Gopizza cools on Singapore, fires up its India ambitions

Melissa Goh contributed to this story

After aggressively expanding across Asia, tech-enabled pizza chain Gopizza has scaled back and is concentrating its efforts on India, its largest and now fastest-growing market outside of its home country of South Korea.

The chain expanded rapidly between 2019 and 2024 and now operates over 1,000 stores across markets like Singapore, Indonesia, and India. These are a combination of full-service restaurants and compact pizza stalls inside convenience stores and cinemas.

A Gopizza store in Bangalore / Photo credit: Gopizza

Since then, it has “deliberately scaled down in Singapore,” where it has put a halt on new restaurant openings, focusing on managing stalls within 7-Eleven convenience stores.

“Our business model structurally changed” in the past two years, founder and CEO Jay Lim tells Tech in Asia. “From 2024, we were geared toward, ‘How can we make profitability happen?’”

Among its latest bets: India.

Banking on India

A “Korean wave” is sweeping across the South Asian nation, driving up the popularity of Korean products, from the food to beauty segments. The country now contributes between 30% to 40% of Gopizza’s revenue, the CEO says.

This figure could reach as high as 80% in the next three years, as the firm channels earnings from other overseas markets to scale its India business, he says.

All of Gopizza’s 60 stores in the country are full-service restaurants, a bet Lim says makes sense because rent is also a fraction of the cost than in pricier markets like Singapore. India’s retail sector also isn’t mature enough for the convenience-store model that it operates in other markets.

He expects the firm’s India business to be EBITDA-positive for the full year of 2026.

In the country, Gopizza is going beyond its core pizza brand and is testing a series of Korean food concepts that it can’t justify building in pricier markets.

In late 2024, for instance, the firm introduced Gochujang, a Korean street food concept store, in India. Gochujang already generates “more profit and revenue” per store than Gopizza due to a relative lack of competition in Korean cuisine offerings in the country, Lim says.

It now operates around 10 of such establishments and has also launched two Korean dessert stores under the brand name Dalkomi.

Retreat from Singapore

Better tech, new ovens

Korea’s convenience stores are now the profit engine