Jollibee buys 70% of Compose Coffee to fuel global expansion
Jollibee’s $340 million bet puts a 2,470-store Korean value coffee chain at the center of its global push, with Compose Coffee already driving the group’s café expansion.
Jollibee Worldwide Pte. Ltd. agreed on July 2, 2024 to buy an effective 70% stake in Compose Coffee Co., Ltd. and JMCF Co. Ltd. for about $340 million, putting a fast-growing Korean coffee chain at the center of its international expansion push. The deal gave Jollibee a brand with 2,470 franchised stores, all of them operated under a capital-light model that the company said had already turned Compose Coffee into one of South Korea’s sharpest growth stories.
Compose Coffee was founded in Busan in 2014, and Jollibee said it ranked first among Korean coffee brands for growth in franchised stores and for brand satisfaction. That mattered because the chain was not being bought as a single premium flag or a one-city curiosity. It was being bought as a format: a value coffee business with no debt, about KRW70 billion in cash, and high double-digit EBITDA and EBIT margins. Jollibee also pointed to Kim Taehyung, better known as V of BTS, as the chain’s brand ambassador, a signal that Compose Coffee already had the kind of cultural lift Korean consumer brands often use to travel beyond home soil.
The transaction value was about KRW470 billion, and Jollibee said the price implied roughly 8x EV/EBITDA on a debt-free basis. After the deal, Elevation Equity Partners Korea Limited was set to hold 25% and Titan Dining II LP 5%, while Jollibee said the acquisition could lift revenues by about 2% and push the international business to about 41% of global revenues once consolidated. Tony Tan Caktiong called Compose Coffee’s 10-year history impressive and said Jollibee was excited to help drive its next phase of growth. The company also said the purchase would make Compose Coffee its largest brand by outlet count, overtaking the flagship Jollibee chain.
Jollibee later said it completed the acquisition in August 2024. By the end of that year, its coffee and tea segment had grown to more than 5,000 stores, about 78% of them franchised, with Compose Coffee contributing 22.6% of the segment’s growth. Jollibee opened 361 coffee and tea stores in 2024, a pace that showed how seriously the company was treating coffee as more than a side category. In Compose Coffee, it found a Korean café brand built for scale, and for Jollibee, that made it look like the kind of exportable format global coffee drinkers outside Korea might soon recognize by name.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
