Mixue Ice Cream & Tea

Mixue Ice Cream & Tea is China's largest ready-to-drink tea chain, founded in 1997 as a small shaved-ice shop in Zhengzhou and built over 28 years into a global network of more than 46,000 stores—surpassing McDonald's and Starbucks in outlet count, per 暗涌Waves . Its commercial engine runs not on brand premium but on vertical supply-chain dominance: 97.6% of revenue comes from selling ingredients, packaging, and equipment to franchisees, with加盟 fees contributing barely 2% . This "production geek" model, as 暗涌 described it, achieves 18.7% net margins on 5–8 yuan cups by owning nearly every industrial step from sugar procurement—about 1% of China's edible sugar consumption—to manufacturing .

The company took only one funding round before its 2025 Hong Kong IPO: a roughly 2 billion yuan pre-IPO investment in December 2020 from Hillhouse, Meituan Longzhu, and CPE Source Peak . At listing it commanded a market cap exceeding 110 billion HKD and 5,324x retail oversubscription, with 66% of proceeds earmarked for supply-chain and overseas expansion . Its "Snow King" IP and animated branding represent a secondary revenue stream, though the core remains what 暗涌 termed "product equality"—the Coca-Cola-like premise that price, not purchasing power, determines access .