Unforeseen events. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplating the relevant forward-looking statement, and the JFC Group gives no assurance that such forward-looking statements will prove to be correct, or that such intentions will not change. All subsequent written or oral forward-looking statements attributable to the company or persons acting on behalf of the company are expressly qualified in their entirety by the above cautionary statements. Without further ado, let's get right into Q3 results. I think, most of you would have seen the press releases and our disclosures with the PSE, but let me summarize it for you. We continue to sustain a very strong top line sales growth as well as our profit growth. What does that mean?
That means we have the highest 3rd quarter operating income margin since 2018, which was our peak year before 2019 and then subsequently COVID. This was driven essentially by our very sustainable and continuing to be very successful business in the Philippines, which was up near 220%. Having said that, international also scored very well. On an SWS or system-wide sales basis, both Philippines and international businesses grew at a record pace, so 51%, and on a revenue base or revenue line, 49%, with all brands registering pretty much a double to triple-digit growth versus same period prior year.
Our international business generated operating profits and some of the highlights here is our North America Jollibee business, our Vietnam Jollibee business, our Middle East Jollibee business, as well as our beverage brands, Highlands Coffee and Milksha. Now to the middle of the P&L. We also had another record gross margin profit rate of 17.1%. Here I just want to qualify that this was not done all through pricing. We are of course pricing out as our competitors too, but we are not pricing out all of inflation. Again, we are pricing up, but not all of the inflation, and therefore, we're also gaining margin through cost initiatives and efficiency programs.
We had a chunky other income, and I'll go into the details of this a little bit later, just to be fully transparent. That added PHP 2.4 billion, and in particular, there are two key events. We had a property in the U.S. that is owned by The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, which we disposed of and took the gain. We're going asset-light, as mentioned in previous earnings calls, and of course, that fund coming from the gain will be put to good use. We also had an asset swap in the Philippines that also produced a gain, which we disclosed in Q3. Our net income attributable to equity holders of the parent company landed at PHP 2.3 billion, which is 30% higher and ahead of Q3 pre-pandemic levels.
Later, I'll walk you through some of the larger ticket items that affected the bottom line as well. Now let me start with our store network. In short, we are on track to add 500 new stores by the end of this fiscal year, as we've announced in 2021 Q4. You can see the numbers here. We sit today at 6,351 stores globally, of which roughly half of it is in the Philippines and half is in our international markets. This represents a growth of 8.3% in a store network basis. We continue to be around 80-20 rule of every new store we open in the Philippines, we're opening four stores in.
Sorry, for every two stores we open in the Philippines, we're opening eight stores outside of the Philippines. Let me give you a high-level snapshot, and then I'll again go into the details of financials. This is our quarterly system-wide sales graph that takes us back to the year 2018, as I mentioned earlier, and right through the pandemic years of 2020, 2021, and of course, where we are today in Q3 2022, which is the last set of data here. You can see here, as group, PHP 77.8 billion of system-wide sales is a record high. You can also see here, Philippines PHP 45.1 billion is a quarter three record high.
You can see our curve here gradually but steadily growing international business, and that's a record of PHP 32.6 billion. If we now look at the middle of the P&L or the gross profit, you can see the dip that happened during COVID period here, where we had losses. Aside from that, I think the key message I'd like to share is that Q3 2023 is a record high 17.1% gross profit margin delivery. That, of course, is the food inventory cost, but also our stores' commissary supply chain costs that's factored into this equation. Philippines delivered 17.4%, and international delivered 16.6%.
If you look right across, 15.4%, Q3 of 2018, 15.3%, 2019. Dip in 2020 and then slight bounce back in 2021, and then the record in 2022 Q3. If you look at operating income, so this is before other income, so purely from operations of our stores or business. You can again see our OPM rate of 5.4% here, Q3 is a record high for Q3. Philippines, we're at 8.4%, and international, we're at 1.3%, despite the losses that we've been seeing in China. Q2 was the worst in terms of China losses, but Q3 also started to show an improvement on that to a near break-even, but nonetheless, we're still trailing behind in China.
Now, if you were to look at that and compare it to our same-store sales growth, of course, the balance of the system-wide sales is our new stores and some Forex favorable impact in it from our international business. The bulk of our growth, you can see here, 48.5% in the Philippines is coming from same-store sales. Meaning the balance will be coming from new stores. All the international markets, the balance will be coming from new stores plus some exchange favorable gains. Let's again focus on the same-store sales growth of 48.5 in the Philippines. Year to date, nine months, we're at 45% versus a year ago. At international, we're at 8.5% in the quarter, and year to date, we're up 35.3%.
The other piece of information that I thought was relevant to share to this group is that, the composite of where this is coming from. Dine-in is starting to become stronger, and we are seeing a return back, and we're seeing a continuation of our off-premise growth. If you were to look at that from volume and value or transaction count, TC, and average check, AC, you can see that growth at the group level is coming 86% from transaction count or volume and 14% from average check. Just to note here, this is above our price increases, so it's actually organic natural average check growth. In the Philippines, you're seeing a slightly different ratio, but nonetheless, I think still the same message.
Majority is coming from new volume or volume increase with 70/22 split. Later, when I talk about the channel mix, you'll see some interesting statistics on where some of this business is coming from. The split on the left is Q3 2019, pre-pandemic, and the tower on the right is Q3 2022. You can see our dine-in is significantly lower at 38% versus Q3, but nonetheless bigger in quantum. You can also see here that takeaway remains relatively similar contribution, and the real growth again is coming through delivery. Drive-thru is flat. That data's found here on the right if you wanted to see it numerically. The point here I wanted to make was that we are now running our business around 19% digital sales contribution to total sales.
This is a group view across all of our regions and markets. Later when Marcos shares with you his thoughts on digital, I think it adds some color to this data. Okay. The P&L summary here from system-wide sales, revenue all the way down to earnings per share. Again, I highlighted here in the two red boxes. These are growth rates versus 2021, and you can see a revenue growth rate of 49%. I know the industry has done well, in particular the U.S., and so forth, but I believe a growth rate of 49% still remains one of the top in our industry. That is having a very positive gearing, producing 60.
Near 63% growth on our gross profit line, and that is translating now into almost 220% growth in our operating income. We're getting positive gearing and also very strong operational leverage. Year to date, I just wanted to highlight earnings per share here. We're up 155% at PHP 6.22. Looking at some of the other ratios or % to revenues. Gross profit margin, again, mentioned earlier, the 17.1% is 140 basis points higher than last year and 180 basis points higher than our pre-pandemic year of 2019. Year to date, we're running at that rate as well. Q4 looks very strong again. G&A, we're seeing the opposite. We're seeing our cost controls coming down.
It's 9.8 versus 10.8 a year ago and 10% two years ago. Again, operating margin, this number was discussed earlier. I know there's a lot of numbers here, but I just wanted to walk you through a little bit in terms of how it splits between Philippines and international, so you get a better flavor. Before we get into that, let me start with the takeaways. 8.4% of our Philippines NOI represents, again, a record high quarter for the business. This also reflects about a 70% franchise to 30% company-owned store mix. On the international side, a positive international OPM despite COVID and restriction in China.
You can see if we were to add back China or to normalize it for China, we'll be running our business around 2.1%. This is still low compared to our domestic business, and that's, again, as mentioned previously, this is due to our investments and the fact that we are relatively new with some of our brands in some of our markets. Later on, I have a slide bridging our operating income to our net income after tax, so I'll save that point for a little bit later. But again, you can see if you look across the line here, you can see the improvement rates. So if you take gross profit, 15.7, 15.3 two years back.
On an OPEX or expense line, we can see it coming down versus last year and down also, compared to 2019. Our operating income level is steadily climbing up. We're not there yet, to where we wanna be, but nonetheless, we're trending in the right direction. Other income. Earlier I mentioned to you that we had a chunky other income contribution this quarter of PHP 2.4 billion. Let me just walk you through some of the key items in that other income. This is pretty much the last of the disposals or gains from disposals in the Philippines. And also I mentioned to you, CBTL had a gain, so that added 4.3%. We're looking at this in terms of a % to our profit line.
We had a significant reduction in accrual reversals. I know historically we've been accruing and reversing at different pace and different rates and quantums. I believe we're now running at a good pace and a good run rate, so 0.7 versus 1.5 a year ago. We've lost, if you wanna look at it that way, some of the other income gains from lower reversals. This provision of -1.1% essentially represents the long tail that we have in our efforts to try to exit some of the brands that are not strategic and to focus on our strategic brands. Specifically here, Dunkin' Donuts was disclosed that we are now exiting that business in China. It's been a loss-making business.
For us going forward, it actually will be P&L accretive. If you look at FX gain, this is the single largest movement of sorts, if you will. Movement of 130 basis points to, going from 0.4 gain or positive or favorable last year to a foreign exchange loss. I think we all understand the reason for this. With the strengthening US dollar, our translation as well as our transaction losses are coming through Q3. I also wanted to mention, if you were to look back to 2019, because some of you would be comparing the bottom % here to pre-COVID, this 3.1 was a one-time revaluation gain on CBTL in 2019. I think we need to discount that if you wanted to compare like to like.
This is now a bridge taking us from our operating income down to our net income after tax. I just wanted to point out here our deferred income taxes. We had an asset, DTA asset in 2021. This quarter we have a liability, so that movement is quite significant, 330 basis points. This is really related to timing of how we're recognizing our NOL carryforwards, coming from our Smashburger business. Again, it's a timing. It will reset, but for this quarter, we're taking it into our books. This is a new view, and I've borrowed this from one of our investors.
You know, I just wanna make sure that I give that claim out. This is in fact a very good view to start measuring our business. This is our EBITDA and free cash flow margin. Free cash flow margin of 10.9% in quarter three is our highest in company record. Q2 we had a significant improvement as well, 9.9%, coming up from Q1 at 3.1%. Sitting at the 1st half of the year, we're at 6.8%. We've now gone to double digit 10.9%. You can see all the movements, some of the items I've mentioned earlier, which we put here as adjustments, but nonetheless, a very solid free cash flow margin.
That takes us nicely into then the balance sheet. Again, similar to update, we have a very strong and fortified balance sheet. Let me start with the working capital. We are collecting our receivables four days quicker than December of last year, so 13 days DSO. Our inventory, this could be lower in theory, but at the moment it's I think it's the right place to be, so a month and a half of carry. The reason for that is we're trying to balance, of course, tie-up of cash, but we're trying to balance that with supply disruptions and interruptions, which in Q2 I said remained our most significant risk ahead.
In Q3, I have a similar view, but, having said that, I should qualify that by saying that we have very strong inventory hedges in place. In terms of supplies, we are now looking quite safe, right into the end of 1st half next year on our key raw materials. If you look down to our covenant ratios, we are way below all the breach limits. Again, remaining very strong. There's a very strong debt service coverage. Debt to EBITDA will continue to make inroads and progress. Areas to focus for the rest of the year and going into Q1 next year, it continues to be, and it remains to be consistent. We'll continue to push for growth at both the top and the bottom line.
We'll be very cautious with our investments, in particular, CapEx, store expansion, capacity build-outs, less so on technology, and I'll save the thunder for Marcos later, but we are investing in technology. We are of course aware of the macro headwinds. We are aware of our borrowing rates and costs, but we're managing through that with a very strong fixed term rates that we've been enjoying for the last three to six months. We again mentioned here, we'll continue to drive our business through digital revenue. So this is incremental, so it's additional transaction count. It's consumers that we didn't have, and it's also tapping into occasions or meal occasions that we didn't have before.
We'll continue to focus on that, and we will not forget about our Philippine business 'cause this still remains our engine. Again, the prices that we have been taking, they've been very measured to make sure that we share the burden of inflation, but not pass on 100% of the burden of inflation. I think we've done a very good job in balancing that, and we've been very competitive. We have not seen transaction count erosion due to price elasticity, so we'll continue to monitor that very carefully. Second pillar of priority or focus is our balance sheet and our capital structure.
I think I had a couple of slides last quarter walking you through where we are on the capital structure, so not much has changed, so I decided this quarter not to regurgitate that, but just to send a message that, again, we continue to monitor very closely, but, we're quite happy with the structure that we have. We'll continue to tweak as needed. We'll continue to have capital ready for, opportunistic investments should any come forward. The last pillar here is we continue to build out. We have not implemented any hiring freeze of any sort.
At the store level, of course, as we build new stores, as we get new franchisees, we're continuing to make sure that resources are available, but also at the skills level, managerial level, and leadership level, we continue to invest in our people so that we can grow and accelerate our international, in particular international, division. Outlook. What I can share with you today, we're very confident that we will increase the store network by circa 8%-10% versus last year. We believe that our system-wide sales and top-line revenue will continue to be in strong double digits, somewhere around 35%-40% range for the balance of the year. Our operating income is expected to be at par or beat our peak year of 2018.
With that, I'm gonna now hand the floor over to my colleague, Marcos. Let me just stop sharing here. All right, Marcos.
Thank you very much, Richard. Let me just load my presentation. One 2nd. Perfect. You can see that, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Thank you very much. Good morning and good afternoon from people who are coming from the U.S. and those who are in Asia. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present today. Really today we would like to present you a little bit the strategy that we have from JFC and what are we gonna do from a digital perspective and how this is adding a lot of value to everything that Richard just mentioned today. Maybe just to introduce myself as I'm new to the organization. I just made my one year. Actually gonna make it in two weeks in JFC.
I used to be the head of digital for Minor International, which is a group that was in Thailand, and before that I used to be the head of digital for Kempinski Hotels worldwide. I'm a Swiss citizen, also with a Mexican passport, and very happy to have joined the family of JFC. Now, just to give you a key element, the entire digital strategy is following our global strategy, which is to be the top five restaurant company in the world, and it's really to bring that digital capability as a core competency of JFC in all business areas.
This is really sustained by our three pillars, really the marketing role, the digital component, and our business technology role, that all of them need to sustain this growth that we are aiming to build. Now, from a consumer perspective, I just wanted to give you a very quick background on where we are because JFC finds itself in a very unique situation where we have a multigenerational element of multiple generations that are part of our consumers. Right now, majority of our generation is between Generation X and Y, but right now big part of what we're building is to really build for that digital approach on Generation Z that you probably can see here in my slides. Why? Because Generation Z's differentiation is that they are digital natives and mobile-driven.
Really the expectations is that we have an omni-channel and a personalized marketing for the consumer segments. At the same time, we need to build for the consumers of the future, which will be the kids that they are the Generation Alpha. You know, we don't speak a lot about that Generation Alpha, but are the young kids of zero to nine years, but they will be our future customers and we need to start building that trust with them. Now, saying that, it's really important to be digital. Why? Because, you know, as raised by BCG, you know, digital leaders generate superior returns. We believe that by implementing all our digital strategy, we will be able to bring superior returns to our organization.
Now, where we are, because we are realistic, so we consolidated our report that is a mix of the data from Gartner Digital IQ Index of 2020 to figure out where is our competition and where we sit today versus them. Today, you know, we at our strategy, we know that we are missing a lot of elements in our strategy, but I'll be able to show you today, you know, what are the elements that we're building to build that strategy. What is the strategy that we're following? Well, we have identified that there are different elements that all organizations within the QSR are following to be the top leading digital leaders and how they're driving this. One of the big examples for us has always been organizations like Domino's Pizza and McDonald's and all the big large organizations.
We know that there are certain elements that you can see here that we need to be working on to be able to bring our technology to the right level and all our digital experience for our consumers. Now, our objective is really to build that growth of all the elements that we have done. As you can see, you can see an initial curve, what we call the building capability, where we have built really all the website deliveries and app delivery sites. We deliver all our digital campaigns and PPC programmatic, and now we're entering in a curve where we're building even more part of the infrastructure.
It's really building our SEO, building the digital asset management, and building a lot of the technologies from a marketing perspective that allow us to build segmentation and also build all the content that we need to build for our tools. This will take us through a curve which allowed us to increase our revenues and profitability, and then eventually as every single technology curve on the top, it will arrive to flattening again and we need to do new investments into the new cycle of technology that will happen. Now, what is our objective for 2026? Really, our objective for 2026 is to achieve with Jollibee, as you can see here, to become a digital brand. As we believe that with the Jollibee network, we can reach that quite easily. Same thing with brands like Smashburger, Chowking, and Mang Inasal.
We believe that we can, and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, we can reach those levels moving from the Jollibee brand and really start becoming very competitive from a digital perspective. Not because we wanna be digital for the sake of being digital, but because it adds to the contribution of the revenues. Now, what are the pillars that we're building on to build this strategy? We have focused on four main pillars that are all sustained with the idea that we need to drive 50% of total digital sales by our own systems versus total system-wide sales by 2027.
The four pillars we have is the 1st pillar is based on data capability, and it's really we wanna build a whole environment of data capacities, which comes from hiring the right people, having data analysts, having data scientists and data engineers, so that all our decisions are based on data-driven decision-making. Second part of our content is the channel orchestration, which is building all the platforms that allows us to drive sales directly through our own channels and not to remove the aggregators, but rather to have a better collaboration with them, but have a much balanced relationship with aggregators where we can have our own channels also driving a lot of these sales and helps us to optimize the relationship with the clients.
Our 3rd pillar is the digital advertising, and for that I have a case study towards the end where I would really like to show you everything we have achieved with the changes to our adtech and martech components. This is really to improve the way we sell and we present ourselves to the consumers, knowing that Google, Meta, and TikTok are making a lot of changes to their platforms, and without us being able to do that, we won't be able to capture them in the right way.
The last one is really the customer experience, which today, they're called total experience, and it's about really the integration of all those elements to have the right type of customer experience centers so that people can call for loyalty, they can call for questions, they can call for sales, and we are able to serve them from anywhere in the world that we have our brands. Two, three last items that I forgot is that we're building a supplier ecosystem. We're building also our digital standards and KPIs and our privacy by design and governance as an overarching element that is built to sustain these channels and our digital academy and training.
Because we know that we can put a lot of systems and a lot of tools, but the most important element is the adoption of those tools, so that our staff and our teams are able to absorb all this information. How we will roll out this is our strategy to have a global, regional, and BU strategy, where we start from the concept and design of all these pieces, then the development is in a combination between the regions and the global, and then production and launch includes the BU, region, and global, and then optimization happens directly at the business. Service and support again gets into region, BU, and global, and then until we have to either retire the product or evolve the product to come back into this cycle.
This is a continuous cycle of technology that we are implementing through all the actions that we're building in JFC. Now, to take into the approach of how we're growing, we have taken a transformation approach that is built on three elements. One, everything that we were building before, we will continue driving it so that we can sustain the existing growth that we have for those channels. At the same time, we will do improvements to all those initiatives with mobile speed, search engine optimization on the elements, advertisement improvements. At the same time, we're building those foundations so that we can have the tools that will be powering up from the future for every single one of those elements. Maybe to show you one of those tools that we're building is the 1st element, which is data capability.
It's really about how we collect the data, how we unify all that data, and then how do we build those segments and predictive models to actually build the activation. Activation means being able to send emails, SMS, social messages, in-app elements, which we have seen in previous organizations. It drives an incredible growth in our total sales through digital channels and also in store channels, because digital is not just about delivery. Now, how does this work? It's really about having the right message to the right audience at the right channel at the right time. As you can see here, this is our stack of technology that we're adding to all our brands worldwide, which is we're adding a content delivery network, we are adding a CDP, analytic tools.
We are adding a lot of benchmarking tools, digital asset management to control all the images that we have worldwide and all that to be able to really send email marketing, SMS, ad push to really get where the consumer is, but not in a mass. I think our approach is to move away from the shotgun approach to have a sniper approach of marketing, which is what the new generations are expecting from us. Now, in terms of the data gathering, we know that the data privacy elements have a little bit safeguarded that data should not be moved from countries.
Our strategy is really to build our data and data warehouses in each one of our regions with only reporting factors that are centralized so that we can make better decisions at the center, but at the regions can drive the regions independently as well. This also complies with all our privacy elements that really almost every country is implementing one by one after the launch of GDPR. What is really about data governance and data quality is having an organized element, and it's for us to harmonize all that data so that we can utilize it for all the tools and systems.
As you can see, we will work on the data not only for profiles and preference, which will be a very marketing element, but also financial data and behavioral data, which we know that are the key to increment the sales and really to drive all the elements of the Jollibee marketing database. Now, how are we gonna deal with the people? Our strategy to deal with the people and the learnings on that data-driven organization is that we are right now in data-aware, right? Organization knows that they need to build the data, and right now our process is to build everybody to become data-guided, which is what organizations identify their data needs, and they're learning to standardize all the data. Why?
Because once we reach a data savvy organization, and we have a culture of data scientists, then the organization can make much better decisions on every day that are less based on instinct, but are all based on data. This will make us a lot faster and will also make our decisions to drive higher performance. Why? Because at the end, data strategy informs and guides business strategy, and then business strategy really sets a requirement for new data strategies that we will continue driving in an endless circle of how we drive our data. As I mentioned to you before, another component for us is the content management system and how do we drive them. It is about unifying all our portals.
Instead of having, you know, one portal per country, we're gonna unify it into a global strategy where we have a unified app that can be exported and localized in multiple markets, allowing us to really push content from one single click in a centralized way, in a much more efficient format than we are today. This goes both from digital menu boards to marketing boards, order management, app, kiosk, and all the different elements that we're working right now from a content perspective to distribute better ourselves across the markets. In addition to that, we're working now on the development of new kiosk technology, knowing that especially in the markets in the Americas, Singapore, Hong Kong, there is a huge trend and where labor is becoming a very, very important component, and it's becoming really, really hard to find labor that wants to be qualified.
The need of kiosk technology for drive-throughs has become more and more important in the strategy. Enabling suggestive sales is also another element of the digital strategy. Why? Because kiosks have the capacity to also learn about the consumer and be able to propose products that people similar to them have purchased, similar to the model of the Amazon's of this world. Just to touch on some of the last elements on total customer experience. Total customer experience is really the union of CX and DX, which is customer experience and digital experience. Is unifying not only the experience that the customer has through all the loyalty, ticketing, or quality, or omni-channel contacts where we get contact from our consumers to deal with and remove the friction from the consumer, but also to deal with the friction at our staff.
Make sure that our staff deals with tools that have very little friction, because if our staff is happy, then our customers will be happy. Our omni-channel contact center, something that we're developing right now, where we're unifying all this element, will be channel that will be able to absorb information from all the different channels, including email, chat, social media, mobile apps, kiosk, branch, and websites, which is something that until now, very few organizations have managed to do correctly.
Of course, data privacy is still a very big concern for us, and knowing that our expansion to multiple countries adds a new level of platform, we're right now in the process of build a centralized and unified center for data privacy that will be also taken care of by the customer experience, making sure that the customer experience is at the top and the data privacy is one of the core elements of this, as this has a huge risk for organizations that don't deal with it on time.
From an adtech perspective, this is the design of everything we've been building, which is a unification of all our adtech tools and how this will allow us to improve our performance by utilizing best-in-class tools in the market, utilizing Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, Google Analytics, Performance Max tools, and really putting all our marketing and adtech perspective to appeal to all our customers through all the platforms in the best way possible. I'd like to show you now a small case study of how we have used this technology and how this technology has really helped us to drive additional revenues to some of our brands.
First example that I'd like to show you, it is about Smashburger and the success we had in September as we launched our new platform for app and website together with our Paytronix loyalty systems that we launched in September. The 1st element I like to share with you is really the online orders. The 1st thing we saw is an increment from 2,749 orders to 8,893, having an increase of 224% on the total growth of orders that we were seeing for Smashburger. In addition to that, we have seen an immediate feedback that show an improvement in customer satisfaction because people were able to finish their orders correctly. People didn't have concerns when they were making those orders.
While it's great that we were able to improve this by improving the quality of the tools we put in the market, I think the most important element for us was how do we bring more people to our stores so that we can increase those sales. Our paid media rollout, we had really an increase of online transactions of 107%. We have an increase on store visits by 39% and an online revenue increase of 19% and estimated store revenue of 38%.
We're really seeing that our new strategies of advertisement that we will be rolling out in every one of the markets and all the brands in our initial rollouts are having great advantages for all the brands, and we see an increment on revenue, sales, transactions, and visits in stores. As you can see here, since the launch of Olo in the Paytronix app, really we've seen 20% swing on the direct sales. You can see here how the sales had an increment just because we changed our advertisement strategy and our platforms, it had an incredible change on the curve. In addition, we are seeing a significant amount of downloads with all the campaigns that we're seeing, which is a really key metric for us to understand that people are downloading our apps, and they're using our apps.
We are really seeing something that we had never seen before. The strategy is, it's actually paying off, and we're seeing a significant change. This, again, as I've mentioned before, is something we will be rolling out in every one of the markets. Additionally to that is really if you see the unified web and mobile, you can see that the overall price has been increasing. That means that we're actually, even with that increase in price per order, we're still able to drive additional sales through those channels. That means that we can make more money using those tools than just the traditional ones. I think that was it for me, and thank you very much for allowing me the time to present to you.
I hope that I was able to give you some of the insights on the things that we're doing and how this is driving performance.
Thank you, Mr. Cadena. It's very, very interesting. As you've said, right, other fast food chains globally are already adapting to this kind of technology. It's good to see that Jollibee is also, you know, investing in the same. We have, I think, about 10 minutes. Richard, Marcos, can you maybe answer a few questions that were sent ahead? Maybe for those in the call, if you have additional questions, you can email them to me, and I can forward it to Mr. Cadena and Mr. Shin for you. Richard, I think the question is mostly just on the news regarding Dunkin' Donuts, Tim Hortons. Basically, the questions were more, can you give more details on what, you know, the agreement entails?
You know, what are you looking at least for the next year or so?
Okay, great. Let me take a step back and frame it by saying both of those brands mentioned are related to our China strategy. For those who are not familiar with our China business, we have three active brands there. That's Tim Ho Wan, Yonghe King, and Hong Zhuang Yuan, which are all Chinese brands and Chinese food brands. Dunkin' Donuts, although we've had it for a number of years, and I think there are many reasons, so probably not important to go through all the reasons, but we've made a conscious decision to exit that relationship. We were franchisees, of course, in China, but we decided to exit because we had not been profitable.
We came to a point in time where we believe that Dunkin' Donuts was more of a distractor rather than aiding our strategy to grow our China business. We took a provision, as I mentioned earlier, and all the settlement discussions, it's all been amicable with Inspire Brands, of course, whom we respect very much, and we decided to exit both sides very amicably. Having said that, I think that also then now opens up other opportunities in China for certain beverages and so forth that I think everybody understands Dunkin' Donuts was not just about donuts, but it was also about coffee. I think it opens up really our opportunities to have more freedom with our China strategy. I also thinking that.
Then Richard, from China maybe to North America, we know that inflation is very bad there. We saw that Smashburger and CBTL and your North America business has actually done quite well despite inflation. The question is actually we had some investors send this ahead. The question is more on how are consumers behaving amid inflationary pressure in North America? Are you seeing any changes in behavior? What is Jollibee doing to sort of like address the situation over there?
Sure. Let me talk about North America, in particular the U.S., which is our largest country in North America. I will start by saying we are relatively small. We have several categories and several brands. We have CBTL. Compared to Starbucks in North America, we are small. We also have our Philippine brands, so that's Jollibee, Chowking, and Red Ribbon. Again, in the chicken or fried chicken segment, we still are very small with a huge opportunity for us to scale and grow. Finally, in the burger space with Smashburger, we're not a QSR, we're fast casual, and we do benchmark ourselves to guys like Five Guys and Shake Shack.
We know that these brands do not necessarily have a large store footprint, but we know that in particular players like Shake Shack has a very strong brand. A lot of the stuff Marcos shared around Smashburger, et cetera, it's now centering around increasing the brand value of Smashburger. We continue to invest wisely. We are not opening new stores per se, but in fact, what we're doing is we're making sure our stores become more and more profitable. I do see a very significant positive curve in terms of how many stores are now becoming profitable. We're liking that strategy. We're also attracting franchisees who've now signed up.
We have a pipeline of a significant number of franchise stores that will start to open in the other years, starting from 2023 and into 2024. That again, I think, signifies that the brand has turned the corner and people are interested in becoming franchisees. I think the opportunity for us on chicken is really to make sure we do the crossover from what is right now, mostly a Philippine community-based strategy, that's been working very well for us. We have very high average daily sales, and we have very high, you know, gross margins and success rates. We're now starting to move into the mixed populations and eventually into the general population. Of course, that entails different menu, different target audience, et cetera. North America, because we're not that big yet.
I think we're still able to take market shares and still able to weather through the storm, so we continue to deliver double-digit growth. We're scaling and sizing up. I wanna put that in perspective. We're not as big as our American counterparts yet. We are growing at a faster rate than they are in terms of %.
Thanks, Richard. I think that's all the time that we promised for today. For those, Richard, I already sent Cosette the questions that were sent over now and we'll be sending you the questions and hopefully we can just get back to the participants of the call on these questions. Any closing remarks before we end the call?
Yeah. I wanna fistly thank everyone for sending questions in. We do read and look at every single one, and we do try to make an effort to get back to you in one way or another. Some of it I blended into my presentation, but some of which we will go back. Also a big thanks to my dear colleague, Marcos. Every time I see him present, I get excited about the possibilities of where Jollibee 2.0 is going. I think it's fantastic that we have, you know, veterans like Marcos on board. Thank you for your time today, Marcos. Of course, Hazel, to you and the team for always being such gracious hosts for us, and we appreciate it.
Thanks everyone for joining, and have a lovely rest of the day or the evening, depending on where you are.
With that, we end this session on Jollibee Foods. Let me take this time also to thank you, Mr. Shin, Mr. Cadena, again, Ms. Cosette, Ms. Ariem, thank you for sharing your views and thoughts today. To all the participants, thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect.
Bye-bye.
Bye.