dailynewsnblog
My free advice to billionaire investor and longtime Wendy’s (WEN) board member Nelson Peltz: Save your money, and go buy a sports team like the rest of the rich people you hang with in Florida.
It emerged late this week — for the second time this year — that Peltz, alongside a consortium of investors, is nearing a buyout deal for ailing Wendy’s.
Wendy’s remains an utter disaster. And for the first time, yours truly — a veteran Wendy’s consumer who covered the company’s last several CEO reigns — is questioning if this business deserves to be around a decade from now.
The Dave Thomas-founded burger chain has posted six straight quarters of same-store sales declines, per Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace analysis. Wendy’s same-restaurant sales in the US crashed 7% in the second quarter versus a 2.3% drop a year earlier. Adjusted operating profits tanked 13.2% year over year.
Not helping performance this year — besides a revolving door in the C-suite that just saw former Wendy’s exec Bob Wright return as CEO — are a revitalized Burger King (QSR) promising higher-quality burgers and McDonald’s (MCD) revamping its value menu.
Wendy’s stock has fallen 65% over the past five years.
It doesn’t stop there.
Buried inside Wendy’s brutal second quarter earnings call last week was a mention that 289 US locations closed during the first half of the year.
There are about 5,700 Wendy’s in the US.
“Understand that the health of franchisees certainly is pressured right now because of the sales declines that we have had,” Wright told analysts on the call. “You guys know this business. When you see some of the sales declines, it is going to show up in restaurant profitability. It is going to pressure the franchisees and create a little bit of fragility there. When it came to closures, I think what you heard in some previous quarters was closures addressed more as a program for the system. You will see us take a much more targeted approach. We are going to come alongside our franchisees if they need our help.”
Thanks, Bob, for the deep analysis. The reality looks to be that this brand will continue to shrink while other fast food chains grow. Not a recipe for success.
Bernstein analyst Danilo Gargiulo said, “We think investors are likely to stay on the sidelines until the next update provides a quantified plan, even as the leadership and capital allocation overhangs we have flagged over the past year are now more constructively addressed. We view the dividend cut as a more deliberate decision to free up capital for investments rather than a distress signal. However, net leverage at 5.0x, the top of the company’s target range, still constrains the pace at which management can deploy capital toward the turnaround, and with FY26 guidance withdrawn, investors have no financial framework to hold the plan accountable to until the next quarterly update. We reduce our estimates to account for the flow-through in the model from 2Q.”
