This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on August 26, 2022.
Adapted from figures and excerpts attributed in the original article to Momentum Works, which jointly released the report with restaurant payment platform qlub.
Momentum Works and qlub reported that Southeast Asian consumers spent as much as US$3.66 billion a year on bubble tea and other new-style tea drinks. The report, titled Bubble Tea in Southeast Asia, analyzed the emerging category and one of the region’s most popular beverage formats.
Indonesia and Thailand were identified as the largest new-style tea drink markets in Southeast Asia.
Taiwanese and local Southeast Asian brands had long dominated the region’s milk tea and bubble tea market. Many local brands also developed by acting as agents for Taiwanese brands.
In recent years, the competitive mix changed as Chinese tea chains including HEYTEA, Mixue Bingcheng, and CHAGEE began expanding into Southeast Asia at scale.
In Singapore, a small market with a population of more than 5 million, the report counted more than 90 chain milk tea brands, over 60 of which had meaningful scale.
Competition was especially intense in the mid-market tier. Many brands had limited defensibility beyond consumer preference for customization and variety.
The report summarized the brand-building path as:
1. Launch products accepted by the market. 2. Test and achieve a profitable single-store economic model. 3. Expand while preserving unit economics.
Execution was presented as the critical final step. That means standardizing processes, controlling the supply chain, and building team management and digital capabilities. The article noted that newer Chinese brands emerging from intense domestic competition had advantages in these areas.
Even in Singapore, which is smaller than Chongming Island and has less than one-quarter of Shanghai’s population, neighborhood differences were described as significant. Consumers in the eastern Tampines area tended to spend within their own district, while consumers in the southern HarbourFront area were known for trying new products and showing little loyalty.
The article also noted that differences across northern, southern, eastern, and western Jakarta were significant. Jakarta’s urban population was described as more than 10 million, excluding more than 20 million people in its suburbs and satellite cities.
The article briefly explained why the word for tea differs across languages. Countries that historically traded with China over land often adopted pronunciations related to northern Chinese “cha,” while countries trading by sea tended to use the Minnan pronunciation “teh.”
Adding milk to tea also developed through different habits and practices across Europe, India, the Malay Peninsula, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tibet.
The article highlighted the region’s creativity around bubble tea, citing bubble tea pizza, bubble tea toast, bubble tea crab, and bubble tea sushi as examples of how the beverage has been adapted into other food formats.
Related topics referenced in the original article included CHAGEE’s international expansion, Mixue Bingcheng surpassing 1,000 overseas stores, Sharetea’s listing with 355 stores, and Mixue Bingcheng CEO Zhang Hongfu’s account of the company’s growth.
Note: market-size, store-count, and listing-related figures are historical and reflect the 2022 source article.
