers is not whether to buy a coffee machine, but what the coffee machine can really replace after they buy it.

The direct competitor of entry-level coffee machines is the 9.9-yuan freshly made coffee downstairs. Taking a 1500-yuan coffee machine as an example, the average daily cost for one cup in three years is about 1.4 yuan, which seems much cheaper than 9.9 yuan. But in the minds of consumers, the whole process of grinding, extracting, cleaning and maintenance will take a lot of extra time every day. Once the machine breaks down, the maintenance cost will not be low, and there is also a certain probability of operation failure.

Besides, when the automatic coffee machine is left unused, the payback period will only be greatly extended.

The deeper problem is that the functions provided by entry-level coffee machines have strong substitutability. No matter you make American coffee or latte, you can buy it everywhere at the price of 9.9 yuan. For ordinary consumers who mainly pursue daily refreshment, entry-level automatic coffee machines do not bring advantages in economy and experience, but provide a more cumbersome alternative, so the story of "self-sufficiency" cannot be justified.

Then look at the consumer group that tends to choose higher-priced products. Buyers of high-end machines will not compare with Luckin and its peers, but target specialty coffee such as Starbucks, with higher requirements for taste and experience. Imagine that if you drink two cups of coffee every day with an 8000-yuan high-end coffee machine, even including the cost of coffee beans and other materials, you can pay back the cost in more than one year compared with Starbucks.

If only from the perspective of use frequency, this account does not add up at all. Combined with the data released by second-hand platforms such as Xianyu, the idle rate of household coffee machines is as high as 6.5%, with an average annual use of only about 5 times. If an 8000-yuan high-end coffee machine is only used 5 times a year, the cost will naturally rise sharply.

Obviously, consumers who spend nearly 10,000 yuan on high-end coffee machines are not calculating this account. What they really think about in their minds is the sunk cost behind it: "I have already spent 8000 yuan, so I must use it."

This is the reverse driving effect brought by high-end coffee machines. In order to be worthy of the machine they bought at a huge cost, users will select specialty coffee beans, deeply study extraction parameters, and actively post beautiful photos on WeChat Moments after making a good cup of coffee.

This unique emotional experience brought by the "home coffee shop" is often unavailable from 9.9-yuan chain coffee. This is the core competitiveness behind high-end models: what they sell is not the function of making coffee, but a product positioning that users cannot easily give up.

In short, buying an entry-level coffee machine and leaving it unused makes people feel that there is no big loss even if they do not use it. But leaving a high-end machine unused will bring psychological pressure that it is a waste not to use it, which in turn promotes the use frequency of the latter.

From these two perspectives, it is not difficult to find that coffee machines in the middle price range mainly sell functions and cost performance, and are just caught between two more convincing product positioning. Buying an entry-level machine is not as convenient as buying a 9.9-yuan coffee downstairs casually, while buying a high-end machine to pursue quality is very "cost-effective" compared with 30-40-yuan Starbucks after long-term use. Finally, a strange pattern is formed where cheap products are not favored and high-end products continue to grow.

For example, De'Longhi, the industry leader, still occupies the first market share, but its share has also dropped by 4.54%; on the contrary, LAMARZOCCO, a high-end brand with an average price of more than 30,000 yuan, has entered the top 10 list of best-selling brands.

03

Selling the Product Is Just the Beginning of Charging

In 2021, the market size of coffee machines in China was only 2.6 billion yuan, and it has grown to 6.5 billion yuan by 2025. In terms of sales volume, the cumulative domestic sales volume of coffee machines in 2021 was 1.862 million units, which increased to 3.481 million units in 2025, almost doubling in 5 years. In terms of penetration rate, the household penetration rate of China's coffee machine market increased from 12.3% in 2021 to 21.7% in 2025, and there is still huge room for growth compared with the penetration rate of more than 80% in European and American countries.

The coffee machine market has huge growth potential, but the most basic intelligent functions of products such as APP reservation, parameter memory and automatic cleaning have long become the industry standard in 2025. At present, coffee machine brands pay more attention to various consumables that consumers need to repurchase continuously after buying the machines.

Recall that for the entire home appliance industry in the past, the traditional sales path was often a "one-off deal": after selling the product, the work was basically completed except for necessary after-sales service.

Coffee machines are different. Taking Nespresso's capsule coffee machine as an example, its selling price in foreign markets is only dozens of euros, which cannot even cover the production cost. However, the profit margin of coffee capsules that need to be repurchased continuously afterwards is as high as 60%. If users buy 300 coffee capsules a year, they can make up for the initial loss on the hardware in only three months.

A similar development path has been directly transplanted to China. Although the gross profit margins of mainstream coffee machine brands such as De'Longhi and Philips remain at a high level of more than 40%, their real profit source is usually not the machines themselves.

Through its own member system, De'Longhi compresses the repurchase cycle to 47 days. An average De'Longhi user needs to buy consumables in the brand's ecosystem every one and a half months. Philips has launched a delivery subscription service for cleaning supplies and filter elements, where users can receive relevant consumables regularly after binding monthly deductions.

Brands are striving to turn automatic coffee machines into an entry that can continuously generate revenue. Selling the product is just the beginning of a series of charging activities.

It shares similarities with the problems of sweeping robots: if the consumables of coffee machines are relatively universal, and there are even many cheaper alternative products, in this case, brands will lose their monopoly position to charge continuously. The high-level intelligent functions brought by AI empowerment try to solve this problem and keep consumers in the brand's ecosystem.

Imagine that if a user spends half a year or even longer letting the coffee machine remember that he likes 90℃ water temperature, 15g coffee powder, 25 seconds of extraction time, 3mm thick milk foam and other parameters for drinking coffee, the coffee machine will remember the user's taste preferences through various parameters. At this time, what the user buys is no longer a simple coffee machine, but more like a private barista at home.

If you change the machine, the data will be cleared, so the migration cost of the coffee machine is much higher than that of replacing a refrigerator or TV. This is the key point for coffee machine brands to continue investing in AI functions: the more the machine understands you, the harder it is for you to leave it.

The contradiction is that excessive intelligence may also make users lose patience with coffee machines.

Some consumers previously said that after using the AI voice assistant, the coffee machine refused to make a cup of coffee after many attempts. Similar situations also appear in the field of smart home and other fields.

This in turn reveals the truth that things will turn into their opposites when they reach an extreme: when the complexity of a machine's intelligence even exceeds the trouble it can solve, the group of freshly made coffee consumers cultivated by the 9.9-yuan price war will vote with their feet at any time and turn to the coffee shop downstairs.

Without intelligence, the consumable ecology cannot bind users; with excessive intelligence, user experience will regress. Brands need to find a balance between them, instead of only focusing on continuous charging after selling the machines. Otherwise, the 9.9-yuan price war can not only boost the development of the coffee machine category, but also hurt it.

To put it bluntly, the growth of coffee machines is not "new demand", but spillover demand that has been matured by the price war and then squeezed out. The reason for its growth against the trend is that Luckin and its peers have paved the way in advance, and how to maintain this growth is the real test for the coffee machine industry itself.

This article is from WeChat official account "Retail Scene of Business Review", author: Jia Hehui, editor: Xiaoyu, published with authorization from 36Kr.