An announcement from Kweichow Moutai regarding price adjustments has once again sent ripples through the baijiu industry. Effective March 31, 2026, the contractual sales price for the Feitian 53% vol 500ml Moutai (2026) will increase from 1,169 yuan per bottle to 1,269 yuan per bottle. Concurrently, the retail price within Moutai's self-operated system will rise from 1,499 yuan per bottle to 1,539 yuan per bottle, representing hikes of 100 yuan and 40 yuan, respectively. Following this adjustment, the self-operated retail price for Feitian Moutai has essentially aligned with the current wholesale market price. According to data from the third-party platform "Today's Liquor Price" on March 30, the wholesale reference price for the 2026 53-degree Feitian Moutai (single bottle) was 1,545 yuan per bottle. This price move, viewed in conjunction with the dynamic pricing mechanism—"adjusting according to market conditions while maintaining relative stability"—proposed in the "2026 Kweichow Moutai Market-Oriented Operation Plan" released earlier this year, can be seen as Moutai's first shot in implementing its market-responsive pricing strategy.
This marks the first time since January 1, 2018—a gap of eight years—that Kweichow Moutai has simultaneously increased both its ex-factory and retail prices. The last synchronized price hike occurred in early 2018, during a period of collective, rapid expansion for the baijiu sector. At that time, the ex-factory price was raised from 819 yuan to 969 yuan, and the retail price increased from 1,299 yuan to 1,499 yuan, with an average hike of approximately 18%. However, the market context then was vastly different from today's. The entire baijiu industry was in the midst of a price surge, with Moutai's end-market prices becoming uncontrollable. The actual transaction price for a bottle of Feitian Moutai soared to as high as 1,800 yuan, accompanied by rampant channel hoarding and speculative reselling, rendering the official guide price largely ineffective. Following that round of price increases, Kweichow Moutai achieved revenues of 736.39 billion yuan in 2018, a year-on-year increase of 26.49%, and its market capitalization surpassed the 1 trillion yuan mark for the first time.
The most significant variable in this latest "dual hike" is the reshaping of the market environment, successfully achieved through the increased supply volume on the iMoutai platform. On January 1, 2026, Kweichow Moutai officially began the regularized sale of Feitian Moutai at the official guide price of 1,499 yuan on its self-operated e-commerce platform, iMoutai. Data shows that in January, iMoutai gained 6.28 million new users, with monthly active users exceeding 15.31 million. Over 1.45 million consumers successfully made purchases, generating more than 2.12 million transaction orders. Among these, orders for Feitian Moutai exceeded 1.43 million. Calculating at a minimum of one bottle per order, the Feitian product alone brought in at least 2.144 billion yuan in revenue for iMoutai in just one month. Crucially, this significant increase in supply did not lead to a market crash. The wholesale price for Feitian Moutai climbed to over 1,700 yuan around the Spring Festival and, even after retreating during the off-season, has remained at a relatively high level of around 1,560 yuan.
The profound implication of iMoutai's successful volume increase lies in Kweichow Moutai achieving, for the first time, a consolidation of control over channel dominance and profit distribution. Simultaneously, by leveraging platform data, Moutai can directly observe genuine consumer demand and use these insights to adjust its pricing strategy across all channels. For the company's financial performance, this "dual hike" is expected to have an immediate effect. Institutional forecasts suggest that Kweichow Moutai's net profit growth for 2025 had already slowed to approximately 5.5%, a rate below 10% being extremely rare in the company's history. Assuming annual sales of Feitian Moutai remain around 100 million bottles, split evenly between self-operated and distributor channels, the 100-yuan per bottle increase in the distributor contract price and the 40-yuan per bottle increase in the self-operated channel price would collectively contribute approximately 7 billion yuan in additional revenue. After accounting for taxes, the net profit increase is estimated to be around 3.5 billion yuan. For Kweichow Moutai, which is currently navigating a phase of growth moderation, the significance of this incremental profit is self-evident.
For the distributor channel, however, the impact of the price adjustment is more complex. The increase in the contract price means higher procurement costs for distributors. Furthermore, the spread between their cost and the retail price has narrowed from 330 yuan to approximately 270 yuan, compressing their profit margin. At the same time, Kweichow Moutai is advancing reforms where non-standard products are sold on a consignment basis via iMoutai, with distributors receiving a 5% rebate from Moutai as their profit, effectively transforming the role of distributors into service providers. It is foreseeable that the profit structure for the distributor channel will undergo further reshaping, accelerating the departure of the traditional "hoard-and-sell-at-a-higher-price" business model from the stage.
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