2026 China Beer T5 Summit: Top Five Brewers on Cross-Border Innovation and Scene Rebuilding; H1 Output Up 0.2%

The 2026 China Beer T5 Summit was held in Qingdao, Shandong. Heads of leading brewers including China Resources Beer, Tsingtao Beer, Budweiser APAC, Yanjing Beer, and Carlsberg China attended. The summit was held only eight months after the previous one, the shortest interval in recent editions. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, June beer output from enterprises above a designated size was 4.049 million kiloliters, down 3.1% year-on-year; the cumulative output for January to June was 19.362 million kiloliters, up 0.2% from a year earlier.

China Resources Beer and Guyue Longshan jointly launched a cross-border innovative product called 'Yue Xiao Pi' (Smaller Beer), aiming to attract emerging groups outside the traditional beer-consuming circle. China Resources Beer believes that cross-border products can drive changes in consumer demographics and generate incremental consumption. Carlsberg China's subsidiary Chongqing Brewery, leveraging a combination of local and international brands, launched over 30 new products in 2025, covering craft beer, tea beer, one-liter large cans, and other beer categories, as well as fruit-flavored soda, energy drinks, and sparkling water in non-beer segments.

Tsingtao Beer has explored a variety of new scenarios, including the Tsingtao Beer Museum, craft beer garden, beer refueling station, Tsingtao Beer Exchange, and beer express office, to offer consumers integrated services of product, scene, experience, and culture. Budweiser APAC emphasized that the core scenario of beer lies in 'gathering,' using cultural and sports events, dining consumption, and other scenes to provide consumers with ways to communicate and release joy, while supporting the recovery of physical consumption scenarios and promoting the healthy development of the dining ecosystem.

Yanjing Beer proposed that the industry should shift from scale growth to value growth, from low-level competition to high-quality competition, and from passively accepting market perceptions to actively shaping industry value. Leading enterprises should allocate resources to long-term value areas such as quality upgrading, consumer experience optimization, channel efficiency improvement, process innovation, brand cultivation, and industrial chain collaboration. Budweiser APAC believes that the beer industry should leverage fermentation technology to achieve attributes such as zero sugar, zero calories, and zero fat, naturally generating flavor through biological reactions, thereby avoiding low-level homogeneous competition with other beverages.