The McDonald's Chipotle Exchange program has been making news of late. The Chipotle restaurant chain was started in Colorado, near the University of Denver, in 1993. In 1997, McDonald's made an initial minority investment in the franchise. By 1999, it had grown to a controlling interest, and, by 2005, it was a whopping 92 percent. The McDonald's connection allowed the firm to quickly expand, from 14 restaurants in 1998 to 480 at the end of 2005. Chipotle went public on January 25, 2006, at a price of $22 per share. Chipotle stock rose exactly 100 percent, closing at $44 per share.
On September 8, 2006, McDonald's Corp. announced it had started an offer for its shareholders to exchange McDonald's stock for shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill. In early August, McDonalds began looking for a reliable source for VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price) information. Above all, the fast food giant needed to rapidly build a website that could provide the hundreds of thousands of McDonald's shareholders with the information they needed to make their exchange decision. The exchange was created to allow McDonald's shareholders to acquire Chipotle shares at a 10 percent discount.
Because it is so easy to integrate Xignite web services into any application -- and because time, accuracy, and performance were critical --McDonalds chose Xignite as a partner in this mission-critical project. The actual price of this multi-billion dollar transaction was calculated using XigniteVWAP.
Take a look at the snapshot of www.ChipotleExchange.com