Coffee Sketcher

Dashang Group

Properties3
descriptionThe Dalian department-store conglomerate that bought Panama's Carmen Estate outright — and now sells its own champion Geisha through a branded coffee shop in China.
tagsorganization, china, retail, panama, geisha
aliases大商集团, Dashang, Dalian Dashang, Dashang Co., Ltd., 大商股份

8 min read

Dashang Group

Dashang Group (大商集团) is a retail conglomerate headquartered in Dalian, Liaoning province, in northeast China. It runs department stores, supermarkets, hotels, cinemas, and an e-commerce arm (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23; Dashang Group official site, accessed 2026-07-23).

It appears in this wiki for one reason: Dashang owns Carmen Estate, the Panamanian farm that set the Best of Panama record in 2023 with a Geisha lot at $10,005 per kilogram. Dashang did not buy a lot of coffee. It bought the farm that grows it.

That makes it a different creature from JD.com, the other Chinese retailer in these pages. JD bought a single record lot at auction as a marketing splash. Dashang went one step further up the chain and bought the land, the trees, and the harvest — every year, not once.

The coffee business

Dashang’s own corporate site lists a coffee-shop chain, 瑰夏·卡门·帕洛玛咖啡店 — “Geisha · Carmen · Paloma Coffee” — among its business lines. The shop’s pitch is single-origin espresso pulled on high-end equipment, built around “our own Panama Carmen Estate beans” (Dashang Group, accessed 2026-07-23). Alongside the drinks it sells the estate’s coffee as packaged goods: whole beans in 225 g to 1 kg bags, single-serve drip bags (a sachet with a paper cone you hang over your own mug) from 50 g to 200 g, and 36 g jars of freeze-dried instant (Dashang Group, accessed 2026-07-23).

That product ladder is the whole strategy in miniature. A farm capable of five-figure-per-kilo auction lots also produces a great deal of ordinary coffee, and Dashang has a retail network to sell it into. The auction record is the advertisement; the instant jar is the business.

Dashang’s own description of the estate — on the “scarce goods” section of its site — puts it on the slopes of the Barú Volcano at 1,550–2,000 metres, across 73 hectares, growing Geisha and Caturra, and holding Rainforest Alliance certification and Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. Practices accreditation (Dashang Group, accessed 2026-07-23).

Ownership of the farm is confirmed from both ends: the importer Sucafina states plainly that “Carmen Estate is now owned by Dashang Group of Dalian, China” (accessed 2026-07-23), and Dashang’s own site calls the beans its own. Locally the farm is held through Panama Red Carmen Cafe Trading S.A. Day-to-day management stayed with Carlos Aguilera Franceschi, the third-generation producer whose family built the place — which is why the coffee’s character did not reset when the deed changed hands.

To verify

  • When Dashang bought Carmen Estate. No source found — importer, roaster, or Dashang’s own — gives a year. The wiki’s other notes report it only as “the early 2020s,” which is itself uncorroborated. Same flag appears on Carmen Estate and Carlos Aguilera Franceschi.
  • How Dashang Group and Panama Red Carmen Cafe Trading S.A. relate. Both names are confirmed; nothing explains whether the Panamanian company is Dashang’s local holding vehicle or a separate party.
  • The farm’s size and altitude. Dashang’s site says 73 hectares at 1,550–2,000 m. Other published figures run from 1,600 m to over 2,200 m and give no acreage — see the fuller conflict logged on Carmen Estate. The owner’s number carries weight but is marketing copy, not a survey.
  • Competition history before 2023. Dashang’s page repeats the claim that Carmen Estate’s Geisha has placed in the top ten at Best of Panama every year since 2003, cites a score of 93.5, and says its Caturra won the traditional washed category in 2020 (Dashang Group, accessed 2026-07-23). This is the same claim roasters make, now traced to its likely origin — the owner. It is still not independent competition data. Check against official bestofpanama.org results.
  • The certifications. Rainforest Alliance and C.A.F.E. Practices status is asserted by the owner only; neither certifier’s public registry was checked.

Two companies called Dashang

This trips up almost every source, so it is worth stating flatly. There are two distinct entities:

  • 大商集团 — Dashang Group, the private parent conglomerate. This is the entity that owns Carmen Estate and runs the coffee shops.
  • 大商股份有限公司 — Dashang Co., Ltd., the listed retail company trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange under code 600694, first listed in 1993.

Dashang Group’s website carries an explicit disclaimer to this effect: “此网站为大商集团官网，非大商股份有限公司官网” — “this site is Dashang Group’s official site, not Dashang Co., Ltd.’s” (Dashang Group, accessed 2026-07-23). Financial figures quoted for “Dashang” are frequently one entity’s numbers attached to the other’s name.

The retail business

The group was founded in 1995 in Dalian and is chaired by Niu Gang. Its brands include New Mart (新玛特, its flagship department-store format), MYKAL, Kingson, NTS, and the Tiangou e-commerce platform. In 2005 it acquired Harbin No. 1 Department Store in Heilongjiang. At its 2014 peak it ran 280 stores and employed roughly 230,000 people on revenue of about CN¥170 billion (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23).

The group’s home market is China’s northeast, with a concentration in Dalian and a deliberate tilt toward third- and fourth-tier cities — smaller regional centres where big international chains are thin on the ground. Its playbook has been to co-locate formats: a department store with a supermarket and an appliance floor under one roof, so a single visit does several jobs.

For a coffee reader, the relevant point is the shape rather than the size. Dashang is a mass-market, price-led retailer with hundreds of shopfronts and a captive customer base — an unusual owner for a farm whose reputation was built on selling 25-kilogram lots to specialist roasters. It is the same Premiumisation logic JD.com follows: an ultra-luxury coffee at the top makes every ordinary bag underneath it look better.

To verify — the financial figures

The research report behind this note gives revenue as CN¥170 bn (2014), CN¥328.9 bn (2020), then CN¥6.95 bn (2024) and CN¥6.20 bn (2025). A fifty-fold collapse did not happen; these are two different things measured — group-wide gross sales for the early figures, and listed-company revenue for the recent ones (see above). Do not put these numbers in the same table or the same sentence. The report’s own source for the recent figures is an FT tearsheet for 600694:SHH that could not be fetched for confirmation. The same report also states 2025 net income as both an actual CN¥490.6 m (down 16%) and a forecast CN¥662 m — a direct self-contradiction.

To verify — scale, headcount, and market position

  • Store and city counts disagree. 280 stores in 2014 (Wikipedia); “over 200 outlets across 50+ cities in 11 provinces” (Daxue Consulting); and a garbled Wikipedia line reading “150 retail stores in Dalian across 150 cities in eleven provinces.” No current, sourced count is available.
  • Headcount. 230,000 in 2014 (Wikipedia) versus “approximately 250,000” for the parent group in the research report — different years, different entities, unreconciled.
  • “The largest department store group in China.” This claim appears in the report via Daxue Consulting and Wikipedia. It is plausible for a particular metric and year but no ranking methodology was cited. Treat as a description, not a fact.

To verify — ownership and shareholder data

The research report’s figures on share count (313,052,571 A-shares), free float (54.13%), institutional holders (Fullgoal 3.564%, Bank of Communications Schroder 2.511%, and others), a 2025 restricted-stock incentive plan at CN¥13.03 per share, and 2025–26 net income forecasts all come from matrixbcg.com and portersfiveforce.com — auto-generated SEO business-profile sites, the bottom of the source hierarchy. None was independently confirmed, and all of it describes the listed company, not the group that owns the farm. Verify against Shanghai Stock Exchange filings before quoting any of it.

Sources

  1. Dashang Group — official corporate site (大商集团) — accessed 2026-07-23
  2. Dashang Group — Geisha · Carmen · Paloma Coffee business page — accessed 2026-07-23
  3. Dashang Group — Panama Carmen Estate champion Geisha coffee — accessed 2026-07-23
  4. Best of Panama — official competition site — accessed 2026-07-23
  5. Sucafina — Carmen Estate Geisha Natural offering — accessed 2026-07-23
  6. Wikipedia — Dashang Group — accessed 2026-07-23
  7. Daxue Consulting — Retailing and distribution in China: Dashang Group — accessed 2026-07-23
  8. FT Markets — Dashang Co Ltd, 600694:SHH profile — fetch blocked, cited via research report, 2026-07-23

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