白酒行业Baijiu (Liquor) Industry

Baijiu (Chinese white liquor) is a traditional distilled spirit unique to China and a distinctive cultural calling card. From the admonition against drinking in the "Announcement about Drunkenness" chapter of the Book of Documents, to the banquet etiquette of "brew this spring wine to wish for longevity" in the Book of Songs, and to Du Fu's poetic elegance of "the Shehong spring wine is still green in the cold", liquor is deeply interwoven with the rites, literature, and folk customs of Chinese civilization. Today, the baijiu industry spans the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, with annual sales revenue in the hundreds of billions of yuan; it is an important tax source for local finances and one of the food-industry categories with the highest profit margins and brand premiums.

This index does not copy the positions of any public list, but computes from underlying public data: it comprehensively evaluates about twenty A-share listed baijiu companies across four dimensions—Scale (operating revenue), Quality (net profit, market capitalization), Innovation (brand history, craftsmanship heritage), and Contribution (taxation). Among them, the "Contribution" dimension is a CPPPS distinctive feature—the combined consumption tax, value-added tax, and income tax of baijiu have long been a pillar of local finance in producing regions (Guizhou, Sichuan, Shanxi, Jiangsu, etc.), a dimension generally missing from international lists.

The model takes logarithms of wide-ranging monetary indicators such as revenue, market capitalization, and taxation to prevent leading enterprises from "running far ahead" and monopolizing the index; it takes logarithms of brand history to balance the comparability of "time-honored brands" and "rising stars"; net profit and craftsmanship heritage are linearly normalized to preserve the quality signal of profit/loss differentiation. Evaluation results: Kweichow Moutai, Wuliangye, Shanxi Fenjiu, Luzhou Laojiao, and Gujing Gongjiu rank in the top five. Overall, "Mao and Wu" lead on both scale and profitability, the originator of light-aroma and the originator of strong-aroma baijiu follow closely thanks to their historical and craftsmanship heritage, and a group of time-honored brands with deep history and high-growth regional famous liquors rank behind them.

This ranking is based mainly on approximate values from public common knowledge, marked "subject to official sources", permanently free and public, and is provided for research and reference only.

The comprehensive strength of a baijiu enterprise is hard to measure with a single indicator: some enterprises are large in scale but weak in growth, some are moderate in scale yet possess thousand-year-old fermentation pits and a proprietary aroma type, and some are not large in volume yet contribute substantial producing-region tax revenue. Therefore, this algorithm adopts the CPPPS four-dimensional framework (Scale + Quality + Innovation + Contribution) and adapts it to the characteristics of the baijiu industry:

Each indicator is first min-max normalized into [0,1] (to remove scale differences). For indicators spanning orders of magnitude—revenue, market capitalization, taxation, and brand history—the base-10 logarithm is taken before normalization, to prevent leading enterprises from monopolizing the index while preserving the gradient between orders of magnitude:

The six weights always sum to 1.0, distributed across four dimensions: Scale 0.20, Quality 0.35 (net profit 0.20 + market capitalization 0.15), Innovation 0.25 (brand history 0.15 + craftsmanship heritage 0.10), and Contribution 0.20. Net profit may be negative (for loss-making enterprises), so it is linearly normalized rather than log-transformed; craftsmanship heritage is a 0–100 score and is also linearly normalized.

Weight-design logic: Quality (0.35) carries the highest weight, because the core competitiveness of baijiu lies in profitability and brand premium; Scale (0.20) and Contribution (0.20) are equally weighted—Scale is volume and Contribution is social value; within Innovation (0.25), brand history (0.15) is higher than craftsmanship heritage (0.10), reflecting the industry essence that "time cannot be replicated". The logarithmic treatment reasonably compresses the gap between "Moutai's 170-billion-yuan revenue" and "Wuliangye's 89-billion-yuan revenue", preventing a single giant from monopolizing the ranking.

Revenue, net profit, market capitalization, and taxation all use approximate values from public common knowledge, referring to each listed company's annual reports, China Alcoholic Drinks Association industry data, and public tax/statistical calibers, marked "subject to official sources". Brand history uses the approximate number of years of verifiable fame/tribute-liquor/fermentation-pit history (such as Fenjiu's light-aroma fame history, Gujing Gongjiu's "Jiu Yun Chun Jiu" tribute history, Luzhou Laojiao's 1573 National Treasure fermentation pits, and the Swellfun site dating from the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties); craftsmanship heritage is a 0–100 subjective score based on aroma-type pioneering, national-level intangible cultural heritage techniques, and ancient fermentation pits, and thus contains some subjectivity.

Limitations: ① the approximate values contain errors, especially for small-cap enterprises whose data fluctuate considerably; ② Shunxin Agriculture (Niulanshan) is measured on its baijiu-business caliber, which differs from the listed company's overall caliber; ③ craftsmanship heritage is a subjective score; ④ dynamic indicators such as brand growth momentum, channel inventory, and internationalization are not included. The ranking is for research reference only and does not constitute investment advice.