Hundred-billion-dollar food delivery war, quietly feeding SF Express

（The author of this article is Spiral Laboratory, and it is published by Cail Media with permission）

By | Spiral Laboratory, Author丨Chasing Life, Editor丨Nut

Recently, SF Holding delivered a historic report card: its full-year revenue first surpassed the 300 billion yuan mark, reaching 308.2 billion yuan, up 8.37% year over year; its net profit attributable to shareholders was 11.1 billion yuan, up 9.31%.

To be sure, what SF Holding delivered is not an “ultra-fast growth” performance. But compared with the “stall” state of revenue decline in 2023, SF Holding returned to steady growth in 2025. Its “three-horse carriage” of express delivery, intra-city, and international businesses also achieved historic breakthroughs.

However, although revenue grew, it became even harder for SF Holding to make money. The gross margin, which barely managed to recover in the past few years, again saw a year-over-year decline in 2025. Even as the “express delivery king,” SF Holding still can’t stand entirely apart from the industry pressures caused by slowing growth in the express delivery sector.

Fortunately, this takeout battle jointly ignited by the three major players, unexpectedly allowed SF Holding to take a share of the spoils. Last year, SF Holding’s intra-city instant delivery business generated revenue of 12.72 billion yuan, up 43.4% year over year.

The express delivery industry is a “hard business” built by scale and efficiency. The position of “king” may look glorious, but to remain stable and seated firmly, SF Holding is far from being able to exhale.

The “Takeout Battle” That Provided a “Godsend”

In 2025, SF Holding’s revenue and net profit both hit record highs. But the most eye-catching growth driver was not the “core business” of express delivery, but the intra-city instant delivery business that cashed in on the “takeout dividend.”

In 2025, SF Holding’s time-sensitive express delivery served as the basic platform: revenue and growth remained steady, accounting for more than 42% of total revenue. However, among all businesses, the fastest-growing segment was the intra-city instant delivery business, generating revenue of 12.72 billion yuan, up 43.4%.

In recent years, SF Holding’s intra-city instant delivery business has continued to grow—from 5.11 billion yuan in 2021 to 12.72 billion yuan in 2025. Yet it was only starting in 2023 that it began to achieve profitability. In 2025, net profit reached 280 million yuan, delivering a doubling of growth.

The reason, of course, is inseparable from that high-profile “takeout battle.” Starting in April last year, several major platforms—including JD, Meituan, and Taobao Flash—rolled out various large-value coupons in a bid to capture the entry points of instant retail. The takeout market repeatedly saw “order surges.”

After coffee and milk tea subsidies, the unit price fell to just a few yuan or even zero. Consumers went on a frenzy “to milk the cow for free,” and many stores posted orders that were several meters long—orders that they simply couldn’t process in time.

During the takeout battle, the peak daily order volume once approached 250 million, while in early 2025, that number was still around 100 million orders. The surge in orders pushed courier demand to a new level, forcing major platforms to start “poaching people.”

Meituan courier Lin You (a pseudonym) said, “Previously I could deliver 30–50 orders a day, but on weekends the platform adds more subsidies, so you have to deliver more than 100 orders. But what you earn is also more—almost 5 or 6 times that of normal days, and some couriers earn over 10,000 yuan per month.”

But the problem is that even if platforms offer order-boosting rewards, high-temperature subsidies, and long-distance subsidies, couriers are willing to take more orders. Yet courier productivity ultimately has a ceiling. At this point, SF Holding’s intra-city segment became the best supplemental capacity provider.

In this sudden takeout battle, JD and Taobao Flash tried hard to replenish capacity, but in the short term there would inevitably be a gap. As an independent third-party delivery company, SF Holding’s intra-city business does not directly compete with other takeout platforms, and it also has a “time-lag” advantage—so it naturally became the instant delivery platform that ate “the most.”

In 2025, SF Holding’s intra-city delivery service saw year-over-year growth in order volume of over 55%, driving a rapid increase in revenue scale. Specifically, revenue from intra-city delivery services for merchants grew 60.0% year over year; revenue from intra-city delivery services for consumers grew 13.7% year over year.

But that’s not all. In addition to serving as “temporary couriers” for catering takeout, in recent years SF Holding’s intra-city business has also deeply bound itself with top chain brands such as Sam’s Club and Starbucks, entering the supermarket and premium retail tracks with higher average ticket values.

The explosive growth in order volume allows SF Holding’s intra-city business to spread and dilute the cost of delivery capacity, forming complementarity with SF Holding’s express delivery network. In addition, brands such as Sam’s Club, Starbucks, and Tianhong actively participated in the instant retail battle as well, bringing SF Holding more high-margin orders.

With these two factors working together, SF Holding’s intra-city business achieved a “favorable timing, location, and people” kind of harvest in 2025. Although the instant retail battle will gradually cool down in the new year, at least in 2025 SF Holding’s intra-city business truly ate its fill.

The Industry Moves On From a Price War

However, SF Holding’s “good luck” was not just this. Entering 2026, there are signs that the “price war” that has long plagued the express delivery industry is also winding down.

Over the past decade, overall express delivery volume in the industry has continued to grow, but compared with the growth rate of as high as 50% before 2017, the growth rate of shipments has gradually slowed. In 2025, the express delivery business volume completed 198.95 billion parcels, up 13.6% year over year. For reference, the express delivery growth rates in 2023 and 2024 were 16.8% and 21%, respectively.

As the express delivery industry moves from incremental markets to stock/consumption markets, the competitive landscape is becoming more stable. With CR6 accounting for more than 70% of market share, in this context competition is more about head-to-head ranking among leading companies. The “price war” naturally became the most direct tool.

According to data from the State Post Bureau, the domestic single-parcel express delivery price fell from above 15 yuan in 2013 all the way to 7.62 yuan in 2025. If measured under the franchise model, the per-parcel price for the “Tongda system” is even lower—around 2 yuan—while in some regions there has been an extreme low price of “sending nationwide for 8 jiao.”

In such a cutthroat, involution-style competition, no one can afford to go their own way. Since 2024, relevant departments have repeatedly called on the industry to “crack down on involution,” but the whole industry is still trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma of “those who raise prices die.” No one dares to raise prices significantly, let alone fire the first shot.

But what people didn’t expect is that the “bad news” of a global oil price surge became the fuse that pushed express delivery companies into having to raise prices.

Since March, Zhongtong, Yuantong, Shentong, Yunda, and J&T have worked together to raise prices. SF Holding’s per-parcel price also rose from a low point of 13.12 yuan to more than 15 yuan. However, SF Holding’s price increases actually began earlier.

After years of continuous price wars following the pandemic, SF Holding started to proactively give up the strategy of “buying volume with price” in 2023. Its per-parcel price also retreated from around 13 yuan in 2023 to around 15.76 yuan, far above the industry average level of about 8 yuan.

By 2025, the price wars in the industry flared up again. However, within policy red lines and given the industry’s price floor that they can no longer retreat from, even though SF Holding’s per-parcel revenue fluctuated, it still held steady around 15 yuan. During this year’s Spring Festival, SF Holding also levied a resource adjustment fee on its mailing and delivery services; it would no longer improve service quality in the direction of “compressing courier productivity.”

For SF Holding, the per-parcel price is the core variable affecting performance. In 2025, its “economic express” business achieved operating revenue of RMB 32.05 billion yuan, up 17.6% year over year, with growth momentum rebounding for two consecutive years. As per-parcel income improved quarter over quarter, SF Holding’s net profit after deductions also showed a quarter-by-quarter improvement trend in 2025, driving a year-over-year increase in full-year profit.

It looks like SF Holding and its peers can finally step out of the shadow of the price war. But that doesn’t mean they can easily “lie down and profit.”

It’s worth noting that in 2025, SF Holding’s gross margin was 13.07%. Although per-parcel revenue increased, gross margin actually declined by 0.61 percentage points year over year. SF Holding said the main reasons were: increasing incentives for frontline operations; strengthening the quality of high-standard time-sensitive service; expanding supply chain and international markets.

This also shows that even if the industry stops恶性 competition, per-parcel prices will be hard to return to levels from a decade ago, which is determined by industry demand and scale.

Although express delivery companies have pulled themselves out of the mire of vicious competition, to truly enjoy good days, they still have to rely on themselves. If SF Holding wants to further increase its profitability, it must further dig into service quality and operating efficiency, and solidify its moat.

Breaking Through the Growth Ceiling

After many years of “1-to-N” full-domain expansion, SF Holding is no longer a single express delivery company. It has grown into a global leading integrated logistics service provider, and its moat is no longer only “fast delivery and good service.”

Earlier on, SF Holding acquired Xinbang Logistics to expand its express transport business; acquired the German logistics giant DHL’s supply chain management business in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau; developed the heavy-freight rail and road intermodal freight business through cooperation with China Railway; and took a stake in Kerry Logistics, the largest third-party logistics company in Asia, to complete its Southeast Asia logistics footprint, among other efforts—expanding its “second growth curve.”

Behind this, in the express and expedited logistics market, SF Holding has been pushed back step by step by the price war of the “Tongda system.” Even though its market share in time-sensitive freight items still reaches over 60%, in the economic freight segment it has only 7.6% of the share.

After 2020, SF Holding also tried to transform “downward.” But the cost it paid was far higher than that of the “Tongda system.” SF Holding’s self-operated model is inherently more capital-intensive than other companies. Once it loses its gross-margin advantage, pressure on its net profit margin will further increase.

Finally, in 2023, SF Holding sold “Fengwang,” its low-discount “special delivery” offering, to J&T, and thus shed this ever-loss-making burden. After 2023, SF Holding’s net profit margin improved somewhat and generally stayed around 3%. But compared with Zhongtong, the company that is best at making money (net profit margin over 19%), the gap is still large.

For SF Holding, getting out of involution and transforming into higher-gross-margin businesses is urgent. SF Holding has already secured the “king” position in the time-sensitive express segment. To find even higher-quality business, it naturally needs to target TOB (business-to-business) and overseas expansion.

In 2021, SF Holding set up a “Supply Chain and International Business” segment. In 2022, this business contributed 34% of company revenue and 28% of net profit. But in the past two years, affected by ongoing changes in the international logistics environment, this segment has also remained in losses. It only returned to profitability in 2025, achieving operating revenue of 72.94 billion yuan, up 3.5% year over year.

It can be seen that for SF Holding to go global, it not only has to face strong competitors such as Alibaba and JD, but also must deal with complex geopolitical factors and a constantly changing global trade environment. The outlook is good, but SF Holding can only plug its gaps step by step.

However, logistics development is also quite “burning money.” Over the past two years, SF Holding’s asset-liability ratio has stayed around 50%, far higher than the roughly 30% level among peers. Although SF Holding maintained revenue growth, the cash flow pressure is also not small.

The good news is that SF Holding’s supply chain and international business subsidiary, Kerry Logistics, has been undergoing transformation. It further shrinks low-gross-margin freight forwarding agency business and increases high-quality express delivery and supply chain business. Although its net profit margin of 2.37% is still thin, at least there is a glimpse of hope.

SF Holding also mentioned in its financial report that it will further improve operating efficiency and increase resource investment. Among them, fully embracing AI and robots also brings more room for imagination.

It is reported that SF Holding has developed a proprietary large model dedicated to logistics. Its daily Token consumption exceeds 10 billion, and over 5,000 intelligent agents of various types are put into use. Last year, SF Holding also rolled out unmanned delivery vehicles in multiple locations to further improve delivery efficiency.

SF Holding courier Wang Ming (a pseudonym) said, “Previously, it would take four or five dozen minutes to run back and forth between network points and residential compounds. Now we can save about two hours every day.” Data from SF Holding’s unmanned vehicle cooperation partners shows that SF Holding’s delivery drones/robots can improve delivery efficiency by about 30% and reduce costs by about 25%.

For SF Holding, the “express delivery king,” the long-term positioning and future layout matter far more for building a moat than the price war. The service experience enabled by technology—this is the competition barrier that is difficult to replicate.

In the logistics industry, you can’t win just by working hard with manpower, and you can’t win just by having technology. Only by tying technology and people together into a single force can you deliver both fast and reliably.

If SF Holding wants to hold onto the “king” position, it doesn’t rely on brand momentum accumulated in the business market, nor on sudden instant-retail dividends, nor on price advantages created by compressing courier productivity. What it relies on is a system-based war of more refined operations.

SF Holding’s “defending the challenger” path is far from reaching the endpoint. But at least, judging from this set of financials, the cards in Wang Wei’s hand are stronger than most people imagine.