The moment Li Yaxi saw the notice of a price hike for shuttlecocks in mid-March, her heart sank. She immediately contacted her suppliers while calculating her cash flow.

"We moved as quickly as we could to prepare the money and grab all the supplies we could get our hands on," said Li, who runs six badminton training centers in Beijing under her company Poyan Sports' umbrella. Her company has been training young badminton players since 2017.

Each tube of midrange shuttlecocks costs 70 to 80 yuan ($9.70 to $11.10). With her players training up to 18 hours a week — many of them play six hours a day on weekends — the costs pile up quickly.

"We spend 100,000 to 200,000 yuan out of our own pocket every year to support the competitive classes (of players), and about 80 percent of that goes to shuttlecocks," she said.

Since her business requires a lot of shuttlecocks, she has been buying them in bulk, normally 30 to 50 cases, with each containing 50 pieces.

"Even a slight increase of 2 to 3 percent will incur thousands of yuan in extra costs for us," she said.

At the end of March, citing a rise in raw material costs, leading badminton brand Victor announced a shuttlecock price hike to take effect after April 1.

Another major brand, RSL, has raised prices multiple times this year. After an increase at the beginning of 2025, prices were lifted again in March. On RSL's official Tmall flagship store, a tube of 12 of its No 7 shuttlecocks reached 145 yuan. Two years earlier, the same product was 74 yuan, almost half the price.

Li, who managed to secure 30 cases of shuttlecocks, can't remember the exact number of price hikes in recent years as they've been so frequent. "We wanted to buy more, but it turned out that there were not enough for us to buy," she said.