Mixue Bingcheng Zhang Yuan: Digitalization has always been our relatively weak link.

Ask AI · How does Zhang Yuan’s financial background help Mixue’s digital upgrade?

Just on March 24, the same day Mixue Group released its 2025 financial report, the company announced a management reshuffle: the former CEO, Zhang Hongfu, was reassigned as Co-Chairman, and replacing him as the new CEO is Zhang Yuan, the former vice president in charge of finance and operations. The next day, at Mixue Group’s performance briefing, this new CEO, Zhang Yuan, made his first public appearance. This appearance contained a tremendous amount of information and essentially set the direction for Mixue’s development over the next few years.

Let’s first get to know Zhang Yuan. Zhang Yuan holds a master’s degree in Finance from Tsinghua University. His career beginnings focused on top-tier financial fields; he has worked at internationally well-known institutions such as Bank of America Securities and Hillhouse Investment. In February 2023, he joined Mixue Group as Chief Financial Officer, leading the optimization of the group’s financial management system, building a financial control system tailored for its scale of thousands of stores, and deeply participating in capital operations and market value management after the group’s listing in Hong Kong. In June 2025, he was promoted to Executive Vice President, taking full charge of the group’s financial management and capital operations. This appointment as CEO is another important promotion for him within Mixue, and it also reflects the group’s high recognition of his professional capabilities. Meanwhile, he also serves as Chairman of the Xuewang Charity Foundation, balancing corporate operations with social welfare initiatives. Internally, people at Mixue describe this adjustment as a “proactive strategic upgrade.” It is not a last-minute change of leadership, but an important move to help the company enter a new stage of multi-branding and globalization.

At the performance briefing, Zhang Yuan opened with a vivid metaphor to explain the reshuffle. He said, “To build a great enterprise, the team needs someone who keeps their head down and moves forward, someone who lifts their head to look at the road ahead, and someone who looks up to the stars.” He went on to explain that over the past nearly 30 years, founder Zhang Hongchao and his brother Zhang Hongfu have, on the one hand, kept everyone “keeping their head down and moving forward,” taking Mixue from a shaved-ice shop to tens of thousands of stores worldwide; and on the other hand, “looked up to the stars,” laying the groundwork in advance for a central factory, self-built logistics, incubating Lucky Coffee, going overseas, and even creating the Xuewang IP. Now that the group has grown into a multi-brand, globalized company, it needs people to focus more on “lifting their head to look at the road” and “looking up to the stars.”

So, who will do these things? Zhang Yuan provided clear division of responsibilities: as Co-Chairman, Zhang Hongfu will in the future focus more on long-term strategy—for example, the Xuewang IP ecosystem, AI technology’s enabling role for the industry chain, green agriculture, and social welfare initiatives—matters that “require deep thinking and long-term planning.” As for himself, as the new CEO, he will work together with leaders of each brand and each region to share day-to-day operational coordination and execution, giving frontline teams more flexible decision-making power.

At the performance briefing, Zhang Yuan said quite plainly, “Digitalization has always been one of our relatively weak areas.” He mentioned that after last year’s subsidies from food delivery platforms tapered off, many orders shifted from offline to online, and Mixue’s previously strongest in-store consumption model was hit, putting pressure on store profitability. This revealed their shortcomings in digital operations. In essence, in the past they had not “lifted their head to look at the road” and had not “fixed the roof on a sunny day” early enough. So going forward, they will strongly “catch up” on digitalization—for instance, guiding food delivery platform users to their own mini-program, using AI to assist with store location selection and managing product shelf life, and so on. At the same time, in 2026, Mixue will proactively slow down the pace of opening new stores in China, focusing more resources on improving the operating quality of existing stores. In addition, they plan to invest RMB 1.6 billion to upgrade the supply chain. The core is to upgrade shelf-stable jam and milk into cold-chain fresh milk and fresh fruit. While this will raise costs in the short term and squeeze profits, he emphasized that it is a necessary strategic investment.

Throughout his remarks, Zhang Yuan repeatedly stressed the philosophy of “keeping your head down and moving forward, lifting your head to look at the road, and looking up to the stars.” He called on management to be forward-looking and not to respond passively. This is not only something said to the outside world; it is also a mobilization and division of work within the company’s management team. He hopes this will help cultivate more “generals who can win battles,” strengthening the leadership bench.

Zhang Yuan’s first public appearance clearly conveys a signal: Mixue is proactively moving on from the “scale dividend” era in which the company simply pursued the speed of opening stores, and is entering a new “value creation” stage that places greater emphasis on quality and looks further ahead. Promoted from CFO to CEO, with his candid and pragmatic style, he has mapped out a new path for this company that is about to turn 30: “slow down, but move more steadily.”