Earnings Call Transcript - FMX Q2 2025

Operator, Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to FEMSA's Second Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. Please note that this event is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to your host for today, Juan Fonseca, Investor Relations. You may begin, sir.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to FEMSA's Second Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. Today, we are joined by Juan Carlos Guillermety, CEO of Spin, formerly Digital@FEMSA; Martin Arias, our CFO; and Jorge Collazo who heads Coca-Cola FEMSA's Investor Relations team. This is the first time Juan Carlos joins us for a quarterly conference call as part of our ongoing efforts to provide more market access to our leadership team. The plan for today is for Juan Carlos to open the conversation with some background on Spin followed by a strategic discussion on where we are today in our digital endeavor. After his remarks, Martin will provide some detail on FEMSA's quarterly results. And finally, we will open the call for questions. Juan Carlos, please go ahead.

Juan Carlos Guillermety, CEO

Thank you, Juan. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today discussing and sharing with you some of the exciting progress that Spin has been making and what we're trying to build. Thank you for your interest and for joining us this morning. Let me begin by providing some brief context into why and how Spin came to be, not to make a trip down memory lane, but because so much of what Spin does today and will do in the future leverages and enables OXXO and FEMSA's digital physical assets more broadly. As most of you know, OXXO began developing a platform for basic cash payments and services many years ago. Selling prepaid long-distance telephone cards and evolving over time by enabling its customers to solve an ever-growing number of needs from utility bill payments to correspondent banking to e-commerce payment functionality broadening the scope of its service offering along with the needs of its customers. More recently, as digital platforms in the market launched and evolved, it became increasingly clear that FEMSA had an opportunity as well as the strategic need to develop its own digital platform, not only to complement its physical cash-based functionalities but to evolve OXXO's broader value proposition and strengthen its role as the most convenient way to meet everyday needs. Looking into the future, convenience retail cannot be imagined without a seamless, integrated digital experience. Spin is one of the most important aspects of how we ensure that OXXO continues to deliver convenience across both physical and digital ecosystems while accessing new profit pools. Since our foundation in 2021, we have envisioned an omnichannel ecosystem centered on payments and rewards. While we always saw it as an integrated experience, we launched Spin by OXXO, our digital wallet, and Spin Premia, our rewards program, as independent fast-to-market products focused on gaining early traction. We then saw the need to complement these assets with a B2B platform to expand our reach beyond OXXO, which led to the acquisition of NetPay. We also acquired a minority equity stake and eventually the assets of Conekta, which has served as the enabler for OXXO Pay. The e-commerce payment platform where consumers can pay for their e-commerce in cash or other means within the safety of the store. Leveraging OXXO's capillarity and reputation as a reliable and trusted service provider and the commitment of our growing team of Spinners, we have been able to consolidate a meaningful position in the market. Since inception, we have achieved the following major milestones. Spin by OXXO has created more than 14.5 million Spin by OXXO accounts, of which more than 9.4 million have been active in the last 56 days. We operate across the territory with strong penetration in nearly all municipalities. Our customer base is young and dynamic with two-thirds under the age of 45 and more than 50% of our users are women. This is specifically relevant as women have historically been underserved by financial institutions. We continue to see strong adoption, repeat usage, and most importantly, growing trust from our customers. Every month, 3.5 million users trust us to move their money through Spin by OXXO, averaging more than 21 monthly transactions per user, out of which 20% are related to offshore, either cash in, cash out, or card purchases, showing it is a very useful payment method. In Spin Premia, we have over 58 million Spin accounts, of which 26.6 million have had transaction activity in the last 90 days. Currently, more than 20 million OXXO customers benefit from the Spin Premia Rewards program each month with an average of more than 7 monthly accumulation and redemption transactions for active users. As of the second quarter, almost 46% of OXXO sales were already identified through our loyalty and rewards program. Our ecosystem is complemented by our B2B initiative, which includes NetPay and OXXO Pay, which we refer to as Spin Negocios. It extends our platform beyond OXXO stores by offering electronic payment solutions and services to micro, small, and medium-sized merchants, both in their physical establishments and in e-commerce. Today, with Spin Negocios, we reach almost 20,000 merchants and process almost MXN 12 billion on a monthly basis...

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

Thank you, Juan Carlos. Good morning, everyone. Let me begin by discussing our consolidated results for the second quarter of 2025. During the quarter, we delivered total revenue growth of 6.3% despite a challenging environment in Mexico, impacting both Proximity and Coca-Cola FEMSA, which was offset by solid top line trends outside Mexico, currency tailwinds, and the consolidation of the OXXO USA operation. Operating income increased by only 1.2% year-over-year as the more challenging consumer environment in Mexico did not allow us to absorb the inflationary effects on our cost and expenses as effectively. In addition, our operations were geared to a stronger consumer environment than the one that materialized, plus our costs and expenses ran a bit ahead of actual volume and traffic. While this impacted profitability, we remained confident in our ability to navigate short-term headwinds by maintaining strong operational discipline and leveraging the solid fundamentals of our business. Net consolidated income decreased by 64.3% to MXN 5.6 billion, driven mainly by: one, a non-cash foreign exchange loss of MXN 4.1 billion compared to a gain of MXN 6.1 billion last year, a swing of more than MXN 10 billion related to FEMSA's U.S. dollar-denominated cash position, which was negatively impacted by the sequential appreciation of the Mexican peso during the period. The second reason was a lower interest income of MXN 2.1 billion compared to MXN 4.1 billion the previous year, reflecting lower interest rates. Turning to our operating results and beginning with the Proximity Americas division, overall, the division delivered mixed results this quarter, improving sequentially at the top line level, but still reflecting a challenging consumer environment in Mexico that was partially mitigated by a robust performance in our other markets in Latam. Same-store sales declined modestly by 0.4%, once again reflecting a combination of a solid average ticket growing 6.6%, offset by weaker traffic, which contracted 6.6% as well. It is worth noting that while same-store sales remained lackluster in Mexico, they grew nicely in OXXO Latam, increasing in the high teens even after accounting for foreign currency tailwinds. While these operations are small in relative terms, these are promising results. While we are encouraged by the team's ability to drive average ticket above inflation, leveraging our targeted promotional activities and the positive seasonal effect of larger baskets around Holy Week, the sustained weakness in traffic in Mexico is a clear focal point for our commercial initiatives as we start the second half of the year. As has been the case for several quarters now, the decline in average traffic was mainly attributable to a persistently weak consumer environment in Mexico, combined with atypically adverse weather conditions across the country. This hit some core convenience categories such as soft drinks, beer, and tobacco particularly hard. On this point, our data suggests these convenience categories may have lost competitiveness relative to others across channels during the quarter. We believe this effect is not driven by SKU level pricing, but rather by the mix of presentations, such as multi-serve returnable beverages, smaller snack presentations, and low-cost cigarette alternatives, which are clearly available in other channels such as the traditional trade but not at OXXO. Total revenues for Proximity Americas grew 6.9% or 2% on an organic and currency-neutral basis, mainly driven by the continued expansion of our network by 1,500 stores year-on-year, a strong performance in our Latam markets, the consolidation of OXXO USA as well as a favorable exchange rate. Gross margin remained stable at 44.1% and expanded by 120 basis points if we exclude the options outside Mexico. Operating income decreased by 2.8%, while operating margin decreased by 90 basis points to 9%. Operating expenses grew faster than revenues. However, it is worth noting that selling expenses, the biggest component of our OpEx grew in line with our expansion of 6.3%, thus reflecting our continued efforts to offset labor cost increases with greater FTE efficiency in the stores through the use of data analytics and new more flexible shift policies. On the expansion front, Proximity Americas added 334 net new stores in the quarter, in line with our plan...

Ben Theurer, Analyst

I wanted to take the opportunity to dig a little bit more into some of the comments you made in the opening and talking a little bit about Spin and the opportunities here and particularly how you think to bring this back into Proximity Americas and to hopefully trying to see some sort of a recovery. As you've seen the business evolving over the last couple of years from the early stages to now and obviously, you're showing progress here on still acquiring new customers with them actually using the platform. What would you say are the missing pieces in order to really make the most out of Spin and Spin Premia as it relates to really boosting again maybe some of that traffic or some of that recovery of the Proximity stores, particularly in Mexico? That would be my question.

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

We're going to take a couple of seconds. We'll be on mute for a little bit. Thank you for the question. I'd like to first highlight that in terms of where we see the future from an OXXO perspective, we're already well underway in leveraging the data that comes from our Premia Rewards program to accelerate our retail media efforts. And the early results are quite promising as we have more data on our customers, and we continue to penetrate further into our base, our expectation is that how we can personalize and customize our offers is going to continue to improve, allowing us to drive higher commercial income. On the Spin side of things, we're very early in our monetization journey as we're currently only starting to explore financial services, including savings and credit products. We launched our first personal loans earlier in the year and are very excited about the prospects of how this can evolve in the future but recognize that we're going to be doing so in a very careful manner and taking time to progress our financial services value proposition. Lastly, I would highlight that we have interest in moving all of our Spin products beyond OXXO, beyond Proximity and Health to have a much wider value proposition, and we're also quite early in that journey that will start primarily focused on payments and rewards and evolve into financial services as well.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

I think I would also add that if you look at the tender, the percentage of OXXO sales going through the Premia program is increasing by 1 or 2 percentage points each month. We reported a figure today of about 45.8%, almost 46%, but in reality, June was already at 47%. So, I'm confident that in three months we'll be discussing rates in the 50s. We're still in the early stages of people adopting this, which is influencing their habits to visit OXXO more frequently and prefer it over other options because of the rewards. This affects engagement whether people are using their physical card or the app, contributing to the overall purpose of Spin as an ecosystem. The growth rates have been impressive, considering this initiative has only been around for just over a couple of years. I believe there's much more to come as people become aware that choosing OXXO for transactions offers benefits that were not available until recently.

Benjamin M. Theurer, Analyst

Can I just quickly follow up on that? So with that tender going up, are you seeing better traffic data with the ones that are signed up for Spin/Spin Premia than traffic data with the customers that aren't signed up? So is there something that potentially can help you recovering the traffic as we move into the coming quarters and into 2026?

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

In fact, we do because that 47% of sales tend to favor heavy users. In other words, the percentage of users that represent that 47% is a lower percentage. And so what that indicates to you is it drives loyalty and engagement with people. So people are obviously choosing to go more to the store more frequently to buy more things driven by the access to the points. And that the value proposition of that program is still going to experience significant improvement in terms of customization, in terms of the types of promotions you offer as we refine the data, we improve the data, and we learn more how to use the data without overwhelming the consumer.

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

I think there's also kind of a double-click you can do on the tender number because the number we give you is percentage of sales, but we're increasingly tracking and incentivizing the number of transactions, which would connect with traffic more directly. And then, of course, there's a second click, which has to do with services transactions, right? Because those give you a lot of information that is very different; what you can glean from a transaction of somebody buying a Coke as opposed to somebody paying their bills. And so there's still a lot of room to keep improving that data acquisition and processing and then implementation within the Spin ecosystem.

Álvaro García, Analyst

My question is for Juan Carlos, given he's on the line as much as I'd love to ask about OXXO on culture, sort of other FEMSA subsidiaries very much focused on profitability. You've had the benefit of sort of being isolated from that mentality for some time now at FEMSA Digital. How do you feel about FEMSA Digital fitting within OXXO to really leverage that physical footprint? And this is obviously in the context of potentially leaning into certain services.

Juan Carlos Guillermety, CEO

Thanks for the question. Generally, we're excited. I think the environment inside of FEMSA is one where we have the independence and the autonomy to drive a differentiated culture within Spin than the rest of FEMSA. It's a culture that is much more consumer tech-focused where we have a strong emphasis in agility and rapid iteration testing based on customer needs and demand. And hence, we've been able to develop our own culture within Spin. Now I recognize that our right to play starts from the assets that we have within FEMSA, more specifically with the capillarity that we have with OXXO and the significant footprint and customer presence across the OXXO platforms, which requires a tremendous amount of collaboration between our teams that although it is a challenge given the differences around culture, the reality is that we have strong alignment, both at the Board as well as at the management level that we need to evolve our thinking towards digital. And hence, this is a strategic imperative for the company, and there's a tremendous amount of focus from the OXXO team in working together with Spin as we evolve our value prop. On your question related to cash burn and our ability to be more aggressive on the growth side and not necessarily as focused on profitability, you're absolutely right. Within Spin, we recognize that for us to be a relevant digital platform, we have to have the scale, the massive penetration within Mexico and the frequency of use, and that requires us investing in the business to be able to drive that stickiness that ultimately will enable us to drive two significant opportunities, as we mentioned earlier in our remarks. The first one is evolving OXXO's convenience value proposition into digital with a much more digital value proposition that leverages both their existing physical footprint and our Spin digital ecosystem.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

I would like to highlight two small points. First, in terms of alignment between the two organizations, we aim to establish a system of joint P&Ls and joint KPIs by the end of this year that will apply next year. This system will ensure that key executives who need to collaborate in OXXO and Spin will have a significant portion of their bonuses tied to the same objectives. We believe this will better align interests and efforts. Second, to be fair to Spin, we are quite conservative in how we assess cash burn. As Juan Carlos pointed out, to consider Premia a breakeven business, the required percentage increase in sales is extremely low—very low single digits. Essentially, if you look at the additional sales multiplied by the gross margin, considering that 47% of sales linked to Premia should drive incremental sales, it's clear that Premia is currently profitable. However, we wanted to avoid measurements that could justify excessive spending. Therefore, we intentionally decided to focus on the actual costs incurred and the points sold to OXXO for the purposes of the P&L and cash burn at Spin.

Thiago A. Bortoluci, Analyst

I would like to explore more the same-store sales dynamics at OXXO Mexico, right? Now it's been roughly the fourth quarter in a row that we are discussing traffic and what is happening there, what are the pressures? And when will it inflect? Obviously, there are a lot of moving parts, weather, macro that comes from the elections. But one thing that caught our attention this quarter was in the beginning of the presentation in Martin's prepared remarks, he said some loss of competitiveness versus other channels and other points of sales. #1. And on the opening remarks on the press release, I see a focus from management to work on assortment.

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

It's not like we've been increasing the prices on an SKU level. But again, I think the best example is, for example, beer. Before you were buying one-way glass presentations, so you were buying cans, and now because you have a little bit less money in your pocket because of the economy, when you have some friends over, you're going to buy the 1-liter returnable beer package and share it with a group of friends. If OXXO doesn't have that packaging presentation, then in effect, it's at a competitive disadvantage. But that second part, we believe, is generally addressable, and we're working on that, both in beverages as well as in snacking with smaller presentations and lower-priced tobacco products. An example is, we're seeing it with Bara as well. If you sparse out Bara and strip out convenience categories and just leave the categories that go head-to-head with other similar discount channels, you can clearly see that we're doing fine on the non-convenience categories, but in the convenience categories, the consumer is simply being more conservative and more cautious in addition to the weather issues, which central to anybody who's in Mexico City knows that the last quarter was particularly cold for the time of the year and in other parts of Mexico, more rain. But we have to react to that, and there is a laundry list of very, very, very long initiatives that have been triggered by the OXXO team around beer, soft drinks, packaging formats, our coffee value proposition, more promotional activity with our supplier partners that we hope will help improve this issue with the traffic during the second half of the year.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

Let me start by addressing this and then Martin can add to it. The situations in Mexico and Brazil are very different. In Health, Mexico is undergoing significant changes. The team is analyzing various strategies for moving forward. The national approach and efforts to enter less familiar areas have not worked as anticipated, leading to over 400 store closures and restructuring. We have some innovative ideas on how to disrupt the industry and change our approach. In Brazil, we have closed a few stores from earlier cohorts and are gaining insights into effective strategies. We expect growth in Brazil to be around 20% in the near future, and we are very optimistic about it. It's important to note that the store closures in Mexico's Health segment and the few in Grupo Nós are unrelated.

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

I asked the OXXO team to analyze stores near hard discount channels and assess whether there was a decline in same-store sales in those locations. The difference is minimal, about 1%. I also requested a mapping of categories in hard discount stores compared to OXXO. The overlap is roughly 20%. The reasons consumers visit OXXO for coffee, financial services, Coca-Cola products, or quick snacks are quite different from those in hard discount stores. We believe OXXO competes effectively with Bara, and we expect both formats to coexist with limited overlap.

Rodrigo Alcantara, Analyst

I want to take the discussion on Proximity Americas just, but on the OpEx side. On one hand, selling expenses, I mean, it was really impressive, the achievements that we saw right, on you guys decelerating the pace of OpEx growth. I mean you mentioned there about the initiatives to have a more efficient labor usage, right? So my question on the OpEx side related to labor is, is it fair to assume this run rate that we saw this quarter to project forward? And how would you say in relation to the 40-hour working week, how compliant would you say you are currently right now to comply with that new regulation as a result of these changes that you have implemented?

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

Sure. A couple of quick things. Let me start with your compliance question. Look, we're always trying to get a little bit ahead of the curve because OXXO is a very big ship. And so it's not a ship that moves on a dime, and it's not moved from one quarter to another, and changes require changes in the operations, systems, culture, and so on. So today, we are not compliant with the 40 hours because it's not the law. But we have been running experiments in certain plazas and certain areas at 45 hours and at 40 hours to see how we would change our operations. Those plans are producing very valuable insights of how you want to use dynamic shifts. So in other words, not everybody in a store has to be at the store the same amount of time. So you can start the day with less people if it's a slow breakfast store and then bring in more people during lunch when you have a lot of activity if it's a store in a downtown business district. Then in the evening, also you can move down. You can move people so that they work a total of 40 hours or 45 hours or 43 hours wherever the labor reform ends up, but you can ask them to work a little bit more certain days and a little bit less other days or give them more days off so that you use them. There are a lot of learnings that are being developed as we speak.

Ricardo L. Alves, Analyst

First question on net income. Considering your operations were relatively in line with what we expected at least. But as it pertains to the bottom line, we saw a big miss relative to what we expected. We saw higher taxes and significantly lower equity income. Can you just share more details on what's driving this volatility below the line just so that we have a better basis to model the second half of the year as it relates mainly to equity income and then also taxes because effective taxes were also higher than expected?

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

Let me start with the below-the-line question. The single most important reason for the decline in net income is one thing, which is an MXN 10 billion swing caused by foreign exchange losses on our U.S. dollar excess cash balances. That just happened to be a very good year last quarter, the second quarter of 2024. Here, it was worse because of the peso decline. And in that way, it's a little tricky, particularly difficult to understand, but the balance sheet items are impacted quarter-on-quarter with FX moves quarter-on-quarter, while P&L are moving really with year-to-year FX movements. And so if you back that MXN 10 billion out, that explains most of it. So without a doubt, if you believe that the exchange rate is going to remain stable, that number should be towards 0. If you believe the peso will devalue, you will see again periods where we have very good profits. So I would tell you below the line, that is the thing that's moving.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

I would like to talk a little bit about July. Martin always gives me a little bit of a hard time because I look for the green shoots. If the month of July ended today, same-store sales are positive in the low single digits. That's for whatever that's worth. Certainly, I think on the other part of that question in terms of some of the stuff that's being done, that rotation in and out of larger presentations, returnables, kind of changes to the price package. Those have happened over time several times. I mean in my tenure, I've seen it happen probably two, three times, where the consumer begins to ask for those multi-serve presentations in both beer and soft drinks, where returnable mix goes up and then eventually things get better and people don't want to deal with the hassle of returnables and you go back to the single-serve one ways. I think we're kind of in the middle of that. And obviously, we're in this process where more of the SKUs at OXXO are going to resemble some of those SKUs at the mom-and-pop where you can kind of do the sharing that Martin was talking about on the multi-serves and the returnables. But there are also these two big external factors, right? The weather and again, if you look at other numbers from people that have reported, they all seem to converge on how beverages and convenience categories suffered during the quarter.

Bob Ford, Analyst

Juan Carlos, how do you think about the sustainability of Spin's consumer fee-based revenue? And how do you see that evolving over time, if at all? And can you talk a little bit about your deal with Mercado Pago? How should we think about the fee income and traffic generation with Mercado Pago versus other correspondent banking agreements?

Juan Carlos Guillermety, CEO

I'll start with the second part of your question, which is the deal with Mercado Pago. There, I would highlight that we're committed to continuing to open our infrastructure to all players in Mexico. We see an opportunity to continue to grow our ecosystem. And hence, we view the deal with Mercado Pago similar to many of the other fintechs that are now part of our network as an enabler of consumer choice and ensuring that we have a robust offering as customers access the store. It's primarily related to both cash in and cash out. There are currently some pilots around pick up and drop off that we are doing with Mercado Libre, where we are excited about the prospects of how that can evolve into a digital solution over time enabling our customers to be able to purchase on Mercado Libre and hence, pick up and drop off depending on their needs directly in the store. Those are still very early stage. However, we do think that that's going to be something that could be relevant down the line, especially as we continue to evolve our own digital ecosystem.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

One of the things that has surprised me and proves the power of the platform of OXXO is every time a new fintech player gains access to OXXO, they put out press releases describing it as new strategic partnerships that we're developing. The reality is they're being managed like all the other people who access our payment platform. There's nothing special or unique about what Mercado Libre is doing within our OXXO stores as compared to any other traditional financial institution or other e-commerce businesses. So for us, it's sort of business as usual to bring in and give access to more players that gives more optionality to our customers.

Antonio Hernandez Veleija, Analyst

If you could exclude the weather impact on traffic and same-store sales, how was the quarterly performance?

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

Traffic ex weather is the question, Antonio. We're having a little difficulty hearing you. It sounds very muffled. The line sounds very muffled. We apologize, but we had a little bit trouble understanding the question.

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

When you look at the categories, I also asked them to help me map all the categories of a hard discount which I know is the subject of a lot of comments that we get.

Ulises Argote, Analyst

On the release, you cited some weakness there on the convenience categories. Could you share some additional color around how much is convenience there from the mix in Bara? You put some numbers there on the release, but any additional color is obviously appreciated.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

If you ask me kind of read the tea leaves looking into the future, certainly, the focus internally is put on the private label part of things and on at least doubling the mix of private label and really continue to move the value prop towards more of a harder discount.

Carlos Alberto Laboy, Analyst

Juan Carlos, I was hoping that you could speak to your interactions with the Board of Directors with their level of support and how their skill and their understanding of the firm's changing digital needs, how it's evolving.

Juan Carlos Guillermety, CEO

Interaction with the Board has been great. I'm very excited about the commitment that they have behind the Spin efforts. If anything, they're looking for us to be much faster in our deployment and execution, looking for the synergies that come from providing a value proposition that has the mix of the physical assets on the OXXO side with Spin's digital value proposition. In terms of the expertise on the Board, there've been significant changes, and I'll let maybe Martin and Juan talk to them over the course of the last couple of years. We do have a number of Board members that are versed in the digital arena, having gone through transformations on their own, both within big tech companies in the U.S. and driving those value propositions across different markets as well as through traditional retail and moving towards a more digital offering.

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

There are two people in particular who have been now on the board for 1.5 years, 2 years, Gibu Thomas and Daniel Alegre, both in previous jobs have had involvement in digital businesses. And in one case, Juan is now very involved in the media business. The areas of focus of the questions and the challenges that they do on the Board are around the cooperation of OXXO and Spin and how do we make sure that those two organizations cooperate better.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

The Board is not static, right? Just as FEMSA, we've gone through the whole FEMSA Forward process, our mix of core businesses obviously has changed over the past decade, so too has the composition of the Board. It connects with the efforts of Jose Antonio in reducing the size of the Board, but also in getting new blood and new talent and new experience into it that is fully consistent with the challenges that the company is looking at and really the DNA of the company today.

Juan Carlos Guillermety, CEO

I would like to highlight that the recent changes in administration in OXXO Mexico have been quite positive. Carlos Arroyo's addition to the team, having led the digital efforts at and then also having been intimately involved with the transformation of Walmart in Central America has created a different type of discourse for us at Spin as we think about our collaboration efforts between OXXO Mexico and Spin that is allowing us to gain momentum across our teams.

Ricardo L. Alves, Analyst

A quick question for Martin on capital allocation. We did see the conclusion of the ASR program. And based on what's been announced, I think that you made reference to that in your preliminary remarks, that would imply perhaps another ASR. So just wanted to see if you have any expectations around that.

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

Again, our commitment is we're targeting $900 million of buybacks from March '25 to March '26. We're about 40% there. We're like $375 million, I think, is the number between the local market purchases and the ASR. Our commitment is towards that $900 million March to March as our target. Obviously, it will always depend on market conditions, but that really should be what people are focusing on of $900 million more than anything that happens or doesn't happen from one quarter to another.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

At the end of the day, we're kind of halfway the 3-year time frame that we provided to get to the 2x. And we're at 0.93. So I think that number changed more in the last three months than it had before. So we're almost at the halfway mark if we think about that North Star of 2x.

Emiliano Hernández Marvan, Analyst

I was wondering if maybe you can share some insights in Europe. Sales look very resilient in the quarter. I wonder if you can comment on how you're seeing the consumer dynamics there.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

One message we’ve certainly communicated about our European operations is that the nature of organic growth in Europe differs somewhat from what we experience in our Latin American markets. Specifically, the number of locations suitable for setting up an avec store in Europe is not as abundant. What we've observed is the Valora team has successfully engaged in transactions where they collaborate with gas station operators. Due to Valora’s strong execution and the recognition they have through the avec brand and beyond, they are often invited to manage the stores for those gas stations.

Operator, Operator

There are no further questions. So I will hand it back to your host to conclude today's conference.

Juan F. Fonseca, Investor Relations

Thank you, everyone, for your time and your interest in FEMSA.

Martin Felipe Arias Yaniz, CFO

And as always, Pam and Alex and myself are always available for follow-ups. So have a great week. Thank you, guys.