Popular fast food outlet, McDonald’s is planning to open 1,900 outlets in 2023, of these, more than 400 of the new Golden Arches will be in the United States or in international markets such as Germany, Canada, France, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Of the 1,900 new outlets, 900 of them will be in China and 400 in the United States.
McDonald’s will spend between $2.2 billion and $2.4 billion on capital expenditure, “half of which will be dedicated to new net openings,” said its CFO and EVP Ian Borden.
“Overall we anticipate over 4% unit growth from about 1,500 net restaurant additions in 2023. We expect this will contribute, along with restaurants opening in 2022, nearly 1.5% to systemwide sales growth,” he added.
According to a report in Yahoo Finance managing director Peter Saleh said he expects US store openings to be just a small part of it.
Golden Arches
“The growth in the US is still going to be rather nominal. At best I think they’re going to open about 100 stores, [then, those] that are closed, maybe another 80 get to about a net number of about 20.”
“From our conversations with franchisees, they’ve been telling us. ‘Yes…We need more stores, because the volumes in the stores that we have, has grown so much that we need to offset it with additional units.”
Despite inflation and development costs, CEO Chris Kempczinski believes now is the right time to boost growth, with global same-store sales up over 12%.
“While we expect short-term inflationary pressures to continue in 2023, we remain highly confident in Accelerating the Golden Arches, which now includes a greater emphasis on new restaurant openings. The recently announced Accelerating the Organisation initiative will complement this strategy to enable the McDonald’s System to be faster, more innovative and more efficient.”
“We have to walk and chew gum” when it comes to unit growth and comparable sales growth. “It’s not one of the other, it’s the two of them in combination… [when] you want to be growing units is when you got strong comparable sales, because that reflects the underlying health of the business.”
McDonald’s is the world’s leading global foodservice retailer with over 40,000 locations in more than 100 countries.
