Conference Transcript - QSR 2026-09-09

Sami Siddiqui, CFO

investment grade rated. And our corporate rating will kind of, we're one notch away from being corporately investment grade with those two rating agencies. And you may have seen yesterday that Moody's upgraded us as well. So we made one step closer to investment grade with them. So we are making progress on this. We expect to be at these investment grade leverage levels by 2028. And then sort of the second part of that is using excess cashflow and really returning the bulk of cash flow to shareholders. So we've had, I think, over 50 consecutive quarters of a growing dividend now. And that's around a 60% payout ratio on our earnings. And the remainder of cash flow for this year, around $500 million, is now going into repurchasing shares. We think it is a compelling time to be buying back our own shares. And especially as we see the path to simplification and the business is simplifying, we anticipate that by the time we get to 2028, it's a really exciting time from a capital allocation perspective. You can imagine a world where we're continuing to grow earnings in EBITDA, we're investment grade, and we can use excess leverage capacity to effectively return that to shareholders, keeping our dividend payout in place and also with the share buyback. So it's a pretty exciting time to be a shareholder.

Joshua Kobza, CEO

Yeah, I think that's what has us, I think, very excited is this vision of where we can be in 2028, which is not that far away of getting back to this 5% unit growth, delivering consistent 3% plus same-store sales. So you get that organic of 8% AOI growth. So you've got consistent organic growth distributing a lot of capital back to shareholders through both dividends and share repurchases that gives you a pretty compelling total shareholder return and a stock that has a very low beta. So it's really uncorrelated from a lot of other things. And we think that's a pretty compelling vision of the world and a pretty compelling place to be invested. Well, I mean, congratulations on this year thus far.

Operator

I mean, you've been one of our best-performing names this year. And we are out of time, but we wanted to thank Restaurant Brands International for joining us. Hopefully, you get a chance to meet with management at some point during the day today. But we wanted to very much thank Josh and Sammy and the team for joining us and thank you all as well. Have a good day. Thank you.