44个品牌、1.5万家店 中国茶饮出海的红利窗口还剩多久？

This article outlines the current status of Chinese tea beverage brands going global, highlights the risks behind the current profitability boom, and lays out core requirements for successful expansion. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. The domestic tea beverage market in China is extremely saturated: by the end of 2025, the country hosts 478,000 tea beverage stores, and the market has entered a phase of cutthroat price competition. Many products are priced below 7 yuan even with additional discounts, dragging down profits for most brands and pushing a wave of leading brands to expand overseas.

2. Overseas markets currently offer scarcity-driven growth opportunities. To date, 44 Chinese tea beverage brands have opened nearly 15,000 stores abroad. The same products sell for several times their domestic price overseas, delivering far higher profit margins than in China, making global expansion a reliable profit safe haven for brands.

3. Expansion overseas is not a guaranteed win. Brands face high local rent and labor costs, strict regulatory compliance requirements, and challenges adapting products to local cultural preferences and tastes. Blind rapid expansion often leads to declining quality control and store closures. The window for easy profit is narrowing, and only brands that build localized supply chains and adapt products to local markets can achieve long-term survival.

This article outlines industry trends, opportunities, risks and core strategic directions for Chinese tea beverage brands expanding overseas. Key insights are as follows:

1. Industry and consumer trends: The domestic tea beverage market has become a zero-sum saturated market, where ongoing price wars continuously squeeze brand profits. Global expansion has shifted from an optional strategy to a necessity. Chinese tea beverages still have very low penetration in overseas markets, where consumers do not have a 7-yuan low-price anchor like their domestic counterparts, and are willing to pay a premium for this new category. This creates clear scarcity-driven profit opportunities today.

2. Pricing and competitive landscape: The same brand's products can sell for 3 to 4 times their domestic price overseas. In regions like Southeast Asia, rent and labor costs are lower than in China's first-tier cities, resulting in significantly larger overall profit margins than in the domestic market. Brands should capitalize on the current scarcity window and expand their overseas footprint early.

3. Risks and strategic priorities: Blind rapid expansion leads to overlapping store locations and uncontrolled quality. Brands also face challenges around regulatory compliance, and cultural and taste mismatches. Long-term success will depend on three core capabilities: global scaling of supply chains, localized product adaptation, and effective cross-cultural brand communication. Building localized supply chains in advance is critical to avoiding a repeat of domestic-style price wars in overseas markets.

This article outlines current expansion opportunities, risks and actionable development paths for tea beverage sellers looking to enter overseas markets. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Opportunity outlook: Chinese tea beverages are currently in a phase of scarcity-driven growth overseas, with low overall market penetration and no established low-price expectation like in China. Product prices and profit margins are far higher than domestically, with Southeast Asia and North America offering enormous growth potential. As of 2026, 44 Chinese brands have already established 15,000 overseas stores, and the window of opportunity remains open.

2. Risk warnings: Sellers should avoid chasing unplanned rapid expansion. After Mixue's aggressive expansion in Indonesia and Vietnam, the brand recorded a net closure of 428 stores across its core markets in one year, exposing problems with overlapping locations and poor quality control. In Europe and North America, rent and labor costs are multiple times higher than in China, and policy barriers such as sugar taxes add further complexity, along with big challenges adapting to local taste and cultural preferences. Actual profits are far less attractive than they initially appear.

3. Proven expansion paths: There are two mature, well-tested paths for expansion. The first is to scale first, then optimize via localized supply chains. The second is to build a profitable direct-operated model first, then scale up. Both paths center on building supply chain capability and localized adaptation.

This article outlines new business opportunities, production requirements and strategic insights for tea beverage ingredient manufacturers amid the wave of Chinese tea beverage brands going global. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. New business opportunities: The expansion of Chinese tea beverage brands into overseas markets is now accelerating, with 44 brands already operating nearly 15,000 stores abroad. Leading brands are rushing to build localized supply chains: for example, Mixue has invested 1.5 billion yuan to build a cold chain logistics system in Indonesia, partnered with local agricultural cooperatives to develop coconut milk supply chains in Thailand, and plans to purchase no less than 4 billion yuan of agricultural products and build new supply chain factories in Brazil over the next 3 to 5 years. This trend is generating massive new order opportunities for both domestic and overseas manufacturing facilities.

2. Production and product development requirements: Tea beverage brands expanding overseas need to adapt products for local markets and meet local food safety and compliance standards. This requires manufacturers to offer customized ingredient production services that align with local regulatory requirements.

3. Strategic insights: Supply chain capability is the core competitive advantage for tea beverage brands going global. Manufacturers should capitalize on leading brands' demand for localized supply chains, build out global production and logistics networks in advance, enhance their customized production and compliance service capabilities, and partner with leading brands to unlock new growth.

This article outlines industry trends for Chinese tea beverage brands going global, summarizes the core pain points facing expansion, and maps out growth directions for relevant cross-border service providers. Key insights are as follows:

1. Industry development trends: Global expansion has shifted from an optional strategy for individual brands to an industry-wide necessity. As of 2026, at least 44 Chinese brands have opened nearly 15,000 stores overseas. Going forward, the industry will shift focus from opening speed to supply chain and localization capabilities, creating enormous market opportunities and sharply rising demand for supporting services.

2. Core client pain points: Brands expanding overseas universally struggle with high cross-border logistics costs, difficulty building localized overseas supply chains, high compliance costs, challenges adapting products to local tastes, and quality control issues stemming from the long management radius of franchising models.

3. Growth opportunities: Service providers can develop targeted solutions to these pain points, including local cold chain logistics, cross-border compliance consulting, local raw material sourcing connections, and quality control management systems for franchised networks. By capitalizing on the wave of leading brands building global supply chains, providers can acquire new customer groups and drive their own business growth.

This article outlines the current status and core demand of the overseas expansion wave of Chinese tea beverage brands, and provides strategic directions and risk warnings for platforms that serve these expanding brands. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Core industry demand: As a large number of Chinese tea beverage brands accelerate their global expansion, their core demand is comprehensive supporting services including localized overseas supply chains, local franchise management, compliance services, and raw material sourcing connections. Current market supply of these services still has significant gaps to fill.

2. Growth opportunities for platforms: Platforms can launch dedicated service sections for tea beverage brands expanding overseas, connecting local real estate, logistics, compliance and production resources to help brands resolve supply chain and localization pain points and attract brands to onboard. Platforms can also tailor services to different brands' expansion models: for example, providing quality control management tools for franchise-focused expansion brands, and localized resource connections for direct-operated brands.

3. Risk mitigation: Platforms should guide onboarded brands to avoid blind rapid expansion, proactively warn of risks from overseas policy differences and cultural/taste mismatches, and encourage brands to solidify their supply chain and profitability model before scaling, to avoid mass store closures that damage the platform's reputation.

This article presents the latest 2026 developments in the global expansion of China's new-style tea beverage industry, sorts out emerging industry issues and prevailing business models, and offers rich empirical insights for industrial research. Key findings are as follows:

1. New industry developments: China's domestic new-style tea beverage market has entered a zero-sum saturated phase, with price wars driving down industry-wide profits. In 2026, the industry is experiencing an unprecedented wave of global expansion, with 44 brands already operating nearly 15,000 stores overseas. Expansion has shifted from an optional strategy for individual firms to an industry-wide necessity.

2. Emerging industry challenges: While expanding brands currently benefit from incremental growth driven by market scarcity, they face multiple unresolved challenges. Blind rapid expansion leads to over-saturated store networks and declining quality, high overseas rent, labor and compliance costs push up operating expenses, and brands face cultural and policy conflicts. The scarcity-driven growth window is narrowing, and the industry is likely to see a repeat of domestic-style price competition in overseas markets in the future.

3. Business models and research insights: There are two dominant mature expansion models in the current market. The first is Mixue's model: supply chain output plus franchised replication, prioritizing scale before fine-tuning operations. The second is Chagee's model: building a solid direct-operated foundation plus cultural output, solidifying the business model before expanding. Both models confirm that deep supply chain capability and localization are the core competitive advantages for global expansion, providing important reference for research on Chinese consumer brands going global.