@samuelszuchan: The biggest restaurant chain in the world, counted by stores, isn't McDonald's. It's a Chinese ice cream and tea chain called Mixue, with almost 60,000 stores, most of them inside China. And Chinese tea chains are now opening all over the world. Back home in the Bay Area, I go to HeyTea two or three times a week, and at the one in Cupertino the wait to get in can be half an hour. In Ho Chi Minh City, I stopped at a Chagee and got a peach oolong with a cheese cap, a layer of salty cheese foam on top. In Bangkok, I ordered one at the counter of another Chagee. When HeyTea opened its first store in Bangkok, people lined up in heavy rain for drinks that cost up to 195 baht, almost $6. That's about four hours of work at Bangkok's minimum wage. Adjusted for what money buys in Thailand, it's like an American paying about $18 for a cup of tea. When one of these chains comes to town, it's an event. In 2023, a 29-year-old from Hubei province who goes by Kangkang opened the first Mixue in a factory town outside Ho Chi Minh City. He gave away free ice cream cones, 430 on the first day, until the motorbikes parked outside blocked the road and the traffic police showed up. By one industry count, at least 40 Chinese tea brands have now opened 9,805 stores outside China. But that's small next to what's happening at home. In 2025, the number of tea shops inside China fell by 29,300. In one year, China lost three times as many tea shops as all of its tea chains have open abroad today. Chagee listed on the Nasdaq in 2025. Its sales outside China more than doubled over the past year. Inside China, sales at its existing stores fell by 16%. Even so, only 399 of its 7,639 stores are abroad, about one in twenty. Part of the reason there are so many stores is how these chains make money. Nearly 98% of Mixue's revenue comes from selling ingredients and equipment to its own franchise owners, so every new store is also a new customer. For its stores in Indonesia, even the lemons are grown in Sichuan, in China, and shipped over in refrigerated containers. And going abroad doesn't fix the problem for long. Vietnam alone got more than 1,300 Mixues. In some neighborhoods there were four to six within one kilometer, and owners started posting their shops for sale. In 2025, Mixue's store count outside China fell for the first time, mostly in Vietnam and Indonesia. In Japan, it had planned about 1,000 stores. By this summer, it had four. And Chagee is closing three stores in Ho Chi Minh City in December. So the chains aren't leaving because the rest of the world was waiting for them. They're leaving because China has far more tea shops than Chinese customers can keep open, and every chain is fighting for the same cups. Southeast Asia is where they went first, because it's close, and it's already showing what happens next: the same crowding, a few years later, in a smaller market.

Sam Szuchan

Open In TikTok:

Region: TH

Friday 13 November 2026 01:00:00 GMT