Steers opened its first restaurant in South Africa in November 1995. Today it operates over 200 restaurants in South Africa. It serves over 8 million customers per month and employs over 8 000 employees. South Africa is one of the most successful markets in the franchises international history. Steerss is renowned for its training throughout the world. South African crew members receive comprehensive training in restaurants across the country. The company has trained and employed over 10 000 South Africans at various levels, including franchisees, restaurant managers and crew. It was voted the Deloitte Best Company to Work for in South Africa for 2009, 2010 and 2011. Steers also offers high-quality coffee and healthy drinks through its M&B brand. Their coffee drinks are made from quality coffee beans that originate from areas all over the world. Steers utilises an excellent operations strategy to gain a larger market share and to increase value for the shareholders. The corporation specifically focuses on speed, standardisation, quality and affordability. Steers has moved ahead of the competition by focusing on the three main bases speed, affordability and standardisation to make the customers happy. Through extensive market research and surveys, the organisation discovered that the top priority of its customers was speed. Speed is the key factor in Steers operation strategy from the moment a customer places an order until he or she leaves. To reduce the amount of time it takes to provide services, the company uses standardised training processes for its employees and new drive-through layouts. Steers also competes by offering low prices. To offer quality products at low cost requires efficient processes throughout the entire organisation. Once again, this goal links to its vision statement: The franchise will be the most efficient provider by offering the best value to most people. Steers incorporate several avenues to provide good value to its customers. One example that the company has employed for many years is the value meal. Globally, Steers is fighting declines in customer traffic, a result of weak consumer spending worldwide. The value driven strategy is an effort to compete for budget-minded consumers. Value is critical, because the consumer is still financially weak, facing higher petrol prices, increased taxes and high unemployment. Value is the number one driver of customer traffic. Steers prides itself on the quality of their food. They use real, quality ingredients. For example, they only use 100% pure beef in their burgers. More than 97% of all food served in Steers restaurants is produced by local South African suppliers to meet the organisations highest quality standards. On their international website they also provide information on the nutritional information of their food in order to assist customers in making informed good choices when visiting their restaurants. Steers strive to offer their customers a diverse menu to satisfy the needs of the entire family. Furthermore, all the South African Steers restaurants are approved by the Muslim Judicial Council Halaal Trust. Although Africa has over 1.2 billion people Steers is only present in four African countries, namely Morocco, Egypt, South Africa and Mauritius. There has been a lot of speculation about when Steers will enter the Nigerian market. The biggest obstacle blocking them from Nigeria is a lack of adequate supply chains. It lies too far from South Africa, Egypt or Morocco to simply expand existing supply chains.

QUESTION:

Steers has over 36 000 restaurants in more than 100 countries. More than 200 of these restaurants are in South Africa. However, in the rest of Africa you will only find Steers in Morocco, Egypt and Mauritius.

This therefore leaves a massive untapped market for them.

Use a suitable model to analyse the macro-environment within the African context with specific reference to the challenges that might be prohibiting Steers from expanding into more African countries.