“We're projecting interest expense this year to increase between 10% and 12% compared to 2022 primarily due to higher average rates on our debt balances.”

In context

“ively investing to drive long-term growth. We estimate that these efforts will have an impact of between $100 million to $150 million in 2023. Turning to G&A, the digital and technology investments that we've made over the past few years have been strong contributors to our top line growth. Moving forward, focusing on our evolution of Accelerating the Arches, and in particular accelerating the organization, will enable us to work more efficiently and effectively, harnessing our scale and reallocating resources to drive growth in the future. In 2023, we expect G&A to be between 2.2% and 2.3% of system wide sales. Despite the cost pressures throughout the P&L in 2023, we anticipate an operating margin of about 45% driven primarily by strong top line growth and franchise margin performance. We're projecting interest expense this year to increase between 10% and 12% compared to 2022 primarily due to higher average rates on our debt balances. And we expect our effective tax rate for the year to be between 20% and 22%. We anticipate currency translation will negatively impact earnings per share of between $0.07 and $0.09 in the first quarter. As of now, we expect currency translation to be a slight tailwind for the full year but as you have seen, currency rates have been fluctuating quite a bit recently. So we'll continue to keep you posted on the anticipated impact to our results. Transitioning to capital expenditures, we plan to spend between $2.2 billion and $2.4 billion this year, about half of which will be dedicated to new unit openings. Globally, we plan to open about 1,900 restaurants with more than 400 of these openings in our U.S. and IOM segments, where we continue to see strong returns. The remaining 1,500-or-so new”