MANILA, Philippines - Local fastfood giant is ramping up its overseas expansion to fuel future growth despite the current global economic slump, aiming to raise the share of offshore business to 50 percent of the total in about eight years.

JFC’s international strategy is two-fold: Bring the Jollibee, Chowking and Red Ribbon brands to markets with heavy concentration of overseas Filipinos and expand in fast-growing markets by acquiring homegrown brands—like in mainland China—and expanding them.

“Fastfood is quite resilient [to global slump]. Therefore, we just have to make sure we focus on value and product taste. Those are the key. Customers will always be eating out; the challenge is: Can you get them or not?” JFC president Tony Tan Caktiong said in a briefing after the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting last Friday.

“Of course, if the economy is in recession, we also slow down, but we’re still doing well,” he said.

Later this year, the group will open one Jollibee and another Chowking store in Qatar as part of its expansion in the Middle East. The group has 10 Chowking stores in Dubai.

In about eight years from now, JFC’s business may be evenly split between domestic and international as far as sales are concerned, said company chief finance officer Ysmael Baysa.

Five years ago, the overseas business contributed only 3 percent of total sales. As of last year, the share has gone up to 13 percent and further to 16 percent as of the first quarter of this year.

“It’s going there,” Baysa said, noting that starting next year, JFC may start opening more stores overseas than in the Philippines. “If you grow organically, then acquire other business abroad, the combination of that will drive growth.”

In 2008, JFC opened 186 new stores, the most it has launched in a single year. Of the new store additions, 76 or 41 percent were outside the Philippines—45 in China (Yonghe King), 21 in the United States and 10 in other countries.

The JFC group has 1,821 stores, of which 306 are overseas. The flagship Jollibee brand, for instance, has 26 stores in the US and nine in Vietnam. Chowking has 17 in the US.

But the biggest overseas expansion so far is in China, where JFC had acquired two restaurant chains. It also signed a joint-venture agreement for a 70-percent share in Lao Dong, a 9-branch restaurant chain in Taiwan.

Last year, it acquired Hong Zhuang Yuan, a restaurant chain with congee as its core product with 38 stores located mostly in Beijing.