Analysis · Asia · 23 Sept 2026

Four ways to buy time: what this week deals reveal about franchise structures in Asia

Central Retail spends its own capital, bhc sells development rights, Mixue prunes its network and Saeki trains managers years ahead of opening. Four structures, one shared constraint: time.

Same market, four different instruments

Four developments reported in recent days describe the same Asian growth opportunity through four very different legal and financial structures. Reading them side by side is more useful than reading any one of them alone, because the choice of structure tells you what each company believes its scarcest resource is.

Central Retail is buying with cash. Kaohoon International reported on 11 September 2026 that the Thai group has put more than THB49 billion into Vietnam, operates over 300 malls and stores in 26 provinces across 1.3 million square metres, serves about 500,000 customers a day, and will add 10 to 12 GO! hypermarkets and 23 to 25 mini go! supermarkets by 2028. Chief executive Suthisarn Chirathivat cited first-half 2026 GDP growth of 8.18% and retail sales growth of 12.9%.

bhc is buying with someone else cash. Tuoi Tre reported on 8 May 2026 that the Korean chain entered Vietnam through a master franchise agreement with Singapore-headquartered Hao Open Foods, targeting 50 stores in ten years. The first store opened on 12 September 2026 in Ho Chi Minh City, per Seoul Economic Daily on 15 September 2026, and bhc runs 51 stores across 10 countries outside Korea against more than 2,300 globally.

Mixue is buying by subtraction. VnExpress reported on 21 April 2026 that its overseas network fell by about 428 stores in 2025 to 4,467 locations, concentrated in Vietnam and Indonesia, while revenue reached around RMB33.56 billion and net profit RMB5.93 billion, both up more than 33%. Reformatted stores averaged roughly 1.7 times higher revenue.

Saeki is buying with years. VietnamPlus reported on 20 September 2026 that the Japanese retailer, with 56 stores at home, will place Vietnamese staff in Japanese stores for at least three years before opening its first Vietnamese outlet within three years, on the way to 100. Its workforce development lead said a fully capable store manager normally takes around ten years to train.

What each structure is actually solving

Direct investment keeps all the upside and all the risk. It suits an operator with a low cost of capital, patience and existing regional infrastructure. Central Retail can afford to grow its hypermarket format at roughly three sites a year because its small format grows at eight and the two share logistics.

A master franchise buys speed and local knowledge in exchange for margin and control. The partner finds sites, funds fit-out, hires and often sub-franchises. The franchisor converts growth into royalty income. The trade is real: bhc will learn Vietnam through someone else eyes, and the quality of that partner will determine whether store fifty resembles store one.

Network pruning is the least glamorous instrument and arguably the most instructive. A system that can close 428 outlets and increase profit by more than a third has discovered that outlet count and enterprise value are not the same variable. The 1.7 times uplift on reformatted stores suggests the binding constraint was site quality, not demand.

Talent-first entry is the slowest and, for food retail, possibly the most honest. Fresh produce, shrinkage and daily ordering are judgement skills. A brand that admits they take a decade to build is writing a plan it can keep.

The common thread

All four are ways of solving for time. Capital compresses the property timeline. A master franchise compresses the local-knowledge timeline. Pruning recovers time already lost to bad sites. Training pays the time cost upfront instead of discovering it later as inconsistency.

That has a practical consequence for anyone negotiating an Asian development agreement in 2026. Development schedules are usually built around capital and property availability, because those are the two things a franchisor can verify in diligence. Almost nobody stress-tests whether a partner can produce qualified store managers at the pace the schedule assumes. Yet the manager bench is the constraint that Saeki quantified at roughly ten years, and it is the one most likely to cause a schedule to slip.

The second consequence concerns exit terms. Mixue experience argues that every development agreement should specify relocation and closure economics from the start: who pays to move a failing store, at what performance threshold, and how that affects the development quota. Agreements that only count openings give both sides an incentive to defend a bad site rather than fix it.

What we do not know

None of the four disclosed franchise fees, royalty rates or per-store investment, so unit-level returns cannot be calculated from public information.
Saeki has not stated whether it will operate directly, form a joint venture or franchise, and published no investment figure.
The Mixue 1.7 times revenue figure comes from company reporting via VnExpress; we have not seen the underlying store-level data or the definition of the comparison set.
bhc has not disclosed how many of the 50 Vietnamese stores will be sub-franchised versus operated by the master franchisee.
We found no newly published independent survey this week on master franchise failure or renewal rates in Southeast Asia. That would be the single most valuable dataset for judging these structures, and we will keep looking.

This article analyses publicly available information. It is not investment advice and makes no promise of returns.

Sources

Compiled from public sources for information only, not investment advice.

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