Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of John Ivankoe with J.P. Morgan.
John Ivankoe - J.P. Morgan
David, I was hoping that you could comment on just your view of the YRI business -- you know, in general. I mean, the conversation that we’ve had many times over the years is a stubbornly low and quite frankly declining store margin in that business and what would increasingly be suggesting that there probably aren’t very many stores or certainly very many markets where Yum! as a corporation has earned the right to own, to use a phrase of your own. So if you can kind of put in the context expectations 2010, 2011 -- one, significant improvement in YRI company store margins, or secondly if you are considering a major plan of refranchising to basically get those stores to franchisees and presumably at this point might even look like a neutral to earnings or even accretive to earnings transaction.
David C. Novak
Well, I think first of all when we think our Yum! Restaurants International business is an absolute powerful engine for us going forward. I mean, the big driver that we have is a business here that is almost owned and operated 90% by franchisees, they are opening up close to 90% of -- this year it will be about 900 new units that we open, and that’s the big driver of our overall profitability.
Longer term, we are very excited about the fact that we are pursuing the Yum! strategy of developing major new sales layers, so we expect to get even more profitability and more cash flow for our franchisees out of these units as we go forward with the launch of the breakfast, of the beverage program, Crushers. We are testing breakfast, we think that will be a long-term opportunity for us because there isn’t a whole lot of competition other than McDonald’s outside the United States in terms of western brands.
So we think the new units and the sales story over the long-term is really tremendous for us and also we have a tremendous lead in the emerging markets.
In terms of the ability to look at our portfolio in terms of what we should own or franchise, we constantly do that. We look at that every year and I can only tell you that we do have an earn the right to own mentality and we do have some markets that could potentially be refranchised and we are looking at that.
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