“This area (Piata Romana) has a huge potential for business and our restaurant is among the top five of our company,” says Daniel Boaje, chief executive of McDonald’s, who was the first manager of the restaurant in Piata Romana (Roman Square) when it opened in 1996.
He says the restaurant serves more than two million customers a year. The McDonald’s network has about 140,000 customers every day and 51 million a year. Judging from the EUR94 million revenue it posted last year, ZF’s calculations show the average cash receipt stood at EUR1.8 last year.
The representatives of the top restaurant operator in Romania did not provide a ranking of the network’s best restaurants but according to ZF’s data, the chain’s top performer might be the one in Dristor (eastern Bucharest), generating more than EUR5 million in revenue, market sources say.
Slightly behind it is the restaurant on the ground floor of the Unirea Shopping Center (central Bucharest), the first opened by the company in 1995 and the flagship of the chain, as sources on the market say.
The Dristor restaurant is open 24-7, explaining the high revenue it generates.
The third top performer in the McDonald’s network is located inside Bucharest’s main railway station (Gara de Nord), where sales stand at about EUR4 million. The best restaurant outside Bucharest is the drive-through in Constanta, which may generate as much as EUR4 million revenue a year depending on the number of tourists every summer.
McDonald’s has 64 restaurants in Romania, half of which are drive-throughs and the rest operate in street front locations and malls.
“We will open one more restaurant by yearend. We have not made a decision yet, we’re looking at Bucharest and the rest of the country. What we know is that the focus is on drive-throughs,” Daniel Boaje says.
Investment in such a restaurant is higher than in a street front location or mall restaurant, because it also entails buying the land to build it on. Therefore it may amount to as much as EUR4 million.
The network opened only one restaurant last year, its first in an office building (America House in Bucharest) and plans to continue with the remodeling of its restaurants.
The latest remodeling project is the restaurant in Piata Romana, which required an investment of EUR750,000 and now includes a McCafe, the fifth coffee shop of the chain, which the management expects to drive sales up.
McDonald’s posted EUR93.9 million revenue last year, down 5.5% on 2010 and almost 15% on 2008, its best year on the local market. Its main competitor is now KFC, after Atlantic Restaurant System, the operator of the Burger King franchise in Romania, closed all its restaurants.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)