In 1997, college college student Zhang Hongchao opened a small shaved-ice store in Henan, then one of China’s poorest provinces, with money lent by his grandmother. Nearly 30 years later, Zhang and his brother Hongfu, Mixue’s CEO, are worth some $8.2 billion each. Zhang’s shaved-ice store, now called Mixue Ice Cream & Tea and known for its soft serve and beverages, has more locations globally (53,000) than McDonald’s (43,500). Its IPO in March on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange raised HK$3.45 billion ($450 million)—the fifth largest in Hong Kong in the first half of 2025—and was oversubscribed 5,000 times. Mixue is expected to open its first U.S. location in New York City, having reportedly signed a 10-year lease on Canal Street.
Mixue’s rapid scaling around the world reflects the strength of its supply chain, its growth via a franchise model, and its viral branding, but it also speaks to the remarkable staying power of Zhang’s early decision to win over cost-conscious buyers with an ice cream cone that costs just 15 cents.
For those in the know, a Mixue store is instantly recognizable. Its glowing logo and signature red interior drew a crowd on a Friday afternoon in November in Hong Kong’s central shopping district. In a city known for its luxury shopping, Mixue’s menu prices also stand out: a juicy grape burst for the equivalent of $1.67, pearl milk tea for $2.06, and soft-serve ice cream for 64 cents, cheaper even than McDonald’s $1.09 Sundae cone. On a poster, the brand’s mascot, Snow King, holds a milk tea and winks. “With Mixue in hand, joy is grand,” it reads.
Mixue’s recent fortunes are grand indeed. In the first half of 2025, Mixue reported 14.9 billion yuan ($2 billion) in revenue, up 40% from the previous year’s period. Its firsthalf profit of 2.7 billion yuan ($370 million) is tiny compared with, say, McDonald’s first-quarter profit of $1.9 billion, but it represents 44% growth from the year prior. (Mixue did not return requests for comment.)
Affordability has always been a draw for Mixue— even if the price of its 15 cent cone has ticked up—but there’s more to the ice cream and beverage chain than cheap treats.
As Mixue expanded, it faced ingredient shortages, which prompted Zhang to start sourcing the chain’s raw materials directly from farmers and producers. In 2012 it established centralized factories and later set up warehouses and coldchain logistics to deliver ingredients like frozen fruit pulps and fresh strawberry and mango cubes to franchisees. (It now has 23,404 worldwide.) That reduces middleman costs, helping Mixue keep its prices low and its products fresh. When Mixue went public in March, it said that approximately 66% of the net proceeds from the offering would be used to widen and deepen its end-to-end supply chains.
Mixue’s close relationship with ingredient manufacturers and suppliers gives it a cost advantage that competitors struggle to replicate. “When they open more outlets, they can immediately send out all these supplies, ingredients…So profit margins are pretty tight, and [food and beverage] brands typically find it challenging to manage this,” says Emil Fazira, Asia Pacific food insight manager at Euromonitor International.
Mixue’s franchise model is also a moneymaker in that it sells equipment and ingredients to its franchisees. It cites such sales as a driver of its 40% year-overyear revenue growth in the first half of this year.
By offering both desserts and drinks, Mixue differentiates itself from competitors that just sell beverages. The sweet treat is one of the fastest growing product categories in Asia Pacific and Southeast Asia, Fazira notes.
While ice cream is usually perceived as a more indulgent treat, Mixue’s more affordable and accessible soft serve, compared with sit-down ice cream parlors, makes it “a bit more unique,” Fazira says.
Just as unique are Mixue’s marketing tactics. In China, stores turned sales receipts into serialized fiction, printing 20 chapters of a compelling narrative featuring its mascot, Snow King, and sparking a nationwide craze.
Abroad, Mixue is engaging consumers with games and gifts. Andrian Lim, a video game streamer based in Malaysia, joined a Mixue Instagram Reel challenge in September to finish a mint lemonade in 45 seconds. The 31-year-old was among dozens who braved stinging brain freeze to win an exclusive Snow King foldable bag.
“I love to challenge myself to the limit, just for the fun of it,” says Lim, who “fell in love” with Mixue’s jasmine tea—and its cheap price.
Looking ahead, Mixue plans to meet the all-day beverage demands of consumers by expanding its stand-alone coffee shops and introducing beer. Mixue’s coffee chain, Lucky Cup, which sells freshly brewed coffee for 6 yuan (90 cents), recently entered Malaysia after establishing a foothold of 8,000 locations in China. In September, Mixue Group acquired 53% equity in Chinese draft beer company Fulu Fresh Beer, helmed by Hongfu’s wife, Tian Haixia.
“[Mixue] is trying to enter new pockets of opportunity…It is interested, or at least keen to understand, that area of product diversification,” Fazira says.
And of course, Mixue’s new beer is likely to be cheap. Fulu Fresh sells for 7.9 yuan or $1.11 a pop.
This article appears in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Mixue’s hot streak.”
Asia’s booming sweet treat product category is fueling Mixue’s rise
44%
Mixue’s profits soared in the first half of 2025 to reach 2.7 billion Yuan ($370 million).
53,000
Mixue’s sprawling global store count now tops McDonald’s
Reed Hastings may soon pull off one of the biggest deals in entertainment history. On Thursday, Netflix announced plans to acquire Warner Bros.—home to franchises like Dune, Harry Potter, and DC Universe, along with streamer HBO Max—in a total enterprise value deal of $83 billion. The move is set to cement Netflix as a media juggernaut that now rivals the legacy Hollywood giants it once disrupted.
It’s a remarkable trajectory for Netflix’s cofounder, Hastings—a self-made billionaire who found a love for business starting as a teenage door-to-door salesperson.
“I took a year off between high school and college and sold Rainbow vacuum cleaners door to door,” Hastings recalled to The New York Timesin 2006. “I started it as a summer job and found I liked it. As a sales pitch, I cleaned the carpet with the vacuum the customer had and then cleaned it with the Rainbow.”
That scrappy sales job was the first exposure to how to properly read customers—an instinct that would later shape Netflix’s user-obsessed culture. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1983, Hastings considered joining the Marine Corps but ultimately joined the Peace Corps, teaching math in Eswatini for two years. When he returned to the U.S., he obtained a master’s in computer science from Stanford and began his career in tech.
The idea for Netflix reportedly came a few years later in the late 1990s. After misplacing a VHS copy of Apollo 13 and getting hit with a $40 late fee at Blockbuster, Hastings began exploring a mail-order rental service. While it’s an origin story that has since been debated, it marked the start of a company that would reshape global entertainment.
Hastings stepped back as CEO in 2023 and now serves as Netflix’s chairman of the board. He has amassed a net worth of about $5.6 billion. He’d be even richer if he didn’t keep offloading his shares in the company and making record-breaking charitable donations.
Netflix’s secret for success: finding the right people
Hastings has long said that one of the biggest drivers of Netflix’s success is its focus on hiring and keeping exceptional talent.
“If you’re going to win the championship, you got to have incredible talent in every position. And that’s how we think about it,” he told CNBC in 2020. “We encourage people to focus on who of your employees would you fight hard to keep if they were going to another company? And those are the ones we want to hold onto.”
To secure top performers, Hastings said he was more than willing to pay for above-market rates.
“With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice: Hire 10 to 25 average engineers, or hire one ‘rock-star’ and pay significantly more than what I’d pay the others, if necessary,” Hastings wrote. “Over the years, I’ve come to see that the best programmer doesn’t add 10 times the value. He or she adds more like a 100 times.”
That mindset also guided Netflix’s leadership transition. When Hastings stepped back from the C-suite, the company didn’t pick a single successor—it picked two. Greg Peters joined Ted Sarandos as co-CEO in 2023.
“It’s a high-performance technique,” Hastings said, speaking about the co-CEO model. “It’s not for most situations and most companies. But if you’ve got two people that work really well together and complement and extend and trust each other, then it’s worth doing.”
Netflix’s stock has soared more than 80,000% since its IPO in 2002, adjusting for stock splits.
Netflix brought unlimited PTO into the mainstream
Netflix’s flexible workplace culture has also played a key role in its success, with Hastings often known for prioritizing time off to recharge.
“I take a lot of vacation, and I’m hoping that certainly sets an example,” the former CEO said in 2015. “It is helpful. You often do your best thinking when you’re off hiking in some mountain or something. You get a different perspective on things.”
The company was one of the first to introduce unlimited PTO, a policy that many firms have since adopted. About 57% of retail investors have said it could improve overall company performance, according to a survey by Bloomberg. Critics have argued that such policies can backfire when employees feel guilty taking time off, but Hastings has maintained that freedom is core to Netflix’s identity.
“We are fundamentally dedicated to employee freedom because that makes us more flexible, and we’ve had to adapt so much back from DVD by mail to leading streaming today,” Hastings said. “If you give employees freedom you’ve got a better chance at that success.”
“For over thirty years, I had a hard cut-off on Tuesdays. Rain or shine, I left at exactly 5 p.m. and spent the evening with my best friend. We would go to a movie, have dinner, or just go window-shopping downtown together,” Randolph wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“Those Tuesday nights kept me sane. And they put the rest of my work in perspective.”
The spots gave it away. Just like a human fingerprint, the rosette pattern on each jaguar is unique so researchers knew they had a new animal on their hands after reviewing images captured by a remote camera in southern Arizona.
The University of Arizona Wild Cat Research and Conservation Center says it’s the fifth big cat over the last 15 years to be spotted in the area after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The animal was captured by the camera as it visited a watering hole in November, its distinctive spots setting it apart from previous sightings.
“We’re very excited. It signifies this edge population of jaguars continues to come here because they’re finding what they need,” Susan Malusa, director of the center’s jaguar and ocelot project, said during an interview Thursday.
The team is now working to collect scat samples to conduct genetic analysis and determine the sex and other details about the new jaguar, including what it likes to eat. The menu can include everything from skunks and javelina to small deer.
As an indicator species, Malusa said the continued presence of big cats in the region suggests a healthy landscape but that climate change and border barriers can threaten migratory corridors. She explained that warming temperatures and significant drought increase the urgency to ensure connectivity for jaguars with their historic range in Arizona.
More than 99% of the jaguar’s range is found in Central and South America, and the few male jaguars that have been spotted in the U.S. are believed to have dispersed from core populations in Mexico, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Officials have said that jaguar breeding in the U.S. has not been documented in more than 100 years.
Federal biologists have listed primary threats to the endangered species as habitat loss and fragmentation along with the animals being targeted for trophies and illegal trade.
The Fish and Wildlife Service issued a final rule in 2024, revising the habitat set aside for jaguars in response to a legal challenge. The area was reduced to about 1,000 square miles (2,590 square kilometers) in Arizona’s Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties.
Recent detection data supports findings that a jaguar appears every few years, Malusa said, with movement often tied to the availability of water. When food and water are plentiful, there’s less movement.
In the case of Jaguar #5, she said it was remarkable that the cat kept returning to the area over a 10-day period. Otherwise, she described the animals as quite elusive.
“That’s the message — that this species is recovering,” Malusa said. “We want people to know that and that we still do have a chance to get it right and keep these corridors open.”
MacKenzie Scott has arguably been the biggest name in philanthropy this year—and has nonstop been making major gifts to organizations focused on education, DEI, disaster recovery, and many other causes.
This week alone, several higher education institutions announced major gifts from the billionaire philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—donations totaling well over $100 million. In true Scott fashion, many of these donations are the largest single donations these schools have ever received.
The donations announced this week include:
$50 million to California State University-East Bay
$50 million to Lehman College (part of the City University of New York system)
$38 million to Texas A&M University-Kingsville
$17 million to Seminole State College
All four institutions are public, access-oriented colleges that enroll large shares of low‑income, first‑generation, and racially diverse students and function as minority‑serving institutions or similar engines of social mobility. They fit MacKenzie Scott’s broader pattern of directing large, unrestricted gifts to colleges that serve “chronically underserved” communities rather than already wealthy, highly selective universities.
Scott, who is worth about $40 billion and has donated over $20 billion in the past five years, has doubled down this year on causes that the Trump administration has cut deeply, such as education, DEI, and disaster recovery.
“As higher education, in general, works to find its way in an uncertain environment, this gift is a major source of encouragement that we are on the right path,” Lehman College President Fernando Delgado said in a statement.
Scott also made one of the largest donations in HBCU Howard University’s 158-year history with an $80 million gift earlier this fall, and a $60 million donation to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy after Trump administration’s cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—an organization Americans rely on for help during and after hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, and floods.
“All sectors of society—public, private, and social—share responsibility for helping communities thrive after a disaster,” CDP president and CEO Patricia McIlreavy previously told Fortune. “Philanthropy plays a critical role in providing communities with resources to rebuild stronger, but it cannot—and should not—replace government and its essential responsibilities.”
Trust-based philanthropy
Scott accumulated the vast majority of her wealth from her 2019 divorce from Bezos, but is dedicated to giving away most of her fortune. She’s considered a unique philanthropist in today’s environment because her gifts are typically unrestricted, meaning the organizations can use the funding however they choose.
“She practices trust-based philanthropy,” Anne Marie Dougherty, CEO of the Bob Woodruff Foundation previously told Fortune. Scott has donated $15 million to the veteran-focused nonprofit organization in 2022, and made a subsequent $20 million donation this fall.
Scott is also considered one of the most generous philanthropists, and credits acts of kindness for inspiring her to give back.
“It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college,” Scott wrote of her inspiration for philanthropy in an Oct. 15 essay published to her Yield Giving site. “It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”
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