Bryan Maher - Collins Stewart

Good morning, guys. Quick question as it relates to hotel acquisitions and all the discussion going on with the stressed hotels. You really haven''t talked about that much here. Given your cash availability, is there any effort at all on the part of Starwood to look at hotels that may or may not be stressed where you have a need to increase your market share in a particular location?

Frits D. van Paasschen

Yeah. I think the bigger strategic statement to make around that is that we continue to want to move towards being asset light. I think that under all circumstances though we would want to continue to have peripheral vision. Our preference, though, would be to have any available opportunities like that done with a partner, someone that we can turn to who has a long-term interest in owning real estate.

Where we would be really excited is to continue to add brands to our portfolio which isn''t to say we feel like we need any to fill holes but our success over the last four or five years with Le Meridien in terms of cleaning up that brand generating RevPar increases, bringing SBG, combining the SG&A into our own existing platform, I think has shown that that''s a real vehicle for us to create value. We''re not modeling or anticipating that but we''re certainly looking opportunistically to see whether that might be something we could do.

Jason Koval

Next question, please.

Operator

Your next question is from Jeffrey Donnelly from Wells Fargo.

Jeffrey Donnelly - Wells Fargo Securities

Frits. How should we think about growth in your unit pipeline from this point over the next few years? So many of your flagship products, W and arguably Westin, are largely new construction assets. At least they market themselves that way. The economics of ground-up construction really don''t make a lot of sense for partners today.

Frits D. van Paasschen

Well. I think you have to take a global perspective and the fact of the matter is outside of the U.S. and may be Western Europe, there actually still are great opportunities for ground-up construction. And as importantly, there are financial resources available to support that. Inside the U.S., what we have worked carefully to do is to make sure that, in essence, all of our brands are conversion friendly brands and that we will continue to look at opportunities to do that. So I mentioned on this call that this year will be the third straight year in which we''ll have greater than 8% unit growth.

I think looking forward we can sustain that for a while and that the number of hotels exiting the system ought to taper off, now that we''ve gotten closer to completing our cleaning up of the Le Meridien and Sheraton brands. I think the unit growth story for us will be very good. Particularly with the shift towards international markets, as we mentioned on the call, 80% of our pipeline looking forward will be development of new hotels outside of the U.S. and I think that just speaks to the robust opportunity we''re continuing to see in so many markets, particularly developing ones around the world.

Jason Koval

Next question, please.

Operator

Your next question is from Janet Brashear from Sanford Bernstein.

Janet Brashear - Sanford C. Bernstein

Thank you. Speaking of those developing markets around the world, I''m wondering if you see more opportunity in these emerging markets in the full service segment or the select service segment and particularly relative to the secular change in the select service segment. We haven''t seen a big track record of success relative to global brands versus, say, regional brands and independents in other markets. What will make this cycle different?