Burger King Japan

ASSIGNMENT School of Business

Queen's University

Doing Business in the Asia-Pacific Rim

TEAM PROJECT CONTENT OUTLINE TEMPLATE

Project Topic : BURGER KING JAPAN

Section I – Group Process

Name : Main Responsibilities for the project

Section II-Report Content

1. Current Situation

The Japanese ‘fast-food” market is dominated by 3 key players: McDonalds, KFC and MOS Burger. Mcdonalds, with 3,800 stores in Japan, forced Burger King out of the Japanese market in 2001 due to an intense price war. McDonalds has however closed 433 stores in the last year and is expecting a 41% fall in net income as a result. In 2007, Burger King re-launched in “Japan”, as CEO John Chidsey said on the opening day of their first re-launch store, “ is a very important market for us, and one that we have great growth plans for in the future”. From 2007, Burger King has opened 16 stores. MOS Burger, a local Japanese burger chain, is number two in the country with 1361 stores. MOS burger specialized in “Japanese takes on the American hamburger” with hits such as the ‘MOS Rice Burger’.

The overall current fast-food environment is enticing, as the number of customers has been growing every month, however, the price-wars that drove Burger King out of Japan in 2001, are ever fiercer and the margins on burgers have fallen to crippling low levels. Even the biggest player, McDonalds, is reconsidering the Japanese opportunity and as a recent article from bnet.com states “the analysts and economists believe there is a far more fundamental reason that McDonald's bas run into trouble, and it centers on those [yen] 59 burgers. Rather than an astute player of Japan's precipitous deflationary curve, they say, McDonald's is emerging as its first major victim.”

Analysis of the Japanese Fast Food Market:

Japanese have an indigenous style of fast-food called ekibento (station box lunch) that is has been associated with trends for over 100 years. Ekiben provides easy...