Business Strategy and Outlook
| Sean Dunlop |The long-term equilibrium in the quick-service restaurant space remains turbid, but all signs point to permanent changes for operators, with customers favoring those brands that offer seamless omnichannel access, personalization, and robust off-premises channels. In our view, Restaurant Brands International is taking adequate steps to meet the demands of the digital native consumer, with recent investments, including footprint reimaging, a renewed emphasis on loyalty programs, and proprietary e-commerce landing pages representing a few of the efforts likely to shore up the brands' competitive positions, though we anticipate that similar investments will simply become a cost of doing business going forward.