Starbucks Corp. Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz said his coffee chain’s scale will help it withstand this month’s natural disasters in Japan, which shuttered more than 10 percent of its stores there.
“The impact financially will be diminished because of the size of Starbucks,” he said in a talk yesterday at the 92nd Street Y in New York with Norman Pearlstine, chief content officer for Bloomberg and chairman of Bloomberg Businessweek. “It’s an extremely important market, not only for its size and profitability, but the emotional connection we have with the Japanese people.”
Schultz, 57, is promoting his book “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul,” out yesterday. His coffee chain, the world’s largest, entered Japan 15 years ago, its first market outside North America.