Author: Think AI, Aaron
"Use your brain often, drink more Six Walnuts" is a well-known advertising slogan.
As the blockbuster beverage of Yangyuan Beverage Company, Six Walnuts once swept across the country. Few would have imagined that this beverage company would be linked to AI chips.
In fact, the parent company of Six Walnuts is almost all-in on AI, having invested nearly its entire annual net profit into AI-related industries for three consecutive years.
Although it hasn't yet made actual money from the AI industry, its stock price soared from around 17.7 yuan at the beginning of last year to a high of 52 yuan in May, a 293% increase, nearly tripling.
The market already views Yangyuan Beverage as an AI concept stock.
In contrast, similar consumer stocks have had a terrible year over the same period. Across the A-share market, 1653 individual stocks hit new lows for the year, with consumer sector stocks accounting for a very high proportion. "Six Walnuts" has become a bright spot in the market.
Why has the parent company of Six Walnuts continued to ramp up investments in hard-tech sectors like AI since 2021? If these investments fail, what will the future hold?
Main Business Shrinking, Founding Team Needs Imagination
There was a time when Yangyuan Beverage was a dominant force. In 2015, its revenue reached a historical peak of 9.1 billion yuan, making founder Yao Kuizhang the richest person in Hebei province that year.
From 2015 to 2018, Yangyuan maintained rapid development, with net profit reaching a historical maximum of 2.8 billion yuan in 2018.
At that time, Yangyuan held a 90% market share in the walnut milk industry, almost monopolizing the entire sector.
Annual net profits exceeding 2 billion yuan also made the company a cash cow.
But by the present, in 2025, Yangyuan's revenue is only around 5.3 billion yuan, a 41% decline over 10 years, and profits have halved to just 1.2 billion yuan compared to the peak.
More troubling is that the decline is not isolated. Yangyuan is under pressure in its main sales regions like East China, Central China, and North China, with declines in regions like Northeast and Northwest China even exceeding 30%. Traditional peak seasons have also failed to reverse the downturn.
Yangyuan heavily relies on core products like Six Walnuts, with walnut milk accounting for over 80% of all product sales.
New products have remained lukewarm, while walnut milk itself is losing market share to alternatives like nut milks and oat milk. The gifting attribute of Six Walnuts has also gradually weakened, placing the main business in a long-term shrinking track.
Faced with weak products, the company did not choose to increase R&D efforts, innovate with new products, or compete on the product front.
Instead, it chose a more imaginative route of AI investment. Yangyuan's overall investment philosophy is relatively simple: invest in whatever is hot.
Setting aside the question of right or wrong, let's first look at which sectors Yangyuan has heavily entered, what results it has achieved, and then we will predict Yangyuan's possible endgame.
Cross-Border Gambling Spree
Since 2021, Yangyuan Beverage has focused on laying out the upstream and downstream of AI hardware. It launched a 3-billion-yuan fund, later expanding it by another 1 billion yuan in October last year, continuously increasing bets on AI, semiconductors, and new energy.
So far, 2.95 billion yuan has been spent, with 1.05 billion yuan still idle, awaiting new projects to invest in.
Among its 4-billion-yuan fund, one major investment drew attention: a 1.6-billion-yuan investment completed in April last year into Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd. (YMTC), acquiring a 0.99% equity stake.
1.6 billion yuan is equivalent to Yangyuan's entire annual profit. Investing the whole amount into a long-cycle industry like memory storage shows the company's boldness.
And YMTC has become hot this year, with reports of a potential domestic IPO and valuations ranging from 500 billion to 1 trillion yuan. Compared to last year's investment valuation, this represents a tripling in value.
If YMTC can successfully list, this single investment will mark the success of Yangyuan's industrial investments.
Because most of the other investments are currently at a floating loss, but Yangyuan has not exited, opting to continue holding long-term.
Among them, an 800-million-yuan investment in REPT Battero, a new energy power battery company, was fully cashed out after its 2023 Hong Kong IPO, realizing a book gain of approximately 241 million HKD.
The acquisition of Xinchao Media by Focus Media was valued at only 8.3 billion yuan, far below the 16.1 billion yuan valuation at the time of investment. Exit has not been executed yet, the fund still holds the equity, and it is currently at a floating loss.
The other AI-related companies are concentrated in areas like AI vision, edge-side AI chips, and GPUs for large model training, forming a relatively complete AI industry chain layout.
What's Next for Yangyuan?
In the coming years, Yangyuan Beverage is unlikely to completely transform into a VC company. Instead, it will likely maintain a dual-wheel model of "consumer main business as the foundation, equity investments for elasticity."
Six Walnuts will still be the company's basic business, but the walnut milk category has passed its high-growth period and will find it difficult to return to its past peak of 10 billion yuan annual revenue.
The 4-billion-yuan Quanhong Fund will remain an industrial fund worth watching.
Yangyuan's future capital will likely continue to flow into the upstream of AI computing power, including hard-tech directions like memory storage, edge-side AI chips, and industrial vision. Non-core tracks like new energy and media will gradually be marginalized.
If YMTC successfully lists, the investment gains could rewrite the income statement in one go, transforming the company's valuation from a traditional beverage stock to a dual pricing of "consumer + hard-tech shadow stock."
Conversely, if YMTC's listing is delayed or the semiconductor cycle turns cold, the stock price could also sharply retreat due to unmet tech expectations.
