Since 2013, the market size of imported alcohol in China has shown an overall growth trend. However, in recent years, affected by the epidemic and other related factors, the size of the imported alcohol market has declined. In 2023, China's total imported alcohol reached $4.6 billion, up 3.4 percent year on year. Looking back over the past decade, the compound annual growth rate has been 5%. The peak value of imports occurred in 2018, reaching $5.7 billion. Last year, the value of wine imports was $1.16 billion, down 19.1 percent from the previous year.

Since August 2018, the amount of imports has shown a downward trend year by year, with the highest value reaching $2.86 billion in 2018, while the amount of imports last year fell by about 60% compared with 2018.

Over the past 10 years, imports have shown a continuous downward trend since 2019. Last year, imports of bottled wine under two liters were $1 billion, down 18.2 percent from the previous year and the lowest in the past 10 years. In 2020, the first year of the outbreak, the decline was the most significant, reaching 24.6 percent. Despite this, the average price of a bottle of wine under two litres has generally shown a steady upward trend over the past 10 years.

From the perspective of the overall market, imported wine is in a weak state of operation. At present, there is still no clear expectation as to when the wine market correction cycle will end. Normally, a cyclical correction in the alcohol market can last for about 10 years, but in recent years, this cycle seems to be trending shorter. It is generally expected within the industry that the adjustment cycle of wine can be shortened accordingly. At present, the overall environment leads to insufficient domestic effective demand, and at the same time, the superimposed effect of the imported wine cycle and the domestic wine cycle jointly leads to the overall weak state of the imported wine market.

In the perspective of year-on-year growth in imports, wine is the only wine that has shown a downward trend every year in recent years. Other types of alcohol, including spirits and beer, showed an upward and downward trend. Imported spirits, in particular, still show a clear upward trend in general.