MCD Updating Our Q1E19 U.S. Same-Store Sales Forecast

By Mark Kalinowski Published on April 1, 2019 at 12:00 AM

Based on our latest proprietary, data-driven checks, and what appears to have been a better-than-expected March, we tweak our full-Q1E same-store sales forecast for McDonald’s (MCD; Buy) U.S. business upward by +20 basis points, to +3.2%. This places us 30 basis points above the current sell-side consensus of +2.9%. In March, we believe core menu items — including fresh-beef Quarter Pounders (both with and without bacon) — sold quite well. Toward the end of March, McDonald’s U.S. began promoting a Quarter Pounder with Cheese Deluxe (as well as the Quarter Pounder with Cheese Bacon). One aspect we like of these burgers is that they are relatively simple operationally, with (for example) SKUs that are already found in the restaurants.

MCD Revising Our Q1E Tax-Rate Projection

By Mark Kalinowski Published on March 6, 2019 at 12:00 AM

We revise our Q1E tax-rate projection to 28.5% (from 24.8%). This change has the effect of lowering our Q1E and our full-year 2019E EPS estimates by $0.09 each, to $1.71 and $8.01, respectively. (Our full-year 2020E EPS forecast remains unchanged at $8.75.)

MCD Updating and Introducing Various SameStore Sales Estimates

By Mark Kalinowski Published on March 6, 2019 at 12:00 AM

This past September, McDonald’s (MCD; Buy) announced that it would reorganize its business into three segments (U.S., International Operated Markets, and International Developmental Licensed Markets). Much more recently, McDonald’s provided some historical information — including same-store sales information — about these new business segments. Armed with this new information, with this report we introduce our same-store sales projections for 2019E and 2020E for the International Operated Markets and International Developmental Licensed Markets segments. As of this writing, there appear to be no sell-side consensus numbers available for these business segments, due to a lack of enough sell-side analysts having published such forecasts.