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Coffee chain giant Starbucks once again aims at the Chinese market.

Published: 2025-12-05 Author: World Gafei

Last Updated: 2025/12/05, Starbucks China-related sources told reporters that Starbucks has been very cautious about opening stores. This strategy is proposed entirely because of market demand, including supply chain and quality control, service and other aspects of Starbucks is ready, all conditions are ripe Starbucks will open a large-scale store, not rash. The move also means that Starbucks will open a new store in China in 18 hours.

Starbucks China-related sources told reporters that Starbucks has been very cautious about opening stores. This strategy is proposed entirely because of market demand, including supply chain and quality control, service and other aspects of Starbucks is ready, all conditions are ripe Starbucks will open a large-scale store, not rash.

The move also means that Starbucks will open a new store in China in 18 hours. Starbucks will open more stores in the next four years than it did in the 16 years since it entered China. Starbucks attaches unprecedented importance to the Chinese market. In the view of Starbucks, the speed of opening stores since entering the Chinese market has been very steady, and more importantly, in order to meet consumer demand, consumer demand is the most important indicator of strategy.

While continuing to open stores, Starbucks has also tried some other measures to deepen its localization in China. Prior to entering the breakfast market to adapt to the development of the Chinese market, Starbucks Coffee Company and beverage manufacturer Kang Shifu Holdings Co., Ltd. announced in March this year that they had signed a formal cooperation agreement to jointly develop China's high-end bottled beverage market.

Under the agreement, Starbucks will be responsible for product development and innovation as well as brand development, while Kang Shifu will be responsible for the production and sale of Chinese mainland ready-to-drink beverage products. China's ready-to-drink coffee and energy drinks market is currently worth $6 billion and is expected to grow by a further 20 per cent over the next three years, according to a 2014 Euromonitor survey. Zhu Danpeng, a researcher at the China Food Business Research Institute, told reporters that Starbucks obviously does not want to miss China's fast-growing ready-to-drink coffee market.

Now, with the increase of domestic consumers' recognition of coffee, Starbucks is facing coffee competitors from many fields. Both the Korean coffee chain and McDonald's McCoffee, which is relatively cheap and good, have become Starbucks' eaters in China in recent years.

Over the years, Starbucks has been going deep into China's first-and second-tier cities. Now, with the improvement of people's spending power, Starbucks is also targeting China's third-and fourth-tier cities. Starbucks is speeding up its store opening not only because it is bullish on the Chinese market, but also because it is under great pressure from competitors.

Compared with Korean Coffee in order to achieve high-speed expansion in China and large-scale opening up to join, Starbucks is "careful" to select partners, such as Uni-President Shang Chao, Master Kang, and so on, in order to avoid falling into a stand-alone situation. However, compared with other large-scale franchise models of coffee chains, Starbucks is more conservative. Starbucks also needs to build its own supply chain in the country's larger market, which poses a challenge for Starbucks, which plans to make China the largest overseas market. In fact, store expansion is not a simple copy, in-depth understanding of the local market layout will be a challenge for Starbucks.