KFC's Explosive Growth in China
omogenization has made it easy for fast-food joints to circle the globe, spitting out carbon copies of themselves, their burgers, and their fries along the way. But in the most populous country in the world, a fast-food giant stepped off the conveyor belt and found unprecedented success by being different, not by being the same.
In the Harvard Business School case "Yum! China," professor David E. Bell and Agribusiness Program director and senior researcher Mary Shelman examine how Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC and Pizza Hut, outperformed McDonald's and became the largest restaurant company in mainland China.
|
|
The case describes how Yum! China succeeded and expanded by staying local on many levels. It keeps close ties to the Chinese government, hires local management, sources food from within the country, and changes the menu to suit Chinese tastes and style of eating.
A matter of scale
One key issue the case examines is "how to implement the rollout of a fast-food chain involving so many stores across such a vast—and regionally different—country," says Bell, who teaches the case in the School's annual Agribusiness Seminar.
Both KFC and Pizza Hut restaurants in China differ markedly in many ways from their Western counterparts. And while Pizza Hut has done very well for itself with nearly 500 restaurants in 120 cities (as of December 2010), KFC's performance has been finger-lickin' incredible. Since the first piece of fried chicken (available in dark meat only, to the disappointment of many an American tourist) was served at a Beijing KFC in 1987, the number of KFCs in China has grown to over 3,000, in 650 cities, with one new restaurant opened a day.
"If I could have written any case in the world, this would have been the one I would have picked," says Shelman, a Kentucky native with more than a passing interest in Colonel Sanders. "Not only is this the story of a successful entry into China by a Western company, this case provides a glimpse of how quickly Chinese diets are changing as incomes improve. Because China is so big this has a huge impact on the rest of the global food system. What happens in China, what Chinese people eat, impacts what you and I pay for food."
What happened in China with Yum! Brands, and with KFC in particular, had a lot to do with China division chairman and CEO Sam Su. "He really flexed the model," says Shelman. This was in part due to KFC being owned by PepsiCo when it first came to China. PepsiCo was not a fast-food company, so Su was given more managerial freedom.
Along with being lucky, Su is smart, driven, and visionary—a classic entrepreneur. But he's also humble. "There's no room for ego," Su explained in the case. "China doesn't have the same culture of individualism that is present in the United States."
Su's strategy was that KFC "would not be seen as a foreign presence but as part of the local community… Our opportunity was to take the best ideas from the US fast-food model and adapt them to serve the needs of the Chinese consumer."
Initially this involved hiring the right people. For Su this meant Chinese managers who read and spoke the language, who understood the restaurant business and the Chinese consumer, but who also had experience in the Western way of doing business. "It was a foot in both worlds," Shelman says. "They knew firsthand the Western model but they also understood the challenges of operating in this Chinese, very traditional, very evolving market."
The people Su brought on board were also close in a way Shelman found surprising when she spent time with them when researching the case.
"There was huge camaraderie evident in the way that the top management team interacted with each other … they bantered back and forth and poked fun at each other," Shelman says. "They'd be walking down the hall jostling, pushing, laughing. This is a group that has worked together a long time—unusual in a country where experienced management talent is at a premium ."
It turns out that unusual employee interactions, at least in comparison with Western business decorum, are the norm at Yum! Brands, something Shelman experienced when she accompanied then-COO Mark Chu to one of KFC's Shanghai locations. "You walk into a restaurant and not only do [the employees] recognize him, but they love him as well."
Single Page View
