into BKs. In December 2013, BK returned to Finland, after three decades of absence. The first restaurant, located on Mannerheimintie in central Helsinki, instantly proved so popular that on every day since its opening, people queued in front of the restaurant to get in, sometimes for over half an hour. The only exception so far has been Christmas time, when the restaurant was closed. According to Mikko Molberg, the leader of the Finnish Burger King franchise, the restaurant has attracted over 2000 customers on every single day, which has surprised the restaurant employees and the franchise owners. The long queues have been extensively covered and ridiculed in social media, comparing them to people queuing in front of a McDonald's restaurant in Moscow in the early 1990s, and contrasting them with the nearly nonexistent queues at the BK restaurants in Stockholm. In 2018, BK expanded into Azerbaijan, Greece and Kosovo, as well as re-entering the Slovakian market after nearly 7 years of absence. In June 2019, BK opened its doors in Albania after 7 months of hype in the QTU Shopping Mall. In 2020, the first 3 BK restaurants opened in Estonia. This was the period of the COVID-19 pandemic so the outlets had to be opened via Tallink by the popular videoconferencing software program Zoom. In December 2020, BK restaurants were opened in Latvia and Lithuania. North America North America is the company's home territory and home to its first non-American stores; it opened its first international restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1969. Since its purchase in 2011, Burger King has seen a 14% sales increase in its Latin American and Caribbean operations. The continued expansion in these market could provide a significant portions of Burger King's growth during the decade of the 2010s. In the Mexican market, Burger King sold 97 corporate-owned locations to its largest franchisee in that country. The deal means multi-chain operator Alsea S.A.B. de C.V will eventually operate approximately half of Mexico's 400+ Burger King locations while receiving exclusive expansion rights in Mexico for a twenty-year period. Elsewhere in Central America, Burger King entered in a deal with another of its franchises, the Beboca Group of Panama, to create a new corporate entity to handle expansion and logistics in the LAC region, which until this time had no centralized operations group. The deal follows a unification of the company's web presence in Latin America