Yahoo Finance Restaurant Brands International Inc. (NYSE:QSR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Restaurant Brands International Inc. (NYSE:QSR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 30, 2024
Restaurant Brands International Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.73, expectations were $0.72. Restaurant Brands International Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good morning, and welcome to the Restaurant Brands International First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kendall Peck, RBI's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Kendall Peck: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Restaurant Brands International's earnings call for the first quarter ended March 31, 2024. As a reminder, a live broadcast of this call may be accessed on the Investor Relations webpage at rbi.com/investor and a recording will be available for replay. Joining me on the call today are Restaurant Brands International's Executive Chairman, Patrick Doyle; CEO, Josh Kobza; and CFO, Sami Siddiqui. Today's earnings call contains forward-looking statements, which are subject to various risks set forward in the press release issued this morning and in our SEC filings. In addition, this earnings call includes non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures are included in the press release available on our website. And now I'll turn the call over to Josh.
Joshua Kobza: Thanks Kendall. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today to discuss our first quarter of 2024. We talked a lot about our business and strategy during our investor event in February so I'll keep my remarks brief today and focus on the quarter. We had a good start to the year with first quarter consolidated comparable sales of 4.6% and net restaurant growth of 3.9%. This translated into system-wide sales growth of 8.1% and organic adjusted operating income growth of 7.7%. Leap day contributed about 1% to same store sales globally so that's important to keep in mind as we talk through results. We're proud of the hard work our teams and franchisees are doing to deliver outstanding product quality and service to guests every day at a great value.
That's what brings guests back and will be the driver of sales and traffic growth today and into the future. We're also making progress towards improving convenience. In addition to remodeling our restaurants we opened 43 net new restaurants this quarter. We continue to expect mid 4% net restaurant growth for 2024 with development ramping in the second half of the year. And finally after an incredible performance in 2023 our franchisees and teams delivered another quarter of improved home market franchisee profitability driven by top-line sales growth and enhanced operations. Before I shift to our segment results I'd like to address the consumer environment. As we've all seen sales across the restaurant industry have been slowing for a few quarters.
In our own data we've seen consumers become a bit more sensitive to price resulting in moderating check growth. This is why driving traffic is so important and why I'm so pleased to see our brands deliver better traffic than most of the industry this past quarter. We know value is also top of mind and while there are a few tactical things we can do on the margin you should not expect us to reinvent the wheel on value. Our priority is to continue enhancing our value proposition through our quality food and beverages at attractive price points, improved operations, and delivering a modern convenient experience for our guests. As we continue executing against our plans we feel well positioned to outperform the broader industry and traffic. Now let's turn to our results and we'll start with Tim Hortons in Canada.
We kicked off Tim's 60th anniversary year with a 7.5% increase in comparable sales, including mid-single digit traffic growth and 8.3% growth in system wide sales. These fantastic results were driven by operational and digital improvements as well as a strong marketing calendar which included the January launch of our retro donuts and omelet bites. Our high quality offerings, great value for money, incredible speed of service and unmatched convenience have made Tim Hortons the most loved restaurant brand in Canada and the number one breakfast destination for millions of Canadians. We saw the team grow sales 7.5% year-over-year in our morning daypart, which contributes over 45% to total system wide sales in Canada. On PM food, we're bringing Canadians delicious products at attractive price points, including our loaded bowls and wraps and anytime snackers, which now include our savory pinwheels.
We're dialing up the craveability of our PM food even more with the launch of our new Flatbread Pizzas which leverage our baked good credentials and offer guests a heartier meal at a really great value. To bring these delicious products from market test, our largest and most successful in recent history to national launch, we invested approximately CAD20 million alongside our franchisees to roll out high speed convection ovens across the system. Our marketing and culinary teams and restaurant owners are really excited about the future menu opportunities. This new equipment unlocks and we see a clear path to achieve double digit PM food market share in the next year or so. We're also building our great cold beverage lineup to make Tim’s a destination of choice for PM occasions.
Even during the colder winter months, sparkling quenchers remained highly sought after refreshments for our guests and helped cold beverage sales grow 12% year-over-year during the quarter. As Patio season approaches, we see an exciting opportunity to drive traffic through additional cold beverage innovations. Finally, we saw another quarter of drive-thru speed of service improvements, with average drive-thru times improving 8% year to 33 seconds. Continued restaurant trainings and ongoing adoption of our single QR code, scan and pay feature are helping to drive these great results. Tim Hortons had a great start to the year. It's an important one for the brand as we celebrate its 60th anniversary, the 50th anniversary for its beloved Tim Hortons Camp foundation, and the 40th anniversary for Tim Hortons in the U.S. Restaurant owners are gathering with Axel and his team in Toronto in June to celebrate these important milestones.
We're confident we can continue to drive growth for the business with the support and hard work of our dedicated restaurant owners, and we're looking forward to seeing them all next month. Shifting to international I'm excited to have Thiago join the leadership team as our new President of International. Thiago has done an amazing job leading our largest international region, which is Europe, the Middle East and Africa, for the past two years, and led Latin America for three years prior to that. He's been instrumental in expanding our brands internationally with the launch of Firehouse Subs International and taking Popeyes to many markets like France and Eastern Europe, just to name a few. In March, I spent time with Thiago and our partners in Asia where we visit our Burger King, Tim Hortons and Popeyes businesses in Shanghai and then visited our Tim's location in Singapore to spend time with our local partners and understand how the team is successfully translating the brand to markets across Asia.
It's clear we have a tremendous opportunity in APAC over the long-term. That said, there is work to do in certain markets like China to improve our near term path and once we have updates on that, we'll share those with you. For the first quarter, International comparable sales were 4.2% and net restaurant growth was 8.4%, driving system wide sales growth of 11.6%. Positive results in markets such as France, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Japan were partially offset by the softer consumer backdrop in China, deceleration in pricing in markets in Western Europe and the conflict in the Middle East. Our performance in the midst of these macro pressures is a testament to our strong brand position and the hard work of our teams and partners. Together, we've developed balanced menus with enticing gourmet premium and value products and are serving guests in modern, digitally enabled restaurants.
Burger King France's value menu and focus on great food coupled with excellent guest satisfaction helped the market grow its share and uphold its strong position in value for money. At Burger King Brazil, value oriented calendar initiatives and effective advertising drove top line momentum during the quarter. At Tim Hortons in Mexico, we have a really strong business and saw another great quarter of comparable sales. International digital sales grew 15% year-over-year and represented over 50% of International system sales, led by Asia Pacific, where digital represented over 55% of the region's system wide sales. We know our four brands are well-positioned to adapt to the evolving business landscape of over 120 diverse markets, with many still representing significant development opportunities for decades to come.
Shifting now to Burger King U.S., comparable sales grew 3.9% and traffic was relatively flat, while total net restaurants declined 2.8%, resulting in 2.4% system-wide sales growth. Results were driven by continued progress across all pillars of Reclaim the Flame, including marketing focused on our flame-grilled and have-it-your-way core equities and strong value messaging. Through operational improvements and a balanced menu of value and calendar initiatives, such as our $5 duos and our fiery Buffalo innovation, Burger King U.S., comparable sales and traffic once again outperformed the industry. We know we still have a lot more work ahead of us, including closing and integrating our pending Carol's acquisition, but it's clear Reclaim the Flame is driving strong early results and positioning us well to outperform in any consumer environment.
On the advertising and digital side, we spent $6 million of our Fuel the Flame investment during the quarter, and given continued franchisee profitability improvements, we're well-positioned to maintain our improved share of voice, with franchisees on track to take on the incremental 50 basis points of ad levies starting next year. Our Royal Reset refresh investments, energy from our Royal Roundtables, and targeted gold standard service trainings are establishing a stronger restaurant-level culture at Burger King that's been a driving force behind our operational improvements. We're also making strides on the digital front and saw increased mobile order and pay, kiosk usage, and adoption of our Royal Perks loyalty program drive digital sales growth of 37% year-over-year, resulting in a digital sales mix of 17%.
We are on track to complete nearly 400 remodels, both through our fully committed Royal Reset remodel program and normal course re-imaging in 2024, and now have nearly 100 Royal Reset remodels that have been open for at least six months. We're really impressed by the results we've seen so far, including average uplifts in the high teens net of control. As expected, that's down a little from the 20% figure we shared in February, as more full remodel restaurants have come into the sample. These results are giving us and our franchisees a ton of confidence that Reclaim the Flame is working, and you're seeing another clear demonstration of that confidence in the expanded co-investment we announced this morning. The $300 million investment will contribute to remodeling another 1,100 restaurants and bring us to between 85% and 90% modern image by 2028.
We're continuing to incentivize better operations and higher scope remodels, while introducing another element to incentivize urgency. By providing franchisees more meaningful contributions, the sooner they re-image. We've seen solid interest from franchisees in our new sizzle image, which we've been piloting and testing over the past few quarters, and are excited to officially make sizzle available to all franchisees soon. Tom and team are on the road with franchisees launching the new program, and we are excited to work with them to bring beautiful, digitally forward Burger Kings to more guests around the U.S. For those of you in Miami, Las Vegas, New Jersey, Northern California, and Asheville, North Carolina, I encourage you to check out our newest BKs to get a taste of what's to come in the years ahead.
I've been to all of those except Las Vegas recently, and continue the restaurants look great and guests are loving the upgraded experience. Between our Reclaim the Flame investment, pending Carol's acquisition, and this additional $300 million investment into remodels, we believe the brand is now fully funded to deliver against our long-term plans for Burger King. Now turning to Popeyes, we're excited to have Jeff Klein take on the role of President of Popeyes in the U.S. and Canada. Jeff has over 20 years of marketing experience, and was an important contributor to our ‘Easy to Love’ plan development, while leading the launch of our we don't make sense, we make chicken, brand messaging, and our wings campaign. He has amazing operations, culinary, and development teams supporting him, and he's excited to continue executing against easy to love.
Shifting to results for the quarter, Popeyes U.S. grew comparable sales 6.2%, and net restaurants 4.0% resulting in system wide sales growth of 10.2%. We're seeing exciting momentum in the early days of our journey as a wings player. The brand's first ever Super Bowl ad proved to be successful driving mass awareness to wings. In March, we built on this strength with the introduction of our newest flavor, honey-lemon-pepper, as a digital exclusive, which paved the way for new and existing guests to try all our wings, and help deliver a digital sales mix of 27%. We layered this digital promotion with our big box value deal, and both represented key drivers in our traffic, and Chicken QSR share growth this quarter. Our Easy to Run kitchen conversions are also delivering encouraging results, and enabling us to create a better experience for both team members and guests.
We started to roll out Easy to Run kitchens in clustered markets beginning with California. I visited our California Easy to Run kitchens twice now this year and have heard from franchisees and team members how impactful the simplified kitchens and automated ordering can be to our business. The best part is that the conversions can be completed in just a few nights with no restaurant downtime during the day. We're showcasing this opportunity with our franchisees next month at the Popeyes convention, which of course will be in our hometown of New Orleans, where our company restaurants will host the system in recently upgraded easy to run restaurants. The team is closely monitoring results from the Easy to Run kitchens we have today, and we look forward to sharing more updates with you on our journey later this year.
Finally, on Firehouse Subs, we saw relatively flat comparable sales in the U.S. and increased system wide sales by 3.3%. We remain focused on driving development and strengthening our digital leadership. On development, Mike and team are building a strong multi-year pipeline with attractive development incentive programs. We saw a nice traction this quarter from these programs with commitments from new and existing franchisees, including first responders, to open restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. The Firehouse team recently participated and sponsored the FDIC convention that stands for Fire Department Instructors Conference, where we served thousands of Firehouse Subs and hosted a session on becoming a firehouse franchisee. Our franchisees in Canada, some of whom are Tim's restaurant owners as well, have done a great job and we're seeing strong average unit volumes in the market.
It's clear Canadians have an appetite for more Firehouse, so we're excited to continue bringing the brand's hearty subs to new destinations across the country. We also made progress migrating to digital channels and grew digital sales mix to over 40% for the quarter. Firehouse holds the highest home market digital penetration across all of our brands and has tons of potential to further enhance its overall digital strategy. I just got back from Texas and Oklahoma with Mike and the rest of the Firehouse team visiting a couple of our best franchisees to talk about development and some of the hot new marketing innovations we're working on. Everyone's fired up for where we're going to take this brand, and I share their optimism. I'm really pleased to have Sami with us today in his new role as CFO.
Sami brings an incredible balance of financial, strategic and operational experience. Having worked across nearly all of our businesses across the last ten years. He's already proven himself to be an incredible partner to me and to the business unit Presidents as we work together to deliver against our long-term plans. So now I'll turn it over to Sami to walk through our financial results for the quarter.
Sami Siddiqui: Thank you Josh and good morning everyone. It's really great to be here today. At RBI, we have five amazing businesses and I'm excited to work with each of them to deliver on our long-term outlook of 3% plus comparable sales growth, 5% plus net restaurant growth, 8% plus system wide sales growth and at least 8% adjusted operating income growth on average over the next five years. For the first quarter, global system wide sales grew 8.1% year-over-year and our organic adjusted operating income grew 7.7%. Organic adjusted EPS declined slightly, 0.9%. System wide sales and adjusted operating income growth were largely in line with one another this quarter. That said, there were a few items that impacted results, which I'll walk you through now.
First, we estimate that the February leap day benefited consolidated comparable sales by 120 basis points, which was almost entirely offset by a 60 basis point consolidated headwind from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and a 50 basis point headwind from tough weather, largely impacting Burger King and Popeyes in the U.S. Second, we recorded just over $7.5 million of net bad debt expenses, compared to $5.5 million in Q1 of 2023, $3 million of which impacted Burger King in that quarter. Our Q1 2024 expenses were primarily split between royalties at our international segment and cost of sales in our Tim Horton supply chain business relating to coffee sales to certain international partners. Third and finally, segment G&A increased $16 million year-over-year, primarily reflecting higher compensation related expenses associated with increased headcount to support our development, franchising and operations efforts.
These items were offset by strong underlying growth in system wide sales and profitability improvements at Popeye's company restaurants, as well as the impact of restaurant acquisitions at Burger King, including 89 restaurants acquired in Q4 of 2023 and 38 restaurants added in January of this year. Shifting now to EPS, organic adjusted earnings per share decreased slightly, 0.9% year-over-year, to $0.73 per share compared to $0.75 per share last year. The decrease was primarily due to an increase in adjusted income tax expense and an increase in adjusted interest expense of approximately $16 million year-over-year driven by our September 2023 refinancing and the impact of higher U.S. benchmark rates, which flowed through to approximately 20% of our total debt.
As a reminder, Q1 2023 adjusted EPS included a $0.04 per share net benefit related to discrete non-cash tax items. Our adjusted effective tax rate this quarter was approximately 17.5%, and included a three point benefit from the timing of equity-based compensation, which typically has an outsized impact on our tax rate during the first quarter. Turning now to cash flow and capital allocation. Q1 is the seasonally smallest cash flow quarter of the year for us. And this quarter we generated $122 million of free cash flow. This quarter we spent approximately $25 million on Reclaim the Flame related investments. We returned $245 million of capital to shareholders through our dividend, which we declared for Q2 at $0.58 per common share and unit with a full year target of $2.32 per share for the full year 2024.
We ended Q1 with available liquidity of approximately $2.3 billion, including over $1 billion of cash, and our net leverage ratio was 4.8 times. We have a clear path to reaching mid four times net leverage by the end of this year, pro forma for our pending acquisition of Carrols. Now speaking of Carrols, we're also on track to complete our acquisition this quarter with a Carrols shareholder meeting to vote on the merger scheduled for May 14th. We've already secured $750 million of funding as an add-on to our existing Term Loan B, which is contingent on acquisition close. For those of you looking to incorporate Carrols into your models, we plan to report Carrols Burger King Restaurants as a separate segment with intercompany franchise and rental fees that will be eliminated upon consolidation.
Our goal in doing this is to keep the Burger King segment relatively untouched and consistent with how the business will be run over the long-term. This will become especially important as we begin refranchising Carrols restaurants in the future. I'll now provide an update on our 2024 guidance and capital allocation priorities. As a reminder, this guidance excludes the impact of Carrols. We now expect 2024 segment G&A between $665 million and $685 million, including equity-based compensation between $180 million and $190 million. This represents about a $15 million reduction from our prior segment G&A guidance, largely due to personnel changes and other identified opportunities across a variety of areas in our business. We continue to expect consolidated 2024 CapEx, tenant inducements, and incentives to be roughly $300 million, compared to around $170 million in 2023.
Of this amount, less than half will be tenant inducements and remodel incentives, which as a reminder, flow through other working capital. Given our expected increase in CapEx and tenant inducements, we expect quarterly segment depreciation and amortization will ramp over the course of 2024, from around $41 million in Q1 towards the mid-to-high $40 million range by Q4 of 2024. As it relates to capital allocation, we will continue to invest in high return opportunities for our business while returning capital to shareholders through our dividends and assessing share repurchase opportunities when appropriate. Over the long-term, we plan to maintain net leverage between three and five times. Where we land in this range will ultimately depend on market conditions.
Finally, as it relates to our long-term outlook, I'd like to address a question we've been asked on why we didn't explicitly guide towards AOI leverage. I'll reiterate what Josh shared in February. This guidance is not what we're striving for. It's what we feel we can confidently achieve over the next five years on average, and meanwhile, we are working towards achieving much bigger results. That said, I'll remind you we have a few earnings streams that don't always grow in line with our global system wide sales. And those are, number one, our property businesses at Tim's and Burger King. Number two, our supply chain business at Tim's and number three, our CPG business at Tim’s. For reference, in 2023, our CPG business represented roughly 15% of total Tim’s segment sales and 15% of Tim Horton’s segment sales less cost of sales gross profit dollars.
To wrap up, I'll be working closely with each of our Presidents and their teams to drive leverage in other areas of our business as we scale around the world and deliver even greater returns from the investments we've been making over the past few years. I look forward to working with all of you over the coming quarters, and with that, I'll hand it over to Patrick.
Patrick Doyle: Thanks Sami, and good morning everyone. When I take a step back and I look at the quarter, I'd say it was a pretty good quarter that I'd put solidly in the win column. As Tim's in Canada, Burger King in the U.S., Popeyes in the U.S., and several international markets won market share, we're beginning to see the benefit of having the right teams with the right plans and the time to execute them in the right way. And importantly, we're seeing the benefit of strongly aligning with our franchisees. The performance from Tim’s in Canada has just been stunning. Axel and team have a clear path to keep driving the business forward, giving Canadians even more reasons to love Tim’s with our growing food and beverage offerings and amazing service.
Our International segment has shown great top line resilience over the past few quarters, especially considering the broader environment affecting the whole industry. With that said, I'd really like to see us unlock the potential we know exists in China. While it's a very small portion of our results today, less than 2% of total RBI adjusted operating income, we know the long-term opportunity there is significant. We'll have more to say about this in the coming quarters. At Burger King U.S., we've now committed more than $2 billion to put the brand on the right track. When you consider today's $300 million co investment, in addition to our $250 million royal reset investments towards restaurant equipment and reimaging efforts, another $150 million towards marketing and digital, and the $1 billion acquisition and $500 million remodel commitment, we're making with Carrols.
I also think it's important to not forget that I'm talking about our investment and in addition, we will be seeing billions of dollars of accelerated investments from franchisees as well. When we work together as a system like this, the impact on the brand will be pretty spectacular. We have a great team in place, led by Tom, who's been driving a lot of positive change. And we finally have a line of sight to driving franchisee profitability past $300,000. I shared with you all in New York a few months ago that you shouldn't question our commitment to getting the brand right in the U.S. The marketing is getting better. We have the biggest focus on operational consistency that the brand has ever had. We now have a path to be nearly fully modern image across the U.S. by 2028.
Our franchisees are now on a path to strong profitability and our strong franchisees know they have the ability to drive even higher than average profits for their businesses. Now it's just down to good old fashioned execution. And that's what Tom loves as an operator. Popeyes is still early on its journey to make the brand Easy to Love. We're coming from a pretty amazing starting point with what I'd say is the best fried chicken in the business, and I'm really excited about the potential we'll unlock for franchisees, team members and guests from Easy to Run kitchen conversions. Jeff understands clearly the benefits that get unlocked by implementing all the operational changes involved here. So again, this is just a matter of focused execution in our kitchens.
At Firehouse, we're working to give more people access to the brand and our development incentive programs are helping unlock the unit growth we know this brand is capable of. I think we've been a little bit slower than expected on the growth we wanted from this brand, but Mike is making all the right development decisions for the long-term and will shortly see the benefit of that. I'm also an optimist and still would bet that Mike and team will achieve my challenge of being 100% digital by the end of 2025. Part of my confidence on achieving that is a point Josh just made. Our International business now has the majority of its sales through digital channels. That's an amazing milestone. Finally, as you saw in March, Josh now has his team in place.
I'm extremely excited about this team and what they all bring to the table. I'm confident that together this team will deliver against the long-term guidance we laid out for you in February and drive value for all our stakeholders. With that, let's take your questions.
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