Chris Turner : Yes, thanks so much. I’ll start with digital. So yes, look, our digital capabilities continue to drive actually all elements of our algorithm. They support strong unit economics. As you heard, we continue to expand the easy operations capabilities which make our restaurants easier for our team members to operate. And it helps our franchisees drive productivity. And so that is helping us ensure that our franchisees continue to have strong unit economics which allows them to invest in building new stores. If you look at that 10% global system sales growth for the full year, we think digital played a big part of that, both on the unit side and on the same store sales side. And then, as I said, from a profitability standpoint for Yum!, as those capabilities continue to mature, we can get more and more leverage out of our digital technology teams and capabilities in-house.
And so that’s part of us bending the curve on those investments that I mentioned in our G&A plan for the year. So again, we’re very pleased with the progress on the digital front and we still have, a lot of that journey ahead of us, and we described big plans this year to continue to accelerate the roll up.
David Gibbs: Yes, I’ll talk about pizza, but on the digital front, one thing I really want to emphasize is just the talent we’ve been able to attract to the digital space, both at Yum! and at the brands, is unbelievable. We are becoming a talent magnet in digital. It’s a great place to work. We’re investing behind this. Our franchisees are quickly adopting it. And even though we’re at $30 billion of sales and growing fast, we’re still in the early innings of what this can do to the business and the way it can transform us. So we could not be more excited about digital. And we will continue to report on the various metrics, loyalty, and things like that as we go forward and keep you guys informed on the journey. On Pizza Hut, yes, obviously, sometimes we forget.
We look at one year numbers without really looking at the full picture. Q1 for Pizza Hut U.S., we have an enormous lap. And obviously, I have to take that into account as we launched melts last year, very successfully, and are now rolling that around the world. But we certainly are planned for Pizza Hut U.S. to be positive for the year. The team has a number of things planned for the calendar as we go forward. And we love the fact that Pizza Hut globally hit a new record on that new unit development and is becoming a bigger and bigger contributor to that part of our growth. And certainly Yum! China last night talked a lot about the great success and the wide runway they have for Pizza Hut in that market.
Operator: Our next question comes from Jon Tower of Citi.
Jon Tower: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Quick clarification on the question. On the G&A guidance for ‘24, is that just on a dollar basis? Can you maybe just level set us where that, what your expectation is? Is it flat on a 52-week basis or, obviously you’ve got an extra week in some of the divisions? And then the question itself is more along the lines of, how franchisees — how are you are working with franchisees to probably approach pricing in 2024, I guess more focused on the U.S. there, given that’s the market where I think there’s some incremental pressure on the lower income consumer. But, how are you guiding them to think about it given some of the pressures on labor that are going to be manifesting themselves throughout the year? Thanks.
Chris Turner : Yes. So the G&A, we ended the year ex-special at $1.17 billion. We expect to be flat on that in the 52 weeks. So there should be an apples-to-apples, comparison on that commentary run plan.
David Gibbs: Yes. And as far as, the U.S. consumer and pricing, just some good news to share there at least from a Yum! perspective, as we think about the U.S. consumer, the best way for us to look at it is obviously through the lens of our Taco Bell business, which is a vast majority of our U.S. sales and profits. Throughout 2024, we saw a slight outperformance from our restaurants that were in low 2023, restaurants that were in low income trade areas versus the rest of the business. So with the low income consumer, I know there’s been a lot of talk about, are they dropping out? Certainly for Taco Bell, that actually, looks, it looks like we’re doing a great job of holding onto them. In fact, in both the entire year and in Q4, we saw the low income consumer trade areas outperform the rest of the business.
And I think that speaks to the strength of Taco Bell in this environment. It is a value leader in so many ways. When you talk to consumers about value, they win on every value perception score. And they can do value with innovation, which is also a great combination. And they can do value while having industry leading margins. So you think about the room that we have to compete with everybody else in the category. I really, really like our position with Taco Bell. Obviously, as we move into Q1, we’ve got tougher laps, U.S. weather, really played havoc on sales early in the quarter. And as we’ve said, it’s going to be the lowest quarter of the year. But we think this environment is one that obviously we can thrive in the U.S. and there will be less pricing to the point of your question.
But it’s not going to slow Taco Bell down in terms of being able to connect with consumers and grow transactions.
Operator: Our next question comes from Jeffrey Bernstein of Barclays.
