Howard Friedman, president of Hilton in the UK and Ireland, said the company wishes “to grab a larger slice of the booming mid-priced market in the UK”. With a minimum of 50 Scandic hotels, the three-star hotels would compete head-on with Holiday Inn's Express brand, which has more than 100 hotels in the UK, and with Ken McCulloch's Dakota chain(see next). To develop the project Hilton Group could use part of the euro525 millions generated by the recent sale of assets. To daten, Hilton runs 142 Scandic hotels globally in the whole of Europe.