McDonald's has got two things to celebrate, a new CEO and a 3.4% market activity increase after many months of dormancy, the USA Today reported.
Steve Easterbrook will become CEO from being a chief brand officer, as a replacement for McDonald's former CEO Don Thompson, 51, one of the company's veterans having served the food-chain for a quarter of a century who will retire on March 1.
For a lot of investors, this is such a good news, as McDonald's stocks rose up by 3.4%, right after Easterbrook's promotion came out.
In the new CEO's previous designation as the chief brand officer, Easterbrook monitored the chain's advanced innovations with regards to the menu, global marketing, and methods to effectively push McDonald's to a higher level of food and service technology.
"I do not think that the news came out as a big surprise. Well, maybe its timing, but not the decision," Sanford Bernstein analyst Sara Senatore told Yahoo News. "It is one of those things that people have speculated for months now," she added.
In 1990, Thompson joined McDonald's to become its electrical engineer. He, then, passed through ranks like the fast-food chain's US stores' president and chief operating officer before, finally, becoming the chief executive officer in 2912.
Easterbrook, on the other hand, is a natural sciences graduate of Durham University. He briefly served other UK-based chains like Wagamama and Pizza Express. After joining McDonald's in 1993, he eventually became McDonald's Europe division president and has been described as a "McDonald's veteran."