July 2020: Westlife Development Limited (BSE: 505533) (“WDL”), owner of Hardcastle Restaurants Pvt Ltd (“HRPL”), the Master Franchisee of McDonald’s restaurants in West and South India, announced unaudited financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2020. The results were taken on record by the Board of Directors at a meeting held today.
Commenting on the financial results for the year ended June 30, 2020, Mr Amit Jatia, Vice-Chairman of Westlife Development Limited said, “At Westlife, our belief is that all situations are good as long as we are able to re-align strategies to manage the situation at hand, and emerge stronger from it. In the last few months, we revisited our cost structure, further strengthened our digital platform, put in SoPs in place for a safe customer experience, trained our people and adapted learnings from global markets to prepare for a strong revival. We re-aligned our business to the new realities and undertook a slew of cost rationalization initiatives across functions,which are yielding good results. We complemented these with customer-forward initiatives to heighten assurance and convenience and deployed an omni-channel strategy. With a robust strategy seeded in deep customer insights, a strong pipeline of bigand bold initiatives, and a strong checks-and-balances system for cost optimization, we believe that we have the spring board to drive quick recovery as the external environment improves.”
In the quarter under review, the company undertook big, bold moves to mitigate the long-term impact of COVID-19-led challenges for the business. The company launched a slew of initiatives to enhance assurance and convenience for its customers. With a promise of absolutely safe and delicious food, the company launched its ‘Golden Guarantee’ proposition – a 42 pointer checklist ensuring social distancing, frequent sanitization and contactless operations among other hygiene best practices across delivery, in-store and take-out platforms. Simultaneously, it activated its omni-channel strategy and launched contactless take-out service to facilitate contactless ordering and pick-up of orders across stores and drive-thrus. Leveraging its strong digital backbone, the company also launched the unique ‘on-the-go’ service enabling contactless ordering and collection of the order from customers’ vehicles. With this, it virtually converted all its restaurants into drive-thru stores, at minimal cost.
As a result, the company started seeing green shoots in the business starting June 2020, as the lock-down started easing in select markets. The company’s convenience platform which includes Delivery, Take-Out and Drive-Thru channels showed great results as sales from these platforms bounced back to pre-COVID levels, for operational stores. Per day per store McDelivery sales bounced back to 70% of pre-COVID levels and daily take-out sales from operational stores surged 1.7 times vis-à-vis pre-COVID levels. Additionally, convenience platform sales came back to pre-COVID levels for operational Drive-thru stores. The company is confident of growing this momentum and further accelerating sales in the coming months.
Despite the extraordinary challenges, the company completed ongoing projects, taking the total count of McDonald’s restaurant and McCafé to 320 and 224 respectively.It also made productive use of the lock-down period by leveraging technology to train their close to 10,000 people on global SoPs and best practices.
Being a responsible company,Westlife Development partnered with several NGOsto deliversafe and hygienic food to frontline warriors and communities most affected by the lockdown under its ‘Meals for Good’ program. Till date, ithas reached out to over 60,000 people across 6 cities already and the company remains committed to this cause.
