Profits Percolate In Orient

Pacific Rim countries offer the best long-term growth opportunity for the Starbucks coffee chain, the company’s chairman and chief executive says.

“The center of the world is moving, and it’s moving outside of North America,” Howard Schultz said earlier this week at Starbucks’ annual meeting.

“I think one day the company will have more stores in the Pacific Rim than it has in North America.”

In 1989, Starbucks Coffee Co. operated 11 gourmet coffee stores, most scattered around the Puget Sound region. Today, it has about 1,000 stores, mostly in the United States, and plans to open 325 more by year’s end.

Schultz said Starbucks for the first time would top $1 billion in sales this year and be operating 2,000 stores worldwide by the turn of the century.

The annual meeting was held at the company’s roasting plant here. More than 2,000 shareholders met in a makeshift auditorium ringed by coffee-bean bags stacked 15 feet high.