SHANGHAI McDonald's opened its first Hamburger University in mainland China, where the company expects to train an estimated 5,000 managers over the next five years as part of aggressive growth plans for the Chinese market.
Tim Fenton, president of McDonald’s Asia/Pacific, Middle East and Africa division, said the company plans to open as many as 175 McDonald’s units this year in China, where it already has 1,146 stores.
Since McDonald's opened its first location in Shenzhen, China, in 1990, it took 19 years for the chain to reach 1,000 stores in China, Fenton said, and the only country to hit that milestone faster was the United States. McDonald’s aims to open an additional 1,000 restaurants in China in six years, he added, which underscores the importance of the management training offered at the new Hamburger University, located at McDonald’s national headquarters in Shanghai.
“It’s a testament to our commitment to growth in China,” Fenton said in an interview with Nation’s Restaurant News. “It’s the fastest-growing market in the system. Before, the Chinese had to come to Hong Kong [to study at HU], and now everybody comes to the epicenter of the market.”
Fenton, who went through HU at McDonald’s Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters in 1978 and 1988, said the value of the program is the “opportunity to share best practices from all over the world and to be with peers who deal with the same issues day in and day out.”
HU China’s curriculum will focus on restaurant operations management and business leadership, and faculty members will come from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“Ever since we opened our first restaurant in China 20 years ago, we have been strongly committed to giving back to society, developing local talent and contributing to the needs of the restaurant sector,” said Kenneth Chan, chief executive of McDonald’s China. “HU China will help us in attracting, retaining and developing local talent for the next twenty years of growth in China.”
While China presents unique cultural differences and aggressive growth projections, the curriculum at HU China doesn’t differ much from classes taught at campuses in McDonald’s other areas of the world, Fenton said.
“The curriculum doesn’t change much country to country beyond dialect and language,” he said. “We have 38 countries, 16 time zones, and 800 languages and dialects in APMEA. But we all speak McDonald’s. Scheduling is scheduling, training is training. We have a system that doesn’t matter if you’re in Tokyo, Sydney or Los Angeles -- you know what the expectations are.”
He said more than 80,000 people have graduated from one of Hamburger University’s campuses, which are located in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Germany, Brazil and, before HU China’s opening, Hong Kong.
“Hamburger University China provides a comprehensive range of curriculum so that our employees can learn, grow and realize their career dreams,” said Susanna Li, dean of HU China. “We are also pursuing partnerships and joint accreditation programs with China’s top business schools and educational organizations.”
One such partnership will be with the China Cuisine Association to develop a food safety and quality control program.
Fenton told BusinessWeek recently that McDonald’s was increasing its investment in Asia by about 20 percent compared with 2009.
Year-to-date through Feb. 28, 2010, same-store sales in McDonald’s APMEA region had increased 7.2 percent, compared with a 3.6-percent increase in the company's global same-store sales, which also reflected a 0.1-percent decrease in the United States and a 4.8-percent uptick in its European division.
According to The NPD Group's CREST service, which tracks commercial foodservice trends in several countries, Chinese consumers increased their total visits to restaurants and foodservice establishments by 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, compared with the third quarter of last year. Their frequency rose to 8.9 visits to a restaurant every two weeks.
China's economy grew 8.7 percent in 2009, compared with 2008, NPD found. Prices remained stable, the research firm added, and while China's consumer price index rose modestly in the fourth quarter, it decreased by 0.7 percent for all of 2009. NPD also indicated that per capita disposable income in China grew 8.8 percent in 2009, exceeding growth in GDP for the first time.
McDonald’s operates or franchises more than 32,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries.
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].