Who's making the money at a kopitiam, the coffee or the rent?

Rent first and coffee second is my answer, and the rent may not stay with the person pouring your kopi. That's a guess from scraps, because I couldn't find a Malaysian kopitiam's accounts, so the sums below are mine.

The cup that won't pay the wages

In 2021, the president of the Malaysia Singapore Coffee Shop Proprietors General Association made the case for dearer coffee. Owners, he said, only made RM20 if they sold 100 cups a day, even with a 20-sen rise.¹

I read that as the rise itself, not the whole margin, because that's exactly what the sum comes to. He was arguing for a higher price, so it isn't a neutral figure. His comparison still stays with me: a foreign worker's pay had reached RM1,650 a month, and that money wouldn't cover it.¹

The minimum wage has gone up since, and I'd guess the price of a cup has too. What I couldn't find is what a cup actually leaves a Malaysian kopitiam after the coffee, the milk and the gas.

A cup against the rent

So here's an invented number to test the idea. Say a cup leaves one ringgit.

The president of a Selangor and KL coffee shop association put rental there at RM10,000 to RM20,000 in 2020, which I'm reading as per month, though the report doesn't say.² Take the middle, fifteen thousand, and that's five hundred cups a day, every day, before anyone gets paid.

Then you count the stalls

A kopitiam operator in Rawang describes its own set-up in a funding note on a lending platform. Besides its own food, "we rent food stalls to tenants", about nine of them.³

It's one operator talking about itself, and it lists two beverage makers against five cooks, so drinks don't look like the big job in that house. It doesn't say what those stalls pay. I couldn't find a Malaysian stall rent, which is annoying, since the whole question hangs on it.

So here's a second invented number. If nine stalls paid two thousand ringgit each, that's eighteen thousand a month, which clears my middle rent with room left, before a single drink is ordered.

That's a little unfair, since the stalls are why you sat down and the drink is what you ordered once you had. The stallholder also sees all this very differently, and that side is in the hawker post.

The nearest thing to accounts

The closest I can get is a cousin. Kimly is listed in Singapore, manages dozens of traditional coffee shops there, and its 2025 annual report describes the same two jobs: leasing stalls to tenants and selling food, drinks and tobacco.⁴

Kimly's outlets, year to September 2025, in S$ million

I expected rent to win, and on takings it doesn't. The counter brings in more than twice what outside tenants pay.⁴

Takings aren't what's left, though. A drink needs beans, milk and someone to make it, and the report gives no margin for drinks. My guess is that a ringgit of rent keeps far more of itself than a ringgit of coffee.

The twist is the last bar. Kimly's main outlet division books more for its own leases than outside tenants pay it, about S$38 million.⁴

It also bills Kimly's own food stalls, and the report doesn't break that down, so this isn't a clean sum. But after all of it, that division cleared only about a tenth of its outside revenue before tax.

So who owns the walls?

That's the question I keep coming back to. In June 2022, two Singapore coffee shops sold for over S$40 million each.⁵ Vulcan Post also quotes a former hawker-chain owner who claims rents at coffee shops there start at S$5,000 to S$6,000 a month.⁵

I wouldn't carry those numbers across the Causeway, but the logic travels. A buyer at that price isn't paying for the kopi.

I think there are really two businesses behind the same tables:

• The owner who owns the shop keeps the stall rent, and the coffee is close to a bonus.
• The owner who rents the shop collects stall rent and hands much of it upward, and then the coffee has to be the living.

They'd have the same menu and very different lives. I don't know how many Malaysian kopitiam sit in each camp, and that's the number I'd most like to see.

If I were buying into one, I'd ask who holds the lease and when it ends before I tasted anything.

I could be wrong about the size of all this. What would change my mind is one Malaysian kopitiam's books showing that the counter pays the rent by itself.