“We'll get to basically about 1,000 gross openings a year in our owned markets by 2027, that commitment that we made at the end of '23 to get to 50,000 restaurants.”

In context

“franchisees. Dexter P. Congbalay: Our next question is with Christine Cho from Goldman Sachs. Hyun Jin Cho: You've reiterated your plans to open 2,200 stores this year on track to growing stores around 4%. But are there any factors that you're closely watching that could impact the development pipeline for 2026 and beyond? Any shift in margin dynamics or store economics your franchisees are seeing that could change the demand for opening new stores? Ian Frederick Borden: Christine, let me take that. Well, look, I think we're -- as we talked about in our upfront remarks, we're really confident about delivering the 2,200 gross openings for this year. And I think we've got a really strong and robust pipeline. As you know, we are in the process of kind of accelerating our pace of development. We'll get to basically about 1,000 gross openings a year in our owned markets by 2027, that commitment that we made at the end of '23 to get to 50,000 restaurants. I mean at the end of the day, we make our decision based on the returns that we generate. Obviously, we want to make sure we have a really strong starting point. So we closely watch kind of the first year performance. But ultimately, what we're also looking for is what do we expect the longer-term return to be for those locations. I think as I've touched on previously, we continue to see solid starting points for new restaurants. We continue to see returns that are kind of in line with our expectations. I think, obviously, any time you accelerate, there's always the potential risk that you can have some slippage in the quality. So we're monitoring that very, very closely. And it goes back, I think as we've talked about before to, I think the volume and the solidity of the work that we did”