McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 5, 2024
McDonald’s Corporation isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Hello, and welcome to McDonald’s Fourth Quarter 2023 Investor Conference Call. At the request of McDonald’s Corporation, this conference is being recorded. Following today’s presentation there will be a question-and-answer session for investors. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Mike Cieplak, Investor Relations Officer for McDonald’s Corporation. Mr. Cieplak, you may begin.
Mike Cieplak: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me on the call today are President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Kempczinski; and Chief Financial Officer, Ian Borden. As a reminder, the forward-looking statements in our earnings release and 8-K filing also apply to our comments on the call today. Both of those documents are available on our website, as are reconciliations of any non-GAAP financial measures mentioned on today’s call along with their corresponding GAAP measures. Following prepared remarks this morning, we will take your questions. Please limit yourself to one question and then re-enter the queue for any additional question. Today’s conference all is being webcast and is also being recorded for replay via our website. And now, I turn it over to Chris.
Chris Kempczinski: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. When we gathered at this time last year we shared the despite a challenging operating environment McDonald’s continued to deliver historically high levels of growth. While macroeconomic pressures persisted throughout 2023, the resilience and power of our system was on full display, and we are heading into the new year in a position of strength. In 2023, we achieved global comp sales growth of 9%. Delivered comp guest count performance of nearly 3% globally with positive traffic across each of our segments, and maintained our leading market share across most of our major markets. These results are a credit to the tireless dedication of the entire McDonald’s system. The over 2 million talented people working in our restaurants, the industry’s best franchisees and our world-class network of suppliers around the world, all executing with excellence and with an unwavering commitment to serving our customers and local communities.
And in our restaurant focusing on the fundamentals of creating an exceptional customer experience has delivered operational improvements, improved service times and increased customer satisfaction across almost all of our major markets. Our Accelerating the Arches strategy is working, fueling over 30% comparable sales growth since 2019 and our MCD growth pillars enable us to remain agile in response to changing customer needs. For example, we’ve expanded loyalty to 50 markets around the world and reached over 20 billion in annual loyalty system-wide sales in 2023. Our user base continues to grow with over 150 million users that have been active in the last 90 days, making us one of the largest loyalty programs in the world. Over the last three years, we’ve also delivered tremendous growth in chicken by developing the McCrispy, a globally consistent high quality chicken sandwich.
With the goal of solving this unmet customer need across the system, it was developed and tested in a few markets first and has quickly scaled to $1 billion brand across more than 30 markets worldwide. Our chicken category now represents $25 billion in annual system-wide sales, on par with beef. And about a year ago, we formed a new business ventures team designed to operate as an entrepreneurial startup within McDonald’s. The team quickly identified an opportunity in a $100 billion category across our top six markets that comprised of beverage-led occasions where our core McDonald’s business underindexes. In a little less than a year, the team opened a pilot CosMc’s restaurant, and the buzz has been electric. Now let me say this again, we’re only talking about a 10-store test.
See also 25 Best Colleges with High Acceptance Rates and 10 Best Cheap Car Insurance in New York for 2024.
To continue reading the Q&A session, please click here.