Starbucks is placing a further big bet on China — where competition is growing and recent results left a bitter taste — in one of Howard Schultz’s last acts before he stepped down as chief executive this month.
The US chain plans to open a store in China every nine hours to reach 9,000 locations by 2025, up from just over 6,000 currently. It is also opening a $130mn roasting plant this year in the city of Kunshan, its first in Asia, as it embeds itself more deeply in the market it entered a quarter-century ago.
China provided $2.5bn of Starbucks’s $32bn in global revenue last year. But its same-store sales in the country collapsed 29 per cent year on year in the final three months of 2022, four times worse than expected, as China abandoned Covid-19 restrictions and the virus spread across the country.