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Shede Spirits Co.,Ltd. (SH: 600702), known as one of the six golden flowers of Sichuan liquor, announced a new management team list at the end of September, with four of six newly appointed executives born in the 1980s and two in the 1970s, the youngest just turning 40 this year. After 33 years since its founding, Shede Spirits is entering an era where the post-80s generation takes charge.
On September 29, Shede Spirits held its second extraordinary general meeting of 2026, completing the election of its twelfth board of directors, an personnel adjustment that quickly drew attention from the liquor industry and capital markets. That evening the company announced that 46-year-old professional manager Tang Hui, a member of the post-80s generation, was elected chairman and continues to serve concurrently as president, achieving a one-person dual role of chairman and president. This is the first time since Fosun took control of Shede that the company has broken its long-standing governance model of separating decision-making power from operational management.
Cai Xuefei, a think tank expert at the China Liquor Culture Brand Research Institute, noted that the core signal of this board reshuffle is a significant improvement in the efficiency of strategy formulation and frontline execution against the backdrop of deep adjustment in the sub-high-end segment, volume control to support prices, and destocking. The new board maintains the dual-shareholder structure of Fosun and Shehong state-owned assets, with Tan Xiangyang, director of the Shehong Finance Bureau, newly joining the board and being included in the strategy committee, further elevating local state-owned capital's participation in corporate strategy.
The reshuffle also finalized the new senior management team, with Li Anhua and Luo Chao appointed as vice presidents, Zhong Lingyao continuing as chief financial officer, and Zhang Wei reappointed as board secretary. Tang Hui brings 20 years of management experience in Procter & Gamble's fast-moving consumer goods system. Since becoming president of Shede Spirits in December 2023, he has personally experienced the entire deep adjustment cycle of the liquor industry, with the company's revenue and profit indicators under continuous pressure. As sub-high-end liquor generally faces channel inventory and shrinking consumer demand, whether the two major shareholders' decision to concentrate both decision-making and operational power in Tang Hui represents a positive attempt to improve strategy implementation efficiency or a risk test of concentrated pressure remains to be seen by the market. As of the October 8 close, Shede Spirits closed at 32.37 yuan per share, down 1.04%, with a total market value of 10.75 billion yuan.
Board Reshuffle Finalized as Post-80s Leader Takes Dual Role
On September 29, Shede Spirits held its second extraordinary general meeting of 2026, electing the twelfth board of directors. The same day, the twelfth board held its first meeting, where all 11 directors unanimously approved multiple personnel proposals. The 46-year-old post-80s executive Tang Hui was elected chairman, continuing as president and also serving as director of the board's strategy committee. Since Fosun took control of Shede, the company had long maintained separate chairman and president roles, with decision-making and operational power kept apart. This is the first time the company has had one person serving as both chairman and president. Previous board members including Pu Jizhou and Wu Yifei stepped down. The new board structure remains stable, still maintaining the dual-shareholder checks and balances between Fosun and Shehong state-owned assets, with Tan Xiangyang, director of the Shehong Finance Bureau, newly becoming a director and joining the strategy committee to participate in corporate strategy discussions.
The board simultaneously completed senior management appointments. On Tang Hui's nomination, Li Anhua and Luo Chao were appointed as vice presidents; Zhong Lingyao continues as chief financial officer; Zhang Wei continues as board secretary; and Zhou Jian was appointed as securities affairs representative. All new senior executives serve three-year terms until the twelfth board's term expires. Notably, newly appointed vice president Li Anhua also comes from the Procter & Gamble system, sharing similar fast-moving consumer goods channel management experience with Tang Hui, while Luo Chao and Zhong Lingyao have deep Fosun system backgrounds, making the new management team's collaborative attributes evident.
Shede Spirits' financial reports show that Tang Hui previously served as customer manager for Sichuan and Gansu provinces, regional manager for Fujian, regional manager for Guangdong, regional manager for Shandong and Anhui, general manager of the distributor channel operations center, general manager of Procter & Gamble's western region and legal representative of Procter & Gamble (China) Chengdu Marketing Company, marketing general manager of Procter & Gamble Greater China's fabric care division, vice president of distributor channel sales for Procter & Gamble Greater China, president of Procter & Gamble Greater China's oral care business group, and senior assistant to the president of Yuyuan Inc.
"Tang Hui has 20 years of experience at Procter & Gamble and can integrate regional sales, distributor channels and broad fast-moving consumer goods marketing across multiple dimensions. Since becoming president in December 2023, he has led Shede's aged liquor and multi-brand strategies for nearly three years. This dual role as chairman and president, combined with the new management team, can shorten the decision-making chain, use fast-moving consumer goods-style refined channels and consumer-end sales momentum to repair the price system, and enhance organizational efficiency and market response speed," Cai Xuefei said.
He believes this reshuffle is a positive arrangement supported by both major shareholders for Shede Spirits to face new situations and challenges. From a personnel structure perspective, Tang Hui has served as president for nearly three years and now takes on the chairman role, achieving better alignment between the operational and decision-making levels. Overall, the board and senior management team are in their prime with solid professional backgrounds, which helps the company stabilize its foundation, focus on improving operational quality and efficiency, and comprehensively transform toward the consumer end.
It is worth noting that Shede Spirits adheres to its aged liquor strategy and emphasized in its 2026 interim report strengthening consumer-end priority, increasing consumer cultivation efforts through Yabuli Forum cooperation, famous liquor enters famous enterprises activities and other initiatives, continuously penetrating high-end circles and enhancing consumer perception of aged liquor quality and culture.
Cai Xuefei emphasized that Shede Spirits' organizational restructuring can shorten the overall decision-making chain and has positive value for the company's volume control to support prices and comprehensive consumer-end strategy. Combined with related capital and personnel adjustments, as well as the smooth handover between Fosun, Shehong dual shareholders and management, it is conducive to the implementation of stabilizing prices, controlling inventory and strengthening sales momentum, and will play an important role in promoting future quota usage, direct expense investment, dealer destocking, and T68 and e-commerce growth.
The years-long separation of powers management model has thus been broken, reflecting the operational consensus reached by the two major shareholders. In the view of Yuan Shuai, co-founding initiator of the New Quality Productive Forces Reception Hall, Shede Spirits' dual role arrangement directly signals that the two major shareholders have ended past power struggles and reached a highly unified operational determination. In liquor companies with complex shareholder backgrounds, strategic wavering and management infighting are common; this adjustment consolidates decision-making and execution authority, reduces operational interference from shareholder demands, and sends signals of management stability and strategic sustainability to channel partners, dispelling market speculation about escalating shareholder conflicts.
Yuan Shuai believes this structure can break down communication barriers between the decision-making and operational levels, shorten approval and coordination processes, clarify boundaries of authority and responsibility, and improve organizational response speed and market adjustment efficiency. However, this model places extremely high demands on the core responsible person's capabilities, requiring balancing the demands of two major shareholders and accurately assessing the market, while guarding against the potential risk of insufficient effective checks after power concentration. This personnel arrangement is not an immediate cure for performance, with its primary value being to build a stable foundation and stabilize internal team and channel confidence; to improve operations, subsequent deep reforms in channels, products and branding are still needed, otherwise the structural advantages will be difficult to realize.
Concentrated Power Confronts Performance Pressure
Tang Hui was appointed president of Shede Spirits in December 2023 and has led the company's operations since then, coinciding exactly with the liquor industry's downturn cycle, with Shede Spirits' operating performance continuously weakening. Financial data shows that in 2023, Shede Spirits achieved operating revenue of 7.087 billion yuan and net profit attributable to shareholders of 1.769 billion yuan, which was also the last complete fiscal year before Tang Hui took office. By 2024, company revenue fell to 5.357 billion yuan, down 24.41% year-on-year; net profit attributable to shareholders dropped to 346 million yuan, a sharp decline of 80.46%. In 2025, operating pressure intensified further, with full-year operating revenue of 4.419 billion yuan, down 17.51% year-on-year; net profit attributable to shareholders of only 223 million yuan, down 35.51%, and non-recurring net profit of 199 million yuan, a decline of over 50%. Notably, in the fourth quarter of 2025, Shede Spirits recorded a single-quarter net loss attributable to shareholders of 249 million yuan.
Along with declining profits, the company's dividend scale also contracted significantly. Cash dividends in 2023 were 712 million yuan, while total dividends in 2025 were only 102 million yuan, a reduction of 85.67%. In the first half of 2026, Shede Spirits saw a dual decline in revenue and net profit attributable to shareholders, down 15.34% and 67.26% year-on-year respectively. On the compensation front, Tang Hui's annual salary as president in 2025 reached 2.4958 million yuan, more than 300,000 yuan higher than then-chairman Pu Jizhou's 2.1717 million yuan.
Cai Xuefei believes the root causes of Shede's performance fluctuations are mainly weakening sub-high-end demand, the industry entering an overall adjustment period, and changes in new consumer behavior. They are also the result of Shede Spirits actively controlling volume to support prices and clearing inefficient distributors in exchange for channel health. Positively, this contraction can be seen as trading short-term financial statements for a long-term foundation. Although mid-to-high-end product revenue declined, regular liquor and e-commerce segments maintained growth, management expenses decreased, and revenue and net profit declines narrowed significantly compared to 2024. Meanwhile, aged liquor jar storage standards and ecological brewing systems continue to mature, and collections including 10-year, 29-degree Zizai, low-alcohol aged liquor, and overseas and liquor tourism segments are opening new incremental market niches. The company still insisted on dividends in 2025, all proving that the enterprise is converting scale slowdown into price stability, consumer-end strengthening, and gradual monetization of aged liquor assets as a bottoming-out repair focused on long-term development value.
Merging decision-making and operational power into one aims to reduce communication barriers between different positions, shorten the decision-making chain, and accelerate the implementation of business strategies. Along with power concentration comes operational risk concentration, and whether this governance adjustment can halt the performance decline is a focus of continuous attention in capital markets.
According to Yuan Shuai's analysis, the root cause of Shede Spirits' consecutive revenue, net profit and dividend contractions has never been a single product or channel issue, but rather that during the past few years of rapid industry change, the company's strategic focus wavered at stages, failing to continuously deepen its most proficient track while repeatedly adjusting resource investment among different market trends, missing the most critical expansion window for the sub-high-end liquor market. At the same time, Yuan Shuai pointed out that channel inventory problems and brand communication continuity issues accumulated over many years were also concentratedly exposed during the industry's overall slowdown. After the entire liquor market shifted from incremental competition to stock competition, the previous model of driving growth through high channel investment and high rebates became unsustainable, yet the company failed to complete its operational mindset shift in time, did not truly settle down to sort out end-user real needs, and did not establish long-term stable profit expectations for core channel partners, ultimately leading to market share being gradually diverted by competitors and performance naturally entering a phase of sustained pressure.
Diverse Equity Model Liquor Company Explores New Path
Looking back at Shede Spirits' development history, the company earlier promoted state-owned enterprise mixed-ownership reform and later experienced major equity turmoil. After Tianyang Holdings took control, capital occupation issues emerged, equity was judicially auctioned, and Fosun's Yuyuan Inc. acquired 70% of Shede Group through bidding, formally taking control of Shede Spirits, with Shehong state-owned assets retaining corresponding shares, forming a diversified equity structure of private capital and local state-owned assets holding shares together. Afterward, the company adopted a separate chairman and president model for many years to balance the demands of the two major shareholders, forming a mutually checking governance structure. In this personnel adjustment, local state-owned assets sent a finance system cadre to the board to deeply participate in the strategy committee's work, while the two major shareholders chose to unify operational and decision-making authority in a professional manager team, a governance experiment made under performance pressure.
According to Cai Xuefei's analysis, Tang Hui's election as twelfth chairman and continuation as president is the first one-person dual role since Fosun took control. The two major shareholders may have made this arrangement from a positive perspective based on comprehensive considerations of strategic continuity, execution efficiency, and dual-shareholder checks and balances. Specifically, Tang Hui has 20 years of Procter & Gamble regional sales, distributor channel and divisional marketing experience. Having served as president for nearly three years, he has already run through volume control to support prices, core major products, comprehensive consumer-end focus and aged liquor 2.0 strategy. The dual role can directly penetrate board goals into quotas, direct expense investment and sales momentum reviews, shortening the decision-making chain at the bottom of the cycle. Meanwhile, the new board retains professional seats for Fosun and Shehong state-owned assets, forming a professional structure of one person managing operations while dual shareholders oversee direction and risk. This avoids the coordination losses of the past separate chairman and president arrangement while using independent directors and shareholder professional committees to maintain supervisory flexibility.
Yuan Shuai believes that the entry of a finance official with Shehong state-owned assets background into the board will not fundamentally change the long-standing checks and balances between the two shareholders, but will shift their game from market-level interest struggles toward collaboration on compliance operations and long-term development. In the past, the two shareholders' differing demands often manifested in disagreements over short-term performance targets and long-term brand investment. After a state-owned background director enters the core governance layer, demands for local industry long-term development, stable local tax sources and compliant corporate operations will be more clearly conveyed to board decisions. The two sides will no longer simply wrestle with each other but form a new balance under a clearer framework of authority and responsibility, allowing corporate decisions to simultaneously consider market-oriented operational efficiency and local industry long-term stability needs, avoiding past short-sighted behavior of overdrafting the brand and channels for short-term performance.
Currently, China's liquor industry has bid farewell to the high-growth era. The sub-high-end track has entered stock competition, business consumption scenarios are shrinking, and problems such as high channel inventory and inverted product prices are widespread, with the industry overall in a phase of deep adjustment. As an important member of Sichuan liquor, Shede Spirits relies on its aged liquor strategy to build a differentiated label, but in an environment of weakening consumer demand, converting brand advantages into revenue and profit is becoming increasingly difficult. Whether this governance experiment of a diversified equity enterprise, led by a post-80s management team, can provide a reference sample for organizational reform of similar domestic liquor companies remains to be seen by the market. Are you optimistic about the new post-80s team steering Shede Spirits? Which liquor product do you usually choose when gathering with friends? Welcome to share your thoughts in the comments section.
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