Maotai finished in 3 months the business it did in the entire previous year.

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As Kweichow Moutai releases its 2026 first quarter report, the first complete business snapshot after its sales system adjustment is also unveiled.

In the first quarter, the company achieved an operating revenue of 53.909 billion yuan, up 6.54% year-on-year; net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company was 27.243 billion yuan, with a year-on-year increase of only 1.47%.

Compared with the fourth quarter of 2025, revenue and net profit grew by 32% and 53% respectively, but at that time Moutai was still in the preparatory period before the sales model adjustment, and the base figures were relatively low.

At the end of 2025, after Chen Hua took over as chairman, the management saw a substantive shift in direction: abandoning short-term "good start" demands in exchange for the long-term health of the sales channels.

Specifically, the company stopped pushing inventory onto distributors, and gradually suspended some distribution plans. In the past, distributors normally needed to complete the annual quota in the fourth quarter to enter the next year's system, but this tradition was broken in 2025, and quotas were no longer forcibly implemented.

Affected by this, wholesale agency revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025 dropped sharply by 58% year-on-year, while direct sales revenue bucked the trend and grew by 27%, reaching 29.032 billion yuan in a single quarter, resulting in a clear differentiation of channel structure.

Entering the first quarter of 2026, this adjustment was further deepened.

In recent years, the number of Moutai domestic distributors generally showed an expansion trend to underpin sales growth, with a net increase of about 210 throughout 2025. But in the first quarter of this year, the company’s domestic distributors saw a net decrease of 255, turning abruptly from expansion into the largest contraction in recent years.

Although the company explained that the distributor adjustment mainly came from the series liquor system, judging from the sharp drop in contract liabilities from 5 billion yuan to 3.027 billion yuan, the traditional distribution model is rapidly withdrawing from the stage of history.

Meanwhile, as an important tool for "following the market" and the most closely watched variable in this round of channel adjustment, "iMoutai" recorded a first quarter sales volume of 21.553 billion yuan, higher than the sales scale of most complete years in its history.

The historical peak for iMoutai appeared in 2023, at 22.37 billion yuan.

At that time, the platform was in its initial expansion phase, combined with high prices for Feitian Moutai, increased official supply, and users' enthusiasm for subscriptions being released, multiple factors resonated to drive sales rapidly upwards.

Starting in 2024, the market price of Feitian Moutai showed a marked decline, prices of non-standard products continued to tumble, and at certain times, wholesale prices even fell below the official guide price, narrowing arbitrage space and cooling user participation enthusiasm.

Under this background, to avoid price system shocks from online low-price sell-offs, the company began to actively control the supply rhythm of iMoutai. The platform’s sales revenue for 2024 fell by 10.5% year-on-year to 20 billion yuan.

The downward trend in wholesale price continued in 2025, with iMoutai's annual sales dropping to 13.031 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 34.92%, and its share of direct sales fell from nearly one-third at its peak to 15.4%.

However, in the first quarter of 2026, this proportion rose back to about 73%, with the channel weighting swinging significantly.

As consignment and agency sales models gradually take hold, distributors are accelerating their transformation into “commission-earning service providers,” and the position of iMoutai will only grow stronger in the future, becoming the undisputed main channel in Moutai’s sales system.

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