1. Why Hainan's Drinks and Tea Deserve a Separate Look

On the national map, Hainan's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing is not large in scale. It has none of the million-ton brewing inputs of a grain-rich province, nor the dense beverage contract-manufacturing clusters of a coastal industrial belt. Judged on output ranking alone, it is easy to pass over.

Yet this sector has a trait rarely seen elsewhere: nearly every one of its product lines grows out of the island's distinctive produce and climate. Beverage plants elsewhere can globalize sourcing, standardize recipes and build factories close to consumer markets; Hainan's lines run the other way, with raw material, craft and even the product itself bound deeply to this land. Coconut juice cannot do without coconuts, Shanlan wine without the dryland glutinous rice of the Li highlands, rainforest big-leaf green tea without the high-mountain clouds and mist of Wuzhishan and Baisha. Here geography is not a backdrop but the root of the industry.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute treats Hainan's drinks and tea as a regional case precisely because it expresses "relying on produce, on craft, on geography" in an unusually pure form. It holds Coconut Palm, a model of turning a single crop into a five-billion-yuan-scale business; it holds Hainan Yedao, a cautionary tale of a slide from the peak and a struggle to keep its listing; and it holds Shanlan wine and Kuding tea, niche categories that hold their corner through intangible-heritage craft and geographic indications. This article endorses no company's market performance; it simply lays out the real landscape of this island business and honestly notes the fortunes along each line.

2. Coconut Juice: A Beverage Base Built on a Single Nut

To discuss Hainan's beverage manufacturing, one cannot avoid the coconut, still less Coconut Palm.

Coconut Palm Group is headquartered in Haikou, is Hainan's largest beverage producer and the domestic leader in the coconut-juice category. Its flagship is the can of Coconut Palm coconut juice whose packaging has barely changed in years, alongside extensions into coconut water, nata de coco, coconut oil, fruit juice, mineral water and tea drinks. Per public reports, the group's total sales reached about 50.98 billion yuan in 2023 and output value about 50.06 billion yuan in 2024, roughly flat year on year; for many years it ranked among the top industrial enterprises in Haikou by output. A coconut that many see as merely a tropical fruit has, in this company's hands, become a business steady at the five-billion-yuan scale, the most solid base in Hainan's beverage manufacturing.

The story also hides Hainan's beverage worries. Public sources show that around 1999 Coconut Palm held a high share of the coconut-juice category, but over the past two decades, as regional coconut-juice brands, new plant-based players and freshly made coconut drinks rose, its share clearly retreated, its supermarket shelf presence faced substitution by regional brands, and classic products still account for a high share of its mix. In other words, having lived off one classic can for decades, it now faces a market continually carved up by newcomers. This shows the point: scaling a single crop is not hard; growing new products and audiences beyond that crop is.

Around the coconut, Hainan in fact has a longer processing chain, from coconut water, coconut milk and coconut oil to nata de coco and desiccated coconut, reaching from beverages into food ingredients. Coconut-juice drinks are merely the most visible outlet of this chain, turning the island's "coconut" label into a consumer symbol on shelves nationwide.

3. Hainan Yedao: The Rise and Fall of the First Listed Health-Liquor Maker

If Coconut Palm represents the steadiness of Hainan's beverage sector, then Hainan Yedao writes a story of rising high and falling far.

Hainan Yedao listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2000 as the first listed company in the health-liquor business, its flagship the strongly island-flavored Yedao Deer-Turtle Liquor. Per public reports, it reached its earnings peak around 2010 with revenue of about 1.605 billion yuan, when Deer-Turtle Liquor was the spearhead product carrying the firm's revenue. Those were the years when the health-liquor concept was most sought after, and a tonic Hainan liquor steeped with deer and turtle became almost a signature festival gift.

The curve since then has trended steadily downward. Public information shows that, amid shifting consumer attitudes, a broad ebb in health liquor and its own operating swings, sales of the Deer-Turtle Liquor series shrank sharply, the company fell into losses for years on end, and revenue slid from the billion-yuan tier to about 225 million yuan in 2023; in 2025, with a negative non-recurring net profit after audit and core-related revenue below 300 million yuan, its stock was placed under delisting-risk warning, sounding the alarm once more. From "first listed health-liquor maker" to "fighting for survival of its listing," the rise and fall of Hainan Yedao over more than a decade is a living case of how a once-star single product is pushed up by the times and then tested repeatedly by the market.

Its meaning is not to talk down a company, but to remind us: a geographic label and a single blockbuster can lift a firm to a peak, yet may not carry it across cycles. Hainan Yedao and Coconut Palm form two mirrors of the same business on the same island, one steadying a crop, the other showing how to follow up after perfecting a blockbuster, with no standard answer for either.

4. Shanlan Wine and Li Tradition: A Niche Liquor Grown in the Rainforest

Hainan's liquor is not only the few bottles on supermarket shelves. In the Li villages around Wuzhishan and Qiongzhong there is a wine that grows almost entirely out of the rainforest and farming tradition, Shanlan wine.

Shanlan wine uses Shanlan rice, the dryland glutinous rice unique to the Li highlands, mixed with a yeast cake made from specific local plants and rice flour, and left to ferment naturally in a conical bamboo basket lined with banana leaves; when a milky liquid drips from the basket's tip, that is the pure Shanlan liquor. Low in alcohol, clear and sweet, it is called the Li people's "Maotai" or Hainan's "champagne." This old craft, from selecting rice and making the cake to fermenting, is a skill passed down through generations, and the Li "Biang" wine brewing technique entered Hainan's provincial list of intangible cultural heritage in 2017; today some firms combine it with quality mineral water from the Qixianling area to make a commercial rice wine such as "Shanlan Yuye," trying to turn a village skill into a product that can leave the mountains.

Shanlan wine is small in volume and travels little, yet it is precisely the most geographically and culturally distinctive branch of Hainan's liquors. It runs an entirely different path from the large-scale industrialization of coconut juice or Deer-Turtle Liquor, competing not on capacity and distribution but on rice variety, craft and ethnic memory. It reminds us that the other pole of this island business is the niche categories that quietly hold their corner through intangible-heritage craft and distinctive raw materials.

5. Rainforest Big-Leaf Varieties: Baisha Green Tea and Hainan's Geographic-Indication Teas

Hainan's refined-tea line is likewise written through with geographic imprint.

The foundation of Hainan tea is the Hainan big-leaf tea tree growing in the island's central mountains, paired with high-mountain clouds, mist and abundant rainfall. The most famous is Baisha Green Tea, produced within Baisha Li Autonomous County, where a distinctive meteorite-crater landform and a year-round misty environment are seen as an excellent site for high-mountain mist tea; Baisha Green Tea is already a national geographic-indication product. Named alongside it are Shuiman tea, made from wild big-leaf fresh leaves in Shuiman Township of Wuzhishan with a strong sweet aftertaste, and Chengmai Kuding tea, produced in Chengmai and also a national geographic-indication product, known as a "longevity tea"; there is also Langui Ren, a flavored oolong, together forming the spectrum of Hainan tea.

By scale, Hainan tea is a textbook case of "small but distinctive." Per public statistics, in 2022 the province's tea-garden area was about 35,600 mu with total crude tea output around 844.6 tons; Baisha county alone held about 12,200 mu, roughly one-third of the province, and the full tea chain in Wuzhishan's Shuiman Township also reached the hundred-million-yuan tier. The larger and better-known players are the Hainan Nongken Wuzhishan Tea Group and its Baisha Tea unit, with the Nongken tea group having entered the "Top 100 Chinese Tea Enterprises" list for several straight years. Backed by free-trade-port construction, Baisha and other areas have in recent years upgraded the tea chain, launching products for younger consumers that brew hot or cold-steep, trying to send this "golden leaf" further.

The trait of this line is clear: small in area and output, but not low in unit price or recognition. It relies not on scale but on the geographic endowment of the meteorite crater, high-mountain mist and big-leaf varieties that cannot be copied elsewhere, plus the backing of geographic indications, turning a small tea garden into one of Hainan's calling cards.

6. Up and Downstream and Exports: The Chain From Raw Material to Shelf

Looked at together, the upstream and downstream of liquor, beverage and refined tea in Hainan almost all revolve around local produce.

Upstream is planting and primary processing: coconut groves, Shanlan rice paddies, tea gardens and Kuding tea woods, together with the quality mineral water used for filling, form the material end. Midstream is manufacturing and packaging: coconut-juice filling, rice-wine fermentation and tea fixing and refining, which need filling lines, fermentation and fixing equipment, packaging and cold chain. Downstream is brand, channel and export, where Coconut Palm pushes coconut juice into supermarkets nationwide, the Nongken and Baisha tea firms send tea out via the free-trade port, and niche categories such as Shanlan wine and Kuding tea are known more through geographic indications and cultural-tourism settings. The common thread of this chain is that the further downstream, the more the geographic label is amplified: consumers often buy not just a can of drink or a packet of tea, but the tropical and rainforest imagination that the word "Hainan" carries.

For sales teams supplying upstream to Hainan's liquor, beverage and tea makers, whether providing coconut raw material, glutinous rice and fresh tea leaf, or filling lines, fermentation and fixing equipment, packaging materials and cold-chain services, reaching the island's coconut-juice, rice-wine and tea processing factory clients in volume is possible through Tianxia Gongchang, which filters the factory directory and decision-maker contacts of Hainan's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing along the two dimensions of region and industry, turning upstream client development from scattered inquiry into following a map.

7. The Institute's View: Geography Gives the Root; Whether New Branches Grow Is Another Matter

Drawing the lines together, Hainan's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing shows a shape deeply molded by geography. Its strengths are all written in the island's produce: coconuts anchor a coconut-juice business steady at the five-billion-yuan scale, the dryland glutinous rice and rainforest crops of the Li highlands brew the heritage-stamped Shanlan wine, and the meteorite crater and high-mountain mist nurture geographic-indication niche teas such as Baisha Green Tea, Shuiman tea and Chengmai Kuding tea. Geography is its deepest root.

Its worries are just as clear. A leader like Coconut Palm faces a retreating share and an aging category; after living off classic products for decades, how to grow new products and audiences is unavoidable. The slide of Hainan Yedao and Deer-Turtle Liquor confirms that a single blockbuster cannot carry a whole firm across cycles. The tea sector is small and distinctive, destined to struggle in a head-on contest with large tea provinces such as Yunnan, Guizhou and Fujian, and export and brand must still be built slowly.

The view of the Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute is that geography has already given this island business ample root, and the real suspense is whether new branches can grow from it: whether the coconut can extend from one classic can into more coconut-based drinks and food ingredients accepted by the young; whether heritage and geographic-indication categories such as Shanlan wine and Kuding tea can, via the free-trade port and tourism, leave the mountains and the island; whether the old names that fell from their peaks can find reasons for today's consumers to buy again. Geography gives an innate recognition, and whether that recognition can be steadily converted into a market has never depended on coconut breezes and sea views, but on products, channels and the relay of generations of craft. What an island can make of coconuts, rice and a single leaf of tea finally turns on how far, beyond its produce, it is still willing to go.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (factory directory and industry data for Hainan's liquor, beverage and refined tea manufacturing)
  • Coconut Palm Group website, Tidesight, National Business Daily, Guancha.cn, Jiemian: Coconut Palm's ~50.98 billion yuan total sales in 2023 and ~50.06 billion yuan output value in 2024, status as Hainan's largest beverage maker, coconut-juice market-share shift and product mix
  • Hainan Yedao (Group) Co. 2024 annual report summary, Jiemian, Stockstar, Sina Finance, Beijing News: Yedao's 2000 listing, ~1.605 billion yuan revenue peak in 2010, decline of Deer-Turtle Liquor sales, ~225 million yuan revenue in 2023 and delisting-risk warning in 2025
  • Wuzhishan municipal government website, Haikou.net, Tencent News, public materials on Shanlan Yuye: raw material and old craft of Li Shanlan wine, inclusion of the Biang wine brewing technique in Hainan's provincial intangible cultural heritage list in 2017, Qixianling mineral water and the Shanlan Yuye commercial rice wine
  • Phoenix Hainan, China News Service, Yunnan.cn, public materials on Chengmai: national geographic-indication designation of Baisha Green Tea and Chengmai Kuding tea, characteristics of Shuiman tea and the Hainan big-leaf variety, origin of the Langui Ren flavored tea
  • Zhejiang University China Agricultural Brand Research Center, Hainan provincial government website, Hainan Forestry Bureau, Hainan Daily: 2022 provincial tea-garden area of about 35,600 mu and total crude tea output of about 844.6 tons, Baisha tea-garden area and output value, the full-chain output value of Shuiman Township, the standing of the Hainan Nongken Wuzhishan Tea Group and Baisha Tea, and tea-chain upgrading under the free-trade-port backdrop