Restaurant Brands says 'Aloha'

Restaurant Brands, New Zealand's largest fast-food operator with 173 stores, is expanding into new markets to drive future earnings growth, opening new burger chain Carl's Jr in New Zealand and expanding into KFC in Australia where it has 42 stores. To improve profitability in its legacy businesses, the company has been refurbishing and adding to its local KFC outlets, exiting low-performing Pizza Hut stores and closing its worst performing Starbucks Coffee outlets.

"A while ago we looked at the growth potential for Restaurant Brands in New Zealand and it was in our view limited to a steady 'business as usual' growth of one or two KFCs per year, maybe one or two Pizza Huts per year, that sort of pace. The ability to grow rapidly with new brands as we have seen with Carl's Jr is a very slow path, and there's not many other brands that we could purchase or would be interested in purchasing to add step change," chief executive Russel Creedy told NBR's BusinessDesk.