Jollibee hints at possible Highlands Coffee IPO after years of delay
After years of delay, Jollibee Foods Corporation is now more upbeat about the prospects for an initial public offering of its highly profitable and rapidly expanding Highlands Coffee business which is the dominant coffee chain in Vietnam.
In an online media briefing, Jollibee Chief Financial Officer Richard Shin said “the numberic says it can go IPO but we don’t want to just go IPO for the sake of IPO. When we take this to a capital market opportunity to create value for shareholders, we want to be very thoughtful and think about the best way we can move forward.”
“We are, of course, always thinking about ways to optimize some of these investments that we’ve made. But Highlands Coffee going IPO in Vietnam as a standalone company is not something that we believe is the best way to take this forward,” he noted.
Shin did not elaborate on how they plan to structure a future IPO for Highlands Coffee and whether they will place it in a holding company with the group’s other coffee chains or food businesses overseas.
He pointed out, though, that the group has grown the business from 56 unprofitable stores in 2012 to almost 900 branches now that are “extremely profitable.”
According to Shin, the coffee business in Vietnam has recovered from recent macroeconomic headwinds related to China, as Vietnam’s economy is heavily dependent on the Chinese economy.
“But we’ve now been seeing positive growth again for Highland, so that’s fantastic, and the market is good and, lucky for us, over that time, we never stepped back,” he said.
Shin said “We continue to build new stores, and we continue to believe in the brand. It was dominant back then and, today, roughly our dominance equates to around the next four coffee and tea brands put together.
“So we’re very satisfied with the strategy we took to not pull back due to fear, but to really understand that it was just cyclical and temporary, and we kept on pushing forward.”
He also responded to concerns over rising coffee bean prices by pointing out that all of Jollibee’s coffee businesses continue to enjoy high margins.