Yum China’s operations have taken on a life and direction of their own. Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Listen to SupChina editor-at-large and Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo read this article.
In October 2015, Greg Creed had his back against a wall. The bespectacled Aussie was chief executive of Yum Brands, the U.S. fast food restaurant giant, and the company’s sluggish growth had turned its quarterly earnings call into something close to a day of reckoning. Earnings for the previous quarter and projections for the rest of the year were well below analyst expectations and quarterly sales at the company’s eateries, which include KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, were up a mere 2 percent.
For Kentucky-based Yum, much of the trouble originated from an unlikely place: China, long the crown-jewel of its quick-service empire. Decades ago, KFC had been the first Western fast-food restaurant to open its doors in the country, and the chain’s red-and-white chicken buckets had become familiar sights everywhere from Beijing to Kunming. But food safety scandals and fresh competitio
Exclusive longform investigative journalism, Q&As, news and analysis, and data on Chinese business elites and corporations. We publish China scoops you won't find anywhere else.
A weekly curated reading list on China from David Barboza, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times.
A daily roundup of China finance, business and economics headlines.
We offer discounts for groups, institutions and students. Go to our Subscriptions page for details.
In public, Chinese diplomats and climate negotiators deny that they see any link between climate change and geopolitics. But there is a deeply cynical consensus within China’s academic and policy communities that climate change creates geopolitical opportunities that China can exploit — and must exploit before its rivals do. Greenland was the proof of concept for this strategy. And it caught the U.S. flat-footed.
The EU Chamber of Commerce in China president talks about China's self-inflicted problems; how he gets away with being so outspoken; and why he believes in China's comeback gene.
