Starbucks began 2013 in style, announcing last week that it would be opening its first store in Vietnam next month, located in Ho Chi Minh City. But while the new store is the company’s first opening in Vietnam, it’s far from its first in Asia.

By the end of this year, said Starbucks management at the company’s biennial investors’ conference in December, the world’s largest coffee house company will have no fewer than 4,000 stores in the region—including around 1,000 in China, 1,000 in Japan, and 500 in South Korea. By 2014, in short, China will become Starbucks’ second-largest market outside of the United States—impressive for a market that it entered for the first time in 1999.

Predictably, investors and analysts have applauded such statistics as signs that the company’s heady expansion in recent times could be maintained: operating income has grown at a heady 32 percent compound annual growth rate over the last five years, prompting skeptics to believe that a slowdown in sales and income growth is all but inevitable.

“Starbucks will have more than 20,000 retail stores on six continents by 2014,†company chairman, president and chief executive officer Howard Schultz reassured investors. “We have challenges, we have issues, but we’ve never been in a better position in terms of the strength and power of the Starbucks brand.â€

But the challenge, as Schultz noted, isn’t in penetrating new Asian markets, but delivering solid growth in more saturated markets. And saturated markets don’t come more laden with Starbucks stores than the United States, where investors were told that 1,500 new stores would be in place by 2017—just five years away.

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