No Moutai at the Thank-You Banquet — Revenue Up, Profit Down, and the Collapse of Premium Baijiu's Consumption Scenarios

A Thank-You Banquet Without Moutai

On August 19, 2026, Unitree Robotics listed on the STAR Market; its thank-you luncheon was served with only red wine and juice — no Moutai. Until recently, Moutai rarely missed occasions like an IPO thank-you banquet or a championship celebration. Six days later, Kweichow Moutai released its 2026 first-half report: the first half-year decline in net profit attributable to shareholders since 2015, and the first mid-year profit decline in nearly twelve years.

Set side by side, the two events point to a single judgment: the consumption scenarios that have sustained Moutai's growth over the past twenty years are collapsing wholesale.

The Ledger of Revenue Up, Profit Down

In the first half of the year, Moutai booked operating revenue of 90.703 billion yuan, up 1.47% year on year; net profit attributable to shareholders came in at 44.517 billion yuan, down 1.95%. The second quarter alone was steeper: revenue of 37.575 billion yuan, down 5.23% year on year and down 31.31% quarter on quarter; net profit of 17.274 billion yuan, down 6.90% year on year and down 36.59% quarter on quarter. Some institutions call this Kweichow Moutai's first "revenue up, profit down" half-year report since its 2001 listing.

The proximate cause of revenue-up-profit-down is written in the cost line: in the first half, operating costs rose 21.81% year on year to 9.474 billion yuan, which the company attributed to higher sales volume and higher production costs. But the change in channel structure says more than the cost line — in the first half, direct-sales revenue reached 51.962 billion yuan, up 29.87%, accounting for 57.3% of total revenue, while wholesale-agent revenue came in at 38.697 billion yuan, down sharply by 21.58%. A direct-sales share above fifty percent means Moutai is now "selling itself," but total volume has not grown on that account.

The end market feels it even more directly than the financial report. A Quzhou liquor shop that has been in business for about thirty years saw its first-half baijiu sales drop by more than 15%, and sales of 53-degree Feitian Moutai fell harder: "the store dares to keep at most one case on hand; anything else has to be ordered in." Customers often find online prices lower than offline. Last week the owner went to Hangzhou with a customer to stock up; after combing through the Desheng food market, not one tobacco-and-liquor shop could produce two cases of spot stock — the price swings were too violent, and downstream dealers did not dare to build inventory. They finally placed an order for thirty-plus cases of Moutai, after which the dealer was still complaining: "On every bottle of Moutai we only earn about ten yuan, and we don't even see the money until the year-end rebate from the company clears."

The Banquet Collapse: Government and Business Both Contract

The industry's prevailing view is that the deeper cause of Moutai's profit decline lies in the unraveling of the core consumption scenarios that have supported its growth for two decades.

The contraction on the government side is policy-driven. The May 2025 revision of the Regulations on Practicing Thrift and Opposing Waste in Party and Government Organs extended the alcohol ban to all beverages containing alcohol, dramatically compressing the space for government consumption. The contraction on the business side is economic: business entertaining has shrunk in the wake of the economic environment. The 2026 China Baijiu Market Mid-Term Report, jointly released by the China Alcoholic Drinks Association and KPMG, shows the baijiu industry experiencing a textbook "volume, price and profit triple-kill": 86.7% of surveyed enterprises saw operating profit decline year on year; business entertaining has slipped from the first place in baijiu consumption scenarios to third.

Replacing them are mood-driven scenarios such as solo drinking and family gatherings — and Moutai's brand story has no place in those scenarios. The "loyalty test" performed at the drinking table depends on banquets with a clear superior-subordinate hierarchy; when there are fewer such banquets, Moutai's role as a "loyalty-test prop" — and its financial attributes — lose their use. The previously recorded stockpile of 120 million to 220 million bottles of Feitian Moutai with an opening rate of less than 20% is now corroborated by the financial-report side.

The Industry's Triple-Kill and the Absence of the Young

The baijiu industry as a whole is in the doldrums, and Moutai cannot stand apart. Baijiu output fell from 13.58 million kiloliters in 2016 to 3.549 million kiloliters in 2025, a contraction of nearly 74% over nine years. In the first half of 2026, the industry sank into a "triple contraction": 61.2% of firms reported a decline in customer count, 74.1% a decline in average ticket size, and 74.8% a decline in revenue. Song Shuyu, chairman of the China Alcoholic Drinks Association, said the baijiu industry has entered a period of deep adjustment, with "volume, price and profit falling in unison" as the main feature of the adjustment.

More unsettling than the industry data is the generational fault line. Wuliangye once surveyed 1,000 young people aged 20 to 35 across the country; the result shows baijiu accounting for only 19% of the alcoholic-beverage categories young people like, far below beer at 52% and foreign/fruit liqueurs at 29%. A report by Ries Consulting shows 39.6% of young people prefer drinks around 10% ABV, and only 11.2% prefer those above 30%. The Quzhou shopkeeper put it more bluntly: "What young people don't like to drink isn't just Moutai — the original premium baijiu brands that used to be popular, like Moutai, Wuliangye, Shuijingfang and Gujinggong, are all out of fashion among the young. Young people want what tastes good, drinks good and is fun; they'd rather pick Jiang Xiaobai than Wuliangye." He believes that, in terms of cultivating young consumers, Moutai has done the least of all.

Wang Li, current general manager of Kweichow Moutai, made a clear statement on this point at Moutai's June shareholder meeting this year: brand rejuvenation is not a加持 for Moutai; Moutai wants to be "evergreen," not an "internet celebrity." The unspoken implication of this line is an admission — that rejuvenation could damage the scarcity narrative on which Moutai has lived; but the cost of not rejuvenating is now showing up in the financial statements, year by year.