China's tea chains now run roughly 5,000 stores across more than a dozen countries, yet Mixue Group's overseas network contracted by 428 stores in 2025 — its first-ever annual decline — while Chagee plans 200 new overseas stores in 2026 and is shifting from light-asset franchising to heavy-asset localization. The binding constraint is no longer storefronts or supply chains; it is local country managers and compliance executives. A recruitment specialist at SunTzu Recruit in Shanghai estimates the qualified bilingual retail-operations talent pool across Southeast Asia and Seoul numbers in the low hundreds.