McDonalds trades fast expansion for restaurant ownership

McDonald’s Romania, the biggest fast food restaurant chain on the Romanian market, bets on land acquisition and on building restaurants from scratch, although the allocated investment is up to four times higher than that for rented places. The plan to open 150 restaurants by 2015, announced last year by Marian Alecu, the former general manager of the company, has now been cut to 100 restaurants.

“The investment is significantly higher, but it will cover the next twenty years, not the next two, and prices will only go up. Owning a restaurant makes us immune to requests from other owners, who could raise rent any time,” Karen Bishop, managing director of McDonald’s Romania, told ZF, at her first press conference since taking up this position in October 2009.

The company owns eight of its 62 restaurants on the Romanian market. The investment in a restaurant built from scratch, which also includes the cost of land, amounts to around 15 million RON (4 million euros), while for a rented place the budget is one million euros at the most.