Daniel Schwartz
Analyst · Goldman Sachs, please go ahead
Hi, Karen, it’s Daniel. We are obviously very pleased with the model that we took in Burger King several years ago when we put these great joint ventures in place, in places like Brazil, Russia, China. As Josh mentioned, since then we’ve actually struck new agreements in places like France, Italy, Poland; so while we’re pleased with the results from some of these existing joint ventures in the coming quarters and coming years, we’re going to see the restaurant development ramp up from these other countries. Actually, in most of the cases, if you go back we’re outperforming what we thought we would achieve and we look at the restaurant pipelines that some of these bigger joint ventures have, the pipeline for the rest of this year, the pipeline for next year, the pipeline for years after, they remain quite robust and the relationship that we have with our partners all around the world remain strong, the returns on capital developing new Burger King units remain quite strong as well. So, the combination of successful partnerships, well-capitalized joint ventures, great returns on their capital and just very positive momentum in performance with the brand gives us confidence that we’ll be able to come continue growing the pace of the Burger King brand around the world. And equally exciting is the prospects of bringing the same development model to Tim Hortons and you saw that the two maps that we put in our presentation, there’s so much opportunity in the world for us to be developing at Tim Hortons. And if you go back just a few years, if you look at the pace of growth at Burger King back in 2010 when we had acquired the brand, it was actually similar to where Tim’s was last year and obviously it takes some time and a whole lot of hard work and great partnerships, but last year we crossed 700 restaurants on Burger King. So, if you look at that outlook for Tim Hortons, we really see a great opportunity to develop Tim’s brand all around the world.