The offer nobody remembers
For years the obvious reading of this market was a fight: an American chain arriving in Vietnam, a Vietnamese chain holding the line. Then Highlands' founder described what almost happened, and the fight turned out to be something stranger.
David Thai said Starbucks made an offer to buy Highlands around the time the American company entered Vietnam, and that he came close to accepting (VnExpress interview). The brand people now measure Starbucks against could have become part of Starbucks. Once you know that, the question stops being who won.
Vietnam already had coffee
Coffee here was never a product waiting to be introduced. It was a daily routine, and not a gentle one: strong robusta, often through a metal phin, often with condensed milk, drunk on plastic stools at six in the morning while the city wakes up around it. The habit is older than every brand in this argument.
Starbucks arrived with an international menu and a premium café experience, and there is nothing wrong with either. But entering a country with established habits is a different problem from creating a market. You are not asking people to try coffee. You are asking them to change where they already drink it.
Familiarity, at scale
What Highlands did was less romantic and more effective. It took drinks Vietnamese customers already knew — phin coffee among them — and put them inside a modern, branded, air-conditioned, predictable café. Same taste, new format. Somewhere to sit for an hour, somewhere with a menu you can read without asking.
Positioning only works when it starts from the customer's existing alternatives. Highlands did not ask anyone to replace a habit. It built a format around one.
Highlands didn't replace a Vietnamese habit. It built a chain around one — and charged for the room.
Nine hundred against a hundred and fifty
The gap in reach is the part that gets quoted, so it is worth dating. In June 2023 the BBC reported Starbucks at 92 stores in Vietnam against more than 600 for Highlands (BBC News). Vietnamese business press put Highlands above 900 outlets in 2025, against roughly 150 for Starbucks (VietnamBiz). Treat both pairs as directions rather than a scoreboard; the count depends on the month and on what is counted.
Reach is not just marketing. A coffee chain competes on whether choosing it is easy — near the office, near the school, on the way to a meeting, with the same drink and the same prices. A habit does not have to be the best option available to survive. It has to be the easiest one to repeat.
Who owns what
Here is where the tidy version of this story falls apart. Highlands is a Vietnamese-founded brand, but it is not local ownership defeating foreign money. Its parent company, SuperFoods Group, is majority owned by Jollibee Foods Corporation of the Philippines, which has held the stake for over a decade.
A brand can keep its local identity while drawing on international capital and international operations. This is not Vietnam against America. It is one company understanding a market, and another company funding the understanding.
Neither of them is losing
Starbucks is not absent from Vietnam and not failing at what it came to do. Its cafés serve people who want its drinks, its atmosphere, its global familiarity — students, meetings, an afternoon that needs a table and a socket. Highlands serves overlapping occasions in a different format, in far more places.
In a country with strong existing habits, the format that fits the habit beats the format that asks the habit to move. The two counts were never going to converge, because they are not selling the same thing.
