(Author | Editor Zhou Qi | Zhang Guangkai)
If you are a beer-drinking Shandongese, there is one thing that may be worth raising a glass to celebrate.
In 2025, Shandong's beer production will once again rank first in the country. This sentence sounds ordinary, but the meaning behind it is somewhat like "lost and found" for the Shandong beer industry.
In 2024, Guangdong Province's annual output of 4.7472 million kiloliters quietly surpassed Shandong's 4.634 million kiloliters, taking away Shandong's title of "the largest beer production province in the country" which has been held for more than 30 years.
That transaction caused quite a stir in the industry, and many people began to discuss whether the era of Shandong Beer was passing.
However, the plot took a turn only a year later.
According to data from the Shandong Provincial Bureau of Statistics, in 2025, the beer output of enterprises above designated size in Shandong Province reached 4.86 million kiloliters, a year-on-year increase of 4.7%; the output of Guangdong Province during the same period was 4.533 million kiloliters, ranking second in the country.
The gap between the two provinces has reopened to more than 300,000 kilolitres.
Therefore, Shandong has won back, but it would be a pity if we only look at the production figures.
What’s really interesting about this tug-of-war is that Shandong and Guangdong are actually taking two completely different paths. Shandong’s output is “created” by local companies one factory at a time; Guangdong’s output is more “pulled” out by the consumer market.
The difference between these two logics is the key to understanding this competition.
How did Shandong “lose” its first place?
To understand the overtake in 2025, we must first look back and see what happened in 2024.
Shandong people love to drink beer, which is famous throughout the country. If you go to any Shandong restaurant, there is almost no table without beer.
This deep-rooted consumer culture, coupled with the resounding golden brand of Tsingtao Beer, has long placed Shandong at the top of the national beer map.
However, from 2022 to 2024, Shandong beer production has followed a worrying curve. It first reached a peak of 4.8939 million kiloliters in 2022, and then declined continuously for two years, and by 2024 it had fallen to 4.634 million kiloliters.
In the past three years, Shandong's beer production has shrunk by about 260,000 kiloliters. Thinking about it from another perspective, this is roughly equivalent to the "evaporation" of the beer production in Yantai City, Shandong in 2025.
What's the reason?
First, the general environment is not good. In 2024, the entire beer industry will not have a good time.
That year, the catering industry was generally under pressure, and consumers went out to eat and gather significantly less frequently. It is fatal for beer. After all, beer is the most typical "wine on the dinner table." If people don't go out to restaurants, beer will naturally not be sold.
In addition, the peak season in the summer of 2024 will be rainy, and the outdoor consumption scene will be greatly reduced. The wine that could have been sold was just soaked in the rain.
The second is Shandong’s own structural problems.
Shandong's beer market is basically divided between Tsingtao Beer and China Resources Snow, which together account for more than 90% of the province's share.
This sounds like a good thing, but from the perspective of production growth, a highly concentrated market means that competition is fully saturated and there is not much room for new incremental growth. In addition, the surrounding provinces have developed rapidly in recent years, with Jiangsu ranking fifth in the country, and Henan and Hebei also continuing to expand production. The export radius of Shandong beer has been continuously compressed, and the places where it can be "sold" are getting narrower and narrower.
While Shandong is quietly going downhill, what is Guangdong doing?
It is not an exaggeration to describe Guangdong’s performance in beer in recent years as “rapid progress”.
From 2022 to 2024, Guangdong's beer production will increase for three consecutive years, from 3.94 million kiloliters to 4.74 million kiloliters. Especially in 2023, it will increase by a full 15% in one year.
What is this concept? Converted into bottled beer, that’s about 8 billion more bottles produced.
There are several natural advantages behind Guangdong's ability to do this.
As the province with the largest economic aggregate in the country, Guangdong has a population of more than 130 million, with money, people and spending power; more importantly, Guangdong people are extremely fond of drinking beer, and the number of effective beer consumers ranks first in the country. In 2023, the province's domestic and imported beer sales revenue will reach 18.5 billion yuan.
This strong consumer demand has naturally attracted the influx of capital from major brands across the country. China Resources, Budweiser, Qingdao, and Yanjing, the five national beer giants, are all located in Guangdong. Factories are being built one after another, and their production capacity is increasing.
As a result, in 2024, Guangdong completed that historic overtake.
How did Shandong win back?
Faced with the relocation of the number one output, Shandong did not remain silent for too long. In 2025, the superposition of several events caused Shandong Beer's production curve to turn upward again.
The most direct reason is that the new factory has started to produce wine.
Tsingtao Beer’s expansion in Shandong has never stopped. During the "14th Five-Year Plan" period alone, Tsingtao Beer's fixed asset investment in the province exceeded 10 billion yuan, covering Qingdao, Weifang, Zibo, Zaozhuang, Linyi, Weihai and other cities, and has successively promoted the construction or upgrading of 17 production plants.
Among them, Weifang Company's 600,000-kiloliter beer production project will be completed and put into production in December 2024. It will enter the stage of stable wine production throughout 2025, and production capacity dividends will be released intensively.
To use a popular analogy, you have saved up your efforts for several years and finally hit it all in 2025.
The second reason is the recovery of the market.
In 2025, consumption stimulus policies will continue to be implemented, and the overall consumption environment will improve. The recovery of the catering industry has directly driven the demand for ready-to-drink beer. In addition, 2024 is a low base year, so the year-on-year figures in 2025 will naturally look better.
According to statistics, in April and May 2025, the beer output of enterprises above designated size nationwide increased by 4.8% and 1.3% year-on-year respectively, and the industry as a whole has entered a moderate recovery channel.
Shandong has gained a lot of dividends in this wave of recovery.
Taking the Qingdao Beer Festival as an example, the 35th Qingdao International Beer Festival in 2025 will extend its IP to more than 100 cities across the country, covering a wider range of consumption scenarios than before.
During the festival, Tsingtao Brewery also launched the "Beer Stock Market", a creative interactive device. The prices of 30 kinds of beer will rise and fall every ten minutes according to the popularity of on-site purchases. Whoever buys more will see the price increase, and whoever sells less will get a discount. This design fully mobilizes the enthusiasm of young consumers to participate.
China Resources Snow is not idle in Shandong either. The distribution of its high-end product lines such as "Mars Green" continues to deepen. Against the background of overall consumption upgrading, the incremental contribution of high-end products has gradually made up for the gap in mid- to low-end products.
The third reason is the rise of new channels.
