A new China strategy adopted by the Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS), owned by the Edinburgh-based Artisanal Spirits Company (ASC), has delivered a 45% increase in Chinese new membership recruitment and a “more resilient business”.

As a result of this pivot, SMWS membership in China has grown by roughly 20%, expanding from just over 2,000 to over 2,500 members. The company relies on a dedicated team in China to support the SMWS brand and its ongoing expansion, and is now targeting around 3,000 members by year end.

ASC’s H1 financial results show that, while revenue decreased slightly from £9.7 million in 2025 to £9.2m due to lower trade cask sales, the group maintained positive momentum in its core branded businesses, where revenue rose by 7% to £7.9m. This branded growth is underpinned by an expanding global community, with total membership increasing by 3% to 39,700. The company has seen strong new member recruitment across key markets, up 15% overall.

The interim report states: “China, which remains the largest market in the region, has seen green shoots of success in H1-26, with revenue only marginally down 3% and membership up +13%, as marketing activity open SMWS to wider audiences and trading has started H2 strongly, with year-to-date sales to the end of August now up by mid-single digit percentage.

“The slowing of the decline levels in China, and the increase in members, give us some confidence that China is potentially stabilising and could close the year with revenue at least in line with prior year. As the largest market in the region, this would have a significantly more positive outlook for the group, from a momentum and trajectory perspective.”

Following the SMWS’s initial launch in China in late 2017, the region rapidly expanded to account for over 25% of global sales by 2022, peaking as a £5m business. However, as ASC chief executive officer Andrew Dane explained, this peak relied heavily on a small cohort of “appreciators” spending tens of thousands of pounds primarily on collection and gifting. As consumer confidence shifted between 2022 and 2025, this top-heavy revenue declined to £2m.

Dane told Scotland China Brief: “People’s desire to go and spend another £3,000 on a 30-year-old Macallan bottle or buy huge volumes of products, which were collection primarily rather than consumption, that almost sort of switched off overnight.

“In other, more mature markets where we had a large base of members buying a small number of bottles, they maybe traded down. They bought four bottles instead of five. They bought a £70 bottle instead of an £80 bottle. And we saw that in China with the rest of the membership cohorts.”

To reverse this trend and build long-term stability, Dane said SMWS has implemented “a deliberate strategy to have a broader base of members who are buying a smaller number of bottles each”, building “a more resilient business in the market”. As a result of this pivot, SMWS membership in China recently grew by roughly 20%, expanding from just over 2,000 to over 2,500 members.

Speaking on the success of this recruitment drive in China, Dane highlights “key themes”: localised product offerings and video e-commerce. “We created a 35 centlitre half-size bottle that we released in conjunction with Steven Lin, who’s a well-known whisky influencer in China, and used that as a recruitment product,” he said. “That was very successful.”

The brand also introduced a sherry-influenced whisky featuring a custom, China-focused legacy label, “which was specifically, again, targeted at recruiting new members in China.”

Dane added: “Those are produced here in Scotland, but specifically for the China market and specifically for recruitment of new members.”

The “second pot” SMWS has successfully leveraged is video marketing via social and e-commerce platforms like WeChat, Tmall, JD and RedNote.

Dane said: “We’ve been testing a variety of video e-commerce approaches over the last six to 12 months. And we’ve kind of struck a few formats that worked really well.

“Short-format videos […] particularly where the name of that individual cask release has a really heavy food element. An example video that I’ve got in the investor presentation is ‘a barrel of butter’ and the kind of video that was created with that. It’s butter being scraped up with a spoon in the background and then the bottles mix, and then a clip to the distillery.

“And so people could kind of connect what flavours to expect with the kind of video.”

Through these targeted digital channels, Dane revealed SMWS has recruited hundreds of new members in just a few months, signalling promising momentum for the whisky purveyor’s future in China.