McDonald’s Expects This Quarter’s Same-Store Sales to See Worse Decline

Fast food giant McDonald’s announced earnings this week and said first-quarter earnings saw a drop of 17% compared to a year ago. The company also said that it expects same-store sales to decline in the second quarter even worse than they did in March.

In March same-store sales had dropped 22% and over half of the fast food company’s restaurants in international markets had been closed. In April, the segment’s same-store sales were down about 70%.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Stree” that it is difficult to generalize how markets are recovering from the coronavirus.

“Looking at comparable sales, we expect the second quarter as a whole to be significantly worse than what we experienced for the full month of March,” Kempczinski told analysts on a conference call.

“It’s really a country-by-country situation because each country’s going through a different level of opening, each country has a different consumer psychology,” Kempczinski said.

Kempczinski said on the company’s earnings call, “Beginning in mid-March, we experienced a significant decline in our business due to the pandemic, dragging down our Q1 global comparable sales by 3.4%. We’re now operating in a completely different world and we expect these changes to persist, long after the crisis is over. In times like these, we take strength from the resilience and experiences we’ve developed over our 65-year history. We’re not immune to the immediate pressures threatening our global community, we came into the situation better positioned than most, and we believe that we will strengthen our competitive advantages following the crisis.”

Shares of McDonald’s have fallen about 7% this year so far.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Mcdonald’s Corp. (NYSE: MCD) and have not been compensated for this article.