Introduction:
Jollibee Foods is a Chinese-Filipino family owned ice cream parlor founded in 1975. Later, due to an
economic crisis in the Philippines, the company decided to extend its product line into sandwiches. This
lead to Jollibees creation of its famous hamburger, a hamburger made with a home-style Philippine
recipe. With high demand for the Jollibee hamburger the company was able to expand into 5 stores
throughout its domestic market enabling Jollibee Foods to become incorporated.
In 1981 Mcdonalds entered the Philippine market, this led to Jollibee’s first serious competition.
McDonalds opened 6 restaurants within the first two 2 years and expanded its growth and marketing
rapidly throughout the Philippines. Jollibee had one major competitive advantage over McDonalds, the
flavor of Jollibees burgers were preferred by Philippine consumers. Why? The recipe was made by one of
their own, a home-style Philippine recipe. Yet, with this advantage Mcdonalds gained 27% share of the
fast food market, but Jollibee still held 32% share of the fast food market.
Jollibee’s team focused on knocking out its competitor by introducing a larger flavorful burger to
compete with the BigMac. Luckily for Jollibee a political crisis lead McDonalds to slow their investments
in the Philippines, allowing Jollibee to boost its expansion to 31 stores. Jollibees victory in dominated its
competitor in the Philippines led to many opportunities for expansion in foreign markets specifically in
the Asian market.
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Key Issues:
Jollibee faced many issues throughout its expansion. One issue is the company’s absence of
control between international and local divisions, which lead to the closure of two stores in
Singapore and Taiwan. In addition, Jollibee failed its opening in Indonesia as a result of too
much local competition which leads to another issue, the lack of marketing research put into the
foreign market analysis. With all of these problems Jollibee had realized its key issues: location,
the lack of partner selections, the need for control over international operations, for a
experienced professionals, and for a greater infrastructure. Once the organization was built, the
infrastructure was improved, and greater resources were obtained Jollibee was able to increase
the speed of international expansion. The increase in operations and expansions unfolded new
key issues: the need to adjust the business model for oversees markets, the menus, prices, etc.
and to establish each store was profitable for the company and the franchisee.
General Environmental Analysis:
SWOT analysis:
On the strengths, Jollibee is a Philippine’s fast food restaurant’s company that has been successfully
established with a solid domestic market which has a low cost operation system that has pro!ted well.
With the advantage of being local, they know well how to appeal to customers taste. Being the !rst ones
in planting the %ags in the Philippines put them at an advantage position to build brand awareness and
easily gain brand loyalty among their consumers relegating their competitors to a lower market share.
Its well-known reputation has giving them the opportunity to !nd partners easily to expand their
business to other countries in the area, that share some cultural aspects. Jollibee is to the Philippines
people as McDonalds is to the Americans.
Some of the weaknesses Jollibee has are the lack of marketing analysis to make decisions in their
expansion of the business to foreign markets. These poor studies lead them to poor choices while
selecting franchises’ partners, to which they also relegate all the power losing the control of the business
to the point that they have to end those partnerships business loosing time and money. As a
consequence, bad choices on location also lead to business failures. Furthermore weaknesses on their
