Masan’s Phuc Long bet pays off after kiosk strategy fails

Masan Group’s Phuc Long bet is finally looking like a coffee business instead of a kiosk rollout. After years of pushing tea and coffee counters into WinMart and WinMart+ stores, the Vietnamese conglomerate has shifted toward stand-alone cafes, tighter store control and a format that actually looks built for repeat visits.

The money trail shows how hard Masan pushed the first idea. It bought 20% of Phuc Long in May 2021 for $15 million, then raised that stake to 51% in February 2022 after spending another $110 million. At that point, Masan said Phuc Long was worth $355 million. By August 2022, Masan had put in another $155 million to lift ownership to 85%, implying a valuation as high as $455 million. The ambition was huge, with the kiosk network eventually described as a path toward 10,000 locations. In practice, the model did not connect with customers the way Masan hoped.

Phuc Long’s rapid expansion inside supermarkets was real. Masan said the brand opened 971 kiosks inside WinMart+ stores in one year and had more than 1,000 locations by mid-2022. But the convenience-led format did not prove durable enough to justify the rollout, and the kiosk strategy was shelved in late 2023 after more investment and a broader reassessment of what the brand should be. That reset mattered because Phuc Long, founded in 1968 in Lâm Đng province and launched as a tea-and-coffee chain in 2012 with its first store in Ho Chi Minh City, had been carrying a café identity long before it became a supermarket add-on.

The pivot has been visible in the numbers. In early 2023, the chain had 114 flagship stores, 23 smaller-format outlets and a kiosk network under review. Masan had planned at least 75 flagship openings that year but managed only three in the first quarter, while testing a hub-and-spoke kiosk model that tripled daily kiosk revenue during the pilot phase. By FY2024, the reset was starting to pay off: Phuc Long’s net revenue reached VND1.62 trillion, or $64.6 million, up 5.6% year on year, and Q4 revenue rose nearly 12% year on year. The chain’s store count later climbed from 158 in 2024 to 237 by mid-2025, including 184 flagship locations.

Patricia Marques, who took over as CEO in November 2024 after more than 11 years running Starbucks Vietnam, has pushed the business toward like-for-like growth and loyalty-program integration inside Masan’s ecosystem. Masan has also added bread, pastries, ice cream and delivery sales, giving Phuc Long more ways to win than the kiosk model ever offered. The turn is a simple lesson in Vietnamese coffee retail: scale is useful, but a real café experience is what customers come back for.