China’s baijiu output fell 4.8% in September, erasing August’s brief rebound

China’s baijiu production fell again in September after a brief year-over-year increase in August, according to figures attributed to the National Bureau of Statistics and circulated Wednesday by the trade publication Huaxia Jiubao, with the report also carried by Sina Finance.

The data showed September output at 275,000 kiloliters, down 4.8% from the same month a year earlier. For the first nine months of 2026, production totaled 2.354 million kiloliters, a 3.9% decline from the year-earlier period.

Baijiu is China’s traditional grain-based distilled liquor and one of the country’s most important alcoholic beverage categories. The production figures refer to commercial output measured in volume equivalent to 65-degree alcohol content, not to retail sales or consumer demand.

The September numbers marked a weaker reading than the one published for August. Data released last month by Zhongshang Industry Research Institute, citing its own database, showed August production at 191,000 kiloliters, up 2.1% from a year earlier. Output for January through August was reported at 2.079 million kiloliters, down 3.8% year over year.

That means the September year-over-year rate deteriorated by 6.9 percentage points from August’s growth reading. The cumulative decline for the first nine months also widened slightly, moving from 3.8% in January through August to 3.9% in January through September.

On a raw month-to-month basis, output increased from 191,000 kiloliters in August to 275,000 kiloliters in September, an increase of 84,000 kiloliters, or about 44%. But that comparison is not seasonally adjusted and, by itself, does not show a recovery in underlying demand. The year-over-year decline in September indicates that production remained below the level recorded in the same month of 2025.

The figures come at a time when investors and industry analysts are closely tracking whether China’s baijiu sector can stabilize after a long period of uneven activity. Because the latest September data point reversed August’s growth, it suggests that the earlier improvement did not yet amount to a sustained turnaround in production.

The statistics cited Wednesday were not taken directly from a primary public table that could be independently verified at the time of reporting. Huaxia Jiubao, a Chinese trade outlet focused on alcoholic beverages, published the latest September figure, and Sina Finance reproduced that report. The August reference used for comparison came from a Sept. 20 publication by Zhongshang Industry Research Institute on AskCI’s website. Both sets of figures were presented as national baijiu production data linked to official statistical reporting.

The latest numbers matter because baijiu remains a large manufacturing and consumer category in China, with output trends watched as a sign of conditions in the domestic beverage industry. Even with the increase in September from August in absolute volume, the broader pattern for 2026 remained negative through the first three quarters, with national production still running below last year’s pace.