Restaurant Brands International Inc. Q1 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good morning and welcome to the Restaurant Brands International First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stephen Lichtner, RBI's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Restaurant Brands International's earnings call for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021. As a reminder, a live broadcast of this call may be accessed through the Investor Relations webpage at investor.rbi.com, and a recording will be available for replay.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on today's call for the first quarter of 2021. I hope everyone is doing well. On many fronts, our first quarter signaled several positive performance indicators that are so important to our long-term business and growth model. Before getting into the quarter, let me take a moment to highlight the foundational elements of our business model and then tie together the indicators that are giving us confidence that we're getting back on track as we emerge from more than a year of COVID impacts. RBI is a fully franchised global business with three amazing iconic brands. Our growth model relies on stable year-over-year comparable sales growth from our existing restaurants in addition to expanding our restaurant footprint around the world at a healthy pace. In the years leading into 2020, comparable sales averaged about 2% to 3% on a global basis, while we grew our restaurant count about 5% annually. At our Investor Day, in May 2019, we shared our aspiration of growing to 40,000 restaurants within eight to 10 years. And we remain committed to that aspiration despite a year of flat growth in 2020, because of COVID disruptions and our proactive strategic closure program. Foundational to our global growth strategy is unlocking the substantial opportunity to grow our brands in many countries where we're underpenetrated today versus our top competitors. And that we attract stable, well-capitalized and experienced operators and investors in the QSR space to deliver on multi-year growth commitments in order to achieve that unlock. In fact, this is exactly what you've seen from our recent global expansion announcements in Q1 and I'll speak about that in a few minutes.

Thanks, José, and good morning, everyone. I want to take just a couple of minutes to revisit our digital strategy. A great example from the quarter and how we can learn from it strengthens targeted conversion within our marketing funnel across all of our businesses today and into the future. If you imagine the non-digital guest experience for a moment, we rely on a powerful, recognizable brand and memorable advertising to attract you to our restaurants. We focus on a few famous core products that are differentiated from our competitors. We entice our guests with visual menu boards and point of purchase materials at the restaurant that highlight deals we think our guests will value. We focus on providing a positive interaction with our team members and serving you hot, delicious food in a timely and accurate way. And we do panel studies, one-on-one interviews and samples of guest feedback to understand how our guests react to the experience we offer, and then use that data to make adjustments for the next time they come in. Now, I'm simplifying it a bit, but not that much. That was how our industry operated for a long time before the power of fully integrated digital experiences, combined with leveraging technology and data has begun to change the way that we and others manage our business. The foundation of our digital and technology strategy is our guest. We want to be part of the smartphone in their hand and be one of the apps that they return to frequently. This is an important point. We've spent decades to develop and protect our iconic brands. We want to design every step of the guest journey with our brand. And we can best do that on our digital platforms. In our own applications, whether on desktop, mobile, kiosk, digital menu boards or any device where we interact with our guests. We are building our apps and our associated digital loyalty programs to be highly engaging, and a reason to visit our brands more frequently, driving lifetime value of our guests' relationships and deepening connections with our own brands. A great example from this quarter that we believe is a guide for the future is the Roll Up to Win experience that José mentioned earlier. We took something historical, iconic and unique to our Tim Hortons brand, and brought it into the modern digital world in a caring and highly guest-focused way. Through that transition, we were able to bring a very large group of our Tim's guests a lot closer by creating a new digital relationship. But we also drove engagement with existing guests spending more time on the app, something we plan to sustain with games, contests, and more reasons to use the Tim Hortons digital ecosystem in the future. Ultimately, this deepening of our guests' engagement is allowing us to better understand our guests and drive sales through more personalized offers. That is to say we are using better offers in addressing a larger portion of our guest base. And it means that our digital platforms are having a more relevant impact on our business than ever before. José mentioned that we are deploying loyalty programs at Burger King and Popeyes as well, which will help to reinforce the already large and growing number of guests engaged on our digital platforms at those brands. Fundamentally what this allows us to do is work very differently and much more efficiently with our marketing funnels across our businesses. Many of the members of our rewards or loyalty programs tend to be some of our most loyal fans. And we can now personalize the offers and messaging that they receive to improve their experience and offer suggestions for other dayparts or menu items that they might like to try. We have also leveraged these channels to communicate about purpose-driven messages that are important to our guests, like Tims For Good, or our recent Popeyes quality campaign bringing even greater visibility to the great work our brands do, at little to no media cost. This is a much more efficient way of marketing to our guests, and we're excited about the path ahead of us. Alongside loyalty, we've discussed significantly expanding our outdoor digital menu board footprint, with plans to have over 10,000 drive-thrus equipped by mid-2022. It's exciting to see the menu boards installed so far, producing a quantifiable uplift in sales even while we were early in rolling out and optimizing our predictive selling capability, and fully integrating our loyalty programs. With that in mind, we continue to work closely with our franchisees to roll the boards out across the system as quickly as possible, while our engineers and product teams continue to improve the software capabilities. I'll stop there for now and pass the call over to Matt to cover financial results.

Thanks, Josh, and thanks everyone for joining us this morning. While we're still working through COVID-related headwinds in various parts of the world, as José mentioned, we've seen solid underlying progress against our plans in many areas of the business. When we look at our consolidated results, we see the benefit of our global scale and diversification across three great brands and a differentiated set of partners around the world who remain focused on growing their businesses. As a result, our global system-wide sales for the quarter were up 1.4% and our adjusted EBITDA was up over 5% organically year-over-year. The undergrowth in system-wide sales, I would call out two other factors contributing to our growth in adjusted EBITDA. First, while we haven't historically had meaningful bad debt expenses, we did increase our bad debt provision in 2020 to reflect an increased risk environment. As sales and unit level profitability have now largely rebounded, we're seeing some release of cautionary provisions which accounted for about one and a half points of our year-over-year growth. Additionally, our Tim Hortons retail business in particular has performed very well throughout the lockdown environment, as a result of market share gains, new product listings with some of our largest partners, expansion into new markets in the U.S., and adding points of distribution. Overall, our growth in retail also added about one and a half points to our year-over-year growth in adjusted EBITDA. Next, we wanted to provide a quick update on G&A. During our last call I mentioned that we expect to continue making proactive investments in digital and technology initiatives, as well as adding hires across a number of key areas, all leading to sizeable year-over-year increases in G&A. When looking at the first quarter, and adjusting for timing and one-off expenses last year, our segment G&A was up slightly year-over-year consistent with Q4. However, as we look forward, we expect these investments to increase over the course of the year as we ramp-up our various initiatives. And as José mentioned earlier, we also recently announced CAD$80 million of support behind the Tim Hortons marketing program in Canada. This, along with other advertising expenses will flow through a newly separated line item in our P&L added as part of an effort to enhance disclosure around advertising expenses, revenues, and core segment G&A. We hope this enhanced disclosure makes things easier for everyone to understand going forward. Now turning to EPS. Our first quarter adjusted earnings per share of $0.55 grew at a higher rate than our consolidated adjusted EBITDA at about 15% year-over-year, including an FX benefit of about 2%. The higher growth was further supported by a lower effective tax rate, mainly as a result of stock-based compensation realized during the quarter and a lower share count following our $380 million share repurchase last year. These tailwinds were slightly offset by higher stock-based compensation and D&A. José talked quite a bit about the underlying progress and opportunities that are driving our positive outlook on the business. And along with that, we're moving forward on our key capital projects, including investing behind remodels and rolling out outdoor digital menu boards across the Tim Hortons system, both of which we expect to ramp up as the year progresses. From a capital structure perspective, we ended the quarter with slightly lower net leverage relative to the end of 2020 now at 6x. While net leverage may seem high relative to other industries, we're very comfortable with our position for a number of reasons. First, our liquidity position is solid between our $1.6 billion of cash on hand and our undrawn revolver; we have about $2.6 billion available. We also have no upcoming maturities until 2024 and approximately 80% of our capital structure is fixed at attractive rates as a result of the refinancing work we've done over the last few years. And most importantly, as José mentioned earlier, our business model as a franchisor is very efficient, and our high conversion of earnings to cash flow provides plenty of capacity to cover our debt service obligations multiple times over. And finally to wrap things up, I'm pleased to share that we declared a dividend of $0.53 per common sharing unit, payable on July 7, 2021, which extends our industry-leading dividend consistent with our previously announced target of $2.12 for 2021. With that, I'd like to thank everyone again for your support. And we'll now open the line for questions.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. The first question comes from Jon Tower with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Great, thanks for taking the question. Lots to dig through today and congrats on the progress. I'm just curious; perhaps you could dig into the incremental ad fund contribution that you've made or plan to make in Tim Hortons Canada? Can you discuss how you plan to utilize the incremental spending or the incremental dollars, particularly given that right now you've got a challenged environment in Canada, as you alluded to earlier today in the conversation, and where we should expect to seeing that show up whether it's in digital channels, more traditional media or is it going to be a promotional activity and particularly the timing, can this bleed over into 2022 given the challenges that are facing the Canadian mobility at the moment? Thank you.

Hey, Jon, thanks for the question. Look, as I mentioned during the prepared remarks, we feel encouraged by the progress we're making at Tims encouraged by the first quarter. Obviously, the situation is different in Canada as it is in the U.S. and some other markets around the globe. But we've been focused on our Back to Basics planning and are making good progress on those initiatives around the quality of our food, expanding the menu, keeping it to what we're really good at and what made Tims famous, modernizing the restaurant experience with our rewards program as well as investments in the drive-thru. And what this investment means is that we as a – as a company, as a Tims team, as well as our owners, have confidence in the plan, confidence in the team, and feel as it's really important to invest now in the business, invest it behind these initiatives to be able to be in a position once mobility returns, the vaccine reaches higher levels of rollout. And things start opening up again, as we've seen here in the U.S., we have confidence that we're going to be well positioned to capture that growth and that return to normalcy that will come to Canada. The timing of it is really a function of how much we believe in the plan and the partnership that we have with our owners and the opportunity that exists in Canada. And how we'll use it will depend, we've got flexibility, obviously, we think that it's going to be investment behind initiatives that are driving our core platforms and the digital experience as well. Overall, we want to be able to bring higher levels of awareness and also just continue to drive our brand love initiatives in Canada and bring more firepower to the advertising budget to be able to get the message out to Canadians in the coming quarters.

Yes, hi, Jon. Yes, just one quick thing I would add there in timing. I think we'd expect, the investments here, as José mentioned to be fluid, it probably fluctuates a bit as we progress throughout the year. But we do expect to invest the entire $80 million Canadian support this year. Thanks for the question.

The next question comes from David Palmer with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Thank you for the discussion, especially regarding Tims. I noticed you mentioned the two-year breakfast comp being positive, and that the breakfast food comp was positive while the breakfast daypart was recently down low-single digits. Could you elaborate on those numbers again and what they indicate for Tims' overall performance on a two-year basis? It seems crucial for people to understand. I realize you might not want to go into guidance, but looking back to 2019, a challenging year for Tims due to loyalty issues and other factors, followed by 2020 as a rebuilding year, it's intriguing that 2022's Street numbers for same-store sales are still below 2019 levels. This appears conservative, don't you think you should be achieving higher sales per unit in 2022 given that Canada has reopened? I'll hand it off now. Thank you.

Thank you, David. Regarding the second question, I won’t delve into that. Our focus is on executing our current plan. We're excited about the progress we're making, although we still have much work ahead. There are macro conditions in Canada that we're navigating, but our strategy is functioning as expected. We're advancing well in all areas, including product quality improvements in coffee with our Dark Roast and new brewers, and we've made strides in our breakfast food offerings, which I’ve emphasized as a top priority over the last year. It's crucial for us to become a primary choice for breakfast when food drives customer visits. We're seeing our coffee rank high, and we're improving our position when food is the main driver. The Freshly Cracked Egg initiative was an important project that took over two years to implement, relying on a robust partnership with our Canadian restaurant owners, alongside our team's efforts in operations, supply chain, marketing, and product innovation. We launched Freshly Cracked Eggs in early February and by the end of that month, our breakfast food category showed positive growth year-over-year and on a two-year comparison, which is a promising start. Additionally, we recorded year-over-year growth in the overall morning segment in the last weeks of March. While we are still seeing negative growth in a two-year comparison for the morning segment, the decline was minimal by the end of March. This indicates that we are in the early stages, akin to the early innings of a baseball game, and we are working diligently with our teams and franchise owners in Canada to make meaningful advancements. Thank you for your question. Let's move on to the next one.

The next question comes from Dennis Geiger with UBS. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks. And José thanks for the color and all the insights across brands, definitely helpful. I wanted to ask a bit more about Burger King U.S., so you highlighted a number of compelling initiatives across chicken, breakfast, digital with a focus on quality and experience. It seems like, wanted to ask how quickly you think a lot of these initiatives can start to drive market share gains from here. And kind of related to that, we've seen a little bit of uneven performance, certainly over the last several years from the brand in the U.S. with LTOs and promotions working well, but it's probably difficult to have really good year-in, year-in consistency with that. So curious now as you highlight a lot of these strategic points of focus, if this can drive sort of greater annual consistency and momentum for the brand going forward, if that's a part of kind of the roadmap that you outline there?

Thank you for the question, Dennis. Regarding the second point, our goal is to establish a long-term strategy. We've made significant changes to our U.S. marketing team, and we are confident in the talent and progress being made in collaboration with our franchise owners. This teamwork is helping us formulate a robust plan that everyone believes in and is committed to executing. We are dedicated to creating something meaningful that fosters sustainable growth over time. In the short term, as I mentioned earlier, the first quarter showed positive trends with nominal monthly sales per restaurant reaching the highest levels we've observed in recent times. A key factor for this progress was the implementation and full-quarter execution of the dollar value menu, which has helped us enhance customer visitation. We also noticed significant year-over-year improvements compared to the industry. It's crucial that we maintain a balanced approach, particularly with Burger King, by focusing on our core offerings while also providing premium and value options. This quarter reflected encouraging progress in that area. In terms of digital initiatives, we have exciting developments coming from the BK team, including the upcoming launch of Digital Loyalty, which will expand to various channels and service modes over time. Additionally, we are witnessing a return to meaningful innovation with the reintroduction of popular limited-time offers like the breakfast French Toast Sandwich and Cheesy Tops. Furthermore, we are preparing to launch the hand-breaded chicken sandwich, which represents a significant enhancement to our existing chicken offerings. Franchisees are enthusiastic about this launch, and we are carefully planning its rollout to ensure long-term sustainability. You can expect Burger King to shift its focus from short-term promotional activations aimed at increasing visits and transactions to more meaningful, sustainable strategies. This includes a strategic emphasis on breakfast, along with long-term investments to bolster that area. We are pleased with the progress we've made so far, but we recognize that it’s just the beginning and there is much more work ahead. We will continue to keep you updated on our progress. Thank you, Dennis.

The next question comes from John Glass with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks and good morning. Coming back to Tims in two unrelated pieces. One just on digital in the past, you've talked about the contribution of digital was negative, it's clipped a positive, maybe just some insights as to how that's progressed, and the contribution of the comps. And inside that 30% of digital customers or transactions you're experiencing, what are the dynamics are you seeing those customers frequent more and if so how much? And if it's a checklist, because they're buying up and you're the bespoke offers, what is that checklist? That's on the Tims Canada business. If we just flipped over the other side of the world, Tims China seems to be getting some momentum and unit growth and just obviously some excitement from external investors. Can you just remind us how the brand is positioned differently there that makes this resonate? If there's any metrics around sales volumes that you can share, so we can just better understand how that opportunity is shaping up?

Yes, thanks, John. I'll have Josh touch on the digital question related to Tims in Canada, and then I'll come back to Tims China. Josh?

Yes, good morning, John. Thanks for the questions on Tims. I would say, directly on the Tims Loyalty Program, what we have seen is that like that, over time, the contribution to this sales has been more positive. We've been consistently working on that, as we've been able to make the offers more targeted. And the team has done, I think a great job of, as I mentioned in the remarks, both consistently growing the base of those loyalty users getting them to be more registered, and then making those offers more targeted, which is kind of over time, allowing the program to be more and more effective. And then I'd say as you asked the question about, what are we doing with the program? Are we growing check or are we driving more frequency? One of the big things that that I referenced in some of our remarks earlier and that we're really focused on that, I think is probably the biggest part of what we're trying to do is driving more engagement with the app. And I think that drives more engagement with the brand and I think that a lot of that's around frequency. So you've seen us doing a lot of different things like the Roll Up to Win kind of digitization of an existing Roll Up the Rim game that's driving people to come back to the apps more often to play more games and we can actually see in the segmentation of our guests, that a lot of the guests are coming back. And they're engaging with us more and more frequently. And I think our goal is to see the guests engage with the Tim Hortons brand more often and come back and visit us more often drive more frequency and engagement over time. So those are some of the biggest things that we've really been focused on where we think we're making progress, and where we think we can do even more over time.

Thanks, Josh. John, on the question of Tims China, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we're really excited about the progress there. We're only two years into it. So we started, we built our first restaurant, opened the first restaurant at the beginning or Q1 of 2019. And we're at about 200 locations now; we've had very, very cutting interest from important investors in China on the business. And we have commitments to double the size of the businesses here and continue on our journey to reach the targets of growth that we set for the business as a starting point when we announced the partnership back in 2019, or at the end of 2018. We're not sharing details on AVs and these sorts of things for that business. But the progress has been tremendous, we're positioning for the brand there. Interestingly enough, the Chinese consumer connects well with the Canadian brand, not Tims necessarily but Tims Canada as a broader concept. Obviously, things like hockey players aren't going to be highly relevant in China, but there's a lot more to Canada than hockey players, and so to the brand as well. So we've been able to build on those, we've done a bunch of research with Chinese consumers and the things that that really resonate are the quality of the product, the quality of the digital experience, the design elements that we've built that are really modern and forward-looking and very cool and connecting well with our customers and convenience being there every day for every transaction with high levels of services. Local team in China is doing an awesome job with Tims and I think it's a really good example, it's a micro example of what can be the possibilities with Tims internationally. We've seen good progress with our business in the UK. We have a really strong business in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia with Tims and we think we have tremendous opportunity for growth long-term with the Tims brand as a great offering for coffee, for breakfast, for baked goods and doing it with a digital forward game plan. So we're excited about the progress, but it's early days and given the nature of coffee growth in China, we think we're well positioned to see a long-term growth of the business there for years to come. Thanks for the question.

The next question comes from Chris Carril with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. So on the back of the recently announced development agreements for Popeyes, how should we think about where the brand along its growth trajectory both in the U.S. and globally? And if you could maybe to help us better understand this trajectory; can you maybe frame up how you're thinking about the brand, relative to how you thought about Burger King ahead of its development ramp a few years back? Thanks.

Thank you for the question, Chris. It's essential to revisit 2019 when we expressed our goal of reaching 40,000 restaurants over an eight to ten-year period. We still believe there is significant opportunity globally to grow our three brands, and both new and existing franchisees are very enthusiastic about this business, particularly considering the strength of our brands and the resilience demonstrated during challenging times. The unit economics and performance during what has been an exceptionally complex environment have instilled confidence that this business is robust and can generate substantial value over time. Regarding our development progress, DK has played a crucial role in our international growth over the past several years. Between 2012 and 2020, we successfully doubled our international presence, increasing the number of international restaurants from just under 6,000 to over 11,000, excluding the U.S. market. This tremendous international growth was made possible by our excellent partnerships through master franchise and joint venture agreements. However, there is still significant potential for expansion in many markets where we have gained ground over the last eight years. Countries like China, France, Spain, the U.K., Germany, and Brazil have shown impressive growth, yet we see even greater opportunities ahead, supported by our strong partners and teams in those regions. As for Tims and Popeyes, we are still in the early stages, as is the case with Burger King. The positive experiences we've had with our master franchisees in expanding Burger King's international presence over the past eight years similarly inform our strategy for Tims and Popeyes. Popeyes, in particular, has generated excitement and interest internationally due to the success of the Chicken Sandwich and overall business momentum in the U.S. This has led to valuable partnerships in the U.K., India, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia, indicating just the start of this brand's international potential. We have much work ahead, and our focus is not on short-term targets but on cultivating something substantial for the long haul. Selecting the right partners, ensuring effective teams with appropriate incentives and capital structures is what drives our operations. We eagerly anticipate the growth of our business and brands internationally in the coming years.

The next question comes from Nicole Miller with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. I was helping to understand consumer behavior and the digital impact through the lens of average checker transaction. So could you please share where you landed last year by concept on the dollar amount, average check or transaction? And then at each brand, how is it trending higher or lower the same as you enter the year and why? Thank you.

Thank you, Nicole. Generally, we do not break out traffic and average check performance for our brands in home markets or internationally. Over the past 12 months, COVID has impacted mobility and transactions, leading to more customers dining through off-premise channels like delivery and drive-thrus, which has resulted in check growth globally. As I mentioned earlier regarding BK, we have seen positive progress in transaction growth in the first quarter here in the U.S., particularly with our focus on the dollar value menu. There is likely a digital aspect to your question as well, so I will ask Josh to provide some comments by brand.

Nicole, I know you heard a couple of thoughts just generally, on this topic. The couple of things that we do see between, they're a little bit different between some of our digital and non-digital channels. I would say at a high level that we tend to see that our digitally engaged guests, even within-store service modes, they tend to be some of as I mentioned in my March earlier, they tend to be some of our more loyal guests, some of our bigger fans. So they tend to be a little bit more a little bit higher frequency guests, so they tend to see them coming in a bit more often. And then obviously, the check profiles a little bit different based on the service mode, but any of our delivery service mode guests are obviously a much higher check profile. So those are the two things that I would probably point out to you in terms of different check and transaction dynamics between the channels.

Thanks for the question.

And the last question today will come from Patricia Baker with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much and good morning, everyone. I just want to return to the discussion of the Tims practice. Thank you for sharing what you have shared with us. And it's great to see that that has traction. It may be early, but I'm just curious what you know about that customer? Is the person buying the cracked egg sandwich? Are they replacing other breakfast offers? Or you may be seeing returning customers that may have lacked on breakfast for you? And do you have any evidence that you're gaining some new customers having this particular offer?

Hi, Patricia, thanks for the question. It's early days with the launch of fresh cracked eggs. The data or the update that I shared was the information we had at this point with which is encouraging with the progress we're making. I think we've seen higher frequency through our digital channels of loyal guests that that are coming back and adding a breakfast sandwich. So we think there's new customers coming in early days. And we're seeing more frequency from existing customers. And that gives us confidence and encouragement that we were on the right path in terms of developing a really high-quality offering for breakfast at Tims. It's really just the beginning of the journey. We've started to add the fresh cracked egg to bagels, and we think there's other opportunities as well to introduce that in another product. So we're excited about the progress, excited about the start with it and looking forward to continuing to drive more customers into Tims for breakfast and for other dayparts as well. Thanks so much for the question.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to José Cil for any closing remarks.

Thanks to everyone for their questions and for joining us this morning. We're pleased to see the business return to growth and to see such a strong start to the year from a development standpoint, as we get our unit growth engine back up and running. On top of that, our digital efforts are beginning to produce impressive results as we discussed highlighted by what we saw from the Tims Roll Up to Win contest. With loyalty programs at all three brands, at all three of our brands and home markets, we're excited to build a more personalized experience for our guests while delivering them high-quality craveable foods at a compelling price. Our teams here at RBI and our franchise partners around the world are working hard to continue building on the progress we've made so far and I look forward to sharing more in the next quarters to come. Have a great day and stay safe out there. Thanks everyone.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.