The big headline from Domino's (DPZ 1.23%) latest earnings report is that U.S. sales declined for the first time in over a decade.
But there's still a huge runway for store growth both in the U.S. and in international markets.
In this video from "Beat & Raise" from Motley Fool Live, recorded on Oct. 14, Fool contributor Demitri Kalogeropoulos outlines the pizza delivery giant's ambitions for adding new locations around the world.
Demitri Kalogeropoulos: What we have here is a breakdown of new store growth, and that's a major growth category for Domino's. Any restaurants has basically two most attractive growth avenues. You want comparable store sales to grow, you want not to be able to boost your sales numbers in existing locations, but you also want to have a long runway for adding more locations over time. This is one of the huge pillars of the Domino's investing thesis.
As Parkev mentioned, the company added a little over 300 new stores in this quarter, including something like, I think it was 42 in the United States and somewhere in that 300 category internationally. That's a accelerated growth rate than just a year ago. Management also said they're actually a little frustrated because they would have opened more, but they had things like construction delays and staffing delays, so there's issues there, so that number would have been higher.
But as of this quarter, Q3 2021, Domino's is almost at 6,500 stores in the U.S. They see ultimately room for around 8,000 total. Again, this is a pretty mature market. I find it pretty interesting that they think that there's still room to add maybe 25% onto their current base. But the opportunity is even more exciting internationally, which this past quarter demonstrates in the fact that they were growing faster and they were able to add more stores.
India, for example, just recently crossed the 1,400 store mark. They're thinking they can take it more than double that over time. There's a lot of growth left if management has their way.
