GUOQUAN Lowers Store Opening Targets, Continues to Calculate Store Efficiency for Its 'Community Central Kitchen' Model

GUOQUAN, aiming to become a 'community central kitchen,' continues to refine its store model.

On August 17, GUOQUAN disclosed its interim report for 2026. In the first half of the year, it achieved revenue of RMB 3.947 billion, a year-on-year increase of 21.8%; core operating profit amounted to RMB 225 million, a year-on-year increase of 18.3%.

However, the gross margin decreased from 22.1% in the same period last year to 21.5%, and the net profit margin also dropped from 5.9% to 5.4%.

As of the end of June, GUOQUAN had 12,198 stores. It opened 997 new stores and closed 365 stores in the first half of the year, resulting in a net increase of 632 stores. Meanwhile, the company has completed the upgrade to the large-store model for 684 stores.

More noteworthy than the performance growth rate is GUOQUAN's adjustment to its annual store opening targets.

The latest interim report shows that GUOQUAN has adjusted its target to having over 13,100 stores by the end of the year, with a net increase of over 1,534 stores for the full year, which is approximately 1,400 stores fewer than the target set at the beginning of the year.

The company still expects the store closure rate to remain below 4%, but explicitly stated that new stores added in the second half of the year will primarily follow the large-store model.

Rather than continuing to expand into lower-tier markets, GUOQUAN is adding more offerings to its existing stores.

In the first half of the year, the company launched 139 new SKUs for hot pot and barbecue, while also increasing products such as NFC juices, craft beers, and flavored tea drinks.

Among these, 'GUOQUAN Farm' is a new business extending into higher-frequency household food consumption. It mainly covers fruits, fresh produce, eggs, and frozen products—items not previously part of the core hot pot and barbecue inventory—through online selection and live-streaming traffic generation.

In the first half of the year, the paid GMV of GUOQUAN Farm across all channels reached RMB 240 million, a year-on-year increase of over 600%. Representative products included Golden Pillow durian flesh, durian mille-crepe cake, and salted duck eggs.

The value of the farm business lies not just in adding a category of goods, but in using higher-frequency items like fruits and fresh produce to bring consumers back to stores, thereby generating associated consumption such as hot pot and barbecue.

However, the growth brought by new categories comes at a cost.

GUOQUAN's gross margin in the first half of the year decreased by 0.6 percentage points to 21.5%. The company directly attributed this to the lower gross margins of non-traditional hot pot and barbecue products like Golden Pillow durian flesh, as well as rising prices for some raw materials.

Meanwhile, the large-store renovations also pushed up expenses: sales and distribution expenses increased by 24.6% year-on-year in the first half of the year, with the company stating that this included costs for adjusting and renovating the new large stores.

Currently, GUOQUAN is still preparing to continue broadening its boundaries. In addition to large stores in towns and communities, the company had 96 camping outlets operating in the first half of the year, and plans to continue promoting GUOQUAN stir-fry in the future; overseas, it will use Hong Kong, China as a pilot for store operations.

In the second half of the year, it will still open stores, but the key metric for evaluating this round of expansion is no longer just the number of stores.

As GUOQUAN transforms from a hot pot and barbecue ingredient store into an increasingly larger 'community central kitchen,' the ability to continuously improve the efficiency of existing stores through a wider variety of categories, while controlling the gross margin pressure brought by new categories and large-store expansion, will be more important than opening another thousand stores.