Malaysia's Zus Coffee to add 6 outlets in Singapore
All it took Zuspresso to overtake Starbucks as Malaysia's largest coffee chain was less than five years since its inception.
It has almost 750 outlets in Malaysia - Starbucks has 320.
The American chain was affected by boycotts in Malaysia for its perceived Israel links amid the Gaza conflict.
After surpassing Starbucks in early-2024, the Malaysian coffee shop operator now plans to further expand with 200 new stores in South-east Asia this year, reported Bloomberg.
There will be at least 107 new Zus Coffee outlets in Malaysia, six in Singapore and about 80 in the Philippines, COO Venon Tian told Bloomberg.
There are four existing outlets in Singapore and about 120 in the Philippines.
Zus Coffee will also be introduced to Thailand and Indonesia this year.
Mr Tian attributes the chain's success to the customisation of flavours to suit the local market.
For example, the drinks flavoured with gula Melaka in Malaysia and purple yam in the Philippines.
Zus Coffee in late-2019 started out as a delivery kiosk with an app and thrived during the pandemic.
"Covid accelerated our business model," Mr Tian revealed.
"You've got the convenience store, which sells your coffee at RM5 ($1.49) and below. Then you have premium mass coffee selling at RM11 and above.
"So Zus positioned itself between that price point. It's about how we make quality coffee accessible to most people."
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In real terms, America's is over twice as high as in the early 1980s; the country churns out more goods than Japan, Germany and South Korea combined. As the Cato Institute, a think-tank, points out, America's factories would, on their own, rank as the world's eighth-largest economy. Even a heroic reshoring effort eliminating America's US$1.2 trillion goods-trade deficit would do little for jobs. In the production of that amount of goods, about US$630 billion of value-added would come from manufacturing (with the rest attributable to raw materials, transport and so on). Robert Lawrence of Harvard University estimates that, with each manufacturing worker generating around US$230,000 in value added, bringing back enough production to close the deficit would create around three million jobs, half on the factory floor. That would lift the share of the workforce in manufacturing production by barely a percentage point. 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The heart of working-class America now beats elsewhere. ©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
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