Latest news with #YumBrands
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
What So Many Leaders Get Wrong: The Disconnects Driving Away Top Talent
What So Many Leaders Get Wrong: The Disconnects Driving Away Top Talent If you ask them, most leaders would say they're doing a good job. They believe they're communicating clearly, recognizing their team, encouraging input, and creating a workplace where people want to stay. But when employees are asked about their actual experience, the answers don't match. The disconnect is easy to overlook until it starts showing up in turnover, disengagement, and missed opportunities. In my interview with David Novak, former CEO of Yum! Brands, he shared, 'Seventy-nine percent of people leave because they don't feel appreciated.' When recognition feels hollow or irrelevant, people check out. Failing to deliver recognition with sincerity can be one of the most expensive leadership mistakes. Why Do Leaders Think Things Are Better Than They Really Are? In many companies, leaders genuinely believe they are creating an environment that encourages curiosity, open dialogue, and consistent performance. They often point to awards programs, recognition messages, or employee surveys as evidence. But when these efforts are disconnected from what employees actually value, they fall flat. Employees want to be seen for the things they care about, but leaders often don't know what those are because they don't ask. Another issue is filtered feedback. Leaders are often surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear. When they hear everything is great, it makes it easy to miss early warning signs. Over time, the gap between perception and reality widens, and people stop trying to fix it. Why Don't Employees Tell Leaders What They Really Need? Employees often stop sharing what motivates them because they have learned it doesn't make a difference. If speaking up has ever backfired, or if they've seen others get ignored, they decide it's easier to stay quiet. Some keep their heads down. Others deliver just enough. But many feel disconnected long before they ever update their resumes. That kind of silence is often misread by leaders as satisfaction. But the absence of complaints isn't proof that everything is working. It may mean people have lost confidence that their opinions matter. When that happens, you get a workplace plagued by quiet quitting. How Do Leaders Miss the Mark On Recognition? Leaders often assume recognition works the same for everyone. A team-wide thank-you or a small bonus might feel meaningful to one person but irrelevant to another. Without curiosity, recognition becomes generic. People hear the seemingly nice words, but they don't feel truly understood and appreciated. Recognition has to be specific and timely. It should reflect the individual's values and the company's core priorities. David Novak called this 'purposeful recognition,' which involves calling out behaviors that align with what the organization believes in. That kind of recognition teaches others what success looks like. What Happens When Leaders Rely On Assumptions? Assumptions cost companies talent. When leaders assume someone is happy because they show up on time or don't speak up, they miss the truth. When they assume public praise is enough, they overlook people who prefer private, thoughtful words. When they give everyone the same feedback to keep things fair, they often make it feel impersonal. The best leaders get curious. They ask what kind of recognition feels most meaningful. They learn what efforts people are most proud of and connect their feedback to the values they want to reinforce. Why Should Leaders Connect Curiosity With Recognition? Curiosity is one of the most underrated leadership habits. Leaders who ask more questions get better answers. They hear what is happening under the surface. They notice effort that isn't always visible. They learn how their team thinks and what their team needs. That kind of attention leads to recognition that feels personal and earned. Curious leaders make it a habit to look past results for insight. They walk the floor, listen more than they speak, catch small wins in real time, and respond with sincerity. When that happens consistently, the team starts to shift. People bring up new ideas. They feel seen and safe enough to contribute. How Can Leaders Spot A Cultural Disconnect Before It Gets Worse? The signs of disconnect often start small. Leaders may notice the same people always get recognized. Meetings may get quieter. Top performers may stop asking for feedback or stretch assignments. Exit interviews may bring up culture more than compensation. These signs are telling you something is off. Another red flag is when leaders think they are recognizing people often, but employees say otherwise. That usually means the praise is too vague or too late. When someone hears 'nice work' without context, it fades quickly. When recognition comes weeks after the achievement, it can feel like an afterthought. What Should Leaders Start Doing Differently Today? Real change starts with different questions. Instead of assuming what works, ask directly. How do you like to be recognized? What type of feedback helps you grow? What does success feel like to you, not just look like on paper? Then act on what you learn. Stop rewarding only the obvious wins. Start acknowledging the quiet effort, the teamwork, the insight, the initiative. Build space into your schedule to notice these things. Share them out loud. Reinforce what you want more of. Why Do Leaders Need to Pay Attention Now More Than Ever? Engagement scores are sliding and retention is harder than it used to be. The economy keeps changing, but the core of what people want at work has stayed the same. They want to matter, be heard, and be seen by someone who understands who they are and what they bring. Recognition alone won't fix a broken culture. But when it's grounded in curiosity, it becomes a tool for rebuilding trust. When people feel understood, they speak up more. When they know leaders are paying attention, they stop holding back. If you haven't asked your team what makes them feel appreciated, you may be missing something important. The people who are still showing up are often the ones hoping someone will notice them before they decide to leave.
Forbes
4 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
What To Know About The IRS's $4 Billion Tax Assessment On Yum! Brands
KFC Taco Bell (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The IRS has assessed $4 billion in taxes, penalties, and interest on Yum! Brands. The issue stems from a tax-deferred reorganization in 2014. Yum! Brands is now suing to prevent the IRS from collecting these funds. M&A is often among the most complicated tax issues large corporations face, which can often lead to uncertainty and scrutiny from the IRS. In this article, I discuss the Yum! Brand corporation, what happened in 2014, and why they are facing such a steep tax penalty now over a decade later. Yum! Brands is the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Habit Burger & Grill. As noted by The Washington Post, this corporation spun off from PepsiCo in 1997 to become among the largest set of restaurant chains in the United States and the world. While it currently features those three staples, the corporation has also previously held other chains, such as A&W and Long John Silvers. Yum! Brands has been known to be innovative by having combination restaurants. In these situations, customers can order from a KFC or Taco Bell (or both) at the same location. What makes Yum! Brands particularly impactful is their international appeal. As stated on the Yum! Brands website, the brands total over 61,000 locations and can be seen in 155 countries. According to CNN, KFC has blossomed to become an international staple in countries like Japan, where people often have KFC as their Christmas dinner. Yum! Brands is also no stranger to tax-related news. In early 2025, the company announced a different restructuring. While the company is famously headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky (hence, Kentucky Fried Chicken), Fortune reported that it will be relocating to Plano, TX, due to, among other things, taxes. Kentucky is a state that levies a corporate income tax (5% in 2025). Meanwhile, Texas famously has a 0% tax rate on corporate profits. Individual income tax is also not levied in Texas. Newsweek suggests that Texas has become a bit of a tax haven for new corporate headquarters such as Tesla, Toyota, Charles Schwab, Chevron, and now Yum! Brands. Prior to 2014, Yum! Brands was made up of separate legal entities based on brand and region. For example, there were separate legal entities for KFC Asia and KFC Europe. According to court filings, On November 30, 2013, Yum! Brands publicly announced a corporate reorganization. In this reorganization, the company would no longer be broken out into segments based on geography. Instead, it would focus its organization based on brands (i.e., KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut). It would also have separate divisions for China and India. The goal of this reorganization was to drive growth. To help facilitate the reorganization, the new subsidiaries issued stock in exchange for stock in the previous subsidiary. This stock for stock reorganization often falls under the Internal Revenue Code Section 368(a)(1)(B), which allows for the acquisition of a corporation solely in exchange for all or part of its voting stock. As long as all of the conditions are met, the Yum! Brand legal entities can exchange the stock without recognizing a gain on the appreciated value of the stock. The conditions for this type of reorganization are as follows: Reorganizations under Section 368 are valuable for a company like Yum! Brands because it wishes to restructure the company's organization to enhance future profits. In a normal transaction where Yum! Brands were selling its stock to another company, Yum! Brands would have a gain (or loss) on the appreciated (depreciated) value of the stock. However, Section 368 allows companies to meet certain conditions to defer the gain to a future period. Importantly, companies still have to recognize a gain on the stock's appreciated value, but this gain will not typically happen until the company ultimately disposes of it. In this case, Yum! Brands thought that the conditions under Section 368(a)(1)(B) were met, which would defer the gain, allowing the reorganization to make more sense from a financial perspective. In Yum! Brand's 2024 10-K financial statements, the company notes the following: As reported by Bloomberg Tax, this disagreement comprises over $4 billion dollars in damages: the $2.1 billion in taxes that the IRS believes Yum! Brands should have paid during their reorganization in 2014, $418 million in underpayment penalties and over $1.5 billion in interest on the money that has not yet been paid to the taxing authority. $4 billion is a large assessment for any firm. However, to put it into context, Yum! Brands in 2024 had a pre-tax income of $1.9 billion and paid income taxes of $414 million on that income. Thus, a tax bill of over $4 billion is astronomical for even a company of this size. NRN reports that the disagreement stems from Yum! Brands believe to have met all of the requirements under Section 368 for the reorganization to be tax-deferred, whereas the taxing authority believes that these matters were not all addressed and initiates billions of dollars of income by way of a sale of appreciated value of stock. NRN also reports that Yum! Brands has taken this matter to court and appeals court but was unsuccessful. In turn, Law360 reports that Yum! Brands have taken the IRS to court to sue them over the collections of this $4 billion. While the matter is still uncertain, many in the M&A tax space continue to watch this saga unfold since it represents a significant assessment being levied against some of the U.S.'s most recognizable restaurant brands.
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Here's What To Make Of Yum! Brands' (NYSE:YUM) Decelerating Rates Of Return
If we want to find a stock that could multiply over the long term, what are the underlying trends we should look for? Amongst other things, we'll want to see two things; firstly, a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and secondly, an expansion in the company's amount of capital employed. Put simply, these types of businesses are compounding machines, meaning they are continually reinvesting their earnings at ever-higher rates of return. So when we looked at Yum! Brands (NYSE:YUM), they do have a high ROCE, but we weren't exactly elated from how returns are trending. Trump has pledged to "unleash" American oil and gas and these 15 US stocks have developments that are poised to benefit. If you haven't worked with ROCE before, it measures the 'return' (pre-tax profit) a company generates from capital employed in its business. To calculate this metric for Yum! Brands, this is the formula: Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) ÷ (Total Assets - Current Liabilities) 0.47 = US$2.6b ÷ (US$6.7b - US$1.2b) (Based on the trailing twelve months to March 2025). So, Yum! Brands has an ROCE of 47%. In absolute terms that's a great return and it's even better than the Hospitality industry average of 9.6%. View our latest analysis for Yum! Brands In the above chart we have measured Yum! Brands' prior ROCE against its prior performance, but the future is arguably more important. If you'd like to see what analysts are forecasting going forward, you should check out our free analyst report for Yum! Brands . Things have been pretty stable at Yum! Brands, with its capital employed and returns on that capital staying somewhat the same for the last five years. Businesses with these traits tend to be mature and steady operations because they're past the growth phase. Although current returns are high, we'd need more evidence of underlying growth for it to look like a multi-bagger going forward. This probably explains why Yum! Brands is paying out 46% of its income to shareholders in the form of dividends. Given the business isn't reinvesting in itself, it makes sense to distribute a portion of earnings among shareholders. While Yum! Brands has impressive profitability from its capital, it isn't increasing that amount of capital. Although the market must be expecting these trends to improve because the stock has gained 64% over the last five years. But if the trajectory of these underlying trends continue, we think the likelihood of it being a multi-bagger from here isn't high. On a final note, we found 4 warning signs for Yum! Brands (2 are a bit concerning) you should be aware of. High returns are a key ingredient to strong performance, so check out our free list ofstocks earning high returns on equity with solid balance sheets. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Nvidia's next AI move? Bringing GPUs into the enterprise
This story was originally published on CIO Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CIO Dive newsletter. Nvidia is gearing up to supply enterprise customers with AI processing power amid a rush to deploy agentic tools, the company's CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday, during a Q1 2026 earnings call for the three-month period ending April 27. 'It's really hard to move every company's data into the cloud, so we're going to move AI into the enterprise,' Huang said. 'We're going to see AI go into enterprise, which is on-prem, because so much of the data is still on-prem.' The GPU giant saw quarterly revenue increase 69% year over year to $44.1 billion as AI usage levels spiked. 'AI workloads have transitioned strongly to inference, and AI factory buildouts are driving significant revenue,' Nvidia EVP and CFO Colette Kress said during the earnings call. Nvidia's fortunes soared in the last two-and-a-half years, driven by massive tech sector investments in AI-optimized data center infrastructure to train and deploy large language models. While hyperscaler hunger for GPUs remains robust, the company is betting on the enterprise market to pick up momentum. Large cloud providers installed an average of roughly 72,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs per week during the quarter and are on track to increase consumption, according to Kress. 'Microsoft, for example, has already deployed tens of thousands of Blackwell GPUs and is expected to ramp up to hundreds of thousands of GB200s with OpenAI as one of its key customers,' Kress said. Revenue by quarter, in billions This embedded content is not available in your region. The GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip, released a year ago, is a high-capacity processor that powers a larger rack designed to handle the most compute-intensive AI workloads, such as model training. In March, Nvidia unveiled its successor, the more powerful GB300 NVL72 rack system. Cloud providers began sampling the new processors earlier this month and Nvidia expects shipments to commence later this quarter, Kress said. As its footprint among hyperscalers continued to expand, Nvidia added to its enterprise product portfolio and forged deeper enterprise partnerships. The company rolled out a line of GPU-powered laptops and workstations in May, turning to its PC manufacturing partners to deliver enterprise customers. 'Enterprise AI is just taking off,' Huang said Wednesday, pointing to the new line of on-premises AI hardware. Kress touted an AI development partnership the company inked with Yum Brands in March. Nvidia will help the corporate parent of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell deploy AI in 500 restaurants this year and 61,000 locations over time to 'streamline order-taking, optimize operations and enhance service,' Kress said. The initiative represents a step up into the AI big leagues for Yum Brands. The company worked with an unnamed AI startup to create a Taco Bell drive-thru chatbot last year. It also marked Nvidia's first foray into the restaurant business, according to the announcement. Yum used Nvidia technology to power its proprietary Byte by Yum platform and enable AI voice agents, computer vision tools and performance analytics capabilities. 'Enterprise AI must be deployable on-prem and integrated with existing IT,' Huang said. 'It's compute, storage and networking. We've put all three of them together finally, and we're going to market with that.' Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Associated Press
27-05-2025
- General
- Associated Press
Kentucky Humane Society Receives $10,000 Kentucky Fried Wishes Grant To Support Women Warriors Program
LinkedIn The KFC Foundation surprised the Kentucky Humane Society with their $10,000 Kentucky Fried Wishes grant! The grant will be used for their Women Warriors program which will connect women veterans, women first responders, and female family members of veterans, with rescue of the celebration was definitely Walter, a cutie patootie kitty who has moderate Cerebellar Hypoplasia (CH), which makes him just a bit wobbly. Visit 3BL Media to see more multimedia and stories from Yum! Brands
