Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen if you wish to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. If your question has been answered or you wish to withdraw your question, star two. Press star one to begin and we’ll stand by for first question. And, your first question comes from the line of Tony Brenner of Roth Capital Partners.
Andrew F. Puzder
Good morning Tony.
Theodore Abajian
Good morning Tony
Anton Brenner – Roth Capital Partners
Good morning. I have two questions.
Andrew F. Puzder
Could you get closer to the phone?
Anton Brenner – Roth Capital Partners
Yeah, I’m sorry.
Andrew F. Puzder
That’s okay.
Anton Brenner – Roth Capital Partners
I have two questions. One is, Andy, you seem to be edging more than I’ve heard you before on your intention of opening new restaurants. On the restaurants that have opened this year are the sales trends less than you would look for? Is there some other reason you went out of your way to mention that you won’t, you won’t open new stores if the trends are disappointing?
Andrew F. Puzder
No. If I gave that impression, I apologize. We’re opening as many new Carl’s Jr.’s as we can find reasonable sites to open them on and, our new real estate department which , you know, we’ve really invested in over the past 18 months is doing a spectacular job of coming up with sites. We’re going into some new markets and we’re going to be developing a lot of Carl’s Jr. restaurants. On the Hardee’s side I want to make sure that, we’re still at that $950,000 average unit volume on the company stores and the new units that open up substantially higher than that but, I want to make sure we get the metrics right before I do the same kind of aggressive development at Hardee’s that we’re currently doing at Carl’s Jr. And, all I meant to emphasize in the script was, if we don’t, while the capital plan contemplates that we will get that formula and I believe that we will get the formula for the metrics on the new Hardee’s units, that if we don’t get it, I have, we have the discretion not to build as many new Hardee’s and that’s really my only point. We fully intend to develop a lot of units. That really is, as we go forward and look at our EBITDA on our earnings per share in coming years, really a big part of our growth in those areas is going to come from these, this new unit development that we’re contemplating and we are aggressively pursuing that.
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