Manila's Jollibee Eyes More Fastfood Buys in China

Jollibee Foods Corp., the Philippines' biggest fastfood chain, said on Thursday it planned to buy three more fastfood brands in China to take advantage of growth prospects in the world's fourth largest economy.

Jollibee, which outsells McDonalds and KFC in its home market, already operates two fastfood brands in China -- fastfood chain Yonghe King and tea house Chun Shui Tang.

Jollibee owns Yongke King, which has about 106 outlets in China. The Manila-based firm operates Chun Shui Tang under a franchise agreement with Taiwanese partners.

"Maybe we can also have five brands in China considering the population there...Maybe we could do that in the next two to three years," Tony Tan Caktiong, Jollibee chief executive, told reporters.

The Jollibee group, which owns five fastfood brands domestically, is expanding aggressively overseas as part of a strategy to become a major regional fastfood company in Asia.

Tan Caktiong said the group was also looking at Saudi Arabia and Riyadh as possible expansion targets. Jollibee also plans to open a branch of its flagship hamburger and chicken chain in Jakarta, where it already operates five outlets of its Chinese fastfood brand Chowking.

Jollibee owns pizza-pasta chain Greenwich, Red Ribbon bakeshop, and an upscale delicatessen DeliFrance locally.

Tan Caktiong said the group's second quarter performance was showing strong results based on initial data.

"In April and May, we did very strong and we are all very optimistic that the second quarter will sustain the first quarter's growth," he said.

The group's chief finance officer told Reuters last month that Jollibee's first half net profit was likely to have grown around 18 percent from a year ago, mainly due to election spending and a stronger domestic economy.

In the first quarter this year it posted net income of 529 million pesos, up 18 percent from the same period of 2006.

Shares of Jollibee jumped 4.72 percent on Thursday, outperforming the main index which gained 1.89 percent.