McDonald’s has announced it is opening its first restaurant in Vietnam, the latest Western consumer company to bring their brand to the Communist-run country.
The company says Tuesday that Henry Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American investor and the son-in-law of Vietnam’s prime minister, would be the main franchise partner.
The spending power of Vietnam’s 90 million people is proving attractive to Western companies even as its economy struggles.
Starbucks opened its first cafe in Vietnam earlier this year, joining Subway, Pizza Hut and other foreign brands.
McDonald’s said the first restaurant would be in Ho Chi Minh city, the country’s commercial capital.
It said Nguyen was chosen after a “rigorous” selection process and said he had worked in a McDonald’s while a student in the United States.
China‘s latest bout with a new strain of avian influenza does not bode well for Yum! Brands, the company said in its 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. March same-store sales declined an estimated 13% for their China operations. This included an estimated decline of 16% at KFC and a 4% growth at Pizza Hut. Within the past week, publicity associated with bird flu in Shanghai and surrounding areas has had a negative impact on KFC sales, the company said. “Historically in these situations, we have educated consumers that properly cooked chicken is perfectly safe to eat, and we will continue to do so,” the company said in its filing. Further updates regarding Yum! Brands’ China sales will be released with first quarter earnings on April 23, 2013. April same-store sales for China will be released on May 10 after market hours. So far, the share price of Kentucky-based Yum! Brands has held up okay from the scare. The stock is up around 0.8% over the last five days but down 1.82% over the last month. China is Yum’s most lucrative market. According to its third quarter report, China accounted for more than half of its overall revenue of $3.57 billion, and the country also generated around 40% of Yum’s profit. Since opening its first KFC branch on the Chinese mainland in 1987, Yum has nearly 5,000 restaurants in more than 800 Chinese cities. Over the last month, 43 people from Anhui, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces and Shanghai have been diagnosed with the new H7N9 strain of bird flu. Eleven people have died, most of them in Shanghai, the World Health Organization said Friday. New cases are popping up daily. On Friday, Beijing News reported that people carrying the H7N9 virus may have entered Beijing in recent days from East China due to an increased flow of tourists, but no cases of bird flu have been reported there as of Friday. While this is a new strain of bird flu, WHO said there has been no evidence of human to human transmission. And even though the disease does not survive in cooked meats, many restaurants in Shanghai have outright banned selling poultry dishes in an attempt to curb fears by the public.
NEW YORK — Yum Brands says publicity surrounding a new strain of flu is hurting its KFC sales in China, putting added pressure on its efforts to recover from an earlier controversy over its chicken suppliers.
The Louisville, Ky.-based company said in a regulatory filing Wednesday that the new bird flu cases have had a “significant, negative impact” on KFC in the past week. The news comes at a sensitive time for the company, which has been working to rebuild trust with customers following a TV report that its suppliers were giving chickens unapproved levels of antibiotics.
That report already sent sales plummeting for Yum, which is the biggest Western fast-food operator in China with about 5,300 locations. For March, Yum said sales at restaurants in China open at least a year fell 13 percent, including a 16 percent drop at KFC and a 4 percent gain at Pizza Hut.
The decline follows a 20 percent drop for January and February.
The impact from the bird flu cases would be reflected in April’s sales results, which will be reported May 10.
“Historically in these situations, we have educated consumers that properly cooked chicken is perfectly safe to eat, and we will continue to do so,” Yum said of the bird flu scare in the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
China announced the first known cases of a new strain of bird flu on March 31. The reports have sparked concerns among experts that the virus could mutate in a way that allows it to spread easily among people. Although there has been no sign of human-to-human transmission so far, the virus has infected 33 people and nine killed. On Wednesday, China‘s premier said that efforts to prevent and contain the virus were proceeding in an orderly manner.
Yum has been reporting monthly sales figures for China to keep investors updated on its recovery efforts in relation to the supplier scandal. As part of its push to regain trust with customers, it had announced the elimination of more than 1,000 small producers from its chicken supplier network and strengthened oversight over farmers.
CEO David Novak has noted that Yum has overcome major ordeals in the past, such as a bird flu scare in 2005 that dragged down sales by as much as 40 percent. And the company hasn’t adjusted its aggressive plans for expansion in the country.
Nevertheless, Yum has warned that that it expects its profit to fall in 2013 as a result of the chicken supplier scandal. That would snap an 11-year streak of double-digit growth.
Yum has more than 39,000 locations worldwide and China has been a critical engine of growth for the company because of the country’s rapidly growing ranks of middle-class consumers.
Yum! Brands is continuing to be affected by health scares in Asia‘s largest nation. In an SEC filing, the company said its March same-store sales in its China division fell by roughly 13% in March. The decline was more pronounced at the company’s KFC chicken restaurants, which saw a drop of approximately 16%. The figure for Pizza Hut was 4%.
Yum! Brands attributed the declines to the latest outbreak of bird flu in the country. In the filing, the company said: “[P]ublicity associated with avian flu in China has had a significant, negative impact on KFC sales. Historically in these situations, we have educated consumers that properly cooked chicken is perfectly safe to eat, and we will continue to do so.”
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Hundreds of fast food workers and supporters protested outside New York City restaurants Thursday to demand higher wages for their low-paying jobs, including about 60 who chanted “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Minimum wage has got to go!” at a midtown Wendy’s.
Linda Archer said she has worked at a nearby McDonald’s for three years and makes $8 an hour. The protesters want fast food restaurants to pay $15 per hour, almost double the current statewide average pay of $8.25 per hour. New York City has among the world’s most expensive rents.
“I’m asking for respect, I’m asking for $15, I’m asking for a union, I’m asking for job security,” she said. McDonald’s said in a statement that it values and respects all the employees who work at its restaurants.
New York‘s minimum wage is $7.25, but the state Legislature last month voted to raise it to $9 by 2016.
The day of picket lines organized by a coalition of unions and community groups followed a similar job action last November. Organizers said they expected hundreds of workers to demonstrate Thursday at dozens of fast food establishments, including McDonald’s, Domino’s, Wendy’s and Pizza Hut.
Fast food workers deserve union representation, said Richard Trumka, national president of the AFL-CIO, who stopped by the Wendy’s protest.
“They’re being mistreated, they’re being underpaid, they’re going to stand together until they get fair treatment and we’re going to stand with them,” Trumka said.
Shahnaz Perveen ate her lunch inside Wendy’s while protesters marched outside but said she supported the workers’ demands. “They work really hard,” she said.
Thursday’s action also commemorated the assassination 45 years ago of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, where he was supporting a strike by sanitation workers.
Several pickets wore signs that said “I am a man” or “I am a woman,” echoing placards carried in Memphis in 1968.
Pizza Hut, which was founded in Wichita, Kan., said it planned to dish out the gratis pizza on campus. But first the ninth-seeded team will have to defeat Louisville in a national semifinal on Saturday and then beat the winner of Michigan-Syracuse in Monday’s title game.
Given how students tend to inhale pizza, Pizza Hut would then have a big promise to keep. Spokesman Doug Terfehr told the Wichita Eagle the chain doesn’t know how much pizza it will need but that it would “bring plenty.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Pizza Hut has found a new way to feed Americans more cheese — a pizza crust made of little cheese-stuffed bread bowls.
The chain on Wednesday is introducing a new pizza that comes surrounded by 16 semi-circles of cheese that can be pulled off and eaten separately. The “Crazy Cheesy Crust,” which will be available for several weeks, isn’t the first time Pizza Hut has incorporated cheese into its crusts.
In 1995, the chain introduced its Stuffed Crust Pizza as a limited-time offer but the pies were such a hit that they soon became a permanent part of the menu.
With each passing year, the growing popularity of the March Madness continues to astound me.
In fact, according research from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an estimated 3 million employees recently said they would spend between one and three hours per day watching this year’s tournament during work hours, potentially costing American companies more than $134 million in “lost wages” over the first two days of March Madness alone. Of course, that assumes each of those workers would have been productive otherwise, which is certainly a debatable topic in its own right.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love college basketball and recognize the many reasons the NCAA tournament is so alluring, from its rowdy fans to the inevitable stunning upsets and the obvious irony that unpaid players can consistently bring such passion to the game.
Watching the games Of course, this unique mix helped drive nearly 21 million people to watch last year’s championship game and helps explain why CBS and Time Warner‘sTurner Broadcasting were willing to pay $10.8 billion three years ago to secure broadcast rights for the tournament through 2024, outbidding rival offers at the time from such competitors as Fox and Disney‘s ABC and ESPN.
Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons.
Of course, that easily eclipsed CBS‘s previous $6 billion, 11-year deal that began in 2003 and absolutely dwarfs the old seven-year, $1.725 billion agreement that ran from 1995 through the end of 2002.
Watching the ads So why, exactly, did CBS and Turner have to pay so much this time around? According to research firm Kantar Media, NCAA men’s basketball last year became the first-ever postseason sport for which national TV ad spending exceeded the $1 billion mark.
You read that right: March Madness ad spending in 2012 managed to outpace even the NFL‘s postseason take, which came in at a respectable $976.3 million. What’s more, advertisers spent more dough on the NCAA tournament in 2012 alone than on the NBA, MLB, and the NHL postseasons combined.
In addition, those companies were willing to spend more than $1.3 million for each 30-second spot in last year’s NCAA championship game, or more than triple the cost of an ad to appear in the NBA championship series games. Even still, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Super Bowl commercials still took the cake in 2012 at an average cost of $3.5 million.
So who’s willing to spend those big bucks to get their names out to the masses? General Motors was last year’s whale, dropping a grand total of $80.3 million and leaving AT&T a distant second at $54.2 million. Naturally, Anheuser-Busch InBev and Coca-Cola were both eager to quench viewers’ thirst, throwing down $31.9 million and $31.7 million, respectively.
There was also no shortage of restaurant advertisements from the likes of Dominos Pizza and Yum! Brands-owned Pizza Hut, but the well-suited and comparatively small Buffalo Wild Wings — which incidentally remains a prominent NCAA sponsor this year — seemed to have gotten the best bang for its buck in 2012. Despite not even showing up in …read more Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
Here at The Motley Fool, it’s no secret we advocate a long-term approach to investing. In fact, we often unapologetically state that any money you need in the next five years simply does not belong in the stock market.
I suppose, then, the title of this article should come as little surprise. Even so, an entire decade may seem more like an eternity to some in today’s world of up-to-the-minute news, high-frequency trading, and incessantly short attention spans.
While month-to-month fluctuations in the stockmarket can be admittedly unsettling, however, there’s no denying that stocks over 10-year periods become much more predictable and — for those of us willing to stick it out — profitable.
With this in mind, here are three great stocks I think any long-term investor could be happy to hold for the next decade:
Gearing up for smarter homes First up, consider shares of network hardware specialist Netgear , which got absolutely clobbered last month after earnings missed estimates, largely thanks to continued weakness in Europe and a shift in profits to the Americas, which unexpectedly raised the company’s tax bill.
Even so, Netgear remains solidly profitable, and its long-term prospects have never been stronger. As I noted last month, management remains confident it can increase the company’s annual revenue 57% to $2 billion by the end of next year, with much of the near-term growth expected to come from new products resulting from Netgear’s recent acquisition of Sierra Wireless‘ Aircard business last year.
What’s more, Netgear’s product portfolio puts it in the perfect position to benefit from the rapidly growing market for “smart home” products, including networked multimedia players, home camera systems, A/C Ethernet devices, and Wi-Fi hardware. In fact, Netgear CEO Patrick Lo recently stated that he believes the smart home product market is poised to maintain a 28% compound annual growth rate and should represent a $25 billion industry by 2017 — a claim that makes plenty of sense considering less than one-third of the world’s 7 billion people had access to the Internet by the end of 2011.
Next, maybe Yum! Brands can satisfy your hunger for long-term growth. After all, as the owner of three iconic brands in Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC, Yum! has managed to grow its earnings per share by at least 13% per year for each of the past 11 years, largely thanks to its continuing mind-boggling pace of location expansion both in the U.S. and abroad. To be sure, even in the seemingly saturated U.S. market, the company built 100 new Pizza Huts and 15 Taco Bells in the fourth quarter alone.
China, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal for the company. In 2012, Yum! Brands managed to open an eye-popping 889 new restaurants in the region, with 369 of those locations finished in the fourth quarter.
When traveling outside the U.S., you’re likely to see some ancient sites, unfamiliar buildings, exciting cuisine, interesting museums and … McDonald’s. The global fast food chain can be found everywhere from Pretoria to Paris. And while McDonald’s has a clear lead in non-U.S. systemwide sales compared to other quick service chains, it isn’t the only one banking on a global presence.
Back in April of 2010, the media was fast to descend on KFC‘s Double Down following the sandwich’s debut in U.S. stores. Gleeful attacks on the bunless offering, which features two deep-fried chicken patties, bacon, two types of melted cheese and a “secret” sauce, included a takedown from The New York Times’ Sam Sifton, who dismissed it as “stunt food” and a “new low” in the category at that. Despite the bad reviews, or perhaps buoyed by them, people bought the sandwich in droves. A month later, KFC had sold 10 million Double Downs and decided to extend the limited-time product’s run indefinitely.
But reports of its initial success were downplayed by analysts, and the Double Down slowly slipped from the domestic spotlight. (A KFC spokesman would not confirm if it is still available in U.S. stores.) Yet in the last two years, the sandwich has popped up in one foreign market after the next, transforming the one-time April Fool‘s gag into a runaway fast food success worldwide.
The unlikely hit is the direct result of parent company Yum! Brands’ successful strategy of transplanting concepts — often outrageous ones — across international markets. In addition to KFC, Yum! Brands’ global portfolio includes Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, which all offer some products with shock-based appeal.
By Agustino Fontevecchia Shares in Yum Brands surged in post-market trading on Monday after the company released first quarter sales data in China. The parent of KFC and Pizza Hut saw same store sales fall 20% in the two-month quarter, an improvement over their 25% estimate, fueling a rally that saw shares rise nearly 7% by 4:44 PM in New York. …read more Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Markets
By Evann GastaldoWant to be Pizza Hut‘s social media manager? Then you better be able to market yourself well—in 140 seconds. That’s precisely how long interviews for the position will last during SXSW in Austin this week, Mashable reports. The way the pizza chain figures it, anyone who can sell himself… …read more Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Yum! Brands . Just ahead of the company’s earnings report, management warned that fourth-quarter comp (or same-store) sales would reverse the year-ago 21% gain to a 6% decline due to a slowdown in China.
On the news, the stock lost as much as $7, or roughly 10% of its value. But it didn’t end there. Shortly after, scandal followed, which involved two suppliers to the company’s KFC restaurants. Reports suggest that these suppliers used excessive amounts of antibiotics in their chickens. The company’s reputation took a hit and Chinese consumers were not happy, as calls for boycotts surfaced. On this news, the stock took another 5% tumble. Yum! was not so appealing.
Big trouble in little China, but was it that bad?The company did its best to mitigate the damage. To be fair, only two suppliers out of 30 were found to have violated health regulations. But as with everything else, it’s going to take some time for the focus to shift to what was an otherwise good quarter, which included a 1% revenue growth, with a 5% increase in worldwide systems sales (which is the aggregate total of every restaurant location, whether company-owned or franchised).
Despite the bad PR and the lowered comp guidance, adjusted system revenue in China advanced 20% for the year and 11% in the quarter. Likewise, comps grew 4% for the year, despite the 6% decline for the quarter. Meanwhile, system sales for the Yum! Restaurants International segment increased 7%. And both YRI and the U.S. saw a 3% growth in comps.
In other words, amid such bad press, Yum! still outperformed McDonald’s in some key areas. McDonald’s posted just 3.1% growth across the global system compared to 5% for Yum!. Likewise, McDonald’s underperformed in U.S consolidated revenue, which only advanced 2%, while posting comp growth of only 0.3% in the quarter. Granted, McDonald’s is much larger, but its performance is at best on par with Yum!’s performance, especially given the negativity in China. For that matter, McDonald’s China comps are still -0.9%.
Can the competition seize an opening?Yum!’s restaurant comp breakdown was also noteworthy. The company reported a 1% decline in Pizza Hut. But KFC, which was the subject of the chicken scandal, still managed to advance 4%. Granted, the full impact of that news won’t be known for at least another quarter. However, Taco Bell surged 5%, which means that Yum! is not ceding market share to Chipotle Mexican Grill as suspected.
However, despite Chipotle’s management insisting that the company is not losing share to rivals, Chipotle posted just a 4% growth in comps. It’s not a terrible number by any stretch, but it’s 1% less than at Taco Bell, which recently launched its Cantina Bell line of food as a direct attack on Chipotle. So far, Taco Bell‘s competitive tactics seem to be working pretty well as evidenced by the comp growth.
A Va. couple was ‘shocked’ by a lewd sight they witnessed while dining at a Pizza Hut — and the reaction they got upon reporting it.Why the manager did nothing at all
Want to be Pizza Hut‘s social media manager? Then you better be able to 
