Word: pizzas
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Against the advice of more experienced colleagues who said Asians wouldn't eat bread or cheese, Heinecke opened the first Pizza Hut in Asia in 1980 in the beach resort of Pattaya, southeast of Bangkok. "It was a daring move," says Kitti Naktisuwan, an analyst with ABN AMRO Asia Securities. It was also the right move at the right time. Thais flocked to sample such customized wares as tom yum (spicy soup) pizza, and Heinecke, who became a Thai citizen in 1991, now has 116 stores taking about 95% of the country's $50 million-a-year pizza market...
...unfair competition, among other charges. The trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 10. Among the issues is a new global noncompetition clause in Tricon's international franchise agreement, which stipulates that franchisees need Tricon's permission to operate any other food business, even ones that don't compete with pizza, chicken or Mexican cuisine, anywhere in the world. Heinecke's previous contracts with the firm barred him only from opening rival pizza outlets. "How can the U.S., which advocates free trade and competition, support that kind of restrictive practice?" Heinecke asks. Says Peter Hearl, executive vice president of Tricon Restaurants...
Heinecke says he can't agree to the clause because pizza isn't his only business. It wasn't even his first. Four years after moving to Thailand in 1963, Heinecke borrowed $1,200 from a loan shark to open an office-cleaning service and a public relations company. He made his first million before age 21. While pizza franchises were popping up all across America during the late '70s, he came to believe that if Thais were exposed to pizza, they would like it. "I operate on the belief that, fundamentally, we're all more similar than dissimilar...
Mention Thailand, and images of coconut curries and spicy shrimp soup percolate in the mind. The country would seem an unlikely setting for a pizza war. But one of the bitterest battles in the global fast-food industry is shaping up in Thailand, and its outcome could determine not merely who dominates the pizza market in this country of 61 million but also the future of franchising agreements around Asia and beyond. "This isn't really about pizza," says William Heinecke, 51, the American-born multimillionaire franchise king and hotelier who is at the center of the conflict...
...Kevin Spacey: One of the stars who energized the strike by writing fat checks for a relief fund; he notes that the average SAG members earns only $5,000 a year In the nick of time, like the delivery boy in a Domino's Pizza spot, star quality arrived. Jay Leno donated $10,000 to a SAG strike fund, and soon Kevin Spacey, Harrison Ford, Nicolas Cage, George Clooney and Helen Hunt had ponied up amounts of from $10,000 to $200,000. Now that famous faces were attached to celebrities, the media woke up to the strike...