Is that competitive? Yes, absolutely. But fortunately, let’s not forget, it has always been competitive in the last 36 years as well. And we have always been able to stay as a market leader in the last 30 Some years as well as. That’s point one. Point.2 consumption trends. What I’m going to share is not the mainstream thinking, so we can agree to disagree. The mainstream thinking is China is going through consumption on grade with many challenges. To a certain extent, it’s true, but to a certain extent, customers are just getting more rational. However, what is not being mentioned at all, is even with 5% GDP growth, or mid single-digit GDP growth, consumption upgrade is still also happening. Urbanization in China is still happening. And we don’t even need to look at the restaurant industry.
We can look at China’s top 6,000 shopping malls which we trap because we open a lot of stores in those shopping malls. Within this segment of top 6,000 shopping mall, 2023 alone there were 400 new shopping more often, not a small number and two thirds of them open during the second half of the year quarter three and quarter four. We are happy to report to our shareholders that these shopping mall location stores are better at trading better than the rest well, apart from the tourist and transportation location. So when a shopping mall open near the highest rate or close the highest rate, you can imagine the traffic moves to something more and that itself is consumption upwards. So come back to the rationalization of the customer. How do we respond to it?
We are the market leader. We — our focus, our focus in the last 30 some years and our ongoing focus is how to build a brand with a combination of good value, amazing product and opening up the price point. As a combination of all these, good food is always number one and you can see why we continue to roll out so many good food but at the same time, we are very cautious about the price point. There’s a reason why original recipe chicken after 36 years the price is less than five eggs of the price we launched 36 years ago only if the China housing price increased by the same ratio of original recipe then I think many Chinese people are even happier. So we do arrange of the product launch. We launched regular [ph] beef burger that priced as much as RMB50.But at the same time, we also introduced the market, the entry price value combo at 20 [ph].
This is the range we’re going for, it’s working. Point three, come through the trading type pattern what have we seen during quarter four and that will give us some idea about the 2024 going forward. We celebrate 10,000 store of KFC during December 15 this year. It was very meaningful for us and it also I hope give some confidence to our investor that Western QSR is solid and has nice growth. Quarter four start with a bit of soft — softness. We don’t have to reiterate again, but the trade improved in November and then improved a bit more in December. Good to know the trend is all right. And then the rebound of dine-in is very strong. However, delivery remains popular. It’s still 36% of our business. Customers like the convenience. By trade zone all improved.
As I mentioned earlier, tourist location and transportation are recovering very well, other than that shopping mall are doing the best and the others. By region recovery happen across all region for Puerto Rico. And we’re northern part of China recovery to recover the best because last year COVID lapping they were very difficult last year. Across the year, Eastern part of China, which is the most important part of our business is still the most resilient region. In city tier, Tier 2 inland, central part of China are recovering the best or doing the best. They are the regional hub, vibrant economy, the living expenses are lower. One good example is, Changsha [ph] is the destination for foodie in China. A lot of amazing food concept there. People go to Changsha just to enjoy different food, but little do people know Changsha’s rent is only about 10% to 15% of Shanghai and yet ticket average is not too different.
And these are the example of the cities doing the best and going forward. And Pizza Hut are doing very well in lower tier cities and that prove that the pizza business model works for lower tier city. Last, but not least, our weekend trading right now is better than weekdays. This is phenomenal for our team because if you remember in a previous earning call our — we can travel it was more challenge after the pandemic. People’s behavior changed. The traffic during weekend throb, what do we do? We launched the whole chicken and the product — the whole chicken product target very, very — has a very clear focus to drive the delivery business during the weekend, customer can buy the whole chicken, put it on the table, have the veg and some rice and this is a very nice meal.
It works. So now our weekend sales actually is better than weekdays. Huge milestone for us, for our team’s ability to build new product, new skill to grow with a change of customer. Thank you for indulging me it’s a long answer. But I hope that gives you give you some sort of long-term view of the way that we trade our business. Thank you, Xiaopo.
Operator: Your next question comes from Lina Yan with HSBC. Please go ahead.
Lina Yan: Hi, management. Thanks for the very detailed walkthrough of your business. And your points are well taken that you’re very nimble in reacting to competition. But when I talk to my clients, what I heard most over the last quarter was the market the fair, as you probably think your price point is, especially by launching more entry price offerings. In my drop down your ticket size, obviously and issue some numbers, your ticket size, certain night was very, like a stable quarter-over-quarter, while why in fourth quarter. But I’m wondering if you could give us more color in terms of how those entry price offering products affecting your sales mix. And what’s the impact on ASP and the number of transaction tickets, so that you can maintain a relatively stable RMB39 ticket size. And on top of that, what will be the impact of enterprise [ph] price offering on your GP margin? Thank you.
Joey Wat: Thank you. Let me reiterate, we have been able to protect our ticket and ticket size and even grow a little bit over the years. So 2019 pre-pandemic, the ticket average 37, 2019 — 2020 is 40 and then 39, 42 and then 41 for 2023. So this is the long-term trend. We even go back even another 5 years, it’s not too far away. So this is always our trading strategy to keep the ticket average relatively stable. To go to specific, the introduction of the entry price product always comes with the new product, it’s a new product and also comes with the introduction of the high priced product. I mentioned that the beef burger, the beef burger grow by 18% last year, by the way to the category. So 50% — RMB50 for beef burger and RMB50 were good beef burger and RMB20 combo is a good balance.
What also help is when we do promotion like even for Chinese New Year, we always try to help customer to trade up to a higher ticket average by having very attractive discount. So it’s a combination of the marketing campaign that we have been doing to protect the ticket average. But specifically for the entry price product, it has three purpose and we are happy to see all three purposes there. One is it does attract incremental customer as we become more and more mass market, particularly for Pizza Hut. By the way pizza’s ticket average move from 122 right now 90 over the last 5 years as part of the turnaround strategy. Obviously what — because we want to open more store, become more mass market, we need to have product and price point that cater for the incremental customer.
So it we’re into what percentage is about 5% right now is not like huge proportion that will offset the balance of our margin. That’s point one. Point two is interestingly when we have the enterprise product, it doesn’t mean most of the customer will go there, not necessarily. The thing about customer psyche, many customer will still go for the product above the entry price product and feel good. It feels good to choose something in the middle not the cheapest one, right? You are the customer yourself, ask yourself how would you choose? So it really actually improve the price perception By having something very low cost there, I’ll give you a one example I did 10 years ago with KFC business. I lowered the small Pepsi coke price in our menu, lower there because it looks good, it looks very affordable.
But how many people actually went for it? Not that many. But the perception is important. It’s almost as important as the reality to a certain extent. So I hope that gave a sense about how do we treat the entry price product, but certainly it helps when we go down to tier five, tier six city to introduce — to introduce our product to certain customers. By the way, it’s a fantastic way to recruit young customers such as student as well, particular with amazing product like the Golden SPA, chicken burger, its breast meat. Breast meat in the U.S., you can sell at a higher price than duck meat, but in China, it costs us less. So the margin, of course, we protect the margin, the margin is just fine. Thank you.
Operator: The next question comes from Sijie Lin with CI CC. Please go ahead.
Sijie Lin: Thank you, Joey and Andy. So we have talked about a lot about the competition. I want to ask one question about Pizza Hut. Do we see that Pizza Hut had a quite good performance on margin in Q4, driven partially by the labor productivity gain and lower right of cost. And we also mentioned before that pizza has margins still lower than KFC and there’s room for improvement. So, what else we can do to further reduce costs and improve efficiency, thank you.
Andy Yeung: Thank you, Sijie. So again, we — when we look at our costs and focus, as we have said many times including whatever you have earlier mentioned, we generally try to aim for record sales, to be remarkably stable over the long-term on a year-over-year basis. And that’s because we have a very excellent supply chain team, very disciplined with our pricing. And this also comes from our commitment to continuously innovate and also introduce new products every year. And then also, as we have mentioned many times, we make the best effort to using every part of a chicken or a cow, so that we can enhance the resource usage, minimize costs, and all these products have allowed us to provide great value for money for our consumer, while keeping our costs of self market disabled.
