Jollibee's Hong Kong Pivot Reveals Two Capital-Markets Paths for Southeast Asian Franchise Platforms

In the span of a single week in early September, the Philippines' Jollibee Foods Corporation put two Vietnamese capital-markets storylines on the table at once — even though the headline was really about Hong Kong. On September 1, JFC confirmed it was abandoning a planned U.S. listing for Jollibee Foods Corporation International (JFCI), the holding company that houses its roughly 7,251 stores outside the Philippines, in favor of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Buried inside that news was a second, quieter data point: Highlands Coffee, the Vietnamese chain that JFC has built from 56 stores in 2012 into a network approaching 1,000 outlets, is doing preliminary work on its own, separate initial public offering in Vietnam, targeted for as early as the first quarter of 2027. Read side by side, the two moves sketch out something more interesting than a single company's choice of listing venue — they are a live demonstration of two different capital-markets paths now open to a Southeast Asian franchise platform, and Vietnamese founders scaling their own brands abroad would do well to study both.

Why JFCI Chose Hong Kong Over New York

JFC chairman Tony Tan Caktiong said detailed preparatory work "reinforced our conviction in the listing and has led us to conclude that Hong Kong is the market best aligned with JFCI's business, geographic footprint, and long-term ambitions" — language that signals a deliberate reversal from the U.S.-listing plan the company had floated back in January. The logic becomes clearer once you look at what JFCI actually is: a Hong Kong-listed vehicle sits closer to an investor base already familiar with stories like this one, at exchange hours that overlap with the markets where the company operates. JFCI's footprint is now genuinely pan-Asian rather than incidentally so. As of June 2026, JFC operated 10,767 stores across 33 countries under 19 brands, and the 7,251 stores sitting outside the Philippines — nearly seven in ten of the total network — are the ones JFCI is built around. That international arm carries brands wholly owned by JFC, among them Smashburger, Tim Ho Wan, Yonghe King and Hong Zhuang Yuan, alongside controlling stakes in The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (80%), South Korea's Compose Coffee (70%), Taiwanese bubble-tea chain Milksha (51%) and SuperFoods Group, the Vietnamese operator of Highlands Coffee, at 60%.

Highlands Coffee's Separate, Domestic Listing Track

Highlands Coffee is not part of the Hong Kong plan — it is pursuing its own, entirely separate track, and the distinction matters. JFC's 60% stake in SuperFoods Group gives it economic exposure to Highlands without folding the brand into JFCI's international basket, which leaves Highlands free to list directly on a Vietnamese exchange rather than sit as a line item inside a larger regional holding company. The chain has grown from a single stall near Hanoi's Hoan Kiem Lake into close to 1,000 stores serving more than 100 million cups of coffee a year, and reporting on the preliminary IPO work points to a target raise in the range of $300 million to $400 million. The timing is not incidental: Vietnam's stock market is set to move from frontier to secondary emerging-market status under FTSE Russell's classification, effective September 21, 2026 — a reclassification years in the making that is expected to draw a new wave of index-tracking foreign capital into Vietnamese-listed equities. A domestic listing that used to mean a shallower, more retail-driven investor base now looks closer to what JFCI gets by listing in Hong Kong: deeper liquidity and access to institutional money that understands the regional consumer story.

Two Different Ways to Take a Franchise Platform to Market

Put the two listings side by side and they demonstrate two distinct playbooks for turning a franchise network into a public company. JFCI is the multi-brand, multi-country route: bundle a portfolio of controlling stakes and wholly owned chains spanning burgers, dim sum, coffee and bubble tea across a dozen-plus markets into one holding vehicle, and list it somewhere with deep regional institutional demand. Highlands Coffee is the single-brand, single-market route: let one chain's home-market dominance and brand equity carry its own listing, on its own exchange, timed to a specific liquidity event — in this case, a market-status upgrade that is about to change who is allowed to buy Vietnamese shares. Neither approach is inherently superior; they suit different starting points. A platform holding many brands across many countries, the way JFC has assembled through acquisitions since taking Smashburger in 2018 and Compose Coffee in 2024, has the scale and diversification a Hong Kong or U.S. institutional book wants to see. A single dominant domestic brand with a clear growth runway, the way Highlands has become close to synonymous with Vietnamese coffee culture, is better served riding its home market's own re-rating.

The Lesson for Vietnam's Outbound Brands

For the wave of Vietnamese food and beverage brands currently building franchise footprints abroad — HappiTea in the Philippines and India, Three O'Clock across South Asia, Viva Star Coffee's steady march through Asia, the Middle East and the U.S. — neither path is available yet, and that is precisely the point worth sitting with. Both of JFC's listings rest on years of unit-economics discipline and a scale of store count that took Highlands a decade and a half to build, and JFC decades longer to assemble internationally. But the two-track structure itself is instructive: a brand does not have to choose, at the outset, between staying a single-market champion and becoming a diversified regional holding company. It can build toward either outcome, or both, depending on how it structures ownership stakes, master franchise agreements and joint ventures along the way. The choice of listing venue, when the time comes, will follow from decisions made years earlier about how internationally diversified the underlying business actually is.

Go Global Holdings works with Southeast Asian founders on exactly that earlier-stage question — helping a brand decide, deal by deal, whether it is building toward a single dominant home-market story or a diversified international platform, so that whichever door capital markets eventually open, the brand is standing in front of the right one.