Yum! Brands' (YUM +0.79%) recent struggles go deeper than just the Chinese portion of its KFC portfolio. In the video below, Fool contributor Demitrios Kalogeropoulos says that Yum!'s latest business results included two other bad surprises for investors.
First, the company took a huge writedown on its Little Sheep investment in China, which cleaved 55 percentage points off its earnings this quarter. Also, KFC sales turned sharply lower in the U.S., flipping from 3% growth last quarter to negative 4% growth this time. That loss swamped the small gain that Yum! saw from its improving Taco Bell business, Demitrios says. Overall, weak profits from the U.S. could make it hard for Yum! to hit the roughly 15% earnings dip that it is targeting for all of 2013, he argues.
