Industry growth slows, corporate profits recover, and the competitive logic of the express delivery industry has changed

[[**In 2026, the growth rate of express delivery volume fell to single digits, but A-share express delivery companies generally achieved profit recovery, price competition eased, and technology-driven cost reduction and international business became new growth engines.**

**Key points**

**1. Industry growth slowed, and revenue per parcel stopped falling and rebounded**

From January to September, national express delivery volume grew only 4.3%, but revenue growth (7.2%) continued to outpace volume. In September, revenue per parcel increased year on year at Yunda, STO, and SF, while only YTO declined by 5.76% year on year. The industry shifted from pure low-price competition to value-driven competition.

**2. Anti-involution regulation reshaped competition rules and forced an improvement in industry order**

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**3. Companies' growth strategies diverged markedly**

Yunda raised prices and improved efficiency (revenue per parcel up 5.94%), STO achieved both volume and price growth (revenue up 18.05%), YTO traded scale for market share (volume up 12.33%), and SF's volume fell 7.25% but it actively adjusted its structure, with revenue per parcel rising for seven consecutive months.

**4. AI and automation became core means of cost reduction**

Full-chain applications such as automated sorting, intelligent scheduling, and AI customer service drove a significant decline in cost per parcel. YTO's 2026 cost per express parcel fell 5.99%, and gross profit per parcel rose 57.11% year on year; Yunda's per-parcel expenses fell 7.46% year on year in the first half.

**5. Internationalization opened a second growth curve**

SF's supply chain and international business revenue rose 15.6% in the first half, and routes at the Ezhou hub were expanded; J&T's Southeast Asia market volume rose 61%, with overseas growth far exceeding domestic growth. Domestic e-commerce express delivery incremental growth narrowed, while cross-border and supply chain space opened up. 2026-10-21 18:05 Industry incremental growth slowed, corporate profits recovered, and the competitive logic of the express delivery industry changed Yinzhen Finance Quick View

This article is from the WeChat public account: Yinzhen Finance, author: Yinzhen Finance

The latest data from the State Post Bureau show that from January to September, national express delivery volume reached 151.3 billion parcels, up 4.3% year on year; express delivery revenue reached 1,163.44 billion yuan, up 7.2% year on year. Among them, in September, express delivery volume rose 2.1% year on year, and express delivery revenue rose 5.6% year on year, with revenue growth still higher than volume. Compared with the double-digit high growth of previous years, the express delivery market has officially entered a low-speed range.

(National Postal Industry Development Situation Table, source: State Post Bureau)

But low speed does not mean low quality. The operating briefs and interim report data disclosed by various A-share listed express delivery companies all show a certain degree of profit recovery. Yunda Holding (002120.SZ) saw September volume growth of only 1.37%, but revenue per parcel rose 5.94% year on year; YTO Express (600233.SH) volume rose 12.33% year on year; STO Express (002468.SZ) achieved simultaneous growth in volume, revenue, and revenue per parcel; and SF Holding (002352.SZ), despite a decline in express logistics volume, achieved seven consecutive months of year-on-year rebound in revenue per parcel.

Yinzhen Finance noted that this does not mean the express delivery industry has completely bid farewell to price competition. On the contrary, as overall industry growth slows, companies' competition for the existing market may become even more intense. The difference is that, under the broader context of "anti-involution," how companies reduce costs through automation and digitalization and how they use internationalization to expand new growth space have become important factors determining competition in the next stage.

01

Industry growth slowed, and revenue per parcel no longer declines across the board

On October 19, four A-share express delivery companies took the lead in disclosing their September operating briefs. In sharp contrast to the slowing industry, each company showed varying degrees of growth in either volume or revenue per parcel, but with clear divergence.

In September, Yunda Holding's express delivery service revenue was 4.587 billion yuan, up 7.88% year on year; completed volume was 2.139 billion parcels, up 1.37% year on year; revenue per parcel was 2.14 yuan, up 5.94% year on year. Revenue growth was significantly faster than volume growth, meaning Yunda's revenue performance that month did not mainly rely on volume expansion.

By contrast, YTO Express. In September, YTO's express delivery product revenue was 6.138 billion yuan, up 5.86% year on year; completed volume was 2.951 billion parcels, up 12.33% year on year; revenue per parcel was 2.08 yuan, down 5.76% year on year. There was a certain divergence between scale growth and revenue per parcel.

STO Express's performance was even more prominent. In September, its express delivery service revenue was 5.469 billion yuan, up 18.05% year on year; completed volume was 2.524 billion parcels, up 15.43% year on year; revenue per parcel was 2.17 yuan, up 2.36% year on year. It achieved year-on-year growth in parcel volume, revenue, and revenue per parcel.

SF Holding's operating logic differs from that of franchise-based express delivery companies. In September, SF's express logistics business revenue was 20.835 billion yuan, down 0.09% year on year; volume was 1.395 billion parcels, down 7.25% year on year; revenue per parcel was 14.94 yuan, up 7.71% year on year. During the same period, supply chain and international business revenue was 7.884 billion yuan, up 28.13% year on year, and the combined revenue of the two businesses reached 28.719 billion yuan, up 6.34% year on year.

(Comparison of September operations of A-share listed express delivery companies, source: Yinzhen Finance chart)

In fact, SF's decline in business volume and rise in revenue per parcel are related to its proactive adjustment of operating strategy. The company stated in its operating brief that it has shifted from scale-driven to value-driven, dynamically adjusting market strategy and optimizing its business structure.

Putting these figures together, the divergence is clear at a glance: YTO was the only company whose revenue per parcel fell year on year in September, while Yunda, STO, and SF all raised prices.

In terms of business volume, the gap between companies is also obvious. Taking the data for the first half of 2026 as an example, the business volumes of ZTO Express (02057.HK), YTO, STO, Yunda, J&T Express China (01519.HK), and SF were 20.15 billion, 16.3 billion, 14.3 billion, 12.3 billion, 11.6 billion, and 7.8 billion parcels, respectively, with market shares of 20.1%, 16.2%, 14.2%, 12.2%, 11.6%, and 7.8%.

On the performance side, growth is the main theme, but there are also decliners.

(Performance of listed companies in the express delivery industry in the first half of 2026, source: Yinzhen Finance chart)

As of now, only YTO Express has disclosed its performance for the first three quarters, with revenue of 58.393 billion yuan, up 7.82% year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 4.630 billion yuan, up sharply by 60.94% year on year.

Overall, against the backdrop of a slowing express delivery industry, companies have entered a stage where growth sources are more diverse and corporate performance is further diverging. Yunda's improvement in revenue per parcel, YTO's scale growth, STO's simultaneous growth in volume and price, and SF's business structure adjustment all jointly demonstrate that although business volume remains important, it is no longer sufficient to explain a company's operating results on its own.

02

Anti-involution does not mean "price cuts are prohibited"; it means restoring competitive order

In fact, the divergent performance among express delivery companies is set against the broader backdrop of industry-wide "anti-involution."

In the past few years, the price war in the express delivery industry over market share seriously affected the healthy and normal development of the industry. In 2021, the per-parcel prices of Best and J&T in Yiwu were pushed down to 1.1 to 1.15 yuan, far below the cost red line of about 1.4 yuan. After repeated warnings by the Yiwu Postal Administration proved ineffective, it directly suspended some sorting centers of Best and J&T. In the following years, the price war intensified, and industry-wide performance came under collective pressure.

More critically, low prices are not without cost; the cost has been shifted onto network stability and the safety bottom line. In the past few years, disorder gradually spread from pricing to the entire franchise network: fake orders and empty parcels, scalpers soliciting parcels across regions, escalating penalties in place of management, and terminal outlets suspending operations went from occasional to routine.

The price war, combined with frequent industry disorder, prompted regulators to act quickly starting last year.

In 2025, a Yunda affiliate was fined 40,000 yuan for failing to fulfill its unified safety and security management responsibilities, and 58 Yunda franchise companies in Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, Jiangsu, Shaanxi, and other places were administratively fined or ordered to suspend operations for issues such as real-name collection and mailing and illegally accepting prohibited items.

The National Postal Work Conference held in early 2026 explicitly proposed "comprehensively rectifying 'involution-style' competition"; the 15th Five-Year Plan for Postal Industry Development issued in July of the same year further wrote "anti-involution" into the industry plan.

In April, the State Post Bureau also convened a symposium with the heads of major express delivery companies, explicitly requiring companies to improve their assessment and management mechanisms. Major matters involving assessment, rewards and punishments, and delivery fees must be negotiated with franchise companies and frontline employees, and headquarters must be prohibited from unilaterally increasing fines. At this point, "anti-involution" has moved from "advising companies not to cut prices" down to dismantling the rule chain through which headquarters pass pressure onto terminal outlets.

After that, regulatory penalties began to hit brand headquarters directly. In June, J&T was placed under investigation by the State Post Bureau for inadequate safety production management of relevant companies and failure to implement unified safety and security management as required; in August, STO was also placed under investigation on similar grounds, and in the previous three years STO and its important subsidiaries had already received 52 administrative penalties of more than 10,000 yuan, including 27 for safety production and 19 for postal matters.

In addition, rectification efforts have been advanced simultaneously across various regions. In May 2026, an express delivery company in Shenzhen was fined 100,000 yuan under the Counter-Terrorism Law for cross-regional parcel pickup; Jiangsu issued 41 rectification notices during its express delivery market order cleanup, focusing on cracking down on "express delivery scalpers" and cross-regional low-price parcel solicitation; and postal administrations in many places canceled inefficient and idle express delivery operating licenses in batches, using the access and exit mechanism to force the withdrawal of market entities.

The effects of these regulatory "sticks" are beginning to show in industry aggregate data. From January to February 2026, the growth rate of express delivery revenue began to exceed the growth rate of business volume, and from March to August it outperformed for six consecutive months; from January to August, express delivery business revenue was 1,028.92 billion yuan, up 7.4% year on year, breaking the one-trillion-yuan mark one month earlier than last year.

03

When price tools are exhausted, where will incremental growth come from?

If anti-involution only means everyone "cuts prices less," the profit recovery in the express delivery industry will not last long. What truly determines how far this round of recovery can go is whether there is still room to tap on the cost side and whether there is a second source of revenue beyond price.

The first thing to bear the brunt is technology. From the perspective of how the express delivery network operates, pickup, sorting, line-haul transportation, and terminal delivery constitute the main links. Among them, automated sorting equipment can improve processing efficiency, digital scheduling can help optimize transportation routes and vehicle loading rates, and intelligent management can improve abnormal parcel identification, mis-sorting warnings, and service quality monitoring. These technologies may not necessarily directly increase revenue per parcel, but they can improve per-parcel costs and customer experience by reducing manual operations, increasing equipment utilization, and lowering error rates.

Entering 2026, companies are also steadily increasing their investment in automation and intelligent equipment. For example, the more than 3,800 sets of transit automation equipment and more than 2,400 AGVs that SF Holding put into operation this year are no longer mechanical tools that passively execute instructions, but autonomous decision-making units connected to the "Apu" AI agent cluster; in the transportation segment, more than 1,400 intelligent driving vehicles, 4.2-meter unmanned light trucks, and L4-level unmanned heavy trucks have broken free from the limitations of fixed navigation and connected to a full-link AI dynamic scheduling system.

In 2026, STO Express added 177 sets of automation equipment across its nationwide outlets, with corresponding investment of about 133 million yuan. Its intelligent vision platform has raised the accuracy of damage identification to 95%, and the effective interception rate of damaged parcels is close to 100%. After the upgrade of the Neijiang transfer center, outbound capacity increased by 150% and inbound capacity by 80%.

Yunda Express has proposed a "full-stack AI" strategy, with AI technology covering the entire chain of customer service, arbitration, route planning, parcel volume forecasting, assisted driving, and other links. In the first half of 2026, the per-parcel cost fell by 7.46% year on year, and the combined costs of sorting, transportation, customer service, and risk prevention and control fell by more than 100 million yuan year on year.

YTO Express's publicly promoted figure for total AI cost reduction is "on the order of one billion yuan," with hundreds of intelligent agents embedded in operations, network management, and customer service, and cumulative Token throughput exceeding 2.6 trillion. As of the end of June 2026, YTO had deployed 420 sets of automated sorting equipment across 77 self-operated hub transfer centers nationwide, and more than 170 franchisees were already using more than 500 unmanned vehicles to improve quality and efficiency in last-mile delivery. Delivered in the data, the 2026 interim report shows that the company's per-parcel express product cost fell by 5.99% year on year, of which per-parcel pickup and delivery service cost fell by 7.88%, per-parcel transportation cost fell by 2.41%, and per-parcel center operation cost fell by 3.47%. With revenue down 1.04% year on year, the cost decline still drove per-parcel gross profit up 57.11% year on year.

More strategically significant than technology substitution on the cost side is the second growth curve brought by internationalization and the aviation network.

Data shows that SF Holding's supply chain and international business revenue in the first half of 2026 was 39.58 billion yuan, up 15.6% year on year, accounting for 25.45% of total revenue, an increase of 2.1 percentage points from the same period in 2025.

Its route network at Ezhou Huahu Airport continued to densify in 2026. In March, the "Ezhou-Derby" route opened, raising end-to-end timeliness for China-UK cross-border logistics to as fast as 4 days. In April, the "Ezhou-Paris" route opened, operated by B747-400 full freighters, and in the same month the "Ezhou-Milan" route began operations, becoming SF's first direct full-freighter route in Italy.

SF's parcel volume fell 7.25% in September, but its international business filled the revenue gap with growth of 28.13%, and the profit margin corresponding to this gap is very likely higher than that of domestic e-commerce express delivery.

J&T Express's overseas business also contributed a second growth curve. In the first three quarters of 2026, the company's business volume in the Southeast Asian market was 8.408 billion parcels, up 61% year on year; parcel volume in the Chinese market was 18.042 billion parcels, up 11.5% year on year, with overseas market growth far exceeding domestic. In addition, in the first half of 2026, the company's total global revenue was 7.672 billion US dollars, of which revenue in the Chinese market was 3.838 billion US dollars, accounting for 50.0%; this was the first time since J&T's listing that the share of China-region revenue fell to the round-number threshold of 50%.

Back at the industry level, the State Post Bureau's January-September data also revealed a structural change that is easy to overlook. Same-city express delivery business volume fell 7.3% year on year, intercity express delivery grew 5.4%, and international/Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan express delivery grew 2.7%. In August, the growth rate of intercity express delivery was still 5.7%, indicating that the incremental space for domestic e-commerce express delivery is narrowing, while the increment from cross-border and supply chain has only just opened up. Channel: Finance and Economics

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