{"id":490327,"date":"2010-03-30T08:10:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-30T12:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"e2249889-c78b-43e3-9643-b1d7d4aa587b:415778"},"modified":"2010-03-30T08:10:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-30T12:10:00","slug":"burger-king-sales-could-offer-upside-surprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/490327","title":{"rendered":"Burger King sales could offer upside surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Despite concerns that demand for its double cheeseburger is waning, same store sales at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.financialpost.com\/markets\/company\/index.html?symbol=BKC&amp;id=14829248\" >Burger King Holdings Corp.<\/a> are expected to improve in March and should provide a boost to the beleaguered stock, says Gregory Badishkanian, Citigroup Capital Markets analyst.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;We sense Burger King&#39;s U.S. same store sales increased meaningfully during March, following very soft results in January and February due to adverse weather, Mr. Badishkanian said in a note to clients. &quot;We do not believe this is widely expected across the Street.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>After falling 8% during the first two months of the year due largely to bad weather, sales at Burger King turned positive in the first week of March. <\/p>\n<p>Even so, investors anticipate only moderate sales growth in March partly on expectations that double cheeseburger demand will continue to moderate. <\/p>\n<p>In February, the fast food chain raised the price on the <span id=\"articleText\">&quot;BK Dollar Double&quot; <\/span>to US$1.19 from US$1 and starting in April it will sell the menu favourite with two patties but only one slice of cheese.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>The premium-priced Steakhouse XT sandwich is also not expected to resonate well in the current environment.&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p>Burger King shares trade at a discount to multi-national peers and short interest represents roughly 10% of the total shares outstanding, he added. He raised his price target to US$22 from US$19, but maintained his Hold rating.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"mailto:dpett@nationalpost.com%20\">David Pett<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/network.nationalpost.com\/NP\/aggbug.aspx?PostID=415778\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite concerns that demand for its double cheeseburger is waning, same store sales at Burger King Holdings Corp. are expected to improve in March and should provide a boost to the beleaguered stock, says Gregory Badishkanian, Citigroup Capital Markets analyst. &quot;We sense Burger King&#39;s U.S. same store sales increased meaningfully during March, following very soft [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4060,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4060"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490327\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}