---
title: "A Traditional Beer Distributor Ventures into B2b and Opens 7 Flash Warehouses"
description: "Recent surveys by New Distribution from 2023 to 2025 reveal that profit decline has become widespread among distributors, though revenue decline is narrowing. A case in point is Haochunte Trading in Zibo, which stabilized its traditional trade, launched a B2b platform, and entered instant retail with seven self-operated stores."
author: "周群"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2025-10-18"
categories: "Consumer & Categories, Dealer Operations"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nV-3mF1P8YFJvQia5pJDxw"
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citation: "周群. “A Traditional Beer Distributor Ventures into B2b and Opens 7 Flash Warehouses.” New Distribution, 2025-10-18. https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/a-traditional-beer-distributor-ventures-into-b2b-and-opens-7-flash-wareh-2ddc203e/"
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---

# A Traditional Beer Distributor Ventures into B2b and Opens 7 Flash Warehouses

> Recent surveys by New Distribution from 2023 to 2025 reveal that profit decline has become widespread among distributors, though revenue decline is narrowing. A case in point is Haochunte Trading in Zibo, which stabilized its traditional trade, launched a B2b platform, and entered instant retail with seven self-operated stores.

Recently, I revisited three editions of the **"Distributor Operating Conditions Survey Report"** published by New Distribution from 2023 to 2025, and two sets of data stood out.

**The first set concerns revenue.** The survey asked: "How did your revenue change in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year?" The results showed that the proportion of distributors experiencing revenue decline was 60.6% in 2023, 58.7% in 2024, and 37% in 2025.

**The second set concerns profit.** The survey asked: "How did your profit change in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year?" The results showed that the proportion of distributors experiencing profit decline was 51.7% in 2023, 63.3% in 2024, and 56.3% in 2025.

From these two sets of data, it's clear that **profit decline has become a common phenomenon among distributors.**

From a revenue perspective, distributors faced the biggest impact in 2023 and 2024. The expansion of new channels such as snack stores, discount stores, instant retail, and supermarket renovations disrupted the traditional distribution system, leaving distributors unprepared for the sudden changes in channel structure.

However, looking at the 2025 revenue data, we see that the proportion of revenue decline has narrowed significantly. This suggests that some distributors, after enduring the shocks of the previous two years, have gradually found new business logic.

A few days ago, I visited Yan Shun, general manager of Haochunte Trading in Zibo, Shandong, and discussed his business over the past three years. This conversation made me feel this change even more strongly.

After talking with General Manager Yan, I realized the changes are truly significant; the business logic is completely different from the past. Over the past three years, Haochunte Trading has focused on three core initiatives.

First: They re-engineered their traditional trading business. They broadened categories, diversified channels, established standards, and solidified their business foundation.

Second: They launched a B2b platform, expanding from water and beverages to full categories, serving 4,000 small and medium-sized stores.

Third: They entered the instant retail business, opening three Squirrel Convenience stores and four Waima Wine Delivery stores.

Now, let me share their case with you.

**No matter how you transform, you must not lose your traditional trade foundation**

During my conversation with Yan Shun of Haochunte, he repeatedly emphasized: "Transformation must not lose the foundation." This sounds simple, but it's key to Haochunte's ability to stay steady amid channel changes.

In recent years, the water and beer business has been tough. Manufacturers pressuring inventory, best-selling products' prices being eroded, and new channel impacts have left many distributors in a predicament of "declining volume, thin margins, and long payment cycles."

Especially for Haochunte, whose product categories and brands were relatively single, mainly beer, the impact was significant. The high closure rate of small and medium-sized restaurants, coupled with the rapid opening of snack stores, discount stores, and flash warehouses locally, severely eroded their original market share.

So starting in 2022, Haochunte began optimizing the structure of its traditional trading business.

**First, expand categories.** With Tsingtao Beer, Ganten, and other water and beverage brands forming a stable cash flow, supplemented by some snack food brands to improve the gross margin structure, they achieved balanced growth in overall business scale and profit.

**Second, diversify channels.** Due to the nature of beer, Haochunte's early channel structure was relatively single, mainly foodservice. By expanding categories with water, beverages, and snacks, they gradually connected all local channels, achieving full coverage across restaurants, tobacco and liquor stores, B&C supermarkets, and hypermarkets.

"When others retreat, we advance. In recent years, the volume vacated in the market has fallen into our hands," Yan Shun told New Distribution. "When the market gets tough, most distributors think about contracting their frontlines, which actually gives us the opportunity to expand at lower cost."

**Third, establish standards.** The biggest problem for traditional distributors is rough management. Whether in internal management or warehouse processes, they often rely on experience, making it impossible to precisely control costs.

Take warehousing and logistics as an example. Many distributors don't know whether their warehousing and distribution costs are reasonable; they only know a rough figure and have no idea where to optimize or improve.

In 2023, Haochunte partnered with a professional logistics company to view operations from a financial perspective. Now, the picking cost per warehouse, driver unit price, loading rate, etc., are all documented and benchmarked against the industry's lowest cost ranges.

Yan Shun told New Distribution, "We learned how to calculate costs two years earlier than others, know what reasonable costs are, and know how to reduce them."

By using data for internal management, strengthening terminal relationships to increase service density, and proactively optimizing category structure to expand channels, Yan Shun's logic is clear: "We don't pursue scale, but we must have the healthiest structure."

The stability of the traditional trade base gave Haochunte the confidence to transform. So starting in 2023, Haochunte launched B2b, and in the second half of 2024, it entered instant retail.

**Growing Upward: From "Wholesale Logic" to "Platform Logic"**

With the support of the traditional trade foundation, Haochunte officially launched B2b in 2023.

Yan Shun told New Distribution that while water and beer are high-frequency, their margins are extremely thin, and in the current market, especially in small cities, growth has hit a ceiling.

At the same time, manufacturers' channel strategies are changing. More and more manufacturers want to find regional operators that can directly connect with terminals and have integrated supply and distribution capabilities.

In this context, B2b for Haochunte is not just an online system but a shift in business logic from "wholesale thinking" to "platform logic."

However, the path to B2b is not easy. Water and beverage distributors naturally lack the "multi-SKU gene" for B2b: few SKUs, heavy customer orders, and high replenishment frequency make the original business unsuitable for an online mall.

"The mall couldn't run, the software didn't fit, and many systems didn't consider the logic of distributor transformation," Yan Shun mentioned. Most B2b systems assume users are starting from scratch, requiring separate warehouses, standardized picking, and fixed payment terms, while ignoring the complex rebate, credit sales, and sales promotion structures that distributors already have.

As a result, Haochunte repeatedly hit walls in the initial stage: data not syncing, warehouses isolated, or inconsistent customer experience.

These pain points haven't been fully resolved even today, but through gradual exploration, they've developed some of their own thoughts and methods.

They didn't make large-scale investments; instead, they took small steps, first figuring out the path.

**Step one: Start from their own strengths.** Water and beer are "heavy goods with low margins," but high frequency means stickiness, making them natural traffic categories.

Haochunte used water and beverages as a traffic entry point, then balanced the structure with high-margin snack foods and general merchandise to build an initial product mix.

**Step two: Let B2b coexist with the traditional trade.** Haochunte didn't treat B2b as an independent line but embedded it into the existing trade system, allowing traditional distribution, warehousing, and financial systems to share the same underlying resources.

Existing trade resources are fully open to the B2b platform. Through corresponding incentives, manufacturers' salespeople also promote Haochunte's "Maibangbang" mini-program. In other words, the same small store might have 3-5 salespeople promoting the same platform daily, boosting expansion efficiency.

A key point here is to communicate with existing core brands: the goal of promotion is to adapt to trends and better sell products, while also potentially not selling core competing products.

**Step three: Use scale to gain influence, and influence to promote cooperation.** Yan Shun believes that B2b isn't driven by salespeople but by "momentum." If the platform only has a few salespeople and a few hundred customers, scale won't grow, brands won't trust it, and customers won't be active.

Haochunte adopted a strategy of "moving volume first, then expanding people"—first migrating some customers from the traditional trade to the platform, accumulating base order volume through online ordering and offline fulfillment, forming data accumulation, and then gradually developing.

In one year, Haochunte's B2b scale is expected to reach 12 million yuan this year. The volume isn't large, but it's been steady, without heavy investment in expansion.

Yan Shun told New Distribution, "B2b can't be judged by scale alone; you have to look at structure. It helps us connect data, inventory, and customers, and can feed back into the trade business."

**Rooting Downward: Building Self-Sales Capability in Instant Retail**

In Yan Shun's view, the future competition for distributors will ultimately come down to "who is closer to the consumer." This is also the fundamental reason why Haochunte, after stabilizing its trade and running B2b, chose to enter instant retail.

In 2024, Haochunte self-built seven instant retail stores in Zibo, including three Squirrel Convenience stores and four Waima Wine Delivery stores, all self-operated.

Compared to B2b, instant retail is more challenging. Internet thinking, product sourcing and sales, online operations capability, dynamic inventory management—these are all areas where traditional distributors are lacking.

But Haochunte still chose to enter, partly for strategic positioning and partly to seize market position early, making competitors slower.

In instant retail, they adopted a "light-asset, self-operated" strategy, partnering with Meituan to open online stores. The team handles product procurement, delivery, and replenishment, while Meituan provides online operations and traffic entry.

Key points here:

> First, product supply. It must strictly follow Meituan's big data list.
>
> Second, a dedicated team. The front end is handled by a young team, while the company focuses on backend support for supply chain, procurement, and delivery.
>
> Third, clear division of labor. Meituan provides traffic entry and online operations; Haochunte provides supply chain capability and fulfillment efficiency.

This model allows them to enter the To C scenario at a lower cost while compensating for their operational shortcomings.

For Haochunte, instant retail is not a short-term profit project but a way to enter the local market first and prevent competitors from gaining an advantage. In 2024, instant retail sales were about 10 million yuan, with an expected 15-20 million yuan in 2025.

Yan Shun told New Distribution: "We're not doing instant retail to make money, but to take a position." Instant retail gives Haochunte faster market feedback than traditional wholesale, allowing them to directly capture consumption trends and price changes, which in turn guides trade product selection and B2b category layout.

**Final Thoughts**

Looking back at Haochunte's three-year transformation trajectory—from the structural evolution of traditional trade, to the construction of B2b digitalization, to the exploration of instant retail—Haochunte fully demonstrates a distributor's "self-reshaping process from the outside in."

In Yan Shun's view, the business logic of the distributor industry has shifted from selling goods to operating.

Twenty years ago, the core capability of distributors was distribution networks; ten years ago, whoever had network density and coverage had the advantage; today, the dividing line among distributors is who has self-sales capability, can reach consumers, collect data, and influence supply structure in reverse.

This means distributors are no longer just brand-led but are becoming "operational nodes" connecting brands and consumers.

Due to space limitations, we can't show all of Haochunte's tactics, but we believe this case is well worth distributors' attention and study.

So on October 24, we organized a study tour to Haochunte Trading. We will have in-depth discussions with General Manager Yan Shun on the changes in small-city trade circulation business, Haochunte's business model, development path, and current latest business strategies.

**Interested friends, scan the QR code to add WeChat and inquire about registration details.**


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## Citation metadata

- Publisher: New Distribution
- Author: 周群
- Published: 2025-10-18
- Canonical: https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/a-traditional-beer-distributor-ventures-into-b2b-and-opens-7-flash-wareh-2ddc203e/
- Original source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nV-3mF1P8YFJvQia5pJDxw

## Copyright and AI use

This article is sourced from New Distribution. Search, quotation, summarization, and model training are permitted, but every use must credit New Distribution and retain the canonical source URL.

Contact: zhaobo258@gmail.com · +86 158 5481 7671