The Taiwanese milk tea that was swept away met with the new tea drink overseas

Mondo Social Updated on 2024-02-02

Visual China.

Text |Watching the tide of new consumption, author |Qingling, ed. |Eucommia.

With the escalation of the war on new tea drinks, the once popular Taiwanese milk tea has repeatedly had bad news in 2023.

First, it was rumored to go out of business, and although the official soon issued a statement denying it, the fact that it was not doing well was put on the table;Immediately afterwards, the original tea brand Happy Lemon was also exposed to the negative news that the store was closed for more than 6% in a year.

However, it may be too early to describe it as "defeated", and in addition to the Chinese market, these tea brands that started in Taiwan are accelerating their globalization.

In June 2023, a little bit opened a store in Los Angeles, USA, with 2$99 ** has become the "volume king" of the American milk tea industry;In November, Happy Lemon's parent company, Yaming Tiandi, announced that the group's efforts will be mainly focused on the United States and other overseas marketsIn December, Gong Cha announced that it would open stores in four Central American countries.

Going back, Happy Lemon entered the Philippines in 2010 and started its journey of globalizationCoco Duke went to North America in 2011 and currently has more than 300 overseas storesIn 2012, Gongcha went to sea, and the number of stores worldwide exceeded 2,000.

In addition, there are also local Taiwanese brands that are rarely seen in the mainland market, such as Sunrise Chatai, Yifang and Resting Pavilion, which have been deployed in overseas markets for many years when they are deeply engaged in mainland business.

In 2018, new local tea players such as Mixue Bingcheng, Hey Tea, Nai Xue, Tian Lala, and Bawang Tea Ji have opened the mode of going overseas, with Southeast Asia as the core, and gradually radiating to Australia, Europe, America and other regions, becoming a new force in the overseas tea market.

According to the 2023 New Tea Drink Research Report, after three years of dormancy, the market size of new tea drinks in 2023 is expected to reach 149.8 billion yuan, with a growth rate of 443%, but in 2024 and 2025, the growth rate may fall to 197% and 124%, the trend of incremental transfer to stock is obvious.

The vast global market has become the next blue ocean, "on the whole, the overseas new tea market is far from the level of 'volume', and the industry space still needs to be explored." Xu Zhou, deputy general manager of Tianlala, said to the new consumption of the tide.

Old players are in charge, new forces are sailing, and in the competition and cooperation relationship, new and old tea forces are joining forces to expedition around the world.

Taiwanese milk tea, which was once the guide of milk tea, is being rolled off the table.

In 2023, a little bit of hot searches, which have been silent for a long time, will be mentioned one after another, "little by little slowly withdrawing from the milk tea industry", "why don't people like to drink a little bit anymore", "a little bit is going out of business" and other remarks forced the official to refute the rumors in person.

According to the data of Narrow Door Restaurant, from 2020 to 2022, a little bit of newly opened stores will be at home; As of October 2023, the number of new stores opened is only 55.

Before Heytea and Nai Xue joined forces to set off a new tea drinking trend, Taiwanese milk tea with free ingredients, hidden menus, and optional temperature and sweetness represented a little bit of the top students in the milk tea industry, and it was also the white moonlight in the hearts of many post-90s consumers.

But now, a little bit seems to have become a representative of aging, and its signature milk tea Four Seasons Milk Green, ** Milk Tea, Black Tea Macchiato and other products are still big items ten years ago.

A little decline is not an exception, in the Taiwanese milk tea that debuted in the same period, tribute tea and happy lemon are also withering.

In October 2023, the parent company of Happy Lemon, Yaming Tiandi, announced that it has 70% of the equity of its subsidiary, Shanghai Xianjilin Catering Management, and Happy Lemon is 100% controlled by Xianqilin.

Before the announcement of Yaming World, Happy Lemon was exposed to the news that the store was closed by more than 6% in a year, and in addition, according to the data of Taiwan** Exchange, the parent company of Happy Lemon, Yaming World, will have a revenue of 8 in 20220.1 billion NT$100 million (about 1.)8.1 billion yuan), down 45% year-on-year; Loss 2NT$800 million (about 64 million yuan), a loss of 194% year-on-year.

Compared with them, the decline of Gongcha is even more silent. It once had thousands of stores with its signature product "Panda Milk Cover Tea", but the latest data from Narrow Door Dining Eye shows that there are only 231 stores left in Gongcha in China.

There are many reasons for the decline of Taiwanese tea drinks, but in the final analysis, on the one hand, the aging of the brand, and on the other hand, the new tea market has been highly involuted, and the Matthew effect has intensified. The accelerated expansion of leading brands such as Mixue, Gu Ming, and Tea Baidao has squeezed the living space of Taiwanese milk tea.

Yaming Tiandi bluntly stated in its financial report: In recent years, the excessive competition in the mainland catering market, coupled with the outbreak of the epidemic, has greatly impacted the consumer market, resulting in a sharp increase in operating costs and serious erosion of profit performance.

Source: Yaming Tiandi's 2022 financial report).

Despite this, these OGs in the bubble tea industry have not completely abandoned their old business, and they are accelerating their expansion in overseas markets outside of the Chinese market.

In addition to the Mainland business, the Group announced that its future efforts will be mainly focused on the United States and other overseas markets.

In 2010, Happy Lemon entered the Philippines and opened the first step to go to sea, and in the following ten years, it expanded its territory to Southeast Asia, the Americas, Australia, Europe and even the Middle East.

The 2022 financial report of Yaming Tiandi mentioned that Happy Lemon has more than 100 stores in the United States, and it is expected that the goal of expanding more than 200 stores in 2024 can be achieved. ”

Gong Cha also started its overseas business early, landing in South Korea in 2012 and opening its global headquarters in London in 2020.

According to Foodtalks, in 2023, Gongcha signed a new master franchise agreement to open 50 branches in four Central American countries in the next 10 years.

According to WorldCoffeePortal**, Gong Cha plans to open 500 stores in the United States by 2025 and expects to expand further in Europe in the next 12 months.

In addition to the above-mentioned brands, Taiwanese milk teas that are not well known in the mainland, such as Sunrise Tea Tai, Yifang Fruit Tea and Rest Pavilion, have also been deployed overseas early. Before the new tea drink in the mainland went to sea, they took the lead in the expedition around the world and completed the enlightenment of the taste buds of foreigners.

There are two ways for milk tea to become famous, one relies on marketing, and the other relies on many stores, and Sunrise Tea is the latter. ”

When asked which milk tea brands she had seen abroad, Jingjing, who had studied in Canada, blurted out Sunrise Chatai, "Sunrise Chatai is the milk tea shop I have seen the most abroad." ”

The history of Sunrise Chata's fortune is basically equivalent to its globalization process.

In 2005, when Taiwanese Wang Yaohui went abroad for inspection, he found that the coffee industry he was in was very mature abroad, but there were few brands in the milk tea track.

As the hometown of modern milk tea, Taiwan has mature experience in the development of milk tea, so Wang Yaohui decided to promote milk tea to the world, and established "Chataiwu" that year, and later renamed it "Sunrise Chatime", which means:

Everywhere the sun rises, you can drink chatime's drink."

In 2006, only one year after the establishment of Sunrise Tea, Wang Yaohui started the first step of globalization, opening the first branch in Southern California, USA, and after more than ten years of tortuous development, Sunrise Tea has expanded to all over the world.

According to the 2022 financial report of Hexagon International, the parent company of Sunrise Tea, Sunrise Chataimen stores cover nearly 60 countries and regions on six continents around the world, and the proportion of Hexagonal international export sales will reach 61 in 20224%, of which the main business in the overseas market is the first to go to sea Sunrise Chatai.

The globalization process of Sunrise Tea is also a microcosm of Taiwan's milk tea going overseas.

In 1987, Taiwan's "Chunshuitang" took the lead in throwing a local snack called "Fenyuan" (made of tapioca flour) into milk tea, and the boss named "Pearl" for "Flour Ball" by "big beads and small beads falling on the jade plate", and bubble tea was born.

In the two or three years after the birth of bubble tea, ** milk tea and white pearl milk tea have appeared one after another, and the rise of milk tea fever has forced the introduction of industrial technology.

After the 90s, brands such as 85 degrees C, 50 Lan, Coco Duke, Yifang Fruit Tea, Qingxin Fuquan, and CAMA rose rapidly, and fought fiercely in the already small Taiwan market.

Sunrise Tea Tai's financial report mentioned that even in 2022, the turnover of Taiwanese beverage stores will only be NT$110 billion, equivalent to about NT$25.3 billion, "The Taiwan market is still extremely competitive and the overall scale is close to saturation." ”

Source: Sunrise Tea Tai's 2022 financial report).

Therefore, expanding foreign markets is the only way for Taiwan's milk tea brand to expand, in addition to entering the mainland, another way is to go overseas.

After 2010, Taiwanese milk tea brands such as Happy Lemon, Coco Duke, and Gong Tea have gone overseas one after another, either starting from neighboring Southeast Asia, or starting from the United States, where consumption is higher.

However, just as old coffee has been tepid in the Chinese market for more than 20 years, it was not until Luckin made coffee into a coffee-flavored beverage that coffee became a popular drink, and milk tea going overseas is also facing the problem of whether it can conquer the taste buds of foreigners.

Fortunately, there are enough Chinese groups abroad. According to the World Overseas Chinese Report (2020), there are more than 100 million overseas Chinese in the world, distributed in more than 200 countries and regions.

Chinese historian Han Qing'an once mentioned in "Yokohama Chinatown" that the rise of Chinatowns around the world is inseparable from three knives: the chef's kitchen knife, the tailor's scissors and the barber's razor.

According to reports at the time, in the 90s, there was a wave of immigrants in Taiwan, and milk tea followed Taiwanese compatriots across the ocean and sea, taking root in a foreign country in the form of stall shops and mom-and-pop shops.

Source: "Taiwan Voice" magazine, 1995 "Taiwan's New Wave of Immigration Perspectives").

For example, Boboq, the originator of European milk tea, was founded by Taiwanese businessman Lai Mingjin because he missed the pearl milk tea of his homeland. In 2012, when BOBOQ became the No. 1 bubble tea brand in Europe, Sunrise Tea had just entered London, and Happy Lemon was belatedly arrived two years later.

To this day, overseas Chinese and international students are still the mainstream consumers of milk tea in overseas markets, and even in the United Kingdom, which loves milk tea the most in Europe, chain brands are more accustomed to opening stores with Chinese people.

For example, Happy Lemon's first stores in London and Birmingham are all opened in Chinatown, and Sunrise Tea Tai's stores in the UK are also focused on London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and other regions where there are many Chinese.

Source: Sunrise Tea Too official website).

In the Australian market, Sunrise Tea Tai also clearly pointed out the value of the Chinese, and the 2022 financial report mentioned that "the Australian market benefits from the overall economy and the annual growth trend of the immigrant population, which has led to the improvement of living standards and the diversification of living habits." ”

The same is true for the Middle East market, when Sharetea entered Dubai in 2012, its total ** is the former Emirates flight attendant Jiao Yan, whose original intention is precisely because he loves to drink, Sunrise Tea is too in Dubai's ** business Jateen Jaduram also felt the rise in the number of Chinese groups, so he fought for the right to **.

Overall, Taiwanese milk tea is 1The main force of milk tea going overseas in the 0 era, the limited nature of the local market makes going overseas a step that has to be taken, and the vast Chinese world provides a direction for their expedition to follow.

But to this day, these milk tea brands that have been going to sea for many years have not been able to make milk tea a global drink, rooted in the Chinese, trapped in the Chinese is always an intractable dilemma, even if it has covered six continents Sunrise Tea Tai, the financial report still frankly said:

Half of the export market is still in Asia.

2018 is a new watershed for tea drinks to go overseas.

Prior to this, the overseas market was still occupied by Taiwan's bubble tea, and only a small number of mainland brands had a presence overseas.

However, with the intensification of competition in the mainland market, the phenomenon of seven or eight milk tea brands emerging on one street has frequently appeared, so looking for the next blue ocean has become a new idea for new tea drinks in the mainland to break the involution.

Like the previous generation of Taiwanese milk tea, the focus of the mainland's new tea drinks is also in Southeast Asia. It is adjacent to China, which can reduce the transportation cost of the domestic ** chain, and the climate of high temperature throughout the year is also more suitable for the survival of milk tea.

According to data from GrabFood, a Southeast Asian food delivery platform, the order volume of bubble tea in Southeast Asia has been growing rapidly since 2018. Among them, Indonesia's order volume growth in 2018 even reached 8,500%.

After 2018, Mixue Bingcheng, Heytea, Nai Xue's tea and Bawang Chaji have successively gone to Southeast Asia, Hey Tea and Nai Xue will make their first stop in Singapore, Bawang Chaji chose Malaysia, and Mixue Bingcheng is Vietnam, and the consumption power of these countries also fits the brand's own positioning.

After a three-year shutdown of the epidemic, in 2023, the mainland's new tea drinks will begin to accelerate the process of going overseas, in addition to Southeast Asia and neighboring Japan and South Korea, expeditions to Europe, the United States and Australia are also on the agenda.

Since August, Heytea has entered the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, the United States and other countries, and opened its first stores in iconic cities such as London and New York

On October 1, six stores in Jakarta opened and announced that it would open more than 60 stores in Indonesia by the end of the yearChabaidao, which has already submitted the table, has also started its journey to the sea and settled its first store in South Korea.

At present, the overseas new tea drink market led by Southeast Asia is mainly distributed in three types of players, one is the traditional Taiwanese milk tea, represented by COCO, Sunrise Tea Tai, etc.;One is the new tea drink force that landed after 2018;There is also a local milk tea brand, such as tealive.

Xu Zhou, deputy general manager of Tianlala, mentioned that from the perspective of overseas competition in the domestic new tea industry, different brand positioning means different competition directions, and they do not conflict with each other.

From the perspective of the competition between China's new tea brands and local tea brands, we have observed that local tea brands are not yet mature, with limited scale and deep industrial foundation, and there is little threat to Chinese tea brands. ”

The reverse is also true, the entry of new tea drinking forces has not squeezed the living space of Taiwanese milk tea and local milk tea. In fact, the new tea drinks that go overseas are generally a higher grade overseas, and even Mixue Bingcheng is more expensive than local milk tea overseas.

Guo Chao, a tea practitioner, mentioned that the intensity of competition in different Southeast Asian countries is also different, "like Singapore and Malaysia, the economy is more developed and the competition is more fierce, but Vietnam's economic level is low, consumer income is not high, and the dominant local milk tea is still less than 10 yuan." ”

Taking tealive as an example, its founder Lu Weili used to be the first merchant of Sunrise Tea, and later parted ways with Sunrise Tea Tai to found Tealive, which has now become the largest milk tea brand in Malaysia, and TeaLive is aimed at low- and middle-end income people.

Xu Zhou also mentioned that in the domestic market, Chinese consumers are gradually less receptive to sugar driven by health, and they prefer bantang and sugar-free products, while many overseas consumers still prefer traditional high-sweet drinks.

Southeast Asia as a whole is still in the era of bubble tea, and there is no iteration, and the awareness of healthy tea has not been awakened. Guo Chao said.

In other words, the tea upgrade due to consumption upgrading in China has not yet occurred in the Southeast Asian market, and the new tea drink forces that occupy a high-end position are still only new entrants rather than subversives in the Southeast Asian market.

As far as the tea market is concerned, Southeast Asia is China more than ten years ago, but it is difficult to say whether Southeast Asia will become the China it is now after more than ten years.

The development trend of the global economy is not clear, and the competition pattern of milk tea in Southeast Asia should still be a parallel trend in at least ten years, and everyone will survive in their own ** zone. ”

On the other hand, in the European and American markets, consumers have higher spending power, but they are keen on high sugar, and with the layout of Taiwanese milk tea such as COCO and Sunrise Tea for many years, the local people have a higher awareness of traditional bubble tea.

At the same time, both cultural differences and legal risks are invisibly raising the cost of mainland new tea drinks entering Europe and the United States, "New tea drinks are still blank in the European and American markets. Guo Chao said.

Since 2018, the process of going overseas for new tea players has been more than 5 years, and in addition to Mixue Bingcheng, which claims to have opened more than 4,000 stores overseas, the number of overseas stores of most brands has remained in single or double digits. "But it's been very fast. Guo Chao said, "It's just that we are used to the speed of domestic store expansion, and we will feel that the pace of going overseas is too slow." ”

Guo Chao mentioned that the overall work efficiency in Southeast Asia is not high, "The overseas recruitment cycle is generally 3-4 months, but in China, you have to join the company in ten days and half a month." ”

In addition to efficiency, the ** chain in Southeast Asia is not mature in China, and many raw materials need to be transported from China, "even if it is a cup, foreign factories may not meet the production standards, or the yield rate is very low, resulting in higher costs, it is better to ship directly from China." ”

Returning to the issue of competition between the old and the new, although in the global market, Taiwanese milk tea has not yet experienced the high degree of involution suffered in the mainland, but with the new forces going overseas, they do not dare to slack off, or threaten to focus on overseas markets, or directly accelerate the opening of stores.

In the 2022 financial report, Sunrise Chata mentioned that it was the No. 1 leading brand in Indonesia in 2021 with a volume of 400 stores, but now Mixue Bingcheng has more than 2,000 stores in Indonesia.

Source: Sunrise Tea Tai's 2022 financial report).

However, compared with the competition caused by the new forces of tea drinking, it is still worth paying attention to the market space.

Shang Xiangmin, co-founder of Bawang Tea Queen, once mentioned, "For most tea brands that go overseas, more than ninety percent of consumers are Chinese. ”

You can shop ten stores in one go, but it's a question of whether you can survive after you finish it. Guo Chao said, "When we conducted research abroad, we found that chain brands with more than 50 stores are very rare. ”

When it comes to conquering the taste buds of foreigners, new and old tea drinks face the same dilemma, which may require generations of hard work, or they may just have to wait for the gift of time.

On this issue, the story of coffee's introduction to China may provide the most valuable reference.

Related Pages