“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.”

In context

“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 restaurants, including about 900 in China, will be across our IDL markets. As a reminder, our strategic partners provide the capital for these restaurant openings. Overall, we anticipate almost 4% unit growth from about 1,500 net restaurant additions in 2023. We expect this will contribute along with restaurants opened in 2022, nearly 1.5% to system-wide sales growth. As Chris mentioned, work is underway on our fourth D, restaurant development, within Accelerating the Arches. We'll have more details to share later this year, but we're excited about the opportunity to accelerate the pace of our new unit openings moving forward. And finally, we expect to generate strong cash flow in 2023, enabling us once again to convert more than 90% of our net income to fre”