Starbucks downgraded by Bernstein

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A Starbucks store in Shenzhen, China.

Starbucks’ strong growth in China will be overshadowed by slowing sales in the U.S., an analyst at Bernstein said Monday.

“The business mix is clearly shifting toward China … just not fast enough to offset the US,” analyst Sara Senatore said in a note to clients. “While we think SBUX’s China business can contribute meaningfully to growth over time, the US’s slowdown will overwhelm it.”

Senatore downgraded the stock to market perform from outperform and trimmed her price target on Starbucks to $64 per share from $67. Starbucks shares closed at $57.99 on Friday; they traded down 0.4 percent in the premarket Monday at $57.74.

Starbucks said Thursday its same-store sales in China rose 6 percent for fiscal first-quarter 2018. U.S. sales, meanwhile, rose 2 percent in that same time period. Overall same-store sales grew less than expected for the quarter.

“We think the China mix shift is a powerful long term story – just as it was for Yum – [but] the issue is that relative to Yum’s business in 2004 (the year the company started to break out results), Starbucks’ is still meaningfully more weighted to the US,” Senatore noted.

China’s contribution to Starbucks’ segment EBIT in fiscal 2017 was 8 percent, Senatore said, while China added 16 percent to Yum’s segment EBIT in 2004. The U.S., meanwhile, contributed 60 percent to Starbucks’ U.S. segment EBIT, while adding 59 percent to Yum’s in 2004.