McDonald’s left with egg McMuffin on its face after admitting it beefed up UK sales by more than £130m because of missing decimal point
Bigging it up: McDonald’s beefed up its UK sales by more than £130m because of a missing decimal point
McDonald’s was left with egg McMuffin on its face after admitting it beefed up its UK sales by more than £130m because of a missing decimal point.
The blunder emerged after the fast-food restaurant was forced to send the corrected figures to Companies House.
The British subsidiary of McDonald’s originally posted revenues of just under £1.5bn for 2013. But this included an accounting adjustment which boosted revenues by £133m.
Unfortunately, this should have been £1.3m as the number crunchers at the restaurant chain forgot to put in a decimal point.
This meant McDonald’s – which appointed a British chief executive, Steve Easterbrook, earlier this year – actually generated sales of £1.37bn, not £1.5bn
McDonald’s said the mistake had been caused by ‘a simple human error due to the misplacement of a decimal point’.
But it said the £377.8m profit the UK chain had originally recorded still stands. It was forced to make the correction for 2013 when it filed its accounts for 2014 – which showed a rise in sales to £1.43bn.
This compares with a fall in the US where the restaurant chain has endured seven consecutive quarters of declining sales.
Its blunder has echoes of the profit warning issued by Supergroup – the company behind the SuperDry fashion brand – after it entered a ‘plus’ instead of a ‘minus’ sign on its figures.
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