Mingming, with 22,000 stores, is very busy and still needs an additional proof of growth beyond opening new stores.

Mingming Very Busy was very busy and turned in its first annual results after listing in Hong Kong stock markets: its store footprint is nearly approaching 22,000, and GMV is heading toward RMB 93.6 billion—signaling that a retail “giant” has truly taken shape in the market.

In 2025, Mingming Very Busy achieved revenue of RMB 66.17 billion, up 68.2% year over year; its adjusted net profit reached RMB 2.692 billion, with a year-over-year growth rate as high as 194.9%.

From the perspective of scale and magnitude, it has already begun to pull away from its competitor, Wanchen Group.

Over the past year, the company opened 7,813 new franchise stores. The number of newly opened stores was 1.66 times that of Wanchen Group. Its total store count was larger by 3,600 stores; overall revenue scale was 1.29 times that of Wanchen.

However, in the spotlight of performance, the market’s doubts are becoming even more clear-eyed: when simple “linear extrapolation” is no longer applicable for forecasting the future, who will take over the baton of Mingming Very Busy’s growth momentum?

Should it continue to search for the last remaining opportunities across the vast sinking markets, or should it rally northward to attack high-tier cities? Should it stick to the vertical snack retail track, or evolve into an all-category discount supermarket?

Before these major questions have settled, Mingming Very Busy is at a crossroads. For it, although the ceiling has not yet been reached, the path to the endgame is still being explored amid the fog.

Space remains

From the perspective of industry life cycles, the expansion logic of the value bulk-snacks segment has not ended.

In 2025, under continued support from the capital markets, the “duopoly” still maintains high growth rates. Mingming Very Busy and Wanchen Group’s store growth rates reached 52.5% and 29%, respectively, jointly supporting the narrative logic centered on store expansion.

Leading companies are accelerating the process of eating into the long-tail market and continuing to replace parts of traditional convenience store formats. Market concentration is expected to increase further. A Goldman Sachs research report estimates that the combined market share of Mingming Very Busy and Wanchen Group could approach 80% by 2028.

Although the scale is already large enough, the regional structure remains unbalanced, and the logic of horizontal expansion still holds.

Deng Xin, an analyst at Huai’an Securities, pointed out that Mingming Very Busy has completed an initial layout in new first-tier and second-tier cities. The average population covered per store is about 68,000, basically on par with comprehensive supermarkets.

Considering that consumption frequency for value bulk snacks is higher than that of supermarkets, Deng Xin believes there is still room to add more stores in second-tier cities. In addition, stores in fifth-tier cities account for 12.3%; the average population covered is about 76,000, which also leaves development potential.

The “misalignment” at the regional level is a key reason why competition in the industry remains relatively rational.

At present, the duopoly is not engaged in direct head-on consumption; rather, it is in a stage of “each one is trying to make a bigger cake.” Mingming Very Busy is working to make up for historical weaknesses in regions such as East China and North China, while Wanchen extends west and southwest from its base in East China.

Goldman tracking data shows that from July to November 2025, among new store openings, Wanchen’s share of deployments in Central China and South China is still in the low single digits, and it has not yet entered at scale into Mingming Very Busy’s core strongholds.

This favorable environment for expansion feeds directly into financial performance.

In 2025, Mingming Very Busy sharply cut new-store subsidies from 120,000 in 2024 to 36,000, and essentially canceled competitive special subsidies.

Combined with the continued release of scale effects, Mingming Very Busy’s gross margin improved by 2.2 percentage points year over year to 9.8%, and its adjusted net margin also increased to 4.1%.

“Space remains” does not mean that growth and returns can continue in a linear way.

In the first half of 2025, Mingming Very Busy’s annualized revenue per store was 3.61 million, down 3.8% year over year; but at the same time, Mingming Very Busy’s average daily order volume per store increased from 385 orders in 2022 to 458 orders.

At an earnings meeting, CFO Wang Yutong responded candidly that the pressure on same-store GMV came from overemphasizing store-opening speed and subsidy competition in the early stage, which meant that operational capability accumulation did not keep pace with the expansion.

To address this, the company carried out an organizational restructuring in the second half of 2024: authority was delegated to regional branch companies to respond quickly to front-line needs, while the headquarters shifted toward outputting capabilities through processes and standardization.

Wang Yutong said that entering the second half of 2025, especially the fourth quarter, Mingming Very Busy’s same-store performance has begun to show signs of recovery.

However, the company’s guidance for 2026 remains restrained: it only emphasizes “improvement year over year,” rather than encouraging the market to apply linear extrapolation.

Structural challenges still exist. The consequences of rapid expansion require time to digest, and even setting aside density issues, the competitive environment ahead will be even more complex.

One notable change is that value bulk snack stores are moving aggressively into the core areas of first-tier cities; it is no longer just a business outside the “five rings.” Many of these stores choose locations in core business districts or communities with dense foot traffic, where rental costs are higher—posing tougher tests for single-store operational capability.

At present, Mingming Very Busy is still in a “one-size-fits-all” stage, and has not yet matched differentiated strategies for niche scenarios such as communities, schools, and office buildings. In the face of internal first-tier city “folded” but diversified consumption demand, precise site selection and refined operations have become required lessons.

Path not set

From a long-term perspective, the scale growth of the value bulk-snacks channel will ultimately return to rationality.

As the marginal revenue effect brought by “opening more stores” continues to diminish, for leading players represented by Mingming Very Busy, their long-term value is shifting from “expansion speed” toward “profitability depth” and “model iteration.”

Differences in the underlying logic determine the margin of error for operating at the single-store level.

According to the standard model disclosed by Mingming Very Busy: investment per store is about RMB 0.8 million to RMB 1.0 million, with a payback period of about 2 years. Compared with high-gross-margin tracks such as milk tea, its store gross margin is only about 19%, and the franchisees’ net margin is between 8% and 10%.

This margin spread intuitively shows that value bulk snacks is never a business supported by profit from individual SKUs; rather, it is an extreme high-turnover game that uses turnover efficiency to dilute fixed costs.

Therefore, the breakthrough in growth is likely to occur first at the operational level, specifically the improvement in sales area productivity (revenue per square meter) at the single-store level.

Over the past two years, Mingming Very Busy has been actively promoting upgrades of its new-generation store formats. It has introduced daily necessities, fresh food, low-temperature frozen products, and made-to-order baking, extending from “snack specialty retail” to “high-frequency discount retail,” and raising its revenue upper limit by widening the product moat.

This expansion still remains restrained.

Although the group requires each store to maintain at least 1,800 SKUs, external statistics show that snack categories still account for 40% to 50%.

An investor who has watched the consumer sector for a long time told Tech Planet: in a high-turnover model, consumption frequency comes before everything. If full-category expansion is carried out rashly, it will not only dilute the consumer mindshare anchor of “value bulk snacks,” but will also very easily lower overall turnover efficiency through the accumulation of long-tail inventory, thereby eroding the foundation of the entire business model.

The company’s approach to supply chain collaboration also maintains the existing route.

In 2025, although Mingming Very Busy introduced a value-for-money “Red Label” and a quality-focused “Gold Label” private brand system, it did not treat them as the core lever for extracting profits.

The management’s explanation is that in traditional retail, private brands are created to gain pricing power and higher gross margins because the company’s products overlap heavily with external suppliers. But Mingming Very Busy’s products themselves are differentiated. The company more hopes to build stores into a “presentation window” for outstanding Chinese food manufacturers, rather than turning them into a mere contract manufacturer.

Behind this restraint lies another reason: compared with expansion at the front end, maximizing optimization of efficiency in the middle and back ends is the more certain, more urgent, and higher-return focus for efforts right now.

By the end of 2025, although the number of Mingming stores was about 3,000 more than Wanchen’s and revenue was higher by about RMB 15 billion, the two companies’ net profit levels were basically the same, with Wanchen’s net margin higher by nearly 2 percentage points.

In a retail industry where profit margins are as thin as a blade, this reflects a clear management gap.

To address this, the company is trying to complete the leap from “experience-driven” to “prediction-driven” using digital methods, covering self-developed store location selection, AI store patrols, and an intelligent ordering system, with the aim of making up for shortcomings in the management premium.

On the supply chain side, at the earnings meeting, Yan Zhou pointed out that the company will systematically push forward the construction of hot-food and cold-chain capabilities: hot food includes ready-to-consume products such as sausages and egg tarts; cold chain covers refrigerated and frozen goods, focusing on trends such as fewer additives, shorter shelf life, and health orientation.

Short shelf-life foods require stricter warehouse environments and faster turnover rates; any algorithm prediction errors or logistics delays may lead to inventory write-downs or food safety risks.

Currently, Mingming Very Busy has 56 warehouses in total, and more than half rely on third-party operations. In its Hong Kong stock listing prospectus, the company disclosed that it plans to use part of the raised funds to focus on building a smart warehouse and cold storage, while also improving the cold-chain delivery system.

Meanwhile, Mingming Very Busy seems to have quietly begun exploring “new products/categories.”

Market rumors say that “You·Recommended,” which was rolled out in Wuhan at the start of the year, was its pilot work in the fresh snack segment, but this information has not been officially confirmed to date.

A Huai’an Securities research report shows that the project plans to adopt a model of “direct operation as the main approach, joint operations as the supplement,” with about 800 stores deployed nationwide. In 2026, its core target will be “scaling by running scale,” focusing on core business districts in high-tier cities, and expanding its service radius with the help of instant retail.

The same research report also notes that on the supply chain side, the company has already built a full-chain model of “central factory + cold-chain logistics + in-store made-to-order.” The Wuhan plan includes a central factory of 10,000 square meters, of which 5,000 square meters has already started production. Core categories are controlled by its own factories, while other categories are benchmarked against Sam’s production-line standards.

With store-format expansion, efficiency optimization, and deeper supply-chain integration reinforcing each other, together they form the upside space of Mingming Very Busy’s single-store model.

For the company, the truly critical point is not how many paths it can choose, but when it can accumulate a replicable and scalable deterministic model, so that before the pace of growth slows down, it can open up new room for imagination in growth.

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