MANILA • Fast-food giant Jollibee Foods (JFC) aims to breach the 4,000-store milestone this year as the home-grown retailer earmarked a record-high capital spending budget of 14.7 billion pesos (S$394 million) to fund its most aggressive expansion to date.

JFC founder and chair Tony Tan Caktiong said during a JFC stockholders meeting last month: "We will continue to aggressively pursue acquisitions and organic growth to accelerate the company's growth and profitability." As of end-May, JFC had 3,555 stores worldwide across 12 brands in 17 countries. Last year, it ended with 3,253 stores.

At a press briefing, JFC chief finance officer Ysmael Baysa said this year's capital spending would be the biggest in the company's history. Last year's actual capital outlays amounted to 6.7 billion pesos.

Of this year's budget, 9 billion pesos will be for store expansion and renovation, while 5 billion pesos will be for new commissaries in the Philippines and China in order to support the growing store network.

Mr Tan said JFC was able to open a large number of new stores through the years because of improving return on investments and increasing organisation capability that allowed it to scale up business across different brands.

Last year, JFC opened 342 new stores, 244 of which are in the Philippines and 98 are overseas.

This 6.7 per cent store network expansion was faster than the historical organic network growth of about 4 per cent.

This year, JFC plans to open a total of 350 new stores, 100 of which will be overseas.

PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER/ASIA NEWS NETWORK