A well-loved fast-food giant known for its bright red branding and aggressive shopping spree abroad has a problem child in its portfolio, and it’s not getting any better behaved.

The item in question is a global coffee-and-tea chain the local conglomerate scooped up years ago, betting on its name recognition and worldwide footprint. On paper, the growth story still looks fine. Sales climbed by more than a billion pesos over the past year. But here’s the catch: The losses grew even faster. The chain bled nearly P800 million in red ink, almost double what it lost the year before. In other words, more people bought more coffee, and the company still ended up worse off than when it started.

That’s the kind of development that makes finance officers lose sleep. A business can’t outrun a widening loss forever just by ringing up more sales. At some point, either costs get fixed or the bleeding becomes structural — and structural bleeding is much harder to stop.

To be fair, not everything in the group’s basket of international brands is struggling. A Vietnam-based coffee operation, home to a much-loved local chain there, posted healthier numbers across the board: more revenue, more profit.

A bubble tea brand elsewhere in the portfolio also turned in a stronger year. So the conglomerate’s overseas ambitions aren’t a lost cause; they’re just uneven.

Things get murkier in Korea. A holding company there that oversees a coffee chain and a newly bought hot-pot restaurant operator posted revenue that barely moved, while profit fell by roughly a third from the year before.

The hot-pot deal itself, inked for close to P5 billion, actually turned a tidy profit in its first couple of months under new ownership, proof that the acquisition wasn’t a bad buy on its own. But bolted onto a Korean unit that’s otherwise treading water, it hasn’t been enough to lift the group’s overall showing there.

The bigger picture: This conglomerate has built an impressive international empire through one acquisition after another, and investors love the growth headlines. But growth without profit is becoming a dominant story.

Until the coffee chain in particular finds its way to consistent black ink, it will keep acting as a drag on results, however shiny the rest of the international story looks.