Hooking China on coffee

The average person in China drinks 5 cups of coffee - a year. Tea has been the hot beverage of choice for millennia. If you run an enterprising java company, that's an opportunity to profitably hook a nation of 1.3 billion people on caffeine. Corporations from the coffee-addicted West have taken note and are pushing the stuff, evidenced by a couple of developments in recent weeks. Starbucks is on a tear. China was a leading contributor to the mega chain's second quater revenue growth, Forbes reported. As Motley Fool headlined it, "China is lifting Starbucks stock to new highs." The Seattle company operates 7,000 stores worldwide and plans to open an additional 1,500 locations in China by 2015 and 4,000 stores in the broader China/Asia-Pacific region soon.