Source: Hongcan.com
Author |?Guo Jiaxi; Editor |Jing Xue; Source |Hongcan.com; ID |?hongcan18
In 2013, Chat Yanjue Se opened its first store in Changsha. With the explosive growth of the new tea drink industry, it gradually became a representative consumer symbol of Changsha, and many out-of-town consumers even made special trips to Changsha just to visit and take photos.
In those years, the market was all waiting for it to move out of Hunan.
But for Chat Yanjue Se, in Changsha it was “just Lǎi” for seven or eight years—right up to 2020, when it finally moved out of Hunan and opened its first store in Wuhan. From Wuhan to Chongqing, and then to Nanjing and Wuxi, the pace at which Chat Yanjue Se expanded was always restrained. In China’s new tea drink market, it’s even somewhat slow.
However, this slow company suddenly started accelerating this year.
From opening in Shenzhen in April to the official announcement of Guangzhou in July, it was only 99 days. And these two cities are exactly the most brutal red oceans for tea drink competition nationwide.
Among the top five cities in the national ranking of the number of tea drink shops, Guangzhou is first and Shenzhen second. With local brands deeply rooted for years and leading brands fully in place, no matter how you look at it, this is not an easy market to break into.
An early-generation internet celebrity that once built national recognition through regional scarcity has proactively entered the core city with the highest competition intensity. TeaYanYueSe is moving out of its comfort zone. When it starts facing its rivals head-on, does it have a winning chance?
Let’s first look at the latest officially announced first Guangzhou store.
This store is rumored to be located at Bai’etan Vientiane City and is expected to open by late September. When asked about the reasons for entering Guangzhou, TeaYanYueSe said: “Guangzhou is the nationwide battleground for tea drinks competition. We want to throw ourselves into this lively ‘contender’s arena’ to see how strong our product and organizational capabilities really are.”
A red ocean with the highest number of nationwide stores—local brands are deeply interwoven, and all outside top players are already in place. No matter how you look at it, it’s not a comfortable expansion zone. But supplying a red ocean does not mean creating a dead sea of demand.
According to data from the Guangzhou Daily, in 2025 Guangzhou’s “beverage and cold drink services” revenue grew year-on-year by 22.8%. It is the fastest-growing segment in catering consumption, with a growth rate significantly higher than the average level of total retail sales of social consumer goods.
This means that Guangzhou is not only a zero-sum stock cake, but also a mature market where supply and demand expand in parallel.
The fundamentals of demand in the Shenzhen market are also solid. In a sense, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are the tea-drink industry’s most valuable “testing stones for brands.”
In these two cities, the supply of tea drink categories is extremely abundant. There are mature players in niche tracks such as fresh fruit tea, fresh milk tea, lemon tea, and regionally特色 tea drinks. Consumers have plenty of choice and are far less dependent on any single brand. The rate at which the novelty of internet-famous offerings fades is much faster than in those lower-tier markets with larger information gaps.
Being popular in a single market just by scarcity is not an achievement. If TeaYanYueSe wants to prove itself, it can only verify—within a market with strong competition and transparent information—whether its brand awareness accumulated in Changsha can extend its brand value in a mature tier-one and high-tier city. The conclusion drawn will then have nationwide applicability.
Moreover, back in January this year—before TeaYanYueSe had officially announced its Shenzhen stores—recruitment platforms had already listed a position for a Shenzhen warehouse supervisor. Clearly, this all-direct-operated brand has already invested warehousing and city-management resources in Guangdong.
Guangzhou and Shenzhen are both part of the Greater Bay Area. With a short logistics radius and reusable supply-chain systems, fluctuations in quality control and logistics costs are far lower than when expanding into an entirely new province.
As for site selection, TeaYanYueSe also has its own logic. Taking its first Guangzhou store as an example: the current rumor is that it will be located at Bai’etan Vientiane City. Bai’etan Vientiane City is Guangzhou’s first Vientiane City. It is positioned as an M1-level ultra-premium commercial complex and is a city-level flagship project built by China Resources in Guangzhou. The mall plans to open by late September, which basically overlaps with the Guangzhou store opening timeline announced by TeaYanYueSe.
Many netizens complained that the place is “too far off,” but actually they were using the Tianhe core commercial district as the yardstick to measure a new business district.
From an operational perspective, the commercial projects in Tianhe’s core commercial district already have stable customer flow, and rent fully reflects the value of mature locations. Brands such as Heytea, Nayuki (Naixue’s Tea), and Bawang Cha Ji have operated there for a long time; premium locations and consumer habits have already formed. If TeaYanYueSe enters, it needs to use higher costs to compete for a portion of customer flow that has already been sufficiently diverted.
And Bai’etan Vientiane City is in its opening-and-tenant-recruitment stage. With the first-store effect and the mall’s opening traffic concentrated and released, on one hand TeaYanYueSe can reduce customer-acquisition investment in the early Guangzhou period. On the other hand, it also helps it avoid direct point-competition with Tianhe’s most mature commercial districts.
The deeper logic is that TeaYanYueSe is tied to and replicates the China Resources commercial system.
The two stores that opened first in Shenzhen entered Shenzhen Bay Vientiane City and Nanshan Vientiane Living Mall respectively; afterward, the brand also opened a store in Buji Vientiane Hub.
All three commercial projects belong to or are operated by China Resources Land. As for Bai’etan Vientiane City, it also sits within the China Resources commercial system.
By continuously entering multiple China Resources projects, TeaYanYueSe and this commercial system have already formed a cooperation foundation. There is experience that can be reused in store construction, opening coordination, and mall operations, and communication and execution costs will also be lower than starting to look for other commercial partners again.
Competition in Guangzhou and Shenzhen is fierce, but consumer demand has also been repeatedly verified through tens of thousands of tea drink shops. For TeaYanYueSe, it is an expensive yet relatively calculable market.
“I’m rather pessimistic: either expansion kills you, or not expanding kills you. We think not expanding in that ‘way’ is more dignified.” Lü Liang once described TeaYanYueSe’s dilemma in the face of expansion.
For a long time, TeaYanYueSe indeed preferred the latter option.
But in recent years, TeaYanYueSe has changed.
On August 3, TeaYanYueSe opened two stores in Hefei on the same day. During the queueing for the two garden-party themed stores, the wait time once approached 5 hours. The brand also said it plans to increase the number of local stores to 5 within the year.
Going even further back: since late December 2024, Yichang, Huanggang, Changzhou, Ezhou, Yangzhou, Jingzhou, Taizhou, and Nantong have already successively entered TeaYanYueSe’s expansion map.
Such a pace is not common in TeaYanYueSe’s expansion history of more than ten years.
After it was founded in 2013, it took it 7 years to get out of Hunan. After entering Wuhan, it waited nearly another two years before opening stores in Chongqing and Nanjing. Previously it needed one or two years to advance to a city externally; now it starts opening up multiple regions at the same time.
Behind the faster expansion is the fact that the space left for TeaYanYueSe in Hunan has become increasingly limited.
It’s undeniable that Changsha is still TeaYanYueSe’s most densely served market and has the strongest brand awareness. But TeaYanYueSe has already covered all 14 cities in Hunan. If it continues to add stores in Hunan, it means either adding density in existing business districts or entering county-level markets with smaller capacity.
The former choice would cause diversion among stores, while the latter makes it difficult to provide a sufficiently high upper limit of revenue for an all-direct-operated model.
In addition, in recent years TeaYanYueSe has also been trying to make the Changsha market thicker.
In 2022 it launched YuanYang Coffee, and then opened Good Mo Lime and Daynight Poems Wine Tea. Together, coffee, lemon tea, and low-alcohol tea drinks covered nearly the hottest directions in the beverage industry at that time.
The secondary brand borrows TeaYanYueSe’s membership system and brand traffic, and the launch speed is not slow. However, as of now, only Good Mo Lime has exceeded 100 stores. The scale of YuanYang Coffee and Daynight Poems Wine Tea is still limited, and none of the three has yet moved beyond the Changsha market.
When the secondary brand cannot take over the growth mission and the main brand moves into more provinces, it gradually becomes an unavoidable choice.
Moreover, tea drink competition in Hunan is also intensifying continuously. Brands such as Guming and Bawang Cha Ji have in recent years kept increasing point locations in Hunan. Their layout has expanded from core commercial districts to community and county-level markets, directly diverting local daily consumption customer groups.
A few years ago, “go to Changsha for a trip and queue to drink TeaYanYueSe” was still a standard travel checklist for many people. Regional scarcity combined with the internet-famous halo made TeaYanYueSe a true “city specialty.” Cross-city shopping agents and queued ordering briefly became the norm. But now, as competitors’ locations continue to penetrate, that advantage is being gradually diluted.
At the product level, original-leaf tea was TeaYanYueSe’s biggest advantage in establishing brand recognition in its early days—freshly brewed tea bases paired with fresh milk and a cream top, together with nut crumbs, forming a distinctive product format. Combined with its naming system to reinforce a Chinese style, it created strong market recognizability. But in the years it tried coffee, lemon tea, and snacks, the market for original-leaf fresh milk tea has already seen a new set of leading players.
In the same track, Bawang Cha Ji listed on the Nasdaq in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, the brand’s global store scale reached 7,531, of which overseas stores accounted for 374.
A brand founded 4 years later than TeaYanYueSe has already surpassed it in scale and overseas business.
With competitors in the same track charging forward nonstop, the time and space left for TeaYanYueSe will only get narrower.
There are many competitors in Guangzhou, and there is already enough existing business to go around. When a new mall opens, it comes with a built-in customer-flow dividend. Combined with the brand’s first-store effect, queueing on opening becomes almost inevitable.
But the real tipping point is after the check-in craze fades—whether the surrounding daily consumption can support the store’s stable operations is the final test.
It’s not uncommon for new-style tea drink brands to show performance gaps across cities. Amaan Handcraft has long been in a “one cup hard to get” state in Shenzhen. After entering Guangzhou, it did get relatively stable topic traction, but it never reached the same level of explosive popularity.
Differences in consumer habits also raise the operational threshold. In Guangzhou, tea drink demand has a stronger daily necessity attribute, and food delivery penetration is at a relatively high level nationwide. Local consumers are more inclined to buy nearby or order online; their willingness to cross regions specifically for check-ins and long queues is relatively lower.
In the past, TeaYanYueSe emphasized an offline, in-store, light-delivery operating logic. In Changsha, this can constitute part of the check-in experience. But in markets with stronger daily consumption attributes, it would instead raise consumers’ decision-making costs.
Notably, even if it chooses Bai’etan Vientiane City, which is still in the commercial incubation stage, TeaYanYueSe still cannot avoid direct competition. There are market rumors that Heytea will enter the same project in the form of a lab store. Recruitment platform information shows that related bakery positions were launched at the end of July.
An even deeper challenge is rebuilding brand value.
TeaYanYueSe’s early brand premium was built largely on regional scarcity. The behavior of consumers going out specifically to check in adds extra emotional value to the brand itself. As nationwide stores continue to roll out, that sense of scarcity will be gradually diluted, and the brand’s topic momentum will also fall accordingly.
According to Red餐 supply chain guide observations, in earlier-entering cities such as Chongqing and Wuhan, store heat has now dropped to varying degrees. Yet TeaYanYueSe’s core best-selling products still mostly come from the initial few products from its early days; its product framework has not changed fundamentally.
When the original leaf fresh milk tea becomes a generic category across the industry, the product-level differentiation advantage continues to narrow, making it difficult for the brand to build long-term barriers just by product form.
Not to mention the all-direct-operated model that TeaYanYueSe has consistently insisted on.
The single-store operating model in Changsha’s core commercial districts is built on high-density customer flow. Guangzhou’s commercial layout is relatively more dispersed; customer flow is distributed across multiple business districts and community commercial nodes. If TeaYanYueSe wants to improve consumer reach, it needs to add more points in multiple areas.
Under the direct-operated model, the brand has to fully bear fixed costs such as rent and labor. The difficulty of reaching break-even per store is significantly higher than for加盟 brands. If the number of stores cannot grow, the costs of local warehousing and management teams cannot be amortized quickly, and the expansion pace is likely to fall into passivity.
For TeaYanYueSe, the “Guangzhou test” has never been about opening-day publicity volume. What matters is the brand’s real survival capability after leaving Changsha’s soil. TeaYanYueSe’s national expansion has no way back. This high-stakes arena in Guangzhou is both a checkpoint it has no choice but to pass and a key test to verify whether its model can detach from its regional roots.