Kuya J targets 200 stores by next year

MANILA, Philippines — Kuya J Group Holdings Inc. is eyeing to nearly double its store portfolio to 200 stores by next year as it enters an aggressive expansion mode, an official of the company said.

“Definitely not this year, but by next year, I’m sure we will have our 200th store,” Kuya J president Winglip Chang told reporters. 

At present, the company has a store network of 105 branches across the country. It was able to reach 100 stores in less than three years.

Chang said the company is eyeing to open around 20 to 25 more stores this year.

Despite the fast expansion of the company, Chang said they are now challenged to find good locations for new stores.

“As we grow, the challenge is to find good locations. Easy for the first 75 (stores) but beyond that, we have to pick our spots,” Chang said.

“If there are 100 good locations available today we will get all of them because we are in a very aggressive expansion mode. So the only hindrance is really finding good locations because there’s no point in opening branches that are not viable,” he added.

Chang explained that the primary consideration for deeming a store viable is the accessibility of the area and the size of the foot traffic in the area.

Apart from opening more company-owned stores, Chang affirmed that the recently launched franchise financing program will also help the company grow its store network.

“We see that as one of the ways of increasing the number of stores that we will be opening. We feel that it’s a good way of doing it,” Chang said.

Under the new franchising scheme, the operator of Kuya J restaurant said it can extend a loan of up to 70 percent of the total cost to put up a new restaurant to interested franchisees.

“The highlight of Kuya J franchise is its in-house financing program which has ability to support up to 70 percent of the franchisee’s capital requirements as well as business development support, service training programs, management systems, and marketing programs,” the company earlier said.

Chang said the company has already received a lot of letters of intent for the program.

Moreover, asked about plans of the company to go public, Chang said there are no concrete plans yet, but added that they want to do it “as soon as possible.”

“It can be a backdoor, it can be an ipo(Initial Public offering), we have no concrete notion or plan on what we are going to do yet. So we don’t want people to also speculate because we haven’t made a decision on that yet,” Chang said. 

Apart from its Kuya J restaurants, the company also owns and operates concept stores Isla Sugbu Seafood City and Tsay Cheng Chinese Cuisine.