HBI Staff | New Delhi 
According to a Business Standard report, fast-food major Yum! Brands which operates Pizza Hut and KFC restaurants in India, saw strong sales growth for the sixth straight quarter (October-December), pointing to recovery in food services. This is also the highest growth in six quarters for the two brands, indicating that their turnaround is on track, analysts tracking the market said. For the October December period, both KFC and Pizza Hut reported a system sales growth rate of 18% for India, the quarterly results declared by Yum! Brands on Thursday show.
System sales growth is industry parlance for overall top line growth. Yum did not disclose same-store sales growth (SSG), which is basically sales growth for stores of one year and above, specifically for India. At an overall level, however, Yum! did give a sense of same-store sales growth for the December quarter, saying international emerging markets (which includes India) saw same-store sales growth of 5% for KFC. For developed markets (excluding the US), same-store sales growth was 3% for KFC, the company said.
In Pizza Hut’s case, fourth quarter SSG grew 1% in emerging markets and declined 1% in developed markets (excluding the US), the company said. Yum! Brands is the third food service major in India after Jubilant FoodWorks, the operator of Domino’s Pizza and Dunkin Donuts, and Westlife Development, which runs McDonald’s stores in west and south India, to report a good set of numbers in the December quarter. SSG for Jubilant FoodWorks came in at 17.8% for the December quarter, highest in nearly five years. Westlife Development, on the other hand, reported SSG of 20.7% in the December quarter, the highest in the domestic fast-food space. This was its 10th consecutive quarter of SSG growth.
