McDonald’s to invest 500M rubles in the first time opening Russia’s Far East restaurants

MOSCOW, Oct 9, 2020, Pan Pacific Agency. Despite the fall in the fast food market due to the Covid-19 pandemic, McDonald’s to open 5 new restaurants in the Russian Far East in 2020, McDonald’s Russia CEO Marc Carena said today. At the moment, the most eastern Russian McDonald’s operates in the city of Krasnoyarsk (Siberia).

“In fact, already this December we to open five new stores: three in Vladivostok and two in Khabarovsk, with a total investment of approximately half a billion rubles,” Mr. Carena said during the signing of the memorandum of intent with the Far East Investment and Export Agency and the Far East & Arctic Human Capital Development Agency.

“When we are sitting together with my team last year, we have a very deep logistic analysis. Thanks to the good transportation development in Russia, we also able very affordable price of our goods logistic, even to the Far East. We also analyzed potential of the Far East region. We have a lot of demand from consumers”, he said. McDonald’s believes, that in the future its stores will also run in other Far Eastern “medium size cities”, Mr. Carena added.

The key issue for the McDonald’s regional stores is local suppliers’ presence, but contacts with them are still being established, the top manager said. “In terms of the currently, the most of the products will be basically transported from the west to the east. We’re very interested to develop local suppliers to reduce our logistic cost”, he said.

“We’re always localizing the menu for each country. In the Far East region, we have a lots of Asian customers. We just recently increase our portfolio, a menu architecture, by launching also rings, and strips, and more chicken products, which we know a very much liked by Asian consumers”, Mr. Carena said.

Russian version of this article is available here.