By Lisa Baertlein
(Reuters) - KFC parent Yum Brands Inc warned that a new bird flu outbreak in China badly hit restaurant sales there this month, even as the company also reported a sharper-than-expected slide in March sales in the country caused by the lingering impact of a separate food safety scare.
"Within the past week, publicity associated with Avian flu in China has had a significant, negative impact on KFC sales," the company said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday.
Yum did not quantify the impact.
The bird flu outbreak has already sickened 33 and killed nine, as Chinese authorities try to clamp down on rumors about the deadly virus and its potential spread.
Yum reaps more than half its overall sales in China, where most of its nearly 5,300 restaurants are KFCs. It was already struggling in the country after chemical residue was found in a small portion of its chicken supply late last year.
"This will set them back a little bit. If those (bird flu casualty) numbers go up, then the impact could be longer," said Edward Jones analyst Jack Russo.
Sales at Yum's China restaurants open at least one year fell 13 percent in March, more than the 10 percent average drop expected by analysts polled by Consensus Matrix.
The March results included a 16 percent drop at KFC and a 4 percent rise at Pizza Hut.
The company plans to educate consumers, as it has done in the past, that properly cooked chicken is safe to eat, Yum said in Wednesday's filing.
In February, KFC's sales were flat in China, which had given analysts some hope a turnaround was already taking hold.
While the March results were disappointing, they may show that the effects of the timing shift of the all-important Chinese New Year holiday on January and February were bigger than expected.
"I don't think we should interpret this, necessarily, as a step back," Sanford Bernstein research analyst Sara Senatore said.
Yum shares fell more than 2 percent to $65.20 in extended trading following the report. Yum's stock traded around $72 in late March before reports of the first deaths from the novel strain of avian flu.
(Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Phil Berlowitz, Matthew Lewis and Andre Grenon)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/yum-says-bird-flu-hits-china-april-sales-000013486--finance.html
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Over the weekend, we told you about an issue with Twitter’s Android update from last Wednesday. The issue centered around the “Me” tab not loading properly, just giving you a spinning wheel on a white screen. Users took to Twitter to complain about the bug, saying that they couldn’t access important features on the screen, like reading DMs and switching accounts. You could search for yourself and tap on your avatar to find your way to your profile, but that was a hack more than anything else. Most users just thought they had a bad connection and waited for the screen to load…forever. Today, the company released an update to the app that fixes the bug: v4.0.1 - Fixes “Me” tab loading issues - Improved UI on Honeycomb devices I’ve confirmed with multiple people who were having the problem that this update does indeed fix the issue, and the “Me” tab is now loading quickly. It didn’t seem to affect every Android device, but the folks it did affect have been pretty loud about it since last Wednesday. Here’s a tweet from just a few hours ago: https://twitter.com/Sumz__ox/status/321342582221328384 Consider the bug squashed. Twitter has been working on unifying the experience for the service on all platforms, including native apps. The main reason for pushing out updates to the mobile versions were to incorporate the new Twitter Cards that were announced last week. This was just a bump in the road for an otherwise beautifully redesigned app that now lets you cycle through your four tabs with a gesture. Now all four tabs work. [Photo credit: Flickr]