Alimentation Couche-Tard A Aktie

Good morning. My name is Joelle, and I will be your conference operator today.

[Foreign Language]

I will now introduce Mr. Mathieu Brunet, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury at Alimentation Couche-Tard. [Foreign Language]

[Interpreted]

Good morning. I would like to welcome everyone to this web conference presenting Alimentation Couche-Tard financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2026. [Operator Instructions] We would like to remind everyone that this webcast presentation will be available on our website for a 90-day period. Also, please remember that some of the issues discussed during this webcast may be forward-looking statements, which are provided by the corporation with its usual caveats. These caveats or risks and uncertainties are outlined in our financial reporting. Therefore, our future results could differ from the information discussed today.

Our financial results will be presented by Mr. Alex Miller, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Felipe De Silva, Chief Financial Officer. Alex, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Mathieu. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the presentation of our fourth quarter and full year results. As we look back on fiscal 2026. This has been an exceptional year for the company, and I'm incredibly proud of what our teams have accomplished. In February, we unveiled our Core+ more strategy, outlining how we would strengthen our core business, accelerate growth in key categories while deepening customer engagement through digital capabilities.

Our model has proven successful as customers continue to respond to our compelling value proposition. Across our network, we strengthened our competitive position, gained market share and delivered growth through disciplined execution. In the United States, we achieved our best performance in years, and we saw traffic growth in the fourth quarter, reflecting the momentum we are building with customers.

In Canada, we delivered record-breaking EBITDA, supported by strong fuel execution, market share gains and growth across the business. In Europe, we continue to benefit from the strength of our diversified footprint and the performance of our teams.

Turning to the quarter. We delivered solid top line growth of nearly 20% year-over-year and we are winning in the markets we serve, strengthening our position and widening the gap versus the broader convenience channel. Before going further, I want to recognize our frontline teams. Every day, they show up as 1 team and deliver on our promise of being fast, friendly and customer ready, bringing our offer to life, delivering value, improving availability and simplifying the experience for our customers. What stands out to me is the reliability of the operation day in and day out. Our teams are maintaining a high standard and strengthening the connection to our brand. That level of execution remains a key enabler as we invest in and optimize our network. Importantly, U.S. turnover has reached the lowest level in our company's history, outperforming industry benchmarks across part-time, full-time and managerial roles. We remain on track with our goal of building 750 new stores through 2030.

This past quarter, we completed the construction of 37 new stores and the relocation or reconstruction of 13 existing stores, bringing us to a total of 130 projects completed during fiscal 2026. At the same time, we have another 34 stores under construction that we expect to open over the coming quarters. As we expand the network organically and through M&A, we are also improving the overall quality and consistency of the customer experience. The integration of our Total energy sites in mid-Europe continues to move forward.

We implemented 95 rebranded sites during the quarter, and we are seeing encouraging signs as these locations begin to benefit from our operating model and customer offer. Let's now turn to our convenience business, where we delivered an impressive quarter. Same-store sales grew 2.2% on a consolidated basis, with the United States leading at 3.4%, marking our best quarterly result in the last 3 years. Continuing with the U.S., we also delivered positive same-store sales in every quarter this year, with each period building on the last.

During the quarter, growth was broad-based with all business units delivering positive same-store sales. We see this as a clear signal that our initiatives are resonating with customers. In Europe and other regions, same-store sales increased by 1.1% with solid contributions from Norway and the Baltics. Norway saw both traffic and basket expansion, while the Baltics benefited from promotional activity and stronger engagement. The Netherlands remained under pressure as we lap prior year tobacco-related benefits.

In Asia, we delivered positive same-store sales results. While partly timing related, it is still an encouraging sign as the team sharpens the offer and works to rebuild customer traffic. In Canada, even as same-store sales declined by 0.9%, primarily due to persistent pressure in tobacco and modern nicotine, we had a good year.

Excluding tobacco, sales were up 1.3% and key categories remained resilient with strength in alcohol and packaged beverages. Diving into our food business where our progress is becoming increasingly visible. In the U.S., foodservice same-store sales grew over 5% with fresh food fast sales growing over 10%, anchored by the continued success of our meal deals platform. At the end of the quarter, we were running at nearly 1 million bundles per week and [indiscernible] moved closer to 1.2 million bundles, reflecting growing customer adoption while responding to a simpler and more relevant offer with clear value.

Execution is also improving with her availability reaching over 90%, up from roughly 75% just a few quarters ago. As we continue to scale the category, we are investing in the capabilities required to support that growth. We see a clear opportunity to further expand the food offer with a strong focus on ensuring fresh food fast delivers consistently across the network.

In Europe, food continues to perform well, led by strong momentum in burgers and sandwiches, driven by simple execution on value and availability. Markets that are winning are those delivering a consistent high-quality offer, giving us confidence in the scalability of the [indiscernible] In Canada, we are building from the same foundation, leaning into value and execution. Meal deals have exceeded daily targets with more than 30% of our food sales coming from a bundle. The team is sharpening execution through improved key row item performance of prepared in Canada campaign and a more thoughtful offer. The overall direction in food is encouraging. We are seeing progress in execution, assortment, vendor partnerships and a coordinated supply model with meaningful runway as we move into our summer season, which will be marked by high-profile product launches and co-branded innovation.

Most notably, we have a new boneless Buffalo Chicken wing product, which was co-developed and co-branded with one of the world's leading brands. We are excited for that item to hit stores in the coming days.

Turning to [indiscernible] We saw continued progress across all regions, led by energy, where same-store sales grew over 15% in the U.S. Strong demand for functional and performance beverages, combined with favorable mix and pricing execution also contributed to margin expansion.

Overall, Packet Beverages delivered another solid quarter, up nearly 6% in same-store sales, supported by innovation, exclusive launches and deeper integration into our meal deal platform. We are also making progress in cold dispensed where improved uptime is supporting higher unit sales and a better customer experience through our loyalty platform. In Europe, packaged beverages are gaining traction, led by energy and functional drinks has improved execution and a more focused assortment are supporting growth across markets.

In Canada, performance remained strong, with energy driving double-digit same-store sales growth and continued resilience in alcohol, particularly in Ontario. We're very excited about the future trajectory of this category and more broadly, it reflects our ability to stay nimble and adapt quickly to evolving customer needs and shipping product trends.

Turning to nicotine. This remains an exciting and evolving category with strong momentum in modern oral. In the U.S., cigarette positive sales growth was driven by disciplined pricing and targeted affordability, limiting unit declines relative to the industry. At the same time, other nicotine products are seeing solid growth at 8.5% in same-store sales, supported by an expanding offer, refresh back bar formats, improved in-store visibility. We are also leveraging our age verified membership platforms, now reaching 3.2 million users, up 12% versus the prior quarter. This is drive being more targeted and personalized engagement through loyalty while improving conversion and retention.

In Europe, next-generation products continue to gain traction with other nicotine products driving category growth. In Canada, results remain impacted by regulatory dynamics and illicit trade with the team adapted through pricing and offer strategies. The performance across category is enabled by execution at scale during the right products are in the right stores at the right time.

Turning to loyalty in the U.S. Our Inter Circle program has now expanded to over 5,000 stores and has grown by nearly 50% year-over-year, reaching 15 million members by May. When you think about where we were just 2 years ago, that is truly a remarkable journey. We are also strengthening the connection between fuel and in-store trips with pump to store conversion quadrupling, reflecting a more seamless customer experience.

In Europe, we have completed the rollout of our revamped extra loyalty program across our legacy markets in Poland as well as our Baltic and Scandinavian business units. We are also beginning to integrate EV charging into the app, creating a more unified customer experience. Looking ahead, digital solutions will play a central role in scaling our initiatives, strengthening relationships with customers and unlocking additional growth.

Turning to mobility. This remains a core strength [indiscernible] the environment remains volatile with geopolitical tensions and higher fuel prices weighing on demand in certain regions. In the U.S., same-store fuel volumes declined by 2.1%, while total gallons sold increased by nearly 5%, reflecting the contribution from network expansion. Europe and other regions were down 4.4%, while Canada remained more resilient with volumes up 2%.

Continuing the positive trajectory we have seen throughout the fiscal year. Our efforts remain focused on growing gross profit across the network through disciplined pricing, margin protection, ensuring continuity of supply and market share gains and volume across our geographies. What gives me great confidence is how we built a world-class supply chain over the years. Along with the trading capabilities and network scale needed to remain competitive on price while capturing margins as market conditions evolve. We have the reach, the experience and the operational depth to manage through these cycles, and our teams know how to execute in this environment.

During the quarter, we also completed the acquisition of 3 fuel terminals in Germany, further strengthening our supply capabilities and providing greater flexibility across our European network. In B2B, across Europe and North America, we are focused on delivering a reliable competitive offering for our B2B customers, leveraging the same scale, supply chain strength and execution that underpin our broader mobility platform. We continue to see resilience in Europe where pressure on volumes was offset by margin performance. We also saw continued growth in nonfuel income with B2B transit charging volumes up by more than 50%.

We are also continuing to roll out our One card payment platform, enabling a more seamless experience from onboarding through fueling, strengthening engagement across the network and supporting market share growth and operating efficiency. Our mobile payment usage increased nearly 60% year-on-year. In the U.S., we are building momentum as we scale the business. Our focus remains on deepening relationships with fleet and commercial customers supported by a differentiated national network, expanding truck accessible sites and execution at the store level.

Large national accounts have grown by more than 15% versus same period last year. Our fleet segment grew volume by 6%, adding 11 million incremental gallons versus the same period of last year as we make strides in government fleet business development. Meanwhile, strategic partnerships continue to drive substantial growth in our truck segment with volume up more than 55% versus a year ago and nearly $27 million incremental gallons.

On e-mobility, we continue to grow the business with disciplined capital deployment as demand continues to increase across Europe. By the end of the quarter, we surpassed 4,000 Circle K branded charge points with a total network of more than 4,700 fast chargers, up 30% year-over-year. We are also seeing strong customer adoption with more than 2.2 million charging transactions in the quarter and over $8 million for the full year.

Utilization continues to improve with charging transactions up over 50% and kilowatt hours sold up nearly 60% versus last year. This reflects the progress we have made in building a scaled and increasingly utilized network in Europe. Reliability has also improved, with uptime now above 97%, reinforcing our leadership position in some of the most advanced EV markets, including Sweden and Norway, where we are respectively the #1 and #2 destinations.

I will now turn it over to Filipe, who will provide more details on our financials.

Thank you, Alex. Good morning, everyone. We delivered an excellent fourth quarter to close the year, driven by the quality of our underlying results, even excluding the impact of certain favorable items. Discipline execution enabled us to maintain operating expenses below inflation, profitability while continuing to invest in the business to support our Core+ [ smart ] strategy.

Our results are at the consistency and durability of our earnings and response of confidence as we start the new fiscal year. More importantly, these figures reflect the contribution of multiple elements and merchandise categories working together. At the same time, we are investing in capabilities that improve availability, simplify the operation and strengthen the long-term earnings potential of this business. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, net earnings stood at $863 million or $0.94 per share on a diluted basis. These results include a onetime net gain of approximately $260 million related to the resolution of a long-standing legal matters, including a U.S. electronic payment inter-trend litigation.

Adjusted net earnings were $667 million or $0.73 per share on a diluted basis, representing an increase of 58.7% compared to the corresponding quarter of last year. For fiscal 2026, reported net earnings stood at $3.1 billion, an increase of [ $563 ] million or 21.8% compared with fiscal 2025.

Diluted net earnings per share stood at $3.37 compared with $2.71 for the previous fiscal year. Adjusted net earnings stood at $2.9 billion, an increase of $312 million or 12.1% compared with fiscal 2025. Adjusted diluted net earnings per share were $3.10, an increase of 14.4%.

I will now discuss the following section on an FX-adjusted basis. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 increased by $350 million or 28.9% compared with the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2025 mainly due to higher road transportation fuel gross margin, organic growth in our convenience activities as well as the contribution from acquisition, which amounted to $47 million, partly offset by the increase in operating expenses.

During fiscal 2026 on the same basis, the adjusted EBITDA increased by $643 million or 10.8% compared to [indiscernible]. During the third quarter, merchandise and service revenues increased by $242 million or 5.8% attributable to both the contribution from acquisitions, which amounted to $137 million in organic [indiscernible] During fiscal 2026, merchandise and service revenues increased by $1 billion or 5.5%.

Merchandise and service gross profit increased by $103 million or 7.1%. This is primarily attributable to the contribution from acquisition, which amounted to $50 million by organic growth as well as improvement on [indiscernible] and sabers margin. Let me expand a little more on margins because this quarter gives a good picture on how the business is evolving.

In the U.S., merchandise margin improved by 50 basis points to 34.4%, driven by favorable category mix enhanced vendor partnership, stronger procurement and in-store execution. This reflects higher margin growth in other nicotine products and packaged beverages, which would more than offset the continued strength of sales in cigarettes. Food gross profit dollars also increased year-over-year, even [indiscernible] some pressure on the margin rate. That pressure was largely a cut of growth, higher ability and the mix effect of a very successful new new platform rather than any deterioration in the economics of the overall -- more broadly, we are demonstrating that we can deliver server value to customers across categories without compromising the overall gross profit profile, supported by partnership, stronger procurement and more targeted commercial exemption.

In Canada, the gross margin rate decreased by 60 basis points year-over-year to 33.5%, mainly reflecting competitive pressure and mix while the impact of lower cigarette sales and higher growth in energy drinks provided a partial offset. In Europe and other regions, gross margin increased by 100 basis points to 29.6%, supported by mix including lower relative weight of cigarettes and a growing contribution from EV charging and service revenues.

For fiscal 2026, merchandise and service gross profit increased by approximately $412 million nor 64%. Our gross margin in the United States increased by 50 basis points to 24.4% by 20 basis points in Europe and other regions to 29.1% and decreased by 20 basis points in Canada to 43.5%.

Moving now on to our presentation to gross margin was $52.44 per gallon in the United States. USD 17.44 per liter in Europe and other regions and CAD 17.28 per liter in Canada. As Alex mentioned earlier, our global scale and capability across trading and the network allows us to medicate volatility while cantering margin opportunities as market conditions able.

During fiscal 2026, our transportation fuel gross profit increased by $748 million or 11.7%. Our transportation fuel gross margin was $47.49 per gallon in the United sales $11.73 U.S. [indiscernible] in Europe and other regions and [indiscernible] per capita rate in Canada.

Turning now to SG&A. For the fourth quarter. Normalized operating expenses were up 2.6% compared to the previous year of 4.4%, which remained below the weighted average inflation across our network. For fiscal 2026, normalized operating expenses increased by 3.1% compared with the previous year of 3.4%, and we're within the range of our growth [indiscernible]. We're participating in managing our expenses and increased combination of inflation, take investment and supporting growth in areas where we expect to achieve returns. These investments are tied to supply chain technology and building the capability to support our long-term ambitions.

As we can to expand the platform and improved execution, optive remains to be destination to the twist and then customer satisfaction and support long-term profitability. A good example of this is our supply chain, where our distribution center investments are about much more than are about much more than sickly expanding capacity. They provide greater control of our procurement, product availability and distribution while simplifying operations across the network. As we continue to spend these capabilities, we are unlocking opportunities to leverage our size and work more directly with suppliers, which will support improved efficiency and strong economics over time.

We are also advancing the rollout of [indiscernible] We have completed the pilot across 4 U.S. business units and have now begun scaling to more than 200 locations. Our real results are encouraging with increased inventory accuracy and product availability, supported by more precise forecasting and element between inventory, shelf space and demand. As deployments expand across the network, we expect these tools to support replenish much reduced complexity and execution started.

In addition, we remain confident in our ability to deliver $850 million EBITDA by 2030 across merchandise cost of goods, not for resale, store operations, general and administrative expenses and controllable costs. We have already covered on investments in our supply chain will allow us to expand stable distribution, improving store operations and inventory management, but also to reduce our merchandise customers. Looking at goods not for resale, we are starting to leverage procurement statilization and vendor consolidation. Recent sourcing initiatives charting fastructure demonstrates the benefit of a more co-deleted approach to purchase it as we continue to enhance procurement activities across the organization with the additional opportunities to improve purchasing conditions, reduce complexity and drive efficiencies across a broad range of categories. While many of these opportunities will take time to pre-material, we are building the capabilities required for all of them while continuing to invest in the future growth of the business.

As a result, we remain focused on balancing growth investments with operational discipline. We continue to operate with 1 of the leanest model in the sector and remain confident in our expects outlook a -- turning to depreciation for the fourth quarter fiscal 2026. -- depreciation expense increased by approximately $17 million or 3.1% compared to the fourth quarter of last year. This increase was primarily run by the impact from recent acquisitions, particularly Capco, which amount accounted for approximately $20 million as well as ongoing capital investment in epicentreplacement and networking projects. As we move into fiscal 2027, depreciation is expected to continue, reflecting the investment base made in recent years, including acquisitions, network expansion and capabilities that support the long-term growth of the business.

From a tax perspective, the income tax rate for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 was 23.7% compared with 18.8% for the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2025. The increase is mainly taken from the impact of a different mix in our earnings across the various jurisdictions in which we operate. April 2026, we recorded a return on equity at 20.2% and our return on capital employed stood at 13.7%. During the fiscal year, our leverage ratio stood at 1.99, we also had strong balance sheet liquidity with over $3 billion in cash and an additional $3.5 billion available through our revolving unsecured operating credit facility.

During the quarter, we repurchased 0.4 million shares for an amount of $22.6 million. Importantly, we have been able to improve returns while continuing to deploy significant capital during the year, including approximately $1.6 billion returned to shareholders for share repurchase alongside the integration of GetGo, which reflects the strength of our operating model and capitalization. We also issued a new real denominated senior ecutotaling EUR [ 750 ] million to replace existing notes of the same value, which were repaid subsequent to the end of the quarter.

Turning to the dividend. The Board of Directors declared yesterday a quarterly side of CAD 21.5 per share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 to shareholders on record after July 9, 2026, and approved its payment at July 23, 2026.

Finally, let me briefly comment on our progress with Total energies. Now approximately 2 years into the integration, we continue to execute according to plan. with a clear focus on aligning the business to our operating model and capturing synergies. As of the end of the fourth quarter, our underlying synergy run rate reached over EUR 60 million, reflecting continued progress in operating expenses, cost of sales and commercial initiatives across the network. This puts us well on track to deliver our stated target of EUR 120 million by fiscal 2027 and EUR 170 million by fiscal 2029.

In closing, fiscal 2026 represented an important year for the business. We improved our top line trajectory, strengthened our position in key categories and continue to build the capability that supports sustainable growth. While encouraged by the progress we are seeing in Core+ more, while being to unlock benefits from initiatives that leverage our scale to strengthen their operating model and improve the economics of the business. As we move into fiscal 2027, our priorities are clear, execute with discipline, focus on system control and invest where we see attractive returns.

I thank you all for your attention. I will turn the call over again to Alex.

Thanks, Filipe. I'll leave you with a few final thoughts. We introduced our updated Core+ more strategy in February, and we are energized by the progress so far. The strategy is clearly working, and we are delivering strong execution against our growth algorithm in a profitable and sustainable way. We did what we set out to do, and this year, we executed against those priorities with a clear outperformance in several areas. We see better traffic, margin expansion and a more productive network while we continue to invest in the capabilities that will extend these advantages over time and reinforce our value proposition for customers.

And importantly, our fuel platform continues to perform. As our teams lean into the strength and agility of our supply chain and global scale to capture opportunities and grow market share across the network. We are seeing a constructive start to the year as we move from Q4 into Q1 with continued momentum across our key initiatives and geographies. Thanks again for your time and your continued support.

With that, let's open it up for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Michael Van is with TD Cowen.

Impressive quarter with big earnings. And a lot of it -- I mean, you're doing really well on the same-store sales growth in the U.S., but I wanted to ask first about the fuel margins -- the U.S. fuel margin was probably 30% higher than what the OPIS data would have implied. And it's clear that some of the investments that you're making and sourcing capabilities is deliver are delivering returns but it's even more evident now in these volatile markets. And I'm wondering if you could give us a few examples of how you're able to attract much higher or much better sourcing prices on the fuel side during this environment.

Michael, thank you for the question. I think you've heard us state many times over the years and the quarters that when volatility exists, we are well positioned to capture the advantages there and margin that becomes available with that volatility. And -- for us, this has been a journey for more than a decade as we've kind of pivoted and invested in our own brands and invested in our supply chain. And as we've talked about previously, it's really about building optionality that gives us sourcing choices when the market becomes volatile and/or constrained. And so you see us executing against that and utilizing that optionality to deliver against OPUS.

So that is a litany of investments over multiple years over the last decade into terminals, into positions while maintaining a very tight bar or risk management profile. So I'm not going to go any deeper than that, but it's something that we have invested in for more than a decade. I think you've heard us consistently state when there is volatility. It is a strong opportunity for us, and you see us delivering in this very volatile time.

And to be on Alex also [indiscernible] , it's not just U.S. You can see that also in Europe. We are trading there. Alex just mentioned that we know we are even further investing in additional terminals there because we receive value also on that piece. So yes, very, very excited by what we have been and what what is still there in terms of opportunities. So we're confident that we'll continue to hold platform there.

Okay. And 1 follow-up, a shorter one, I guess, I'll let others get into the same-store sales and all that. But just on the exit run rate, I know you entered Q4 with a pretty strong same-store sales growth in the U.S. I'm wondering how you exited it amid the pressures that we were coming from the [indiscernible] and whatever.

Yes. I think we continue to execute very well, Michael. Core+ more is delivering. And it's not one category. It's the things we talked with you about -- we are clearly delivering in fuel. We are delivering in nicotine. We are growing thirst substantially. We are growing food. We are growing EV and our digital platforms are enabling traffic and growth across that. Our trends in Q1 are very similar to Q4. Our volume has improved a bit. Margins remain -- fuel margins remain robust traffic and same-store sales remain within our growth algorithm, and we continue to control costs and pursue the efforts we're making to expand margins. So Q1, the momentum continues, and we're just focused on executing against the strategy we shared with you in February.

Michael, I understand that that's your last coming calls with us. So just wanted to thank you. It has been a pleasure to work with you. And yes, just wanted to wish you a happy retirement, Michael. Well deserved.

It's been a great 25 years covering you guys.

Your next question comes from Irene Nattel with RBC Capital Markets.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer to Mike's question. Let me just pivot for a second and can we talk about capital allocation, please. Balance sheet is pretty clean at this point in time, your ratios are fabulous. Can you -- and yet there was no activity on the NCIB. Can you talk about how we should think about F27 perhaps from an M&A perspective around NCIB and just conceptually, we talk about continuing investment. How much dry powder are you keeping for CapEx, et cetera?

Thanks for the question. So -- our capital allocation framework remains unchanged. And really, it's about maintaining financial flexibility. In terms of priority, I would say, first, in terms of capital allocation, it serves investing in our organic business. and you have heard us aiming at reinvesting 30% to 25% of our EBITDA into the organic business. Second is, of course, M&A and pursue attractive M&A prophecies within our disciplined financial framework. And the third 1 is maintaining a disciplined leverage profile. So today, we are within our comfort level, so between 2 and 2.5x. And all the excess capital will be used to -- through a new share repurchase program. So that's how we have defined our capital framework, and that's how we'll continue to proceed. And yes, we're keeping always in mind that we want to create long-term value creation for our shareholders. and that that remains change. So that's what I can see in terms of capital allocation, Irene.

And can you comment on the current M&A environment and sort of where your head may be at with all volatility in the market right now.

As we mentioned the last few quarters, and I'm sure that Alex can comment as well, but we continue to see activity there, their files. So of course, as it's part of our DNA. We are looking at that and remain confident that over the the framework of our Core+ more strategy. You will see us actually doing M&A in in our industry, of course, prioritizing the market we are present, but but also looking at why not expanding in other regions in the future. So yes, that remains -- we remain quite positive and optimistic in the environment in terms of M&A today. Alex?

Yes, sure. Irene, good to hear your voice. I just remind everybody, we're focused on our Core+ more, and we're not relying on M&A to deliver our growth algorithm and hopefully, we're increasingly showing you that. M&A remains very active. We're seeing multiple files and multiple geographies, large, medium, small. We just continue to pursue transactions with our focus on our strategic and financial criteria. And that's really what we can tell you, but there's plenty of activity in the M&A space right now.

Your next question comes from Vishal Shreedhar with National Bank.

Could you following on the fuel margins, which were exceptionally strong, could you comment on your fuel capability across your major geographies. I noticed that you purchased some terminals as well in Germany. My understanding is that the strongest in the U.S. to capitalize on this, but maybe you can expand and give you some context. And I'm also asking in the context of your longer inventory holds in Europe and how that might complicate your ability to take advantage of volatility.

Again, thanks for the question. Yes, we're in very volatile times. I think that's 1 of the reasons we have a little more cash on our balance sheet. It's also -- we upped our inventories in Europe a little bit. to ensure that we -- I think I shared on the last update that our supply and trading teams, their #1 responsibility is to keep our stores in product. And with the events, we thought it was wise for us to put a little more inventory into the system just to be safe. It really is about optionality. It's about recognizing various markets how those markets receive product, what options are there to supply those markets and building those options so that when you need them or when opportunity exists you can take advantage of that.

In events like this, when markets get volatile, you start to see product flows change, certain areas get quite tight on product, that's when those options benefit us. and that's what you saw flow through our financials in this quarter.

Your next question comes from John Zamparo with Scotiabank.

I wanted to ask about the merchandise margins, particularly in the U.S. And I wonder if you could update us on where you are in your journey on building out new distribution centers. what type of impact did that have in the quarter? And how should we think about margin improvements to come from increased DC penetration over the next few years?

Thanks, on for the question. Yes, pretty excited. As we mentioned in last quarter, we have opened these 3 new DCs in U.S. And associated to that, we were commenting about some ramping up cost that were impacting our G&A, but we are seeing that actually going down in this quarter, and we start to see improvement in terms of avability in the store and and getting this operation starting to mature. So very excited about what's coming -- all these investments are being done with, of course, the objective of improving capability, making sure that we have the product in stores and we can help our stores to deliver the best experience to customers.

But of course, also with the mind of getting returns on that. So yes, you will expect, we are expecting actually to have on the midterm, a positive impact in our cuts and of course, also in our SG&A because on the COG side, of course, getting deeper in the supply chain as we did with the fuel we get better economics with the vendors at some point. And we'll start to see that already this year, John. And on the SG&A side, but it's no doubt also that only the supply chain will help us actually to be more productive in store at some point. So there's a lot of benefits to see there. Of course, a supply chain, we are just at the beginning of the journey. It's a learning curve, you should expect over the end of this year. But I would say most importantly, in the coming 2 years, more positive impact in our P&L coming from the disease -- and as you know, we are continuing to assess what else we need in terms of supply chain on -- in U.S. and as well in Europe. So more to come by that, but very excited by what we see today.

And I'd just add on that, I think we've talked with you consistently about our data journey, our journey around analytics, around I think understanding better where to really push on compelling value, where to run promotions, where not to run promotions we just continue to get improved -- we continue to improve on that, and we continue to improve at our category management. And I think our pricing strategy is inside of category management I think we also talked with you on Core+ more about, we actually have some structural tailwinds around mix. And we shouldn't overlook Europe. Europe had a really strong merch margin in the quarter, and that I think we talked with you about our EV business, it continues to grow, and it is becoming meaningful for us. That is a really nice tailwind into our services. and merch margin as well as our investments in car wash. So there's some positives for us that I think we believe over the mid to long term, we'll continue to provide some momentum for our business.

Your next question comes from Chris Li with Desjardins.

So much for all the helpful comments so far. My question is I know market conditions are still obviously very fluid. But given all the positive comments you've made about the momentum of your business so far, I guess my question is, do you have a good line of sight to achieving your financial framework of more than 10% organic EPS growth this year. I just asked in the context of that, you'll be lapping some tough comps on the fuel margin at least later this year. So I wanted to just to gauge of what's your comfort level on achieving that target this year.

Thank you, Chris. And I would say we have a great momentum Alex has been mentioning what's happening in Q1. We feel very confident. The team are doing an amazing job there executing, as you know, at pace, transforming this company from 1 region to another. So there is no reason for us to tell you that our financial growth algorithm is not achievable. We announced that 5 months ago, we remain very confident and yes, we'll execute according to that. So is there good confidence there.

Just I think in this quarter, we delivered against every level of the algorithm. And that's our focus and fleet I brought up, but just -- our teams are really executing across across the geographies and the focus that they're having and the execution they're having they deserve the credit. And we sit here in a pretty confident strong position. And I think also we're just focused on winning the environment we're operating in, and we see resilience from consumers. So yes.

Your next question comes from Martin Landry with Stifel.

Given the high fuel prices during the quarter, I believe that triggers more trip to the pump as consumers put roughly the same dollar amount as usual. So I was wondering if this increased traffic at the pump has translated into more traffic inside the store -- would it be possible to break down your 3.4% same-store sales merchandise growth into traffic and basket for the quarter?

Yes. So our our fill rates are down 12%, 13%, 14%, but our traffic at our pumps are up because of the higher prices. I think the key element here is our ability to access those customers and incentivize them or entice them to go into the store and our digital platforms are what are enabling us to reach those consumers. And I referenced in my comments that we've quadrupled our capability of getting those fuel customers into our stores. The breakdown of our 3.4% we referenced, we had positive traffic that was slightly positive or up, but that's great for us, and the rest is basket. It's a mix of -- we had a really strong quarter in nicotine, really strong quarter in food. And first, we were 3.6 in cigarettes, other nicotine 8.5%, I'm doing this off my head. You heard me reference energy. I think PacBev was up 6%, 6.5% in Food, I referenced in my comments, right? We were up a little over 5% and 10% on same-store sales. So you see us executing against Core+ more and that mix is what's driving the 3.4%.

And to bid on Alex, on this traffic, we see that as an opportunity, a huge opportunity, and Alex was mentioning all the work that we are doing on the digital side and connecting the dots between the fourth court and the store. And there's an opportunity for us to to build on this profit that's coming to the forecast and to be even better and getting more customer entering in our stores. So we are doing that personalizing offer and -- and yes, I think here, we are already seeing some of that. Alex is mentioning it, but there's a huge unlock for us and a lot of opportunities to continue to grow in that space.

Your next question comes from Tom Palmer with JPMorgan.

Wanted to maybe kick off on the foodservice side. It's an area where you noted the top line strength really for multiple quarters now. last quarter. So in the third quarter, you had noted some margin pressures from shrink and I think some mix headwinds around the meal deals. Curious the progress we might have seen just given that improved margin in the fourth quarter? And any expectations in terms of continued progress as we move into '27.

Yes, I think -- thanks for the question. I think we talked with you about the need to do a reset on food, our focus on execution. We are stable now. We are executing. We are producing food. You heard me reference that our hero items are over 90% production. So we are executing and we are stable and that presents the platform one, to continue to evolve our offer and to continue to work on our production and bring our shrink down. But we are still in early innings in food, and our goal is to drive traffic and to drive sales growth.

Our meal deals are resonating with consumers. You heard me reference 1.2. Our compelling value is resonating with consumers, and we are going to lean into that over this summer in a big way with fuel unlocks, our new chicken wings I referenced, we have a $2.50 meal deal in play right now. But we are going to really focus on continuing to grow sales, but we can do that in a margin constructive way. And again, I just complement the teams. This has been a journey, and they are really executing really strongly right now.

Also I did a follow-up just on the fuel volume trends that you're seeing. You noted kind of the higher frequency, lower gallons per Philip. Do you guys look and kind of see like a price level or point where pressure becomes more acute in terms of price levels? And if so, -- are we there today? Just given some of the price moves that we've seen here over the last few weeks? Or was it maybe more pronounced if we look back to earlier period?

Yes. I think if you look at our quarter, where we had the most pressure was really out on the West Coast of the United States, and that's where prices were the highest, California, Arizona. So we reached $6.5, $7 a gallon in California, over $5 a gallon in Arizona.

So we definitely see those price points impacting demand. The Southeast United States, the Midwest of the United States really continued with with really solid volume performance. As I shared, we've been strengthening on volume performance as we've moved into this quarter and prices are coming deck. So I will never predict the future of what's there, but prices are coming down really across our geographies. And we're confident in our ability to continue to capture market share and deliver strong volume performance.

Your next question comes from Mark Petrie with CIBC.

I actually just wanted to follow up on the topic. I think you touched on in your answer to Martin's question, but the impact of the loyalty program and the personalized promotions, hoping you can quantify the impact ideally to U.S. same-store sales and volumes. And I know you called it out specifically with cold dispensed, but maybe on a consolidated basis. And then, Alex, you referenced the up to store conversion up 4x -- but I'm assuming that's off a relatively low base, so some broader contracts would be helpful. And then what you think the runway or what you think the opportunity is from here as that program gains traction.

Yes. I think our capability in the space just continues to advance. And you heard me reference our launch of our new engine and new platform in Europe, and we're seeing very solid results. So you asked me to quantify it. I think for us, it's all about membership active members, increased visits, increased basket, and we are seeing that consistently. Those numbers continue to go up month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter. And we fundamentally believe that is playing in to our improved performance on same-store sales. Can I give you an exact percentage of what we we believe or know that to be, I cannot. But we know that the program is resonating with consumers. We know we hit the top 10 app downloaded in the United States. -- during this past quarter, and we know that more and more people are using the platform. And once they're on the platform, they are shopping with us more and they are buying more from us. And you're right, the quadruple is on a low platform, but we're in the early innings of personalization, which just gives me increased confidence -- but our teams are really executing our capability in that space, the way our digital teams are working with our operators has never been stronger.

And again, this is another area that gives us confidence and we believe is underpinning the results we're sharing with you.

Okay. And maybe just to clarify, the 4 on the pump to store conversion. Like would that have been a material tailwind to the traffic growth that you're talking about?

No, it's not material enough to to be material. But the value of these platforms is we know who the customers are. We know what they're purchasing. We know when they're coming to buy fuel from us and if they're coming into our stores, and we're getting better at incentivizing them and enticing them to come into our stores.

Next question comes from Bobby Griffin with Raymond James.

I appreciate the details throughout this call. I guess, Alex, I wanted to ask more of a high-level question on just like the overall market from the fuel side of things. When you look at the last period of volatility in 2022 and compare it to this period of volatility here today, and you think about how the market reset, are there things that are different that give you confidence that the business resets differently than it did maybe last time and -- or vice versa, things that we should keep in mind. Does anything there on how you think about lapping kind of a period of volatility when the last 1 was a few years ago when we saw different aspects play out.

Yes. I think every event is different. And the global fuel and products markets are incredibly resilient. So what you see is product flows adjusting real time and movements of where product goes to really keep the world supplied with product and those flows changes and any event like this it adapts and the changes from last time are not the changes from this time. I can't predict when the next big volatile occasion will come. And I cannot predict fuel margins. What I can predict is that our ability to execute our capabilities in this space, I think, continue to grow. I think we are well prepared to compete under any environment. And when we see these volatile environments, we realize significant value.

And then just quickly for me, a second one.

Philippe, on the productivity of the capital employment, I don't believe you mentioned kind of new store productivity, but could you maybe touch quickly on what you're seeing out of the new store class as you guys have rated the organic openings and how those are opening up and hitting pro forma numbers?

Yes. Very excited by our ATI program. The stores that we're opening are for 5x more profitable than the average stores that we are in the network. -- after 3 years of operations. So both stores are really making a big difference. That's why we have to in the decision actually to accelerate our inter program -- and yes, you have heard Alex mentioning that, yes, we are well on track to open 750 stores over the next 4 years.

Next question comes from Corey Tarlowe with Jefferies.

Great. I wanted to touch on SG&A. So it was up quite substantially in the prior quarter and then the quarter you just reported costs, I'd say, were relatively well controlled. Could you give us maybe a lens into kind of what's changing from a cost perspective in the business, what we might be able to expect going forward, especially as you invest more into foodservice?

Yes, thank you for the question. And let me start saying that I'm very proud of what the team is achieving on the cost of [indiscernible] -- you're hearing us a lot talking about transformation, how we are deeply transforming this company on investing in many places this company more digital, faster and really enabling better execution, better customer experience. And that is possible because we are keeping a very significant discipline on the cost, okay? You heard me saying last quarter that, yes, we were above completion, but it was linked to some of the vestments -- so -- and directly related to the supply chain. And when you look at this quarter, we had not so significant investment control of investment ramping costs. And you can see the underlying costs, they are going down at 2.6% growth during the quarter, softening good, a lot of pending in terms of selling initiatives, Teams market in Europe in in their overhead cost structure on the marketing piece.

So when you look at U.S., a lot happening there also in the store, the rigor model on looking at supply, waste management, security, we have mentioned to you many times about all the procurement set up and the good thing that we're seeing there. So pretty excited by what we see -- the way that you need to look at gene and we have said that during the corpsman presentation is really aiming at delivering normalized expenses below inflation. That's our goal on -- and you should look at on a yearly basis, not quarter-to-quarter because again, there will be some investment there time to time. But yes, you -- you can trust -- we are very confident on the team. We were again yesterday looking at both plants. And yes, there is a lot happening on the savings that it was a huge confidence that will be there in terms of guidance from a cost perspective.

And I'd just add, you've heard me reference the execution of our teams. And at the end of the day, you look at our P&L and our cost lines, our big cost lines are our labor lines in our lines in our stores. And the teams are really executing there as well, really strong overtime management -- you'll hear me talk about turnover, that directly relates to training cost -- so you see the productivity gains, the strong overtime management, the reduction in training hours the teams are executing, and we are just fighting hard to save dollars in our core operations to enable the investments we're talking with you about. But again, the teams are executing well, and we're well positioned. And we gave you our growth algorithm, and we plan to execute inside of that growth algorithm.

Understood. And then just a quick follow-up, Alex, on the same-store fuel volumes, the margins are quite robust and better than you've seen in quite a long time if ever. So -- as you think about the level of margin that you're generating and the volumes that you have in the U.S., is there a consideration about potentially investing more into price to drive better volumes?

Yes. I mean we compete every day at every site, and it is all about customer value proposition and being extremely consistent for the customer that they can count on us to be in a certain price position against our competitor sets. And candidly, that does not change, regardless of the supply environment or our underlying margin. This is about consumer value proposition being very consistent on the to, on the price side and then leveraging our digital platforms to deliver additional value for visits and additional trips for loyal customers.

This concludes the Q&A. I will now turn the call over to Mathieu for closing remarks.

Thank you, Alex, and Filipe. That covers all the questions for today's call. Thank you all for joining us. We wish you a great day and look forward to discussing our first quarter 2027 results in September.

[Foreign Language]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.

Good morning. My name is Joelle, and I will be your conference operator today. [Foreign Language] I will now introduce Mr. Mathieu Brunet, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury at Alimentation Couche-Tard. [Foreign Language]

English will follow. [Foreign Language] Good morning. I would like to welcome everyone to this web conference presenting Alimentation Couche-Tard's financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026. All lines will be kept on mute to prevent any background notes. After the presentation, we will answer questions from analysts during the web conference. We would like to remind everyone that this webcast presentation will be available on our website for a 90-day period. Also, please remember that some of the issues discussed during this webcast might be forward-looking statements, which are provided by the corporation with the usual caveats. These caveats or risks and uncertainties are outlined in our financial reporting. Therefore, our future results could differ from the information discussed today.

Our financial results will be presented by Mr. Alex Miller, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Filipe Da Silva, Chief Financial Officer. Alex, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Mathieu, and good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining us today. I want to start by saying how energized our team is following our strategic update last month in Toronto. We were grateful for the engagement from many of you, and I hope today gave you a clear picture of our refreshed Core + More strategy and where it will take us over the next 5 years. It is a simplified, focused and customer-centric approach built around our priorities, which are supported by value-driving enablers. It's important to note that these initiatives are already well underway and producing measurable results across the business that are increasingly visible in our performance. Our teams are executing these priorities today, and we are beginning to see the benefits in customer engagement, store performance and operational momentum across the network.

More importantly, this focus is driving traffic by delivering on our customer promise of being fast, friendly, customer-ready and offering compelling value. And at the center of it all, making our customers' lives a little easier every day. But it all starts with our people. Earlier this month, Couche-Tard recognized for the fifth straight year as a Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award winner, highlighting the world's most engaged workplace cultures. This year, we have added recognition of being a winner with distinction, joining only a handful of companies worldwide who have made significant strides to implement workplace initiatives that sustain engagement and help employees thrive. This is helping us beat industry averages and turnover and is showing up in our performance. As we sharpen our execution and focus on delivering a consistent customer experience across our network, we are also extending our reach through organic growth to bring that experience to new customers and communities.

In the third quarter, we completed the construction of 37 stores, reaching a total of 80 stores since the beginning of fiscal 2026. We have another 58 stores under construction, and we are well on our way to reaching our goal of 100 new sites this fiscal year. And as outlined during our strategic update, we are now accelerating the network expansion to add at least 750 new sites by 2030. As we grow and optimize our network, we are equally focused on building the capabilities to support it. We are strengthening our supply chain as well as investing in best-in-class inventory management, which Filipe will cover a little later.

With 3 newly opened distribution centers this past quarter, we are now supporting approximately 3,200 stores across North America with self-distribution from 6 facilities. As outlined during our strategic update, taking greater control of our supply chain and dealing directly with manufacturers, create opportunities to capture margin with benefits flowing through to better cost of goods, improved product availability and a broader assortment for our customers.

With that, let's take a look at our convenience business. I'm very pleased with how our teams performed this quarter, particularly in an environment where many consumers remain stretched. For the third consecutive quarter, same-store sales were positive across all 3 of our operating regions. We finished the quarter at 2.0% on a consolidated basis, in line with the growth algorithm we shared during our business strategy update. In the United States, same-store sales increased by 2.8%, marking our strongest performance in more than 2 years, driven by solid growth in several of our core categories, including energy, nicotine and continued progress in our food journey. While the quarter began at a slower pace following the government shutdown in November, performance strengthened across the network as the weeks progressed, with nearly all of our business units posting positive same-store sales.

I also want to highlight that traffic was up in almost half of the BUs as customers continue to respond to the value and convenience of our offer, whether in our stores, on our forecourts or through our loyalty and digital platforms. The consistent execution by our teams across the network is helping strengthen our position in the market. And as you heard me say in Toronto, we are winning in retail and widening the gap versus the convenience channel.

Turning over to Canada. Growth moderated as expected but remained positive at 0.3%, with alcohol continuing to perform well even after cycling the full year impact of the Ontario beer legislation. This reflects the strength of our product selection and the growing appeal of our stores as a destination for customers. Europe and other regions were up 0.4%, supported by our price and assortment and by the continued progress in food, where our author is increasingly making our stores a go-to destination in several markets.

Growth was moderated by lapping the earlier benefit from the tobacco legislation in the Netherlands. Excluding Asia, where results declined in the mid-single digits due to continued soft consumer sentiment, Europe delivered growth of approximately 1.4% for the quarter. Food continues to be one of the most important growth levers within Core + More, and we are seeing strong momentum as execution improves across the network. In the U.S., food same-store sales grew in the mid- to high single digits as our hot food offer and value proposition continues to gain traction with customers. The results also reflect the investments we have been making in the category and the strength of our scale and procurement capabilities, which allow us to deliver compelling food offers at price points, very few others can match. Meal deals remain a key anchor of that performance, supported by better availability, a simpler assortment and more consistent execution across our stores. We sold 13.3 million meal deal bundles this quarter and roller grill and breakfast sandwiches continue to lead the mix with the $3 price point representing more than half of transactions.

More broadly, our progress in food extends beyond meal deals as we continue to invest and build the category through innovation, stronger execution and targeted marketing, including through our digital platforms. Beyond the U.S., food also delivered mid-single-digit results in Canada, supported by meal deal promotions. In Europe, where food has remained a consistent contributor, we are now preparing to introduce a more unified platform built around breakfast, lunch and dinner occasions, supported by a broader campaign launching in May across 12 countries with the ambition of building a best-in-class burger strategy across the region.

Turning to thirst. Energy delivered solid mid-teens growth across all 3 regions. In the U.S., packaged beverages delivered another strong quarter, supported by the depth of our assortment and larger baskets, even as adult beverages stayed under pressure. Energy remained the primary growth driver with both leading brands and emerging players contributing and helping us gain share versus the broader convenience channel. In Canada, Energy also contributed to category growth, while alcohol performed well despite cycling last year's regulatory change in Ontario, driven by beer and strong gains in wine. In Europe, energy drinks continue to outperform the market, particularly [indiscernible] and sugar-free variants with functional beverages and sports drinks also contributed.

Nicotine was another area of strength in the U.S. Same-store sales grew in the mid- to high single digits. Modern oral nicotine was again a standout category, substantially outperforming the broader market. While age verified digital membership is nearing $3 million, up almost 75% year-over-year. Cigarettes also returned to growth during the quarter, supported by continued share gains and disciplined pricing, though that mix did weigh somewhat on margins.

In Canada, nicotine trends continued to face regulatory and illicit market headwinds, though we continued to perform better than the broader market. In Europe, value and margin growth remained solid, with strength in pouches and e-cigarettes helping offset volume pressure even as we lap the earlier benefit from the change in legislation in the Netherlands.

Turning to loyalty. In the U.S., Inner Circle added another 1.2 million members in the quarter, bringing total membership to $13.7 million,, with the program now available at more than 5,000 stores, engagement continues to build, supported by more relevant and timely communication at key moments across fuel, car wash and in the store. Our redesigned mobile app is also gaining traction with monthly active users up nearly 50% year-over-year. Ease of use matters, and we are seeing that come through more clearly as our digital experience continues to improve and deliver more value for customers.

In Europe, our enhanced Extra program continues to scale ahead of expectations, with average visits per member loyalty traffic and new member sign-ups all increasing versus last year. The redesigned mobile app will launch in Europe later this fiscal year, bringing customers a simpler and more relevant experience with a stronger value focus.

Shifting to our fuel business, performance remained steady and resilient across our markets. In the U.S., fuel volumes slightly declined at 0.4% year-over-year, but improved sequentially versus the prior quarter. We continue to gain share and outperform industry peers, supported by the size and scale of our network and greater control over our fuel supply chain. That is helping us capture lower-cost sourcing opportunities, respond more effectively to market volatility and support margins.

Inner Circle also continues to support engagement around fuel, with our January Fuel Day driving nearly 70,000 new member enrollments and nearly 80,000 reactivations. In Canada, volumes remained positive, up a solid 4.2%, driven by promotional activity and demand growth alongside continued share gains and maintaining pricing discipline. That performance is especially notable against the softer economic backdrop and speaks to the strength of our fuel offer.

In Europe, volumes were down 1.6%, reflecting the broader macro backdrop and extreme weather in parts of the region. Even so, margins remained healthy, supported by favorable supply conditions, disciplined execution and continued progress in expanding supply pathways across the network.

Shifting to B2B. Our European business delivered solid performance in Q3, while card volumes were slightly below last year's results, they were more than offset by strong margins. Growing nonfuel income also remains an important priority with transit charging continuing to build as part of the broader offer. In the U.S., B2B fuel share continued to grow quarter-over-quarter, leveraging the national scale and strength of the Circle K brand. We are deepening relationships across fleets of all sizes, with a deliberate focus on commercial diesel growth and executing new strategic partnerships. Large national accounts are increasing. Our proprietary card programs are demonstrating strong retention and usage within our network and Inner Circle membership among B2B customers continues to rise.

Finally, in e-mobility, we deployed over 430 DC ultrafast Circle K branded charge points across Europe in Q3. This included hitting a milestone in Sweden, where we activated our 1,000 charge point, 5 years ahead of plan. Overall, we added EV charging to 48 new locations in the network and now have 675 locations with Circle K branded chargers at the end of Q3, bringing more customers to our integrated convenience and charging offer.

The European fast charging network is now over 4,300 charge points, up 31% versus last year. Out of these, nearly 3,700 are Circle K branded charge points. Utilization reached all-time highs across Europe with nearly 3 million charging transactions on Circle K branded transit chargers.

With that, I'll now turn the discussion over to Filipe, who will provide further details on our financial performance this quarter.

Thank you, Alex, and good morning, everyone. We delivered one of our best quarterly performance in over 2 years with same-store sales accelerating as the quarter progressed and contributing to solid growth in both adjusted EBITDA and earnings per share. These results validate that the actions outlined in our business strategy update are translating into measurable outcomes. Continued focus on traffic, customer value and operational execution is strengthening our growth algorithm and driving long-term value creation.

As Alex mentioned earlier, in the United States, same-store sales were positive for the third consecutive quarter. The improvement reflects continued progress in growing basket size and reinforcing our value proposition for customers. It also highlights the positive impact of our initiatives implemented across our network, which are helping us outperform broader market trends and capture incremental share.

As we signaled in previous quarters, growth in Canada moderated as expected but remain positive. And Europe and other regions also posted positive same-store sales, supported primarily by company offers, through price and assortment which continues to resonate well with customers across our markets.

For the third quarter of fiscal 2026, net earnings attributable to shareholders of the corporation stood at $757 million or $0.82 per share on a diluted basis. Excluding certain items described in more details in our MD&A, adjusted net earnings were approximately $751 million or $0.81 per share on an adjusted diluted basis, representing an increase of 19.1% compared to the corresponding quarter of last year.

Now let's review the detail each of our business segments on an FX-adjusted basis. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 increased by approximately $196 million or [indiscernible] 11.9% year-over-year, mainly due to higher road transportation fuel gross margin, the contribution from acquisition of approximately $79 million as well as organic growth in our covenants activities partly offset by the impact of regulatory divestiture related to the GetGo acquisition, which amounted to approximately $9 million.

During the third quarter, merchandise and service revenues increased by approximately $351 million or 6.6%, primarily driven by the contribution from acquisitions of approximately $205 million and organic growth, partly offset by the impact of regulatory divestiture related to the GetGo acquisition of approximately $23 million.

Merchandise and service gross profit increased by approximately $150 million or 6.2%. This is primarily due to the contribution from acquisitions of approximately $71 million as well as by the organic growth, partly offset by the impact of the regulatory divestiture related to the GetGo acquisition of approximately $8 million.

Our merchandise and service gross margin in the United States was largely in line with prior year at 33.9%, down slightly by 0.1%, mainly reflecting change in sales mix from higher cigarette sales along with temporary pre-operating costs related to the new distribution centers as we continue to invest in strengthening our supply chain capabilities. Margins slightly decreased by 0.1% in Europe and other regions to 38.9%, mainly driven by a change in sales mix and increased by 0.1% in Canada to 32.5%.

Moving on to the fuel side of our business. Our road transportation fuel gross margin was USD 47.71 per gallon in the United States, an increase of USD 3.43, while in Europe and other regions, it was USD 10.87 per liter, an increase of USD 1.58.

Finally, in Canada, fuel margins continue to post an impressive CAD 15.82 per liter, reflecting an increase of $2.28.

As we discussed during our business strategy update, fuel margins across our network remain healthy and continue to reflect the strength of our supply chain capabilities and in-store execution. Our scale, disciplined pricing approach and ongoing optimization of the supply chain allow us to consistently perform at the high end of the industry, and we remain well positioned in a challenging retail environment.

Turning to SG&A. Normalized expenses for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 increased by 4% year-over-year, primarily reflecting inflationary pressures and targeted investments, supporting our strategic initiatives, as well as investment to support the acceleration of our food service program and ensure our stores remain customer ready. The increase also includes some preopening costs -- pre-operating costs associated with the opening of new distribution centers as we continue to strengthen our supply chain infrastructure. We continue to see measurable gains in workforce efficiency. In the U.S., regular labor hours were slightly down year-over-year, while over time hours declined at a high single-digit rate. As a result, over time as a percentage of regular hours improved 50 basis points versus prior year, reflecting continued progress in labor scheduling and store level tools that are helping our teams operate more effectively.

More importantly, on a year-to-date basis, normalized expenses growth of 3.3% remains broadly aligned with inflation, reflecting our continued focus on efficiency while supporting key investments in the business. This builds on the strong track record we have established in managing costs across the organization.

Following the more than $800 million in savings delivered under our Fit-to-Serve program, our Core + More plan has identified an additional $850 million in opportunities at the EBITDA level across store operations, merchandise cost of goods, general and administrative, goods not for resale and other controllable expenses.

Lastly, we are also continuing to advance the rollout of our RELEX platform. Early results from the pilot phase show encouraging improvement in product availability and the insights gathered are being incorporated as we prepare for broader deployment. As the platform scales, RELEX is expected to help further reduce spoilage and hence, inventory efficiency, support margin resilience and strengthen collaboration with our vendor partners, while also streamlining in-store operations through simpler ordering and more optimized shelf layout.

For the third quarter of fiscal 2026, our depreciation expense increased by approximately $46 million or 7% year-over-year. The increase was mainly driven by the impact from acquisitions, along with ongoing investments across the network, including equipment upgrades, store remodel program, new store opening, network optimization initiatives, technology enhancements and mobility solutions.

From a TAM -- tax perspective, the income tax rate for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 was 21.8% compared with 21% for the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2025. The increase is mainly stemming from the impact of different mix in our earnings across the various jurisdictions in which we operate. As of February 1, 2026, we recorded a return on equity at 18.3%, and our return on capital employed stood at 12.4%. We are also seeing a positive shift in our return profile, supported by disciplined capital allocation, the recent acquisitions performing as expected, improving overall profitability and continued progress on working capital.

During the fiscal year, our leverage ratio stood at 2.25. We also had a strong balance sheet liquidity with $1.5 billion in cash and an additional $3 billion available through our revolving unsecured operating credit facility. During the quarter, we repurchased 1.9 million shares for an amount of $684.4 million, subsequent to the end of the quarter, 0.4 million shares were repurchased for an amount of $21.6 million.

Turning to the dividend. The Board of Directors declared yesterday a quarterly dividend of CAD 0.215 per share for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 to shareholders on record as of March 2026, and approved payment effective April 9, 2026.

In closing, this quarter represents an important step forward for the business, delivering one of our best quarterly performance in over 2 years, provide encouraging evidence that the initiatives outlined in our business strategy update are gaining traction and producing measurable results. Our continued focus on traffic, customer value and operational execution is strengthening the foundation of our growth algorithm. While we remain mindful of the broader consumer environment, the progress we are seeing across our network reinforces our confidence in our ability to drive sustainable growth and long-term value creation. I thank you all for your attention.

I will turn the call over again to our President and CEO, Alex Miller.

Thank you, Filipe. As we look ahead, we remain focused on executing against Core + More and on delivering for our customers in ways that are meaningful and consistent. We are seeing positive outcomes across the business from customer engagement and category performance to continued gains in share. While the consumer and geopolitical backdrop continues to be dynamic, we remain cautiously optimistic. It's still early, but the trends we are seeing so far in Q4 are encouraging. The work our teams are doing every day across the network and their focus on being fast, friendly and customer-ready while delivering value for our customers, gives me confidence Core + More is driving results. I'm proud of what we have accomplished so far this year and excited about the opportunities ahead.

With that, let's turn it over to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from John Zamparo with Scotiabank.

It's a broader question about the current environment for oil prices and fuel. And I wonder when you look back at the history of the industry, can you give a sense of at what price point on fuel, you tend to see some level of demand destruction, both fund in-store purchases and on fuel volumes?

Yes. Thanks for the question, John. Clear trends always fall through for us as price goes up, unit purchases -- average unit purchase comes down. It doesn't necessarily mean the demand destruction and it actually drives additional trips to our sites. I don't know that we have an exact dollar amount that we say demand destruction occurs. A lot of driving is obviously needed or is something that consumers must do. Clearly, when we get over 4 -- up to $5 a gallon, that puts additional stress on consumers that are already [ stretched ] and have so much money to spend. I don't think we see direct correlation between higher fuel price and in-store traffic or in-store performance. We don't see those correlations in our data. So -- and I can tell you thus far during this event, our in-store and our merch is performing quite well.

Yes. Just to complement what Alex is saying, John, I believe that in this environment, we have demonstrated consistently that we are able to outperform. We have this integrated supply chain on the fuel side that help us to really have different optionality in terms of sourcing, pricing capabilities as well. So yes, we believe that -- there is no doubt that it will put further stretch on the consumer, but we are well positioned to continue to outperform the market.

Yes, I think that's a great point, Filipe. In times of volatility historically have almost always been positive, net positive for us over the cycle, where we capture additional margin over the cycle of that volatile period. I think as Filipe referenced, our capabilities in our fuel supply, trading and logistics teams in Houston and in Geneva, we have a lot of confidence in their capability. They have a dual mandate, first and foremost, to keep our stores wet or supplied with product. Secondly, to use the optionality that we purposely build to capture additional margin and volatility generally leads to that optionality leading to greater margin capture.

Your next question comes from Irene Nattel with RBC Capital Markets.

Just following up on your last comments, Alex. Just around acceleration and performance. So when you talked about the quarter, you started negative in U.S. merch same-store sales. So can you talk about the exit rate? And then more specifically, what you've seen in inside store behavior, both pre February 28 and post February 28. So give us all some comfort around all of that as fuel prices have gone up.

Yes. Thanks for the question, Irene. Yes, I think as we said in Toronto, the first period of the quarter, this past period in the U.S., we were actually negative 0.1%. So that gives you an indication of the strength for the remaining portion of the quarter. I think also just what I'm so pleased about is the breadth of that. One, in our core categories of nicotine, thirst, obviously, this is a very strong performance quarter in fuel. But in nicotine and thirst, just solidly positive. 5% positive impact that I referenced that energy was mid-teens growth, positive in cigarettes, high single digits positive in other nicotine products. So just really executing in the core space. It's also broad-based across our BUs. All of our BUs this past quarter, except for one in the U.S. were positive same-store sales. Texas, Arizona, Florida, our southern states that had experienced some challenge, they were all solidly positive in the quarter. The Midwest continues to perform very strongly with mid-single digits positive. So -- and those trends have continued in this quarter to answer your question, Irene. We're -- we've actually run more than 2 straight periods of positive traffic across the U.S. We haven't done that in a long time, Irene. And the broad base of the strength continues. And food continues to accelerate as well, where we're approaching double-digit growth now. So I am encouraged by the progress that we're seeing. And post February 28, we have not seen a change in those trends.

That's really helpful. And just as a follow-up, you noted in your remarks that in the BUs where you've rolled out Inner Circle, you're seeing, I think you said like double the strike, whatever it is. Can you give us an idea of the time line to roll Inner Circle out across all the BUs in the U.S.?

Inner Circle is rolled out across all of our BUs in the U.S. now, Irene. So they are in every one of our BUs across the entire network. And we continue to refresh the program, add capability that you heard in my remarks, Extra is rolled out across all of our BUs in Europe, except for our new mid-Europe BUs. And we're working on the backbone of technology capability to be able to do that in the future.

What you're maybe referencing also, Irene, it's this -- this pilot that we have launched in Europe about the -- putting in place a reward program based on the visit. So we are very excited by that. The more you come, the more the rewards you get. The first results are promising there. And yes, that's something that we believe that will -- as we'll be rolling out, we'll make a huge difference as well.

Yes. And Irene, let me give you a few facts of kind of how the -- how it's performing, right? So active monthly users on our inner circle is up 46%. Average visits per member is up 7% in Inner Circle. It's up 9% for Extra in Europe. Merchandise visits per member is up 13%. So we continue to be very encouraged by our digital platforms and the engagement from customers and consumers.

Your next question comes from Mark Petrie with CIBC.

I wanted to ask about the U.S. merchandise gross margin rate and just sort of the puts and takes there, the impact of prepared food. I think in general, food is viewed as a tailwind to gross margin. But is that the right way to think about it as you guys are sort of in an investment phase to grow that business?

Yes. Thanks for the question. Yes, there is no doubt that food as we mentioned during our business strategy update on [ the loan ] will be accretive to the category. We are building that today. There's no doubt that we still have some opportunities to improve the spoilage execution at store level but we are improving sequentially our performance there. As a whole, when you look at the gross profit margin performance of U.S. this quarter, actually, this slight decrease compared to last year. It's more actually linked to the mix and the strong results linked to cigarettes. Cigarettes have been posting a positive growth during the quarter. And with a lower margin, so that impacted negatively the overall performance of the GP rate.

The second impact on the quarter is, as I mentioned earlier, linked to the impact of our -- of the opening of the new DCs, okay? We are very excited by this new strategy that we are having to go deeper on the supply chain. But there is no doubt that at the early days, you have some impact, preopening costs maturing the operations there. So that has an impact compared to last year. But again, I reiterate here that on the long run, that supply chain will be accretive to the gross profit as well. So confident when we look at the quarters ahead, we believe that, yes, we'll be able to showcase growth profit with a better profile.

Okay. Could you just help us understand how long do you think those DCs end up as a pressure on gross margin? Like is that something we should expect to sustain for a couple of quarters? Or is it more isolated to Q3 in terms of materiality?

I think it's fair to say that there will be some as you can see on -- when you open a new store, you have a couple of quarters that you are ramping up and just fine-tuning the operations. So yes, I think it's fair to expect that some impact on Q4, potentially Q1.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Chris Li with Desjardins.

Just maybe a -- first, I have a question on fuel margins. And when we look at some of the industry data from OPIS, the margins are a bit softer versus the average. But based on your remarks that in a volatile environment, you do get some outsized outperformance. Is that the case currently right now and -- versus your historical outperformance? Are you getting better results during this volatile period?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Chris. I think we certainly get -- what I said was that over the cycle, we realized higher margins. We're in the -- what we would say is more of the front end of the cycle. With that said, margins are fine so far this quarter. I would say they're in line with what we've delivered year-to-date thus far. So that's the answer I can give you.

Your next question comes from Martin Landry with Stifel.

I was wondering if you can give us a bit of an update on the M&A landscape. Last quarter, you had mentioned that your pipeline was active. So any color on that would be helpful.

Yes. Thank you for the question. We remain very active on multiple opportunities across all 3 of our primary regions. And we are deploying the same capital discipline, the same models that our founders taught us and that we've deployed for the past 4-plus decades. But we remain -- there remains a lot of deal flow, a lot of deal activity, and we are highly engaged in that and our decentralized models enable us manage multiple files at the same time, and that is what we're doing right now.

And you can see in the quarter, we have announced that we have acquired 24 stores during the quarter. Again, we discussed that in Toronto and in our Core + More strategy, the single store operator acquisition. That's something that we are focusing more and more. And you can see the acceleration of that quarter-after-quarter.

Your next question comes from Michael Van Aelst with TD Cowen.

I'd like to turn my attention to Europe for a bit. The -- can you give us an idea of what the growth was excluding cigarettes on a same-store sales basis? And kind of how we should expect that drag from the -- lapping the regulatory change to, I guess, continue over the next few quarters?

Yes. I think growth in Europe would have been 3.2%, excluding cigarettes, Michael, and thank you for the question. I think it's also -- legacy Europe was up 2.7%. And the month of January in Europe was one of the coldest ever in Europe. So it really impacted our 4 new mid-Europe countries, Poland, the Baltics, where we had a week to more than a week of really just people at home. So it drove cost, drove electricity price, and it really impacted sales. So we're delivering 6% growth on food. We're driving strong energy growth. Packed beverage is up 5.8% and 6.5% in mid-Europe. So the same trends of Core + More and executing against food. And we do think the weather impact in January specifically, it really did negatively impact us in the period. So we're -- we feel good about our European business, as you heard us say in Toronto, and we're quite confident that we will continue to deliver merchandise same-store merchandise growth in Europe.

Okay. And just a follow-up on that. So from the cigarette drag, do you expect that to be less in future quarters? Because I know when the regulations change, I know you were very prepared for it. I'm just wondering if you guys got more market share right off the bat and then you saw that ease as the year went on? As others kind of [indiscernible] impact there.

Yes. I mean, cigarettes in mid-Europe were down 2.6% for the -- that drag on Netherlands specifically. And then there's also border traffic into Luxembourg, where there's a lot of things happening around border traffic, specifically from Germany into Luxembourg that's impacting negatively some cigarette sales. We don't know how long that will continue, but -- so that basis stays there. But across Europe as a whole, we continue to take share. And in other nicotine, we believe, as we said in Toronto, we can more than offset the cigarette declines across Europe.

Your next question comes from Bobby Griffin with Raymond James.

Alex, I just wanted to go back to your comments about the self-distribution journey. With 3,200 stores now receiving products, are you starting to see some of those savings flow through the P&L today? Or is this program more where it has to be at scale before you get the unlock? So we're just kind of not yet seeing anything actually move the P&L and that's still to come.

Yes, that's -- thanks for the question. And that's still to come. I think as you heard, our first and foremost, getting these DCs open, getting product into them and making sure that our stores have product is our primary goal right now. We are starting to work on, and we have done a couple of commercial deals for supplies into the DC, and we will continue to do that over the coming quarters. But this is really the long game for us, right? This isn't about a short-term win. This is a fundamental belief that supplying our stores ourselves ultimately will enable us to capture additional margin, lower working capital, provide our stores, products when they need them at the times that best suit them and our customers. So this is the long game for us. And we're very convinced that this is the right strategy for us, but we're not really focused on next quarter of seeing a giant commercial win here.

Your next question comes from Corey Tarlowe with Jefferies.

Great. I was wondering if you could touch on the monthly cadence of comps? And then anything you're seeing quarter-to-date?

And then secondarily, Filipe, could you just comment on what we're expecting for SG&A in Q4? And how we should expect and when we should expect normalized expense growth to converge with what you've steered us toward for the Investor Day, i.e., less than inflation?

I guess I'll take the first part, Filipe, and you can take the second part. Yes, again, as we shared with our strategy, we're focused on Core + More. We're focused on fuel and nicotine and thirst and then our enablers of growing food in our digital products and we believe that's working. So the trends in our business on the back end of this the quarter we're reporting now. And as I shared earlier, with Irene's questions, the trend that we're seeing is quite positive. Traffic is positive. It's broad-based across categories. So we remain optimistic around our delivery on same-store merch. So we're just focused on continuing the trends we're seeing in our business. Filipe, I'll hand it to you on the cost question.

Yes. Thanks, Alex. Corey, so on the OpEx, when you look at Q3 again here, when you look at the underlying performance, we feel good actually about what's happening. Teams are really doing a great thing in terms of for productivity, the procurement, centralized procurement on the GFR is delivering also good results. But at the same time, as we mentioned, in Toronto, there are some investments. So on this quarter, you had the DC, we continue to take care of our food program and making sure that we are helping the store to execute this food ambition. But -- and having said that, so we remain very confident on this ambition that we said that normalized expenses will be growing at inflation. When you look at year-to-date, Corey, we are 3.3%. So we are not that far there. And yes, when we look at the next coming quarters, we'll be there. Q4, you will see a -- very likely a better performance on the normalized expense. That's what we're seeing. Again here, similar to what Alex said on the DC, we're here for the long run, confident in our ability to deliver this ambition of 3% roughly in line with inflation. We have the actions, the Fit-to-Serve program is there to help us to fund this strategic investment.

Your next question comes from Luke Hannan with Canaccord Genuity.

I was just wondering if we could get an update on the partnership with Guy Fieri. And how rolled out is that across your network today? And I imagine that those sales are occurring at higher ASPs when compared to the meal deal assortment that you have in the U.S. And Alex you talked about the distribution of sales there. Does the success of that partnership help give you any thought, I guess, updating the price point architecture for the meal deals?

Yes. Thank you for the question. I think as I've shared with you with food, that the one thing we're going to do is be very deliberate about what we're doing and when we're doing it and making sure that we're fully prepared and that anything we're rolling out or expanding, we have tested and really proof that it's ready. Guy Fieri is still in only Northern Tier at this stage. And that's largely a result of some ongoing supply chain issues regarding these products that we need confidence to build out that we -- if we're going to launch these stores and launch these products in additional business units, that the supply chain is robust and that we will have those products. They are at a higher ASP or sales point. And we've had success selling them in Northern Tier. And our strategy has always been a multitiered approach across price points. We do not envision changing our focus on meal deals as a result or our price points on meal deals as a result of Guy Fieri.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Mark Carden with UBS Financial.

So it sounds like you're continuing to see strength on modern oral nicotine. I understand that September may have been a bit unique, but how has promotional activity compared to what you've seen in the past few quarters? And then with the growth in cigarettes, how are you thinking about mix going forward?

Yes. I think other nicotine just continues to grow. And there's a lot of folks trying to gain that growth. So there continues to be a lot of activity, a lot of promotional activity, and our partners in that space continue to be very active with aggressive promotions across other nicotine and that exists today, most of which we put under Inner Circle. I don't -- the category's growth is very consistent, continues to grow. It's not clear to me on the horizon when that would change or the kind of trends that we have or how that's happening changes.

With cigarettes for us, it's all about capturing our share and continuing to win there. Traditionally, we have been beating market by 100, 150 bps. That expanded pretty dramatically this quarter and continues. And I think that's through the capability of our category teams, our pricing teams and our data analytics around how we're positioning sub-premium, premium value and sub-value brands. And I think we're getting better at that as we get better with data and our promotional activity, and we're going to look to continue to do that. Cigarettes is one of our lowest margin categories. So growing cigarettes will have a mix impact on us, but it is more gross profit dollars to the bank, and that's what we're focused on.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Mathieu for closing remarks.

Thank you, Alex and Filipe. That covers all the questions for today's call. Thank you all for joining us. We wish you a great day and look forward to discussing our fourth quarter 2026 results in June. [Foreign Language]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and now please disconnect your lines.

Good morning, everyone. [Foreign Language] On behalf of Alimentation Couche-Tard, welcome to our strategic update 2026. Thank you for being with us today, whether it's in person here in Toronto or through the webcast.

Now I will continue in English. Welcome to our 2026 business strategy update. Thank you for those joining us in person here in Toronto and to everyone connected via webcast. I'm Mariusz Chojnacki, Director of Investor Relations. Today, our leadership team will share our positioning Couche-Tard for the next phase of profitable growth and long-term value creation. We will begin the event with a fireside chat featuring our President and CEO, Alex Miller, and Mathieu Brunet, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury. This will be followed by presentations and a Q&A session. We'll wrap up before noon with some closing remarks, and for those attending in person, we will be providing a light lunch.

Before we begin, a few housekeeping items. Today's remarks will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. We refer to the following forward-looking statements accompanying this presentation as well as the risk and uncertainties outlined in our financial reporting. Therefore, our future results could differ from the information discussed today. Full details are available in our public filings, and a recording of today's event will be available in the presentation -- in the Investor Relations section of our website, along with presentation materials to follow.

With that, Mathieu, over to you.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. I am pleased to kick things off today, and I have the privilege to interview Alex Miller. As we look back at the last 18 months since he was appointed CEO of Couche-Tard. So Alex, when you took over as CEO, I remember you came to me and you said you needed to know a lot more about that Investor Relations stuff and what that actually meant for you. Since then, we've actually spent a lot of time together, working on quarter ends in different projects. So it's been great to know you since then. But now I ensure that many investors will also like to know more about you since you've been with the company for many more years. So why don't you start things off by telling us more about yourself and your career path.

Thank you, Mathieu. Thank all of you for being here, excited you're here today. I grew up in Central Illinois, in a small rural town. I met my wife, Vicki in college. We've been together for over 30 years. I have 3 children, 3 wonderful children, at least most of the time. One is in college now, 2 are in high school. I like to be outdoors. I like to try and stay active. I'd like to golf, I'd like to ski, I'd like to my mountain bike. I'd like to read.

From a work perspective, I started after school after I graduated college working for Amoco Oil Company in St. Louis, Missouri. My first job was running 3 convenience stores. I spent my first 8.5 years with Amoco for about 3 years, they got bought by BP in retail, different jobs in retail, category management, pricing, fuel pricing, I wrote a new labor model, I remember, moved kind of all over the United States or several times in the United States. And then I moved to London to BP's headquarters to work in finance, planning, worked on M&A, then moved into what we called alternative energy. So I worked in solar, wind, natural gas liquids, combined cycle gas turbines. And then I moved back to Chicago for my final 4 years working in BP's fuel value chain and their supply and trading teams. Brian Hannasch, our former CEO, and I met in my second job in Amoco. So I've known Brian for more than 30 years, and I worked for him twice in BP and Amoco. We obviously kept up through the years and Brian brought me over to Couche-Tard to -- he had the idea that we had gotten large enough at that time to kind of consolidate our supply and logistics fuel trading in North America. So I started doing that for Couche-Tard. We decided to then do that globally. I then took on a senior operating role. I ran real estate for a while, and then I became COO and here I am.

That's quite the experience in retail actually. It started about 5 years ago for me, working for Couche-Tard, and it's been quite impressive to see how retail is fascinating initially. So if we're reflecting now just on the last 18 months in your career and you in your role, can you give me the top 3 most important things that you have learned since becoming the CEO?

Yes. Mathieu, I think, first of all, just the scale and resiliency of our global platform. I've visited all of our business units every year. And I'm just amazed by quality of our assets, the quality of our teams, the diversification of our teams, how local our teams are, it is just a pretty profound network and platform that we've built. The free cash flow that comes off of that platform is impressive. We're very blessed by that.

I think secondly, just the power of being in stores and being with our people, I think it's pretty easy to get chain to a desk chain to PowerPoint slides, really resist that. Our business is alive in our stores. I learn more being in our stores than I do sitting in front of my computer or looking at a PowerPoint deck. I learned from talking to our people, hearing what's really happening, what's working, what's not working, what projects we didn't get quite right and where our focus needs to be.

And then I think the third thing I would say is just the pace of change with consumers. It's -- I've never seen just the ramp at change and what's happening across retail, how consumers are behaving. So it's just imperative to stay close to the customer right now, really stay on top of that of what's happening and adapt and adapt quickly.

Yes. And you're totally right. It's been such a changing environment, whether it was customer-driven, the outside environment, the interest rates, inflation, so it's been a wild couple of years actually for us as a company. Now I'm sure there's a question that is on everyone's mind today, but what has not gone to plan that impacted the execution of the 10 for the Win strategy that we presented 2.5 years ago?

Yes. I think I'll touch on 3 things. I think first, we didn't anticipate the consumer softness. The environment, obviously, COVID never been through COVID coming out of COVID, the inflation. We hadn't experienced inflation like that in decades. Many of our people and many of us had never experienced inflation like that and just the pressure that it put on consumers, their consolidation of trips, their pursuit of value. We didn't anticipate that in what we built intend for the win.

I think secondly, just category headwinds or category changes. I guess it kind of gets to the changing consumer. I've been in this business for a long time. And usually, categories would move 1% or 2% year-on-year, up or down, seeing categories move up or down 10%, see it happening very quickly. That continues today. Again, I don't think we anticipated that. I don't think we'd necessarily change quick enough. I think we've learned from that.

I guess third, I would say, just our food execution. I think as we reflect when we first rolled out our food program, it was too complex. It had too many SKUs. The processes weren't tight enough, we need thousands of people to execute anything we give them. It has to be tight, kind of has to be bulletproof. It was too complex when we initially rolled it out.

I mean those are quite good learnings, I think, from what we've seen over the last 2.5 years. But if we -- let's continue to expand on the same topic for a moment. There's also been a few successes as well as part of 10 for the Win. So why don't you tell us what you're the most proud of from the strategy that came out?

I think there's a lot of successes and there's a lot of things I'm proud of, Mathieu. I think let me first just start with our people and our operating metrics. We're a retailer. We focus on execution coming out of COVID. It was very difficult during that time. We have just improved our core people metrics and our core operating metrics, just quarter-over-quarter really ratably, and we're back to being Couche-Tard and our people metrics are better than they've ever been.

I think secondly, just our network growth and discipline. You saw in the video there, 100 new stores. We have a machine, real estate and development team that is a machine. We are building sites. We are doing it with our normal discipline. And just Total. It's a big transaction for us, complex transaction, and we're integrating it. We're ahead of our model plan. We put on the business when we acquired them. I'm really proud of the progress we've made there.

Thirdly would be digital transformation. Candidly, 18 months ago, we were waffling a bit. I think we were behind in 18 months, I think we've leapfrogged and we're ahead. And you're going to hear Erica and Ed talk about that later today.

I guess fourth would be a food reset. We have learned from our mistakes. We've gone back, we've reduced SKUs. We've tightened our process, and we're in action now, and Louise and Hans-Olav will talk about that later today.

Fifth, our cost discipline and reinvesting. We delivered on our agenda. We've saved hundreds of millions of dollars. We've performed pretty consistently at CPI, absorb this inflation, while investing materially in systems and platforms. And just last is culture as a performance engine for us. Our culture is so important to who we are as a company. I think our culture is as strong as ever right now.

Yes. It's -- I think those achievements really make my life easier in Investor Relations, that's for sure. It's certainly been great the last couple of quarters to be able to showcase the successes that we've had and also the momentum that we've been building. So you kind of finished on culture. So I want you to kind of keep that thought and talk to us about the culture. I know you've told me a few times, one of the reasons you were appointed CEO is because you were the one that was going to protect that culture. So talk to me about what makes the culture of this company so special and unique?

I think first is humility, being humble. We are a team of 150,000 people. We are all together. We are out in stores. We are talking to each other, humility in everything we do. I think second is our values. I'll talk about those a little bit later, but we live by those values every day, and we all share them. I guess third bit of our culture is just absolutely being customer obsessed, focusing on the customer and everything we do, listening to them, adapting to them, that's our culture, Mathieu.

I'd say the second thing is our decentralized operating model as a structural moat. That model, our founders put in place has served us so well. We have 30 business units around the world. They are local. The people that work in those businesses come from those geographies grew up in those geographies. They are close to the business. They own the business. I recall maybe 6 months after Filipe joined and he and I were just sitting around talking and he said, he goes, the thing that just amazes me about this company is the ownership of their P&L and the ownership of their business. That is our decentralized model. That's pretty unique.

I would definitely echo everything that you said. And I think a personal example for me is how everyone came together as one team as we were preparing for this Investor Day, right? I mean it was -- I mean everyone was very happy to chip in. So that was great. But other than preserving the culture, are any other points -- any other points of emphasis that you have focused on?

Yes. I think a few things, Mathieu. I guess, first, I'm sure the team is pretty sick of me saying now less is more, less is more, less is more, something I've lived by. I've managed by I fundamentally believe in. What does that mean? It means focus. And I think with the company of our size and our scale and the complexity that's happening around us, it's even more important. Less is more focused on what is priorities and get after it. We know when we focus this organization, they can deliver amazing things.

I think secondly would be customer-ready operations, just we are an operating company. We have to be ready for those customers. It is the most differentiating thing we do. I'll talk on that a little bit later. Digital and supply chain enablement, that is our scale. That is deploying our scale. That is things smaller, single-site operators. They don't -- they can't do that. Those are advantages for us. Those are how we utilize the scale, and we are working on that.

I guess last, just retention and engagement back to our people, Mathieu, our people are who get it done. When we're turning over people, we have to retrain people, and that customer ready suffers, really getting after and continuing to improve on intention and engagement is always going to be a priority for me.

Great. Thank you, Alex, for the amazing opportunity to have this interview with you and for providing us with a better understanding of your achievements at Couche-Tard and also what your priorities have been as the CEO of this great company.

Now I know that investors and analysts are eager to learn more about where you're taking Couche-Tard into the future. So before we start the presentation, why don't we just take a quick moment and you tell us why it was important to bring everyone here today and present the company's outlook and the strategy for the future?

Yes. I think I'm just incredibly proud of what's been built and what we're continuing to build. We are going to grow this business. We have great people that are highly motivated, Telling all the time. You asked me about people all the time. And I always tell him I said we need more great people, but I fundamentally believe we have stronger people than we've ever had. We have phenomenal leaders up and down in this company. And I'm excited for the future. I'm excited for you to get to be with some of our leaders and to hear about where our focus is.

Great. Alex, thank you so much. The mic is all yours.

Thank you, Mathieu. I'm excited. I hope you can sense to share with you our strategic update. I'm going to take you through just a bit of our history because our history is important to us. I'm then going to pivot to kind of our vision of the future and the things we're paying attention to. And then we'll bring it back to the strategy. I'll introduce the strategy and then several of our leadership team will go into greater detail around that strategy.

This is a condensed time line of our history. As the video said, our founder started this company with one store in Laval in 1980. They grew in Quebec, they grew into Ontario, and they continued to grow West into Canada. Our founders would tell you a lot of people told them not to go into the United States. A lot of foreign companies failed. A lot of Canadian companies failed going into the United States. If you know our founders, they believed in their model. They believed in themselves, and they entered the United States in 2001 when they bought big foot oil. They doubled down on that bet when they bought Circle K was a huge transaction for us at that time, a couple of years later.

Then they entered Europe. They were -- I remember they had been talking about entering Europe and they found the right opportunity. They bought Statoil in 2012. I think maybe it will help if I tell you a little story to try and underpin who our founders are and we're up really is our culture. I joined Couche-Tard in January of 2012. Brian hired me to do the fuel role. I lived in Chicago, Illinois at the time. My kids were in school. I was supposed to move to Phoenix to do my fuel job. But I couldn't move until the summer because my kids were in school. So Brian said, I want you to go work in one of our stores before you move to Phoenix. So I went to work for out of store in Oakland, that's in South Chicago. And Brian told me, he said, get in there, learn what we do. He goes, if something comes up that is relevant of why I hired you, he goes, "I might reach out and ask you to do something". I don't think it's been 2 weeks and he sent me an end. He called me, said, I'm going to send you an NDA, go sign it and I'll call you. So he sent me the NDA, I signed it. It was Statoil. They were working on acquiring Statoil. So I spent months working in our store in South Chicago. And at night, I was in the data room reviewing fuel contracts, working on a model. I ultimately wrote a paper for our Board suggesting that the fuel margins were sustainable in Scandinavia, turned out I was mostly right, luckily.

I then went to -- in the early summer, Brian invited me to go with Elaine himself and Ray Pare, who at the time was our CFO, to go ride sites in Benelux on another file and -- and that was really cool for me because I got to know Elaine and then and Brian a little more. And all we were riding the sites, they were pleased with the assets we were buying. They were holding on price and pleased with what we were paying on price. But what they talked about the most of why they were doing this transaction was the leadership team they were acquiring.

They fundamentally help that for them to enter Europe, they had to get a great leadership team because they knew we weren't going to bring Canadians or Americans over to run our European business. I sit here 13.5 years later. And Hans-Olav sitting right there. He is one of our senior leaders. Ina Strand, who is our Chief People Officer; came in that transaction. Jorn Matson who is another one of our senior leaders over in Europe. They all 3 came in that transaction and 13.5 years later, they are still here with us. I think they like our culture. You can ask Hans-Olav later. That's our culture. That is our culture.

I think we entered Asia in 2020 and when we brought out our franchisee in Hong Kong, but we've kept adding with additional transactions. So in Canada, multiple transactions in the United States, Topaz in Europe, then Total in Europe. So we just keep building on those platforms that our founders have built.

Now this is our network. This is what we built. 29 countries, 30 business units, 17,000 sites, as you heard in the video. We don't chase site count. We don't have an aspiration to have 20,000 sites or 30,000 sites. That's not who we are. We take a very focused view on our network. And we're actually very active with our network, and it is an incredibly differentiated in our channel, and in retail in general and provides the foundation for our strength and our ability to grow and to grow earnings. And Aaron, who runs our network will talk about that in quite a bit more detail later today.

We pursue NA for 4 reasons. We want attractive long-term assets. We want robust return on capital. We have to believe that we can deliver meaningful synergies, and we better have a plan, and we follow that plan to do it. Lane just challenged us this week on something we were talking about Filipe, right? What's your plan? Can you need a better plan, but we follow that plan. We developed those plans, we execute those. Everything we do, we have a model, that's what goes into our budgets. We know with every transaction we've done, whether we've achieved those models. I can tell you with a couple of exceptions, we have.

And we -- the final reason is, can we acquire distinct capabilities or platforms, programs or people, as I mentioned, with Statoil. This is our operating model or the flywheel that our founders developed they gave us and that we follow today. We invest in the business, strategic growth. We invest in our business. We ratably invest in our business. We do that with financial discipline. We invest in our existing assets. How does that show up? That shows up through ideas then the piloting of those ideas, proving those ideas and then scaling those ideas. We do that over and over again, and we ratably invest in our business.

I mentioned our decentralized business unit operating model, global local. We will not change that. It is unique. It is differentiated. We fundamentally believe it's one of the things that makes us so strong and has delivered the returns that we have over many decades. We only add regional enterprise or global headcount or where we feel we can deliver scale and unique capabilities. We're pretty aggressive about restricting, monitoring where are we doing and how are those interfaces working with our business units.

And then finally, it's a cliche, right? Retail is detail, it is a cliche, but it's right. retail is detail. We focus on operational excellence. We monitor a lot of KPIs. We talk to our business units every period about their performance, the things that are working, the things that aren't working, and we are focused on our stores and our operational execution.

25 years of EBITDA, EPS and net earnings. And some of the many transactions, sizable transactions on the bottom of this slide. I think it's a pretty good performance under any lens. You've owned Couche-Tard for these 25 years, you've done pretty well. It's quite an amazing story. It's one all of us. I've been CEO for 18 months. It's a responsibility to take over for Elaine and Brian in this trend and what's been built. I take that extremely seriously as does this team. I know what's on your mind. Hey, it's a great chart, Alex, but what about those last 2 years? What about that orange bar and that pink -- or the orange line and the pink line, those went down the last 2 years.

I could sit here and I could talk to you about COVID and margin -- pretty extreme margin expansion. I could talk to you about the Ukraine Russia war and the dislocations that drove an oil gasoline and diesel markets and increased margins and our capability to capture a pretty substantial share of that, but those are excuses. I know what you want to know, are those bars going to be going back up in this trajectory. I can tell you, the answer is yes. We're going to talk to you about our vision of how that happens.

I'm pleased with the last 2 quarters we've talked with you about. We've gotten some momentum, that momentum has continued in this latest quarter. And as we talk with you about our strategy today, the answer is yes. So that's a little bit about our history. It's hard to talk 45 years' worth of history in 3 or 4 slides, but it means a lot to us. It is where we come from. It is kind of what grounds us as leaders of this company.

I now want to pivot to our vision. Our vision has changed. This is a new vision for us as part of the strategy refresh, to become the world's favorite stop for people on the go. Why did we decide to change it? Again, I mentioned earlier that the environment is changing, right? It's changing rapidly. Consumers are changing. I referenced, I have 3 children. They're a lot different than I am. They live differently, they interact, they consume differently. The world is changing. We need to adapt. What does that mean for Couche-Tard? It means channel blurring. It means digital. It means where -- we need to beat the C-store industry, right? And we are by increasingly widening gaps candidly. But we need to win in retail because channels are blurring. Consumers are making choices. Consumers have more choice, more visibility through these digital channels than they've ever had.

Consumers are starved for time. They're looking for efficiency. They're looking to be talk to where they live and where it's relevant for them. And they are on the go. We love on the go. In bricks and mortar retail, I would -- there is no other space I would rather be than where we're at. We have incredibly great assets. We are incredibly convenient. People get into our stores and they get out of our stores very quickly. Most of the things that are purchased from us are consumed immediately or within 90 minutes. We believe there's broader things we can sell in those stores that fit these criteria. You guys are very intelligent people and you read like I do. Blue collar jobs are growing. Trade schools are growing. These are our customers. They're on the go. We can serve them. So people on the go is our sweet spot. And it's not just in the C-store channel, it's in retail as a whole.

Our mission hasn't changed. You heard it in the video to make people's lives a little easier every day. It's kind of simple. Maybe you think it doesn't matter. We think it does. I'll just tell you a story, right? You hear us -- you hear me saying I'm in our stores all the time and I visit all of our stores. I think one of the things that just amazes me when I'm on those rides and I'm with these guys and people kind of see us standing around. We're usually wearing protective orange or yellow jackets because we're out on our parking lots. And they're kind of like who are you guys? Are you the big wigs, but the number of times that people come up to us and thank us and want to recognize one of our employees, you wouldn't believe how many times that happens. It happens all the time. It tells us a story about somebody and how great they are, how -- what they do for them, how they've come through for them. That's real. I think that we're all consumers. We're all time pressured. And I'm 53, but for me, the experience is getting worse. I get disappointed a lot, I wait in line. People don't have some people are rude to me. People don't seem to care that I'm there to transact with them, this matters, right? This really matters. So making people's lives a little easier is what we do.

This is our customer promise. Again, it's a pretty simple slide. One of the things when I took over as CEO, I thought we had the opportunity to -- we hadn't lost focus on the customer, but I thought we had the opportunity to focus even harder. So we did a ton of consumer research to go out, ask our customers what they were -- what they wanted from us, what were the most important things they said they wanted. This is it by a long ways, not even [indiscernible]. That's why we use our cameras in our stores to monitor wait time. And I can tell you our wait times in almost every business unit is getting faster. They want us to be fast. They want us to be friendly. As per my story previously, they want to have a positive experience. They want employees that are engaged and happy to be there.

Customer ready. What does that mean? It means that they want our stores to be clean and they want us to have the products that we are supposed to have that they came to purchase. They want us ready for that. We are investing in platforms and technology that you'll hear about later today. It is going to be a game changer. It's in Europe for us today. It is going to be a game changer for us to improve on our customer readiness. And I think the thing we added -- so those 3 have been in focus for us for quite a while. We added a fourth, it's called compelling value. That is the change in the consumer. It's not like value wasn't there. Clearly, you've had the Walmarts of the world for a long time with low price. But value with these constrained consumers is even more important. You might be sitting there saying, Alex, you guys are on a convenience store. You're not really known for value. So let me be clear. We're not planning on complete -- competing with Walmart for everyday low price. But the places we participate in our core and the things we're developing, we absolutely can compete in value. We have tremendous scale. We have tremendous vendor partnerships. So -- and we can run real compelling deals, so we are running fewer promotions but more compelling promotions. And when we get this right, our consumers respond, and this is something we're going to double down on as we look to the future.

I talked about our values a little earlier. One of the questions I get, I saw it was on a the IR group always gives me a Q&A. But I get asked this all the time. One of the questions on the tough Q&A was, Alex, is it hard to lead and manage in this polarized political environment? The answer I always give is no, it is not. The reason it is not is because this is how we lead this company. These haven't -- these aren't values we created this year or last year or 10 years ago, these are the values for the 14 years I've been here. And if our founders and Brian were here, they would tell you these were our values before then.

Let me give you a little color about -- so what is one team. You heard it on the video. I was glad to hear it. One team is we don't do politics. We don't do silos. We don't do skip coating. We are all in this together. We are all attacking the customer, servicing the customer, this is what we do. We do it every day. We work together. We support each other. We welcome people for who they are, what skills they bring to us and provide an environment for them to grow and achieve.

We do the right thing. Again, sounds simple. We do the right thing in everything we do. We support our communities. It is at the core of our decentralized model. We just went through a pretty nasty snowstorm in the Southeast United States. We always have 2 priorities. Louise and I talked about this just recently, keeping our people safe. First and foremost, we will do anything to keep our people safe, make sure they have housing, make sure they have food, make sure that if they're stranded at work, we can get them home from work. And then we look to keep our stores open because we need to service our communities. And our communities really rely on us in times of disaster. It's really important for them. And having water and fuel. Basic food is really important, and we deal with them a lot. But it's even more than that. We -- you won't see -- I don't have a big corporate marketing budget. I don't think you'll see Couche-Tard or Circle K on the Bell center, if anybody is going to make that decision, it's Steve who's sitting in the back, we go to our business units. Our business units carry those budgets. And we encourage them to participate with local charities and support their communities for the things that they value.

My favorite value is play to win. One thing I'd love since the day I joined this company is we get after it, right? We get after it. We work hard. We want people to make decisions. We want to push down decision-making. We want them to own their business. That is my job. I view my job as success. The fewer amount of decisions I need to make the better. I want our people on the ground empowered to make decisions and owning their business.

So now it's time to balance our strategy refresh. Core plus more. We are focused on long-term profitable growth, consistent organic growth, the customer is at the center of everything you will hear about, leveraging our scale, that's in our network, our platforms and our systems. And the thing I'll tell you, everything you're going to hear about today, we are in action on today. It's not on a slide, it's not -- it's -- you're not going to hear about a lot of bright shiny objects or some massive change for Couche-Tard. You're going to hear about us focused on our core and the things we think we can do more of and leveraging our scale. Financials that Filipe will share with you at the end of this don't include any M&A. They are all organic. We are going to grow organically. And what we are talking about, and you see the word on this slide is we want and need to grow traffic. We want more people visiting our sites and shopping in our stores.

And I referenced that I was proud of the last 2 quarters, been improving. That trend has really continued into this quarter, and we are seeing positive traffic in a number of business units and I really feel great about that. So we're going to amplify the core. This is our core business, fuel, nicotine and thirst. It is the predominant reasons today that people come and visit us. We like this space. Two of these 3 things are growing from a macro sense. We are taking share in all 3, an increasing amount of shares. Trey has sent me Nielsen, all of us Nielsen data in the last 2 periods where we outperformed market by 500 to 600 basis points we have never achieved that -- those type of gaps. We can't do that without executing in the core.

Then we're going to do more. You're going to hear more about the food reset. Our numbers, we've grown nicely in the first 2 quarters of this year. That has continued and again, progressed further in this latest quarter. Offer -- what is offer. It's assortment. We need to evolve our assortment, change our assortment. We think we can. We're going to underpin that with our investments in supply chain, and you're going to see a video later from Trey on that.

Network. I've talked already a lot about it. Aaron is going to talk about it later. Mobility solutions, that might surprise you. I think if you live in the U.S. or you live here in Canada, it looks like EV, Wow, I just watch all these automakers take these huge ride-offs and the subsidies aren't there and things, but I can tell you in Europe, EV is very real. It is growing and we have built just a fantastic platform under Hans-Olav's leadership, and he's going to talk to you more about it later today.

And our enablers, and I'm really excited that Ed and Erica are here to talk with you today because -- it's always -- I know for me, it's a black box. What are we doing in tech in these systems. This is our scale, right? This is our scale, data, digital platforms. This is where AI comes in. They're here to talk you about it. We're going to continue to drive efficiency into our business so we can keep our costs controlled and make the right investments.

I've heard Elaine say once, I've heard him say it 50 times. Alex put people around you that are smarter than you. You're going to meet 6 of them or hear from 6 of them later today. I think maybe we're -- I've added to Elaine's guidance to me is these 6 people have very different backgrounds, different experiences in life. And probably most importantly, different skill sets. We are good at different things, and we complement each other, and I'm really excited for you to hear them later today.

I guess last, I'm going to finish with people. Anyone that knows me knows that I fundamentally believe the most important thing in a business is people. We have incredible assets in this company. But our people are blood. Our people are how we execute, how we get things done, nothing is more important to me. I created operations first when I became COO. That was a focus on our people and our customers. I referenced our people metrics. We are hitting levels we -- this doesn't sound humble. We are crushing industry on turnover levels. We are beating them by 20%, 30% and then we continue to get better at it. We're increasingly being recognized by various entities for being a wonderful employer. That is really important to me. It is really, really important to me. And great people enable this strategy.

So with that, I'm going to finish. I'm going to hand it over to Louise, who is going to take you into the core.

Hi, everyone. I'm Louise Warner, and I'm the EVP of North American operations. And I have the privilege of presenting the core on behalf of all of our teams across the world. You heard from Alex about the importance of the people in our stores and in our teams across the world. And you'll hear later from Aaron that location is the #1 reason why people build a convenience store. Erica and Ed will tell you about all the amazing things we're doing in tech and digital and the personalized offers we're bringing to our customers, which they love. But in the end, we need to have the products that people need and want when they visit on a convenience occasion. And as Alex said, those things today and into the future, things that are pretty simple, fuel, nicotine and thirst.

For fuel and nicotine, these are mature products. They've been around for a while. And many of you will think that these are declining products. We don't see it that way. Firstly, we believe and can and evidence that we take market share. And second, the underlying consumer is actually growing in both of those areas. For mobility, we see fuel and e-mobility growing in totality. And in nicotine, the underlying use is actually growing as well.

And hopefully, I don't need to convince you about first. First is a category that is growing overall and broadening the diversity of the occasions, the diversity of the products that are offered. It's amazing how many different things can be in those occasion. And I'll tell you a little bit about why we're so excited about this.

You can also see the financial significance of these products to our business. On this slide, you can see the significance to revenue and gross profit. And so for us, to continue to grow organically, as Alex referenced, we believe and can continue to outperform in these categories. In the coming slides, you'll also see me talk about U.S. statistics quite a bit. Why do I talk about the U.S.? It's our biggest market. So obviously, that's a good reason to talk about it, but it's also the most transparent market. So it's where we're able to get lots of good data to share with you transparently and tell you the story of why we're winning.

So let's start with fuel. We're incredibly proud of the business were bill and fuel. Alex told us his journey as the first dedicated fuel employee of the company. And today, we employ thousands of people working in this business with an integrated business all the way from customer to supply. These customers are pretty diverse. Their individual guests like you and I pick up our cars, but there are also businesses large and small visiting our sites. The majority of our stores globally are now under the Circle K bands. So Circle K, Couche-Tard, INGO, the controlled banners, our brands that we control. And you'll hear from Aaron and Erica also why that is really important as part of the unlocks in the network and our digital solutions.

But it's more than that. Having our own brand isn't about some marketing presentation that someone came up in a dark room. The red canopy allows our customers to recognize us to see Circle K as they come down the road. It allows us control and cost advantages in our supply chain. And it also simplifies our tech platforms, allows us to own it and then tailor our solutions to our customers. And with this formula that we've built with fuel, we're on the same path with nicotine first and the more categories to emulate a success.

So one of your favorite topics and also fortunately, one of mine, fuel margins. We presented a view very similar to this a couple of years ago, and our conviction continues to grow in this year. On the left-hand side, you'll see the cost of doing business continuing to grow. Alex mentioned inflation. We see ourselves with a strong cost discipline, continuing to be out of beat that inflationary pressure that we see across the industry.

Secondly, we also see industry margins continuing to rise, people acting rationally saying, "Hey, my cost of doing business is rising. I need to find a way to pass this cost on". So we see fuel margins continuing to rise in line with CPI, taking also into effect the volume demand destruction in some of our markets. And we see this trend in all of our geographies. This is not something new. This is not something that you will see period-to-period, quarter-to-quarter and maybe even year-to-year, but it's a continuous trend that we see and we believe in.

The other thing on this chart is our outperformance. So you see the gap between the industry and our performance continuing to rise. We believe not only is this sustainable, but we have more opportunities to outperform, and it's from all of the things that we've been working on over the years. This is not one thing. These are the hundreds of things your team are doing every day. So what are some of those things?

Well, lets us more. So we'll tell you them all, but it's thinking about our customers, thinking about keeping our focus fast, keeping them clean online the whole time. How do we approach our customers? How do we build personalized loyalty offers that they love with fuel at the core? How do I think about my supply chain, my sourcing, my logistics, the efficiency every little piece goes to the bottom line and also making sure that we're dynamic with our fuel pricing strategies.

So let's move on to nicotine. We see rapid shifts in the products that are available to our customers in the nicotine category. We see our customers choosing to either broaden or substitute the products that live traditionally used into the small products. So let's use a couple of examples of what this looks like. In some cases, traditional cigarette user will add another product. So this might be one of our white nicotine products. Or maybe I'll -- for my friend, Trey, on the example, he would have traditionally used snuff and now he's fully transitioned to white nicotine product.

So what that means, overall, we see across the industry, a decline in the traditional cigarette products, but an increase in the consumption of the more modern alternatives like vaping and white nicotine. And in the later part of the decade, we believe that these new products will have more significance in cigarettes in our overall business. And like fuel, we are outperforming the market in this category. And we're doing that by working closely with manufacturers, watching these trends and making sure that we have the products available to our customers as and when they need them.

It goes without saying that the regulatory environment is a significant influence on this category and how and when we introduce products is dependent on that regulatory environment. Our commitment to our communities, as Alex talked about in this space is to be a responsible retailer and to only introduce products that are legally allowed in the communities that we operate in. And our customers then have confidence also that they can trust us to be that responsible retailer.

As you can see a few statistics on this slide, we are outperforming the markets we operate in, in all of these categories, both the traditional cigarette categories but, in particular, these new modern products. So let's give a couple of examples. The traditional cigarettes in the U.S., we sell twice the number of volume of the average industry location. For modern oral in the markets we trade more than 1 in every 5 cans that are sold in those markets go through our register. And that means that our manufacturers come to us when they want to help us bringing an offer to our customers.

Some of you will be aware of the amazing information we ran last fall. In the space of 4 weeks, with the support of our manufacturer, every time someone bought a nicotine product of any type, we were able to offer a free caners in to our customers. And in the space of those 4 weeks, we gave over away millions of cans of ZYN, and that's maintained momentum of those customers coming back.

Compelling value to our customers through deals like the ZYN promotion I talked to and the digital solutions we're bringing together. This is also frontline pricing and personalized offers, so we can attract all types of customers. And later, you'll hear from Trey in our video about how supply chain is going to help us continue to grow in this space.

Okay. But let's move on to first. I think you heard the excitement from Alex. We're all so excited about this across our business. We see demand from drinks growing, and it's an all-day occasion. You can see on this slide, we talk about some. Sometimes it's hot or cold. Sometimes it's a big drink or a small drink. Sometimes it might be dispensed or packaged. It may be nonalcoholic or it might be beer and wine or it might be ready to consume something on the go or someone wants to take home. For all of those things, we've invested over many decades to serve all of those needs. And so we're outperforming in this category.

Our customers know that we're the destination for thirst. You see on this slide, we talk about globally 7 out of 10 customers when they come into our stores, they buy a beverage. In terms of value SKUs, this is over 8 out of 10 customers. And these are often now private label controlled brands. So in the U.S., that's -- we're known for polar pulp. In Europe, it's Circle K coffee. And in Canada, the most popular as Froster, which [indiscernible] at this time of year is incredibly popular.

And our customers are evolving. You may have seen in some of our publicly listed suppliers reports, but they have headwinds on some of these categories. But that's not the whole story. We see thirst evolving and in particular, energy and functional drinks being the growth category. This, as Alex referenced, is not a small change. We see double-digit percentage growth in all of our markets on energy, showing that the customer is just embracing these drinks and wanting to buy them on the go and every day of the week. And we're winning.

We saw this trend coming through analysis, through our data, through our market research, and we invested and partnered with manufacturers to make sure that we were ahead of the curve, first to market. On a store-by-store basis, ours per cell 2x our convenience store peers. And in fact, when we look across all channels, we also sell 2x the industry average of all channels.

What are we doing to make this a success? First, the investment in our stores. Alex talked about upgrading, investing ratably in our stores over time. This is our cooler capacity. These are our beer caves, and we're able to fit extra capacity into the stores in all shapes and sizes. So our people are creative. They find some more space. We're investing in physical plant.

We also are investing in data. So looking at market trends, seeing which products we're selling, making sure we stay ahead of these curves. And our strong relationships with suppliers allow us to bring product exclusive all amazing deals to the market to win that customer. And unlike some of the channels that we're competing with, we have some extra opportunities for ourselves to use our digital platforms to help us.

Two examples. Actually, you can see it on the picture here. Because we sell both thirst and fuel, we're able to use our loyalty platforms and personalize offers to our customers. So if they buy 3 energy drinks, they can get a discount. Customers love it. All we're partnering with a company called [indiscernible] who allows our customers to get an instant rebates through our digital platforms, sometimes $5 or $10 off a pack of beer.

So it's a way of us driving both thirst and other sales in our core and winning that customer to keep returning to Circle K. So hopefully, you've heard from Alex and I this morning about the passion for our business, our strategy, our history and how that flows into our core. We're winning in fuel, nicotine and thirst. And we not only currently outperformed the industry, we believe we have more growth to contribute more earnings from these categories. This is through our scale. This is through our brand, and we have more opportunities, as you'll hear later, particularly in the emerge categories to build on that success through our supply chain. But none of this is possible without the people in our stores. They are the ones that bring these products to life, that encourage our customers to come back every day with their friendly service.

So it's time for a bit of a break. Hopefully, you get a chance to go outside and have a chance to have some of our Circle K coffee. And then after the break, I'll join by my colleagues, Hans-Olav and Aaron, and we will get into the next part of the strategy, which is invest in more. Thanks for your time.

[Break]

Okay. Welcome back, and thank you to Alex and Louise talking about the culture, the values in the company and how we drive our core of the business. And Alex, yes, I can confirm. I love the culture of this company, and I love the value. And actually, that's what I also see when we acquire new companies.

So now we have talked a lot about the core. Now together with Louise and Aaron, I will talk about the more. More is the 1, 2, 3, 4 more reasons to get the customers into our stores. In retail, it's all about get them in. If we get them to our food court, that's the best place to attract them into our stores. When we get them into our stores, it's all about trading them up and trading them even up more, and is meeting a well merchandise store, in stock, a friendly face, easy access, and then if they have this good experience, we get them back even more. That's what we're going to talk about with the more.

It's not about any shining new objects. It's about the things we already have done. We have piloted everything we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about food. We're going to talk about our merchandising or supply chain or super good new store program. M&A, we're going to talk about EV, and we're going to talk about car wash. All of this we already have, and we have great experiences and it's all about scaling it up and getting more out to it.

So let me start about the food journey that we have been on in Europe. We have fantastic food offering in Europe. About 23% of our stores or sale of all merchandise sales in our store in Europe and is growing is food, and it's a fantastic food offer. When I go and want a hamburger, and I'm 100% nonbiased, I'll go to Circle K and I buy my hamburger there. It doesn't go to a QSR. In the morning, when I go and I go too often to take a plane, I always stop at the same store. It has 28 EV chargers, is completely filled up at 7:00 in the morning with 4 transit EVs with the EVs, all the plumbers, all the electricians, they go into the store, they charge the car, before they start their working day. They buy a coffee, and they get a breakfast offer. And that breakfast offer is so good that I myself before I go on the plane, go and buy that breakfast offer to eat it on the plane.

We have developed this offer over the last 20 years. And we see that it's super important. It's not only about offer, but it's also about the profitability. And we have great operating profitability on our food offer. We have a great skill set. We have the toolbox, and when the customer start to food from us, they also be more emotional connected to our brand. It's a destination and it's not the commodities, not the sneakers is actually a difference on the taste, the quality and the freshness of the product. And we have succeeded on this journey in Europe. So let's take a look at the movie, and then Louise will talk more about the food in North America.

[Presentation]

That was a pretty cool video, right? And pretty yummy-looking food. And I personally was like, maybe I could do with one of those burgers. So that will showcase what we're doing in food in Europe and why we're being so successful as HO talked about. Food is a critical priority for us in more and where we see opportunity to grow.

As Alex mentioned, when we step back from what went well in temp for the win and what we needed to improve on, food was a big topic for us. We asked ourselves what -- why are we successful in food in Europe, but we hadn't met our goals in North America. We looked into our own North American operations, and we found some bright spots. In particular, we had a couple of business units in North America, who came to us through mergers and acquisitions, our Northern Tier business unit, our GetGo business unit, who had really strong food-centric cultures and practices. We also thought about our winning formula in Core, what has made us successful in the other products and how are we outperforming?

We also know from our experience in retail across many decades that this is not something that is exactly the same in all of our geographies. We know that we need to tailor our offers and our operations to our local markets. So -- for us, as we went through this reset, it wasn't a lift and shift of what you saw in the video, but instead taking a step back and finding the right ingredients, yes, good food for our business in North America.

So this reflection has guided where we've been working in the last 18 months and some of the success that you're seeing come through in our numbers. Firstly, as Alex said, we took the opportunity to think about our customers.

As HO mentioned, we have potential food customers all the way around us. But we wanted to make sure that we were successful in the customer groups that were easiest or the best -- most likely food customers for us. Firstly, we looked at the first circle in this chart. The people that are already buying food from us, how could we sell more food to these same customers. We also have a number of people already in our stores that we heard from their feedback that we're willing to try our food products. So we've really centered our attention on these 2 groups. We also know later that we can go and find more opportunity in our forecourt customers, any new customers to our channel, the food available opportunity is so huge across our industry and across other channels. But today, we're focused on those first 2 circles.

And as part of our reflection, we said to ourselves, we needed to focus on 4 things. I'm going to talk about 3 of these and you're going to hear the role of the controlled supply chain for food and all our other products in a video later from Trey. We also look to industry data and saw what we were achieving today and what is possible for us. And so we set ourselves this goal to grow food revenues at 4x the pace of merch revenues are ahead of us.

So let's start with these -- the 3 priorities I'm going to talk about. As Alex mentioned, operational execution is core to who we are as a Couche-Tard and Circle K. And when we looked at what we were doing in food, we hadn't applied our retail excellence to this particular area. So we've been doing a lot of things in the operational excellence area to make sure that we do what we do best when we're winning. That's looking at operational metrics, that's changing our processes, simplifying them, changing the tools we use, making sure we're measuring ourselves and setting ourselves goals. And most importantly, using our decentralized model and setting up some healthy competition between our business units to go after and chase the targets that we need to, make sure that we have food available when our customers want to buy it at the right times.

And one, a lot of the improvements that you've seen so far -- that we have seen so far is being driven by this operational execution. We still have gaps, but we know what they are, and we're now on track to continually improve.

We also looked at what we were selling. And we realized that we were trying to sell products to our customers that they didn't actually want to buy. So we've taken a step back from our menu and reduce the number of products that we sell, we call it SKU rationalization. We also took the decision to make it clear to our business units what their hero products were. These are hero products are different in our different geographies, catering to the local customers' needs. And there are things like in where I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. There are things like a hot dog, a freshly baked cookie or my personal favorite, our spicy chicken sandwich, which is amazing.

So we looked at our heroes and made sure that these were the focus of all menu and the focus of what we were selling and make sure we get those heroes available at the times of day that our customers wanted to buy. We've also centered on meal deals around these heroes. So we -- Alex talked about what we heard from our customers, "Hey, we want compelling value" and with the partnerships that we have with our merchandise suppliers, we knew we had a unique opportunity to provide eye-catching value to our customers. So we've gone all in across all of our geographies on meal deals, and hopefully, you can see some of the results we've got. Customers love it.

And for us, by partnering with some of the -- our best vendors on our first categories, we're able to bring value to the table without impacting profitability. Then when we look to what this allows us to do, we have operational control, and we simplified our menu, targeting our customers to what they really want to buy. This now allows us to innovate, to pilot different things that we're doing. And this is where our decentralized model really comes to life. This allows us to do different pilots in different parts of the country or the globe and try things in a particular geography. These -- each of these things may not be a product offer or there maybe an experience like a digital menu board or how we talk to our customers. And not all of these pilots will be successful. The benefit we have of having multiple BUs trying different things is we can try things and decide they're not going to be successful and choose not to scale.

And some of these things may be scalable all the way across the globe or they may be scalable into only certain business units based on customer tastes. We're taking learnings from some of our acquisitions GetGo being a really key one in the United States. And so we really believe that this is going to fuel our next wave of growth.

So wrapping up, you'll hear from Trey on the supply chain. But through this reset, we believe that we have the winning formula that were transferred from core that we've taken the learnings from Europe to drive food sales in the U.S. and Canada, taking the learnings from our own experience and be able to hit that 4x goal that we've set ourselves.

So in a similar way, we're thinking about the rest of our stores. So we've talked about first fuel, nicotine, food and we sell some other stuff in our store. So we believe that we have opportunity in this space as well. Firstly, we talk about private brand. Actually, we sell a lot of private brand. We probably don't talk about it in this way, but our private brand is our fuel, our Polar Pop, our Froster, our Circle K Coffee, our private label water and many products in our store. So -- and even food, we made the choice as we brought our food products to North America, that these would be Circle K food products. So today, actually, our whole strategy, our whole operation is underpinned by private label or controlled brand products. However, we also know that we have more opportunity in this space for the rest of the store.

And so we have taken a different approach similar to our reset on food. We realized that the private label products that we're putting into the rest of the store weren't very purposeful. So just like we have with food, we've taken a step back and reset our strategy. We've set ourselves this flywheel on category management to say what role does private brand play in our portfolio. And we are working through this cycle to identify the right private brands. And this may be nuanced. It may be a Circle K brand. It may be a controlled brand or it may be something like a co-brand.

So let me bring this to life with the key example you see on this slide. So when we first brought some tea products into our store, we decided, okay, we can save our customers some money, we'll put some Circle K on again. We're just slap it into our stores and how we go. Unfortunately, our customers didn't really want this product. They didn't know what it was. They didn't know what it tastes like. They didn't understand the flavors, it didn't really appeal to them. And it wasn't very successful. So instead as part of what we thought about with private brand, we said, okay, what role do we want private brand or a controlled brand or a co-brand to play in our portfolio.

We decided that our customers one of the confidence of a known brand, and we had the opportunity to co-brand with Arizona Tea, and to bring product exclusives into our store. And you can see from the results on the slide that this has been a really successful and purposeful approach in this category. So this is the approach that we're going to take going forward in private brand. And we believe that it's -- it will be straightforward for us to meet this goal of 10% private brand in any of the categories that we think private brand plays an important role.

So when we think about this more broadly, private brand is just one of the opportunities we have in expanding our offer. Alex talked about his kids and how they are very different to Alex and how we see evolution of customer choices as we move through different generations. You'll hear from Erica and Ed later, how we're supporting that with different digital offers personalized rewards and all of these things. But we also have the opportunity to follow some of the customer trends, what people are looking for differently.

We also talked about channel blurring and -- the younger customer doesn't have a fixed view of what they buy and what sort of format or store, they're happy to shop wherever, for whatever. And so for us, we see this as an upside opportunity for us to say what products do people want on the go and to bring those offers to the store. This is not a story of are though. We're not saying, hey, throw out the old and bring in the new. We have a loyal set of customers that come to Circle K every day for a set of products that they love and know. We want to continue to have those customers come to our stores and have the products that they want. But we also want to bring new customers to our stores, and we see these 3 themes of global flavors and wellness and functional as important things that younger people want in our stores.

So let me give you an example of global flavors to bring that to life. Our Southwest -- in our Southwest U.S., some of our business units identified that their customers wanted to buy Hispanic candies. So they went out, got a local supplier for the Hispanic candies and put them in the stores. These products are selling like crazy. And so the other business units adjacent to that business unit, Stolt Pride, one of the things that we talk about with our business units and put those same products into their range.

Out in Florida, they realized that they had a similar opportunity, but maybe with slightly different regional profiles for that same set of Hispanic candies, to pick the ones that worked in Florida and brought in some different types. Then halfway around the world, we're following the same theme. In Hong Kong, they're embracing global flavors, but in Hong Kong, this is products from Japan or Korea, which people in their stores are just grabbing and wanting to buy every day. So same theme applied totally differently in a different set of stores.

And like food, we don't see the evolution of our offer as a one-off exercise. We see this as an ongoing change for us as our customers evolve, being first to market, tracking trends, using data of what works and deciding what doesn't evolving our offer as we go. As I've mentioned a number of times, a key enabler for our skill journey has been our supply chain. The ability to control the products that we source and the cost advantages that come from supply chain control have been critical to underpin the success in fuel.

We are on a journey to expand our ambitions in merchandising and food in the same way. This will benefit all of the categories that I've talked about today in the store, whether that's thirst, nicotine, food or any of the offers that we're talking about, being able to bring the range of the products into the store that we want and have the cost advantages of controlling our own supply chain. This is a multiyear journey. So this won't happen overnight. And so it's really important for us to have the right patience and discipline to bring this to life. But there's no one better than anyone Trey Powell's made us a nice video to show you our merchant supply chain and food supply chain today and to tell you a bit about our ambitions in this area. So let's play the video.

[Presentation]

All right. Thank you, Trey. It's exciting to see how our merch supply chain is coming to life, and is going to deliver value to our network. I'm Aaron Brooks, Senior Vice President of Real Estate and Fuel customer. I've been with the company about 11 years now. I came over in the Pantry acquisition in 2015. I'm here to talk to you today about our existing network, how we're growing that network and M&A, 3 things you heard Alex get excited about today. So I'm going to tell you why you should be excited well.

Let's start with our network. In our industry, location isn't just a factor. It is the #1 reason for customer choice. And we have a network of locations that is not easily replicated. The thousands of locations that we control and operate are in some of the best metro areas, suburbs and small towns across the world. But scale is only part of the story. It's the quality and the way that we manage our network, which sets us apart from other retailers.

If you look at where our industry is heading, customers are telling us through their behavior, their real estate and asset quality matter more now than ever before. You've heard Louise talk about traditional categories such as fuel and nicotine changing. And there's a lot of operators that also have cost pressure as well. So what this means is that the gap is widening between the best performers in our industry and those operators that have underqualified or poor asset quality or potentially have high leases or high debt levels that they're dealing with. This is where our scale, our balance sheet and our disciplined approach to our network helps set us apart from the industry. We have a very structured and data-driven process to manage the full life cycle of our assets from site identification to remodel and eventually to divest.

Over the past 10 years, we have divested more than $1.5 billion of noncore assets, and we've recycled that capital into higher returning such for us. So while you may see total store count staying relatively flat, in actuality, we have been on a multiyear journey to improve our network for the future. You can see this on the slide where we are selling tail end and underperforming assets and investing that capital into sites that not only bring our brand promise to life, but are substantially outperforming the legacy network as well.

So given the promise we see with sites we're adding to our network, let's talk about our growth engine, where the U.S. is our primary target. We are continuing to take advantage of scale in this fragmented industry. Nearly 65% of convenience stores in the U.S. are owned by operators who have 10 or less locations. I'm going to get to M&A, and I'm going to get to development here in just a minute, but let me talk to you about 2 levers that we have to attack this fragmentation. The first is franchise. So we have a full franchise program. What that means to us is that the Circle K banner is both on the store, but it's also on the food court. This is a capital-light approach for us to grow our brand, but it's also a very attractive offer for our franchise partners to tie into our scale, through our fuel supply chain and our merchandise capabilities. With this attractive offer, we will add more full franchise sites to our network this year than ever before, and the pipeline is robust with franchisee applications.

The second is what we call single-site acquisitions. So that's us targeting operators who have 10 stores or less and looking to acquire. When we go into our growth markets, we are making conscious build versus buy decisions. And as we go through, if there is a quality asset that we can buy at an advantaged multiple and plug it into our scaled economies at a faster rate in which we can build it, we are buying. If we're in a small town and there is an independent who has the best corner in that town, we're going to look to pursue to buy that versus buy -- versus build on a secondary corner.

So just like what you've heard with full franchise, just like what you're about to hear with development, we will add more stores to our network this year through single-site acquisitions than ever before, and we feel very strongly about the pipeline that we have.

So let me get to the headline. And I'm going to reference our single-site acquisitions and our development with this. We are confident and delivering 750 new high-quality company-owned, company-operated sites to our network over the next 5 years. We have the capabilities and we have the capacity to outperform on that 750, but we will remain disciplined. The commitment that you shareholders have from us is that we will not chase volumes at the expense of returns.

So speaking of returns, let's dive into our development program, where you'll notice that we have increased the performance and ramp of our new stores. Many of you saw our new store layout a few years ago, and you saw how they're engineers to bring to life what Louise has been talking about, about food, thirst, nicotine and fuel. The customer feedback has been phenomenal. And we have shown in the numbers that these categories outperformed the legacy network substantially in our new builds.

And as we told you as well, we have an industry-leading return hurdle rate on our development program of 15%. And we are proud that we are in our second consecutive year of historical new growth while outpacing those return thresholds. So you may be asking, how do we do it? And what's the opportunity for more?

First, we have always had a disciplined site selection process. It's anchored in finding a location with strong traffic, great visibility, easy access. That's not unique to Circle K, and that's what one in the industry is doing. What is unique to us is that we will never compromise on paying more than fair market value for our assets. If you think about our pipeline, we're screening about 1,000 stores every single year. And the first question from every level of our development and our operations team is the same question that Elaine and the founders were asking back in 1980. What's the cost? And what's the return profile?

And I'm proud of the team and the culture that Alex is referencing that we're passing on throughout the organization. I actually took Elaine on the trip a couple of weeks ago. We went to 4 different states. We saw somewhere between 40 to 50 sites. And what made me proud is while we were out there kicking the dirt, not once did Elaine or myself have to ask about cost of returns because each development manager led with that information. I tell you this because really what our discipline is doing is it's making sure that we have the right cost basis to effectively operate our sites for decades to come. So cost disciplines remain the same.

What has evolved is our intentionality behind building asset resilience. We are doing this through ancillary offers, high-speed diesel, food, car wash. But we're also doing it through geographical diversification as well. We have more than 1,400 rural locations today that outperformed the rest of our network, where we know our brand, and our offer resonate with those consumers. And actually, the picture you've been looking at all day. This is our new, what we call our rural core building. When we talk about fit to serve, when we talk about bringing all of our strategies together, this building was designed, value engineered specifically for a lower cost profile that we could roll out faster to some of these rural markets.

So you've heard about food, and Hans-Olav will be discussing car wash here in a minute, but let me highlight the high-speed diesel network that we have, which consists today of more than 500 accessible sites for the professional drivers. We are not trying to be a travel center with capital-heavy projects tailored to the overnight driver. Instead, we are catering our offer to the local professional drivers who need a convenient place to stop and fill their tank and tummy.

So when you heard Louise talk about B2B, this is another good example of our strategies coming together. We've built the capabilities. We've built the sales team to go out there and win the professional gallons. We're also building the assets so that folks can come in. And because of this combination, I'm proud to say that today, in the United States, we sell more than 1 billion gallons of diesel.

So to wrap up on development, our goal isn't just to be bigger. It's to be more profitable. We've managed to accelerate our build rate to historic levels without compromising on our returns, a feat that distinguishes us in this high-cost environment. As we refine our data and focus on high-growth markets, we're interest adding [indiscernible]. We are building destinations that create a network and give us a sustainable competitive advantage for years to come.

So speaking of competitive advantage, let's get to M&A, where we are experts. We don't just buy. We integrate and we realize accretive synergies. We are committed to M&A in our channel, and we are executing on our playbook, which is to be disciplined, be strategic, but also to be ambitious. First, our bread and butter over the years has been consolidating regional chains in the United States, and we continue to see upside here to strengthen our network where our scale drives immediate margin expansion.

Second, we see a similar story in Europe, where we have room to grow in our existing geographies but also we can expand into new territories and fill regional gaps. Third, we see accretive return potential in Latin America and Southeast Asia. While Europe and North America continue to evolve, markets like Latin America and Southeast Asia offer long runways for traditional fuel growth and rising GDP as well. So the main message is we will continue to focus on what we know and what we have done well throughout the decades. With the acquisition runway we see today, there is no need for us to move into other adjacencies. So when I started, I was talking about the importance of location to our customers. This is critical for our on-the-go customers. It's critical for our mobility customers, and now Hans-Olav is going to give us an update as we deliver more to these customers as the markets evolve.

Thank you, Aaron. It's fantastic to see how we can grow the company and leverage scale with all the opportunities we are working on.

So now I'm going to talk a bit about the EV journey. Just to start with this journey. We had our first EV charger in the market in Norway in 2011. That was done in a partnership with a utility company. And we continue to evolve the rollout of EV chargers with the Teslas and with the utility companies until 2018. Then we decided that the market in Norway was so mature that it was the right time to start to invest ourselves. And I think this is important because we, as a company, we doesn't have a big technical depth on EV chargers at our forecourts. We are only a modern charges above 150 kilowatts and all the investments over the last years have been 300 to 400 kilowatts.

But for a move in to talking about what we do, let's take us a short look at the global growth. Europe, definitively market where EVs is growing. I live in Norway, 30% of all the cars in Norway today is pure EV. More than 95% of all new cars sold in Norway is pure EV. And if you look to Scandinavia, it's similar. It's today, 30% is EV. And as you see, [ 61% ] of new cars sold in Scandinavia is EV. If you look to European markets, it's also growing. Our biggest market is Germany. And there has been some uncertainty also in Germany due to the big carmakers. The growth in Germany had a slowdown in 2024 with 17% sales but it increased in 2025 to 22% sales. And now in January, we saw 24% of new cars in Germany was pure EV.

If you look at U.S. The uncertainty in Canada is bigger, both the political and the regulatory environment is changing, and we have seen a decline in the forecast for U.S. of 50% if you look at the expectations in 2035. So our focus on investment on EVs is in Europe alone, and in North America is primarily to do it in a partnership until we see that the market is right and then they probably will go in and invest ourselves. But the growth is big.

So if you look at the global EV sales, 3 million cars in 2020. Now we are at 15 million cars yearly. It's just going up and up and it's more low-cost cars also. So it's more customers that can adopt to this journey. And if you look at that again and you look at the kilowatt, which is really matters, the growth is 11x between 2025 to 2035, and we want to take our fair share of this growth.

So if you look at how we're doing it, we have more and more proof point that we can be and we will be a winner in this space. If you look at the customer, we have the best locations. We have built this company over 100 years. We have the locations on the corner on the highway where the customers need to charge their cars. And when they go to our stores, we have the amenities. We have the restrooms. We have the seating. We have free WiFi. We have the food, we have the coffee. We have everything you need when you spend 20 minutes to charge your car. And that's what we see also.

If we ask the customers in Norway and Sweden, where do you prefer to charge a car, we get the #1 position in Sweden, and we get the #2 position in Norway. And if you take Norway, we are #5 in regard to number of chargers. And in Sweden, we are #2. So the customer wants to go to our stores to charge the car.

When the customer come to our stores, we see that the EV customers in Norway come 50% more often than a fuel customer. And then they come to our stores. They actually go more frequently into the store than the fuel customer and they have a bigger basket.

And if you look at the pure EV charging station compared to a fuel station, it's 30% more profitable with a pure EV charge station based on the gross profit we have today on the charging station. So everything is going in the right direction.

And you also see, if you look at Norway, the forecourt traffic the last year have declined with 3% to 4%. While the in-store traffic in Norway, has increased with 6%. And we know that this is due to the EV chargers and a good, valuable food offer.

So the conclusion is clear. The customers have told us that they prefer our brand, and they prefer the uptime. They prefer the good digital solution we have with them. I prefer to go to our stores and buy the amenities and the products we have in our stores.

If you look at the digital solution, is if we want to win in the EV customer journey, you need to have the best digital solution in the market. And our digital app is rated as the top 3 in the whole Europe. So we also have developed a fantastic digital solution and more than 40% of the customers are paying through the app or through -- another 30% are paying through a tap and pay solution with our cards. So we have to have that interaction. And then a lot of the customer is also paying through auto charge solution, where you only plug the charger and you walk into the store and you buy all the good stuff that we have in there.

We also know that we are doing much better than the competitors. If you look at the number of charges we have in the market, we have 10% market share in both Sweden and Norway. But if you look at the charge stations or the kilowatts sold or our chargers is 20% market share. I just saw a statistics from a Norwegian interest organization, average kilowatt hours on the market was 43,000 kilowatt hours per charge point, and we had 70,000, so significantly higher than the average in the market.

We also see that in Norway, we have or in Scandinavia over the last 3 years, our combined fuel gross profit and EV gross profit have increased 7% yearly, that's a fantastic number, and we are agnostic. We are not only focusing on EV. We also want to sell the last droplet of fuel, and we actually take market share on the fuel game also in the Norwegian market. So we are a winner. And I think that is important. We have proven that we have the right to win. We have proven that we have the best network. We have proven because we have the best amenities, but we also have 3.7 million loyalty customers in Europe. We have 2.2 million customers with the company card that we can communicate with and that we can lead the journey from normal fuel into EV opposite to what most of the competitors can do.

We have the capability. We have a top-notch EV team and we have a great digital team that support us on developing our digital solution. And then last but not least, we have the best uptime in the market, 97% to 98% of the time the chargers up working is as good or better than the fuel pumps. And we mostly have 300 to 400-kilowatt chargers that we lost and will be relevant for the next 8 to 10 years.

What we focus on is to fortify Scandinavia. We want to be the #1 top player in Scandinavia is to conquer mid-Europe, with Germany and Benelux going to invest more and more in this market as we see the growth coming in. And last but not least, in North America, will focus more on partnership and look at what the development is. And when the market comes, then we are ready to invest if it comes.

So that was all about the EV. We are winning there, and we're going to continue to invest and it's good for the business. This customer or something that we will win together with.

Then I'm going to talk a bit about car wash. We are one of the biggest car wash players in the world. With the True Blue acquisition and with the acquisition of Total, we have more than 3,500 car washes in our business. We have the opportunity to scale this business, the opportunity to take out certain regard to procurement of chemicals of carwashes; we have the opportunity to learn from best practices. I take an example, and we acquired Total in Germany. We have more than 800 carwashes. They closed their car wash when it was under 3 degrees.

When I who is living in Norway, I wash my car at minus 8. It's all about keeping them open. You need to eat them, but you get much more customer when you can start opening more of the car washes. We have great locations that Aaron is building and through the True Blue learnings, we know that we can expand this into the new to industry stores that we are investing in. We can scale it up and it's something that the customer wants to have. We also see on the EV journey that those customers are washing the car more often than other customers.

So here again, it's all about doing more of what we have and investing more in this and being one of the big winners in the car wash journey. So I think to sum up the more, Aaron and I talk about it, more better stores, more acquisitions. Louise have talked about more food being as good as we are in Europe on food, doing more private label, improving the supply chain. All of this is doing more of what we already have proven that this company are good in giving the customers 2, 3, 4 more reasons to go into the core, giving the customers more reasons to come to the store, we'll trade them up and we will get them back. We think we will be successful with this as we move forward.

So that's all for me. Now we're going to take a break and Ed and Erica will come back and talk to you about how the digital journey will support to win in the market going forward.

[Break]

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome back from the break. I'm Erica and I'm joined here today by my partner and friend, Ed, we are going to discuss how digital, data and technology enable the core plus more strategy. I'm a new face in the room. I joined the company 18 months ago. But I am not new to Circle K. I've been a loyal customer since the Dairy Mart acquisition in my small town of West Lafayette, Ohio over 15 years ago. And my family and I frequent the station every single weekend. It's very common to see us there, fueling up our truck, filling up our coolers and grabbing snacks before we head to the ball fields.

I had the privilege of interviewing with both Alex and Brian before I took this position. And I'll tell you the one thing that came through very strongly in the interview process was the importance of culture here at Circle K. That became very evident the day that I visited stores with Alex for the first time. We walked into the store just any other customer who walked through the door. And instantly, he was greeting every single team member by name. They were excited to see him. They were excited to see me and show me the store and how passionate they were about serving our customers.

We then grab his go-to meal. I think it was a spicy chicken sandwich and an unsweetened ice tea and sat down and conversed with the team members about all the great things and being part of the Circle K family. So it's definitely been an exciting journey for me so far. And I know you are a familiar face to many in the room. Could you take a moment and introduce yourself.

Yes. Hi, everyone. I've been at Circle K for 8 years. I've seen some of you before in Phoenix for an Investor Day. How we say I was a customer before I was an employee. I love this channel. It's a morning energy drink for me, an afternoon chicken sandwich or Cherry Coke on the way home, but I promise you when I'm home, I'm in a store every single day, my friends, Rich and John know me very well. They know when I'm in town and they know what I'm not in town because I'm not in the store. And they know I'm here with you in Toronto and they're going to be asking me questions when I get back about how the meeting went. So looking forward to seeing them and giving them a recap of the week. This culture is real, and it's authentic, and it's what keeps me going. You see this come to life on our pride tours. When our leadership teams are out in the stores, interacting with people, Erica mentioned, Alex, knowing people by name, Rich and John, my friend is back in the store. You see that across the leadership team.

And for me, I love combining this culture with a passion for solutions that make a difference for our employees and customers, making it easy, and we're doing that with mobile applications. We're doing that with handheld devices for our employees and customer-facing technologies like our smart checkout and digital applications. We are enabling tech to try to keep things simple, we make sure it's reliable, and we're doing it at a scale that nobody else can do.

Over the last few years, we've leaned harder into back to basics, and staying close to our stores with a focus on removing pain points or friction, a renewed focus on our core. And today, digital and tech move together, no handoffs, no silos, one team. And I hope you've seen that theme come through as we have conversations today. We like to think that we power nearly every part of the store experience. And that's how Erica and I'd like to think of ourselves as e-squared.

Erica and Ed, e-squared.

Erica, when you joined and you first looked under the hood, what were some of your early observations? And where did you focus first?

Yes. So my title on my position were new but there were foundational building blocks already in place here at Circle K. We had been making investments across data, digital and technology far before I joined. But there were 2 key areas that we really needed to dive into to deliver a better experience for our customers and for our business. Number one, internally, we needed to make sure that we were breaking down those silos that we were connecting the road maps we were positioning the resources to move together to provide a connected experience for the customer. And that alignment needed to go back to our merchandising strategies, to our fuel strategies to ensure that digital data and tech were integrated as part of the business solution, not developing one-off solutions for just the sake of doing digital.

Number two, we needed to make sure that the customer experience felt seamless. We didn't want our customer to be shopping by our org chart, right? They wanted a connected experience that both easy, fast and friendly. So those were the 2 focus areas when I came in. We also built out exceptional teams. I'm so proud of the talent that we've been able to bring into the organization and find within the organization to optimize and grow across data, digital and tech. So we're going to show you a little view to see what we've been up to in the last 18 months.

[Presentation]

All right. I love that video. It makes me very proud. And J, J is not unique. Jay is every customer for us. We are able to personalize offers, rewards and content at a national level at a local level and at a personal level. And that didn't happen by after spot. We've made tremendous progress the last 18 months. And the investments that we've made across digital, tech and data are showing up in our P&L.

If you look at our app engagement, as you saw, it's a key component of our digital journey. We are meeting consumers where they are, and we know that is on their mobile devices, and we want to ensure that our digital capabilities are able to deliver real-time value. Our app utilization is up 31% year-over-year. And that's good news for our consumers. That's where they can unlock the greatest value from Circle K. And as Hans-Olav mentioned, highly rated, both our EV app and our mobile app across the globe. Our consumers are also visiting us more often. They came in 6.5 additional visits this year versus last year. And when our rewards customers are coming in, they are buying the product that shouts value to them. Our Polar Pop sales are up 26% for our rewards customers. That $0.79 is resonating with them, and they are fueling more often.

Our rewards customers in North America purchased 121 more gallons this year than they did last year. They're also utilizing our digital channels for nicotine offers, which we can now personalize and customize specifically for those rewards customers in their preferred brands through our channels. One of the things that I'm most excited about, as you saw in the video, was Jay was able to be recognized at the pump to drive traffic to and through from our forecourt to our stores. we're seeing a 21% conversion rate by that real-time offer that's focused on food and thirst to get customers and traffic into our stores. It's pretty exciting.

And how are you making all this happen so fast? I know I'm pushing you daily, but we're getting a lot done.

Yes. It hasn't been easy. I can tell you the biggest unlock has been really about simplification and standardization that allows us to move with speed and scale. I've been here a little bit longer than you. It's been a hard road. We used to have this saying that I'm happy it's retired called #44IsTooMany. Four different combinations of our retail systems, tech sac across our stores, different hardware types, payment types, fuel brand partners, back office systems. Think about designing deploying, integrating testing on that many -- it really kept us slow. So we kind of -- we've consolidated those platforms, and we built our own middleware layer.

Behind the scenes, we call it Information Super Highway. And we think this is our secret sauce. This is a thing that allows us to connect disparate technologies and an ecosystem of things you wouldn't see bolted together in other places. So a smart checkout. Next to a traditional POS that is a competitor of that device. You saw it in the video, if you look closely, that doesn't happen anywhere else. It doesn't happen in our competitors. So today, it's not down to 1 million but is far fewer than 44, which enables speed and duration without sacrificing reliability. And speaking of reliability, laser focus on operational resilience.

Our systems have to work. Period. And we've had a ton of focus. This is how we tie into that fast, friendly customer proposition. Customer already means our payments up, our network is up. Our technology works and point of sale, our digital applications or working for our customers. And for us, that translates into -- and we've made improvements in network and payment uptime, and we've shortened the time to resolve tech issues when they come up. So this means less lost sales. and more time for our associates to focus on what's most important, and that's the customer. So today, I'm proud to say our tech foundation is solid. And this enables digital data and tech to move together and not in silos. This is how we scale experiences without breaking infusion.

Yes. And I think where this is most evident in our recent results and experiences is in our loyalty program. across the globe, both Extra and InnerCircle have had transformational years. Members are up 8% in Europe, and I'm proud to say we will be fully rolled across all company-owned stores in the U.S. by the end of this year. which is amazing for our consumers as we know that they want to shop our brand across state lines. We've also evolved. We've evolved from an e-mail program into meeting customers where they are, whether that's through push or tech or personalized offers directly through their mobile app. We are meeting consumers, and we are connecting with them in meaningful ways at a time that is convenient for them.

One of the things I'm also excited about is we are moving towards a program that rewards customers, every visit every time, whether you come to us to fuel, whether you come to us to charge, grab your favorite hot dog or wash your car, at Circle K, every visit counts, and we are going to allow you to choose the rewards that are most meaningful to you and deliver those through our digital channels. That is a real differentiator and we're making it even easier to enroll in the program. We have simplified the program, removed the steps so that a customer only has to reply with three letters. Yes. whether they're in the forecourt or in our store, being introduced to our program by our team members, we can instantly detect to enroll, they respond, yes, and they are getting instant savings that day.

I also want to mention, actually, we just had a field day in North America, in our U.S. stores. And in a single day, we were able to add 70,000 new customers into our program. This is strength in numbers. We are so excited to have the ability for our consumers to enroll in multiple ways, and they are seeing the value attached to fuel, attached to food, attached to first by getting into our program. So outside of me monopolizing your time and making improvements across data and digital, what else has the tech team been up to.

We've got a lot going on. I want to talk about the 70,000 customers signing up in 1 day. There's nothing short of a shuttle launch to make that happen. Like the days before we scale up all of our back-end systems. We've got a mission commander on that day. And it's a networks go, payments go, mobile app go, loyalty, starch your engine. And it is super impressive. This effort that we have built on these platforms and the outstanding collaboration across our teams to pull something up like that off in a flawless and seamless way. We're investing in platforms that enable this that allow us to scale at the speed our business. And quite honestly, you all expect from us. We run a journey of data platform modernization with streamlined data flows and advanced security with a foundation to tap in emerging AI with great partners like Snowflake, and data bricks.

As you can imagine, growing through M&A like we have, you pick up a lot of disparate data sets. So consolidation is underway to tap into the full potential of the data-driven decision-making that you heard Louis referenced earlier. We're building productivity, embedded decision tools like Realex, which is improving forecasting, inventory accuracy, store execution. You might have seen this reference in the earlier video, you might have heard Filipe talked about it on previous earnings calls. And certainly, all the underlying components driving our digital ambition, loyalty engines, promotion engines, mobile app, customer data platforms that enable personalization in a connected customer experience.

This is coming to life for our customers in very meaningful, very profitable ways. And we have an initiative that is redefining the retail systems tech stack. It's about simplifying the back-end systems, so capabilities scale across markets. This is the one that the tech guys get excited about. This is the stuff that happens behind the scenes, but we're building a point of sale for the future. asked this question, when did your phone south being a phone? Talking on it is the thing that you do a lease. When does the cash registers not being a cash register. For us, it will be an application or a micro service that can run on any screen side by side with other business applications with a supporting tech stack of payment gateways, back-office applications, edge compute and more. Actually testing this concept in Sweden with ambitions to scale rapidly here in the year ahead.

By the way, if you've seen our point of sale in Europe, I call it the Flip Phone of POS. It's got an old school keyboard. And it served us really well. It's over 20 years old, but it is time to modernize and we're building a solution to do that. We're bringing this to life in a way that's going to support all the great M&A activity and integration that Aaron talked to you about a little bit earlier, and it's going to allow us to retire some legacy technology. Final note here. As you see on the slide, we nearly doubled our investment in tech over the last 5 years. And what I can assure you is these investments are disciplined. They have business cases, they have KPIs associated with them, and they have returns targeted in line with other company initiatives. And I can tell you, Filipe and team challenge us on this every step of the way.

We'll continue to test, learn and scale what works and we'll adjust quickly when it doesn't. Speaking about investments, Erica, would you like to tell us about an exciting new opportunity?

Yes. I am excited. As we talked about, we had a foundation in place. We needed to connect the foundation across our 4 core off-site and in-store. We needed to make sure that we had high data quality and we were able to measure results. And bringing that all together, I now have great confidence that we are able to introduce to you full circle media. Retail media is a huge opportunity. It's a $150 billion business across the globe. And we believe Circle K has the right to win in this space, and we plan to.

We are unique in the fact that we see both convenience and fuel transactions. We know the mobility patterns of our drivers. We also have habitual shoppers. We know that they come and visit us multiple times a week. That allows us to connect with them in real time when we know they're on the road or on the go. Our consumers also come to our stations ready to buy, right? They're impulsive buying. They're not browsing. They're coming in and they're ready to put their dollars to work, right, and purchasing hopefully, our food, our fuel and our thirst products. In our vendor community, they're ready to go. They are very excited about this program. They are excited about the investments that we've made across data, tech and digital whether that be our forecourt opportunity, whether that be the ad walls in our stores or our proprietary lift screens at our point of sale.

We are now in a position to monetize all of those assets and provide consumers with products and promotions that are relevant to them in real time. So as we bring all of this together, and we've talked about core plus more, hopefully, you have a better understanding of how digital data and technology come together to enable this. We are able to deliver end-to-end experiences here at Circle K. It's powered by technology. It's informed by data, and it's delivered through our digital products. This is a differentiator for us in a position we've not been in before, and we are very proud to be in now.

Our scale, our speed and our One Team approach really has positioned us to enable core plus more and win for the business and for our customers. Thank you for your time. We really appreciate it. I'm now going to hand it off to Filipe to talk us through our financial guidance. Thank you.

Thank you, Erica, and Ed. Let me start by sharing a secret I really think that I have the easiest job in this company. When I'm hearing that -- listening at Erica and Ed, each of my colleagues this morning, I'm sure that you have noticed how much they care about returns. How much they care about profitability. Speaks a lot about the culture. And Alex has been mentioning this morning, the ownership that this company has and all our leaders across the organization about how they care about investment, how they care about the SG&A. It's really a stronger asset and make my life easier. And it's true. When we look at our numbers the last 2 years, it doesn't been up to expectations.

Let's look -- let's step back and look, and let's look at our numbers. We are still a strong cash engine. We have 1 of the best-in-class returns in the industry. And that speaks a lot about the strength and the foundation that this company has. So now let's move and let's talk about, I'm sure that you are all waiting for about the financial framework. But maybe let me step back and provide a bit more context about how we have been thinking about this guidance. And I will start mentioning Alex and his opening remarks, when he was mentioning that this company has been built through acquisition. And that has built actually the company that we have today to scale the footprint. That's been very successful. But the focus is now to prove that we are able and can grow the profitability of this baseline consistently and organically.

The -- for that, we are -- and during all these days, you have seen and you have heard the team talking about everything that we have in plan and already in motion to deliver a long-term sustainable growth. And we believe here that we have the right plan, the right CP to achieve that. and give us the right level of confidence to get there. And this guidance that I will share with you in a while, it's really about providing you greater transparency and how we expect actually this baseline business to create value. So let me be clear. We continue to play offense in M&A. And Aaron mentioned that earlier, we'll continue to grow footprint, our footprint in the geography we are present and we'll selectively expand into new geography.

But really, this framework is about how we can deliver additional value from the base line. So with that in mind, let's move to our growth algorithm. So first, let me incur ourselves in this page before moving to the details. What you see here is basically our 5-year long-term guidance. And here, it reflects actually, how we are seeing our business and the strength of our core, but also the acceleration that we are already seeing in the more. And at the same time, the benefits that are coming through our cost discipline and our operational execution. This guidance also have three main characteristics. And let me share each of them with you.

First, we strongly believe that this guidance is balanced and realistic. We are laying out in front of you a plan that really is building on what we are able to achieve with our core. And also with all the plans that the team has showed you this morning, explained to you this morning, how we believe that we can increasingly see the new growth engine contributing to the bottom line. The second characteristic of this guidance is that we -- this outlook is really designed to be resilient. We have learned and Alex was mentioning what was one of the opportunity of the 10 for the win strategy.

Here, we believe that we are taking into account a steady macroeconomic backdrop. And we are actually taking into account here a similar macro that we have seen in the last 3, 4 quarters. And we are also including the evolving dynamics in fuel, in merchandise and in mobility. That make us believe that actually, this plan here is, again, realistic and can be achievable. The last piece that I would like to say about this guidance is that each of these into that you see in this page are connected back to a strategic lever that we control. Whether we are talking about the same-store sales the operating expenses, the total fuel gross profit, there is a concrete plan behind that, and there is a set of actions that we are already executing.

Again, this guidance also is really about the baseline. There is no material M&A embedded into it. The [indiscernible] M&A sit outside this framework. It's not a different seat. So now let me spend the next coming slide to explain to you each of these indicators one by one. And I will start with the top line guidance. So as you can see in this slide, we are expecting our same-store sales growth to grow by 2% to 3%. And how we'll be doing that? First, relying and on our core. As we highlighted this morning, we are leading the nicotine transition. We are -- we have a very strong customer value proposition on the first.

And so with that, we really believe that the core will continue to grow. Half of this same-store sales growth will come from the more. And again, Luis shared this morning, we have a plan to grow meaningfully our food offer and food category. But we are also putting in place new levers through price brand, for an enhanced offer that will help us actually to drive further growth in our same-store sales growth. On top of that, you can see that we are adding 1% to 2% through the NPI programs, our new store plan. And Ironshore with you. We are aiming to open 50 new stores over the next 5 years.

And Aaron, again, share with you these stores are consistently outperforming in basket, in traffic, in profitability as they mature over time. So give us a high level of confidence that looking at this guidance, we will be able to grow the total merchandise revenue by 4% to 5%. Now let's move to fuel. And here, Luis already put a bit of context there. We know that this category is inherently very volatile. So it makes forecasting volume or margin in isolation, forecasting that in isolation is not necessarily very, very helpful. But the fundamentals of this category remains very solid. We are in each of the regions that we are today present. This is a very disciplined market. We have rational players competing with us. And so it shows that demonstrate that the economics are quite predictable over time.

And Luis also shared with you that we see a strong correlation between total gross profit fuel gross profit and inflation. And we see that actually to continue to persist over time. That is the reason why we have incurred our guidance on the total fuel gross profit. And we believe that we can grow this indicator around inflation. And again, here, we know how to do that. We have a strong momentum on the B2B business, particularly in the U.S. We have seen in the last quarter, we are growing volume there. B2C and it's really connecting with our loyalty capabilities. We believe that there is room for growth there as well. And of course, our supply chain capabilities. We continue to increase sourcing optionality, increase our supply chain, their capabilities to help us to drive additional total gross profit. Now let's move to expenses.

And here, the core discipline has been and remain the core strength of this company. I've been mentioning, and you have heard the teams today, we care about any investment, any dollar that we're putting into this business. And the goal here is very simple for us. We want to see our comparable expenses to grow below inflation point. But that -- and for that, we are balancing strong cost discipline and strong cost initiatives savings with balanced and targeted investment. I will talk in the next slide about our cost-saving initiatives. So here, I would like to spend a bit more time about the investment. First, those investments that we'll be doing are really targeted and clearly linked to the core plus more strategy.

You have heard the team this morning. We are talking about investing in food, investing in digital and technology and also in supply chain. Those investments are important for us. We need them to build a company that will be here for the long term. But let's be clear, at the same time, we are making those short-term investment with an expectation of returns. And here, I will take it as an example, we are very clear and very meaningful on that. And I have some examples to show you. We have been talking the last few years about the investment that we have done in data, for example. And that's true. We have invested in people. We have invested in tools.

And that has impacted our G&A. But the reality also is that now we are starting to see the benefits of it. you are hearing what we can do with this data in terms of enhancing our and personalizing our offer, how we can negotiate better with suppliers. So really here, it's starting to come to tuition. And the same with other investments that we'll be doing, supply chain, for example, supply chain, you have heard trade this morning. We are investing. We have opened three DCs this year. And of course, again, that's an impact in our P&L in the short term. But let's look at the long term. We will gain control in our supply chain. We'll be able to negotiate tighter conditions with suppliers and will improve working capital as well. So there is clearly, intentions and financial expertise behind any of this investment. And let's also be very clear to get to this guidance that we are putting in front of you, we will offset actually this investment.

And that's why here, we have a strong cost initiative program. And it's what you can see in this page here. We have done that in the past. So yes, there's nothing -- nothing new. You know this company and some of you even better than me, I think -- we have been delivering consistently on the savings and on G&A. And the last few years, and Alex was mentioning about one of the positive things that happened during [indiscernible] is clearly our G&A. We have been delivering more than $800 million sustainable savings over the last few years. And that helped us actually to absorb inflation to protect margin and again, to invest in some of the growth initiatives. And we have some of all investments is running through the team. So when we look at those four pillars, there is nothing new here.

We are already working on it, executing and actually delivering it. So of course, the procurement, we will continue to work on the store operating efficiencies. That's who we are. We are looking at how we can operate better and leaner in our stores. We are also looking at reviewing the process and putting automation there. And of course, we'll continue to leverage where it makes sense, our global capabilities. Let me bring to life some of this and what's happening today. On the procurement side, you have heard me talking about how we scale our procurement from a GNFR point of view, from an expense and CapEx point of view. We are ramping up this centralized and global team. We are today in reducing optimizing category, reducing number of SKU, and we are being smarter and using analytics to analyze our spend. and good things are already happening. So was sharing with you our intention to accelerate on the EV program.

And the last few months, we have been delivering meaningful savings on negotiating globally the chargers. We have got 30% to 40% unit cost savings just on leveraging our scale. And that's an example among others. On the process redesign, we have -- you have heard the team here to talk a lot about merchandise supply chain. We are reviewing actually the end-to-end process on that and very significant value to unlock there, not only on the G&A side, but also on the COGS side, we are now -- we will be in a position to negotiate much better with suppliers will be able actually to also lower the cost to serve our stores.

And of course, it's -- we are to say that we'll be able actually to manage much better our working capital. So there's a lot happening there and give us a high level of confidence that we can achieve these cost initiatives. And let me share with you the numbers here. What you can see in this page first is that we are not leaving nothing in the table. Each -- it's a company-wide program. We are touching every line of the P&L. And in summary, what we are expecting over the next 5 years is to deliver around $500 million in SG&A, $350 million in COGS for a total positive impact of EUR 850 million at EBITDA level. But actually, our feet-out program goes even beyond the EBITDA. We see meaningful upside on the working capital. And here, Trey and his team has a big and important role to play. We, again, are going deeper in the supply chain integration. We expect meaningful savings and improvement in our management of the inventory.

So all in all, our fit-to-soft program is expected to deliver around 1.5 billion of value unlock over the next 5 years. And again, part of that will be intentionally invested into our business to continue to sustain the growth of this company. Now let's move to, I think, the most important element of our 5-year guidance. And here, we're talking about our adjusted EBITDA and adjusted diluted EPS ambition. We -- when we look at that, it clearly shows the power and that this core plus more strategy brings to the table. Focusing on these core areas will really pull in motion and maintaining, of course, the discipline on costs will bring actually a flywheel and a positive in terms of profitability.

At EBITDA level, we are expecting to grow between 6% to 8%, again, excluding M&A. We see really M&A as an incremental to this baseline trajectory. From EPS point of view, we are showing here a growth of above 10% for the next 5 years. How will be doing that? Of course, through the operational improvement, but also using we've proposed our share buyback program. And that will be a program that we'll be using if we are not deploying our excess cash to M&A. Again, here, CPS is really about the baseline and exclude any additional M&A. Let's talk a bit about the capital allocation. And again, here, you know this company, we will continue to be very disciplined in our CapEx allocation. That's something for us that is key in how we want to continue to create value on the long term.

And first, let me talk about free cash flow. Just in FY '25, we have generated $1.8 billion cash flow in this company. And we are expecting to generate in excess of 2.5 billion this year. So we are, again, a strong cash generation engine. And that gives us a lot of flexibility and strength to reinvest in our business to support our growth and actually to return value to our shareholders on a responsible and a consistent way. When we look at our CapEx allocation, we want to reinvest into the business up to 35% of our EBITDA.

And again, here, we will be very intentional in how we deploy this CapEx. 70% of this CapEx actually will be allocated to growth initiatives and 30% to stay in business. And here, we are being very careful on how we are prioritizing. Of course, prioritizing first, the high returns initiatives. But also the initiative that will help us to transform the core and to enhance the customer value proposition. On the CapEx, specifically, we'll be allocating roughly 40% of that to NTI. And again, [indiscernible] mentioned that earlier. That's our highest returns in our portfolio initiative portfolio. And we'll be investing 15% in EV. Again, here, EV, we are accelerating why? Because the returns are there. On the balance sheet, we keep maintaining -- we want to keep maintaining a strong investment grade credit rating currently standing at A+. Our goal is to keep a leverage between 2 and 12x.

And without M&A, we will be continuing to use our share buyback program. That actually will help us remain in this target leverage framework. But again, if there is an M&A opportunity, the files that can -- with the right profile of returns, we will be in position to act because we have the balance sheet to make it happen. So let me conclude this financial guidance just to tell you that we are very confident in achieving this outlook. We have the right momentum. Alex mentioned that earlier and my colleagues as well, we have shown a sequential improvement between Q2 and Q1. And we are seeing a strong momentum in Q3, particularly in U.S. we are very excited by that.

We are really focusing on the things that make us stronger. And that's why also we believe that we have the right plan the core plus more. It's really about leveraging our strength and the core, and we are winning there. I believe that there is still a lot of value to unlock. But we are accelerating in those new growth engines. Again, food, mobility, price label, those will help us actually to accelerate the growth. And of course, we'll keep maintaining our cost discipline. And finally, we have the balance sheet. It's in our DNA.

We all remember this 4 decades history of [ Couche-Tard ]. We will do M&A, and we have the balance sheet for that. So we believe that we are well positioned to deliver meaningful profitability and share value return. So thank you, and let's take, I think, a 10-minute break before I think back to Alex for his closing remarks.

[Break]

Welcome back. I'll look to be brief in the closing because I know less is more, and I know you're keen to get to Q&A. The business model that our founders have given us is as strong as ever. It is ingrained in us. That culture that focus on detail, that focus on basics. Our values remain extraordinarily strong. One of the things Brian used to say is we don't want to be like anybody else. We want to be Couche-Tard. And we are very focused on those models. Our founders have given us, and we absolutely believe that will carry us into the future. and continue this great trajectory this company has been on for more than 45 years.

We see significant consumer change. We see the heightened pace of that happening. I think the message I would leave you and you heard some of it today is we have the data capability to really stay on top of that change and increasingly adapt at pace. We talked about our network. I think you know us for our capital discipline, our M&A discipline. I don't know if you knew our network discipline. And I thought Aaron did a great job today of walking you through that. It's another core piece that our founders have given us. It is a platform that is increasingly advantaged versus what others in our channel and retailers are doing. It really gives us that base to deliver on the organic growth that we signaled today.

Invest, amplify the core. The core is the primary drivers of our traffic today. And again, we like this space. If you haven't heard, we are bullish on nicotine. I know here in Canada, we need some things to work through for us. But for us, across our footprint, nicotine is growing, and it's growing in spaces at much higher margin profiles than traditional cigarettes. And we are a destination. It is a place we are massively outperforming the market today. We are bullish on nicotine. As Louise pointed out, first is just growing the innovation it's just fantastic for us. What's happened in energy, functional drinks was just with Pepsi and Coke last week, just the new products, the things that are happening. That is our space. We are adding coal capacity. We really feel good about our journey on first. And then in fuel, right? We've been -- hey, liquid fuel demand in our core markets is going to slowly decline. I think you heard from HO today about what happens with EV. And you saw in Norway and Sweden, we are going -- the combination of liquid fuel. We are taking share in liquid fuel. We throw EV on top of that. We're actually growing that mobility CAGR at a nice rate. And the great thing about these EV customers is they like our stores and they like the other things that we do, and it is driving increased trips to our sites.

Investing more. You got some exposure to our European food today. We're pretty good at food. I know you're skeptical about our journey on food. I know you are. I'm looking forward to announce in 3Q. We've had -- we've had some nice growth in the first 2 quarters. And I can tell you that growth has accelerated. We've got the playbook down. We've got it now. We've got it in 2,800 stores. We're putting it in another 900 stores. we've got it. And we are going to stay focused on food. It is a natural place for us. We are under-indexed against industry. We have the capability to do this, and we are going to execute against that.

Our offer assortment, again, the consumer is changing. You heard -- you watch the video and saw the investments in the supply chain. Our ability to adjust offer is informed by our data sets. Our investments in the supply chain give us access to broader assortment advantaged cost of goods. That is a primary focus for us over this 5-year period. And then the enablers, right? Our job is to deploy against our scale. We are large. We have capacity. We have great leaders, great people. Now we have great platforms, processes. And I'm glad you got to hear from Erica and Ed. Again, it's usually -- it can be a black box, as I said earlier. They were here today, they talked about what they're doing. They talked about what they're enabling in our business. and we are ramping at scale, and we have real momentum right now.

Our commitment to you is to grow organically. That is our focus. We are focused on our core. We are focused on the model our founders have given us. We have momentum in our business right now. And that is what we want to do. And that is what we will do. So I'll stop. I said I'd be brief. I know -- I assume you're eager for Q&A, and I've got the whole team up here with me, and we'll take your questions.

Thank you. Thanks for everything today. Nice seeing all of you. I had a question on your new long-term targets as it relates to your new robust store expansion goals. So first, hoping to hear how confident you are in hitting the new store build targets in terms of I'm thinking about it like identifying and acquiring site locations, construction time lines, et cetera. And then second, how dependent are your new long-term growth targets on you hitting those NTI targets? I guess I'm wondering if you maybe fall short on the new store builds are there other levers to pull to kind of offset that and still hit your targets?

Thanks, Bonnie. Thanks for being here. Thanks for the question. And Aaron, I'll come over to you to talk about it. I'm highly confident. Why am I highly confident? We delivered and exceeded our target last year. we will exceed our target this year. Why do I know that? Because those stores are under construction as we speak, and we have good visibility to their progress. You heard Aaron reference 1,000 stores. So we have a really strong team in this space, Bonnie, and all of this is kind of mapped out because it takes a long time to do it. Aaron?

Yes. No, I think, Alex, building on some of your points. So on our foundations in place. The team is there, the foundations are there, the processes are there. Just like anybody coming out of COVID, we face challenges in terms of time to build cost inflation, and I'm excited by the fact that this year, we've actually decreased our number of days of construction. We've actually seen costs come out of our build. So that gives us really good foundation. But then when you look at the pipeline, we've spent the last couple of years with our D&A team really outlining where our key growth markets and what do we think those opportunities are. We are confident based on that data, but also on the activity that we see and the projects that we see coming through Alex has mentioned a few times to you in the past, we have a pipeline of over 1,000 sites. And they're in different phases of our development program, where we are focused on building those and bringing them to life faster. And again, as Alex said, we have a lot of confidence, but we're going to keep to our discipline and make sure that, that is our foundation.

Aaron, do you want to talk about SSAs as part of delivering that target?

Yes. And as I mentioned in the presentation, we have a team specializing in our single-site acquisitions. And as we go, again, it's a build versus buy decision as we see these operators facing additional cost profiles we think we are uniquely positioned to go take advantage of that, our balance sheet, our ability to act quickly helps in those conversations. So again, as we go, it's focused on asset quality and building our network in the right shape.

Yes. And Bonnie, we didn't answer your question. So you saw a 2% to 3% same-store sales, 4% to 5% total network grows. So that's this right? That is what that is.

Yes Martin Landry from Stifel A lot of good discussion on organic growth. I'd like to maybe switch to M&A. Valuations of public equities have risen a lot in the last couple of years. Has that translated into private valuations? And is that impairing your ability to transact right now?

Thanks for being here, Martin, and for the question. Asset prices remain kind of high. I think it's fair to say, Philippe. We're active on a number of things. So there's plenty of activity in our geography. And for us, it's the discipline will remain intact. I mean, the model that our founders have given us, we follow it to the letter. And that's all about returns and synergy delivery and what are we going to pay. And so I don't -- I think you heard Philippe say and Philippe, you can comment in a sec that I think we're confident we will do M&A over this 5-year period. Are we not getting several files? Yes. Is that new? No. Philippe?

Yes. I think what gives us confidence that M&A, we tip and will be part of our growth in the future that we have been very good at delivering synergies. And I don't think that there are so many players that can do that in the industry. So that gives us much confidence that we'll be able to position in the right files, we will be there. We'll be able, and that means that we'll be able to deliver this level of synergies and to pay, of course, always the right price. But there is no doubt for us that M&A will remain part of our growth.

The framework that you've articulated on the EPS side, it's more tempered than Couche-Tard's longer-term history of growth. So if you look at it even in 10 and 15 years. So wondering if this -- so wondering if this reflects heightened conservatism and certainly, the lack of M&A and/or a recognition of the law of large numbers and Couche-Tard is bigger than it was, and it's just more difficult to grow as you get larger. And maybe you could give us -- because I ask in the context because Street estimates are a bit higher than the framework, at least at the low end. So you can give us some sort of context of what would characterize at the low end and what would be a reasonable kind of middle end target of that 10 plus, which could range so widely.

And Philippe, I'll quickly come to you. This plan is based on organic growth. We want to put a plan in front of you and a strategy that we're going to deliver on. Delivering against our commitments is also part of our core fundamental foundation in our culture. This plan is pretty tightly tied to the way we budget and how we set targets internally each year. And I think the other thing I would say is that, what we've put in this plan, we are very close to or at delivering currently in this current environment. Philippe, I'll come over to you.

Yes. I would say that one of the them, main components between the EBITDA and the EPS and where we can act it's a share buyback program. And the reality here is that this buyback program for us is -- it's a kind of a plug in the model. And here, to your question, are we being conservative? SP-5 Maybe, but why? Because we want to make sure that, again, here, Vishal, we give us enough flexibility if we need to act on the M&A side, okay? So if you ask me, are we or guidance being in the lower range, we think so. But we have learned in the past. We prefer to underpromised and overdelivered, and that's what we'll be working on in the future.

Irene Nattel, RBC.

Irene Nattel, RBC. One of the newer elements here that I'm hearing from you is around loyalty, data, personalized offers, a lot of which is the holy grail in retail. Can you talk about where you are on that trajectory? And what role that might play in, let's say, delivering 3% instead of 2% or even something higher than 3% on the same-store sales number.

Erica, I will be coming to you. You saw some of our capabilities today, and it's real. We're all members and we get text in. We have personalization capabilities, and we've got some cool stuff in the future that Erica all talk to. I think I referenced earlier this kind of gap that we just see widening in the U.S. to market to 500 to 600 basis points, Irene. And those are new levels for us. It's -- we're not possible to link that directly back to our just kind of advancements in digital, but we sure think they're helping. And when Erica says, we see it in the P&L, that's what she's referencing. Erica?

Yes. I would say -- thank you for the question. We're excited about where we are because we're here. We are here now. Millions and millions of our consumers are receiving communication from us on a daily basis. in the moments that matter to them at the time that matters to them on the categories that matter to them. And the ways of working is really what's a differentiator from where we were to where we are now. we are embedded in strategies with merchandising. We're attending and understand our nicotine goals, our third schools, our private label goals. And digital data and technology, we are enabling those. We're not off developing separate strategies. We know our ambitions and energy drinks. And we're going to develop customer journeys that facilitate that growth along the way.

The channels are in place, the technology is in place. And underlying all of that is the data that's so powerful to connect to our consumers that our vendors really value as well.

Irene, I'd add one last piece that I'm really excited about, and that's partnership. I and Erica have now developed our ability to plug in partners. We're pretty big. So I think the notion to partner, obviously, partner loyalty programs here in Canada are pretty powerful, I believe. So we have the ability to partner both kind of nationally or country-wise, but also very locally. That's something I'm pretty excited about as we think about the future of this program.

Mike Van Aelst, TD. So I wanted to touch on the same-store sales number that you provided 2% to 3%. It's been a challenge the last number of years, tough consumer drag from cigarettes. Can you talk to us about what's so going to enable you to get to that 2% to 3% when you break it down, say, between maybe can change in the consumer health, if you're seeing that, the drag from cigarettes within the nicotine category seems to be diminishing quite a bit just because the other nicotine products are becoming much greater in size. And then also the new program. So if you kind of break it down into the less dragon cigarettes or nicotine in general, the consumer health and then these other programs, like what's how you get into?

Okay. And Philippe, I'll come to you. I believe you had a kind of a chart in your presentation. So we are planning, as Philippe said, really at a consumer environment that we've experienced the last, call it, the last past year. So there is not a plan in a massive consumer upward trend from a macro perspective. We are delivering at that level now. And I think the build is -- it's probably best Philippe, I'll just let you speak to the build because it was in your deck.

Yes. Again, when you look at this 2%, 3%, what we're saying is that we do -- we believe, Mike, that half of this growth will come from nicotine and first because -- the slide we shared about nicotine, we do see this category actually growing. We know -- we are taking into account that the cigarette is declining. But the reality is that other nicotine products are really with a strong trend there. So that's the piece.

First, you have seen the number again here. There is a huge and significant trend, and we see that to continue actually to happen across our geographies and Louise and Trey can talk even more about the strong partnership that we have bid with the major vendors of this category. And we believe that here, we are really well positioned to build growth there. So that is on the core. So half of the 2%, 3% guidance.

The other half is about the new offer. And here, again, Louise has mentioned, we are expecting food to grow 4x faster than the overall box. So here, there is a significant upside that we are expecting by food. And this number is not coming from anywhere. That's happening today. And we're confident that we can build up on this momentum. And of course, here, there is also the upside.

We already have a lot of pride brand, as you know Louise mentioned, but there is still a significant room there. So all these components give us very good confidence that we'll be between this 2%, 3%. And when we look at dynamics between the regions, there is no doubt that for us that U.S. will be a key driver of this growth, following by Europe. And yes, there was maybe some question about nicotine in Canada. We are taking into account that. And for sure, Canada will not get this potential tailwind because we know that the environment is not the same. But overall, yes, we are very confident about this 2%, 3%.

But just to be clear, the nicotine in the past few years, was that a drag? And now you see it -- now you see it turning to growth?

Oh, yes. Yes. Yes, yes. And for us, because we -- it's true that maybe is a misconception. And again, with you can comment further there. But we talk a lot about cigarettes. But again, when we look at the overall category and including now the opportunities, the vaping and so on, this category actually is growing.

Yes. And I think we still see a strong base in traditional cigarettes, right? There's some people that are just wedded to that product. That's the product that they know and love and they're staying cigarette buyers. And when we think about sales, the manufacturers know that, that product is declining, and so they've gone to look for these other products. We talked a bit about like nicotine as we went through, but each geography has a set of products.

Vaping is bigger in some of the European markets than it is in, say, the U.S. where white nicotine is the one that's growing but the breadth of the products is really an important part of the story. And we were talking in one of the breaks that -- some of these products are now socially acceptable again as well, which I think is helping drive some of this change, especially with the younger consumer.

Chris Li from Desjardins. I have a 2-part question on margins. First on fuel and then one on merchandise. On fuel first, you guys were obviously bang on 2.5 years ago in predicting industry margins will be low $0.40 per gallon and you guys are outperforming it. However, as I look back the last 2 or 3 years, your reported few margins have been largely stable. So my question is, what are you seeing that gives you confidence that it will continue to grow in line with inflation. And then the second part is there is a slide around supply chain optimization that Philippe has. Does that mean that you expect to -- your outperformance versus OpEx, you expect that to continue to widen? $0.04 to $0.05, do we expect that delta to grow because of some of the initiatives that you're putting on?

So, Louise, I'll come over to you quickly. Yes, I think the cost increases in our space are very real. They are tied to regulatory, environmental, cost of labor, increased regulation. And our breakeven point is one of the lowest in the industry, right? We have great merch sales. We have a strong cost discipline. So all of those things are supporting those margins needing to go up. And I'll let Louise talk to our ability to continue to widen our gap.

Yes. No, thanks for the call out to our outlook a few years ago. And I think it's really hard -- we're not in the business of predicting fuel margins. Hopefully, you got the sense of that. But we do believe in the fundamentals that Alex just talked to. I think a lot of our competitors are more dependent on fuel than they are -- than our business. So we have much stronger store sales to help offset some of that cost inflation. And so that's one of the things that we think underpins that the fundamentals, the macroeconomic principles behind that growth.

We also see it in all markets, right? And by markets, we share with you very aggregated statistics, but we have the opportunity to look very granularly across different countries, different states and provinces in Canada. And so we see a very consistent trend as well. So that's one of the other things that gives us confidence. And then your question on the supply chain side, I think we have this big scale. And increasingly, that scale is within our control. So often when we did transactions in the past, it came with a fuel supply contract. In some cases, we still maintain long-term relationships with fuel suppliers. But in many cases, we have full freedom to source however and whenever and whatever we want in the fuel supply chain.

And because of the scale, things that are a little bit boring mightn't sound like very much can add a tremendous amount of value very quickly. But this is a commodity. And we also know that we need to keep on adding that value every day because other people are out there trying to do the same things. So we believe in our ability to outperform, but we know we need to continuously reinvent ourselves in that fuel supply chain in that commodity market to keep that sustained performance and also exceed it.

Supply chain is just one of those things as well. Hopefully, you've got a sense that we just look at -- we're not a company-owned departments on fuel. Many companies are. We look at it through the full integrated value chain all the way from the board pricing, the rebates we give right to the source, and that's why we're being able to drive that performance.

Just to add a final that, rightfully so we're really focusing on the U.S. But obviously, in some of our countries in Europe, we've seen some pretty significant volume decline. We have seen -- up to this point, we have seen margins largely adjust for that decline really in almost every instance, right?

Luke Hannan, Canaccord. I wanted to follow up on the same-store sales growth CAGR that you guys have outlined. And maybe more specifically, in the past, you've talked about there being challenges with the consumer that's showing up in those BUs where there's more exposure to those border states. I'm curious to know and also trying to reconcile that with your comments about Q3 momentum to date being somewhat stronger as well. So are you seeing a rebound specifically in that consumer that's showing up in those BUs? And if so, can you share anything on that front as far as what you're seeing as far as basket traffic, et cetera?

Yes. We are seeing our gaps to market widen to levels we have not experienced previously. We are seeing that pretty broad-based across all of our business units with maybe 1 or 2 examples. So we don't -- we think maybe the underlying has improved just a touch. I don't know, 7/11 announced today. I didn't read it yet. But we really believe the driver is us outperforming market further, and that is pretty broad-based across the United States.

And Alex, I'd just add this topic of channel blurring. I think, particularly in these markets where we see this change in customer behavior, different people shopping at different occasions. We've taken a step back and said, hey, what's happening in these other channels around us. And some of that outperformance is that reflection to say, where are our customers shopping? And how can we help them? Whether it's a time of economic prosperity or a time that they are uncertain. How can we help them across the board? And I think that reflection in some of these challenged locations is actually helping us really get targeted on how we help the consumer in the state that they are at the given time.

Yes the final piece I'd add is this digital component because that helps us with the channel blurring and we, I think, is helping us here because I'll just speak to myself I shop at Circle K a lot.

He does.

We know what I bought. So this isn't -- we all have separate e-mails or the e-mail companies have gotten good at filtering out this load of just mess we all get from people, right? What I get from Circle K is directly targeted to me. It knows what I buy. And now it knows when I'm on one of our sites. That's pretty powerful, and that's pretty useful to me, candidly. So we think that's part of it as well.

John Zamparo, Scotiabank. I want to come back to capital allocation. I wonder if there's an EPS or a buyback number that's implied in the guide. And then you're guiding to organic growth in a lot of component of organic plus M&A. And I wonder how we should interpret that. Is it that M&A is less likely extension part of the history of this company, but I think a lot of that's one of the products that Booster success is that it's harder to move the needle in that trend. So I wonder if we are considering doing something different M&A that you're paying more for higher quality assets? Or is it just that the opportunities are not there right now you'd rather focus on internal capital allocation?

So I'll come back to you, Philippe, on the buybacks. We want need and believe we can grow this company organically. That -- we are focused on that. We thought it was the right thing to do to provide that guidance and to share with you why we have confidence in doing that. That does not mean that we are not confident in M&A. We are as active on M&A. I've been here 14 years. I've worked on almost any sizable M&A we've done over those 14 years. there is a lot going on right now. So there's plenty of M&A. We are as active as ever.

As we said we are focused on rolling up our channel. Will we pay more? So we are focused on high-quality assets. We will pay when the returns are there inside of our financial playbook. That's -- Philippe?

Yes, yes. And just to build on what Alex said, I think you like certainty, guys. And here what we're saying, okay, that's the baseline. That's what we are saying that we can control. And the M&A will be just pure upside. And we'll be achieved there. We don't want to send a message that we'll do M&A at any cost. That's what we are. We won't do that. But yes, to Alex point, we are active as ever. And there is a strong likelihood that over the next 5 years of this plan, that yes, we will be announcing M&A. I have no doubt about that.

And coming back to your question on the share buyback. I mentioned that earlier. It's kind of the plug. What we are saying to you guys is that -- the share buyback is for us to remain between the 2 and 2.5x target leverage. So that's what we have embedded in this plan, and that's how we'll continue to use the share buyback program.

Bonnie Griffin from Raymond James. I guess I want to go back to one of the slides about the supply chain, but on the merchandise side, it seems you're pushing more into own kind of your own supply chain. So just curious if you can unpack that more maybe in terms of where ultimately you see can go in terms of the merchandise you have in your stores, the speed of that? And then ultimately, for us, what could the potential unlock be from a cost saving standpoint when you get to the end goal, whatever that might be 3, 5, 6 years from now?

Louise, I'll come over to you. We are pushing into the merch supply chain. Why are we doing that? When I joined 14 years ago, we bought every molecule fuel rack forward. We bought contracts. We had a bunch of fuel brands. Now we haul half of our own product. We have storage, we have traders. We have realized significant value by going into that fuel supply chain, as Louise talked about earlier. We also believe we have the capability to go do it on the merch side. We believe that the merch side unlocks a number of things, and I'll come to Louise for that. But at the critical point is channel blurring and assortment and the ability to procure what we want to procure bring those products and at a cost of goods, we like. Louise?

Yes. And I think you heard in the video, Trey talk to these advantages. So we have existing facilities today. And we see some advantages of operating them in the way that we operate them. So we do know that just with a fairly simple setup, we can already create value. And then as Alex talked about, as we go and extend our capabilities into the merch supply chain, we think we can deliver more value from 3 things.

One, the customer, so bringing different types of products to them that they want. Maybe it's fresher maybe is quicker, all of that stuff, but making sure that we have those products that they actually want. And they, in many cases, may be private label, but there may also be an assortment that we struggled to get cost competitively in another way. We have the benefit of the efficiencies in the supply chain, the cost advantages of doing it ourselves. We know that when we have a supply chain solely focused on our stores, they're more reliable and they're more cost effective. So we see that as well.

And then it's the commercial leverage it gives us. So the ability to go to different suppliers, manufacturers that we don't talk to today and say, "Hey, what can you do for me today? And then to use that commercially back with our existing supplier base and negotiate either with the new one or the old one or a combination of those to deliver that incremental value. and then it kind of feeds on itself, right? You're bringing new products to market, cost competitive, better sourcing arrangements. The suppliers then want to work with you and so on and so on. So we see it in the same way as fuel less commodity focused, more offer focused.

Yes. Thanks, and I'll echo my -- thanks for putting this day together. Very helpful. Mark Petrie with CIBC. So I wanted to ask about the merchandise growth beyond same-store sales growth. So I think we talked about the NTIs but that's essentially half of your top line growth for merchandise is nonsame-store sales, and that's much bigger than what we've seen historically. So could you just expand on that? Like NTI we talked about, but then some of those other pieces? And what is it that puts you at an inflection point to be able to accelerate the growth from those different areas?

Aaron, I'll come over to you. This -- we've been ramping this up for several years. And as I said, we've been delivering against our targets. You heard Aaron say these sites outperform our average sites materially. They sell a ton of food, they sell a ton of merch. They do strong volume. So it is predominantly that. I mean we will build more than 100 this year. That -- it's significant. Aaron?

Yes. Yes, I think as Alex has mentioned, we've really gained confidence by what we've seen over the last couple of years with the stores to life. And what we're seeing in the numbers, as Alex has mentioned, across our key core categories. We are very happy with the sales volume, but also the returns that we're seeing out of these assets. So tying it back to the question that Bonnie first started with, at the end of the day, we have a lot of confidence in our pipeline. We could go out there, could we build 1,000 stores. But I say that because -- we bring it back to our discipline. We bring it back to what the market gives us. We're not going to do things that we see some of our competitors doing. We're going to keep to that discipline. But the 750 number we feel good about.

And maybe just to complement the -- your question about what's in there between same-store sales and total merchant revenue. There are to a business that have been talking about that will be growing meaningfully.

EV. EV that we are investing 15% of our CapEx, we are expecting actually EV to drive growth and the second one is a carwash. Carwash is already a big business for us. We believe that there is also a meaningful growth to unlock there.

Corey Tarlowe with Jefferies.

This is our last question. Sorry, I should... Thanks for coming in.

I'll try to make it a good one. I think, Alex, you had mentioned that promos were down. Curious what's driving that? And then secondarily, how do you think about pricing and promotions going forward? Given, I assume some of your large suppliers, namely one of them, I think, last week, Pepsi announced up to 15% reductions in price. And other retailers have also talked about disinflation and even deflation in certain categories within food. So how do you think about how that informs getting to that 2% to 3% and what that means for the business?

Yes. Thanks for the question. Louise, I'll come over to you. Yes, the promos are down. They're down because we're a lot better with our data. And we are analyzing our promotions. We have boundaries and frameworks for what's a successful promotion and what's not a successful promotion. I think you heard me say we're more focused on just impactful promotions on impactful products in spaces that we know we -- these are products that people really want. We know that they're looking to us to have them and we can offer very attractive price points. So that journey for us will just continue.

You heard about the investments in data platform 2.0. It will just continue and the data is going to drive that. We do not view that as a negative. We view it as a positive. You've seen the last 2 quarters, we've had some gains and that's part of it. Deflation, I think Pepsi lasers get killed. And they're not the only CPG company, right? I mean these are -- the price points between private brand and some of the CPG companies, and they're losing market share. And I think some of them believe they've gone too far. I think we'll make decisions on where we price and how we do things. But I guess we're not at a point where we see that as a significant risk at this stage. Louise?

Yes, just said, we're trying to drive sales through selling more products to our customers. That's our ultimate objective, right? And so we know we need to have them priced and promoted in the right way to make money for ourselves and for our customers to get a good deal for things that they really want a good deal on. So being more purposeful with promotions is a key part of that. We'd rather have something that people get really excited about rather than the whole store on sale. Our data and analytics capabilities are getting better, but we still have more room to go in that journey as we collect the data using the identified customer data that we have through loyalty, that helps us drive that even more. So I think it's all of the things Alex talked about, price promotion deals, rewards, personalization will play a big role, and we'll continue to evolve that. But to address your question on deflation, I think our objective is to drive sales through more customer visits, people wanting to buy more products from us. That's where we start that conversation or traffic.

Just want to sincerely thank you all for being here and engaging with us today. We're excited about our future. We're focused on our culture and who we are in our core -- we see other areas to grow. So thank you very much for being here and spending the morning with us. We have some lunch out there. If you're able to stay, please grab some lunch and get home safe. Thank you very much.

Good morning. My name is Joelle, and I will be your conference operator today. [Foreign Language]

I will now introduce Mr. Mathieu Brunet, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury of Alimentation Couche-Tard. [Foreign Language]

English will follow. [Foreign Language]

Good morning. I would like to welcome everyone to this web conference presenting Alimentation Couche-Tard's financial results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026. All lines will be kept on mute to prevent any background noise. After the presentation, we will answer questions from analysts during the web conference. We would like to remind everyone that this webcast presentation will be available on our website for a 90-day period. Also, please remember that some of the issues discussed during this webcast may be forward-looking statements, which are provided by the corporation with its usual caveats. These caveats or risks and uncertainties are outlined in our financial reporting. Therefore, our future results could differ from the information discussed today.

Our financial results will be presented by Mr. Alex Miller, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Filipe Da Silva, Chief Financial Officer. Alex, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Mathieu, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for being with us today. Before we dive into the results, I'd like to flag something for your calendars. On February 11, 2026, we'll host a business strategy update where we'll walk you through the next phase of our growth journey and our vision for the future of convenience and mobility. We'll share a clear and thoughtful view of where we're headed and what it means for our customers, our network and the opportunities ahead. You'll receive a formal save the date and additional details in early December. Today's focus is very much on the solid progress we've made this quarter. It's been a little over a year since I stepped into the CEO role, and I'm genuinely proud of the way the business is performing and of the relentless focus our team is putting on winning the customer.

Since the start of the fiscal year and for the second consecutive quarter, we've delivered positive same-store sales in every geography, along with steady, reliable performance in fuel. In an environment that remains challenging for many of our customers, they continue to respond to the value and convenience we're working hard to deliver, both inside our stores and on our forecourts. Our customer-focused initiatives are gaining traction, and we're seeing clear proof of that in this quarter's results, which are outperforming the industry. As we strengthen our value proposition and continue enhancing the customer experience across our network, we're also expanding our reach through disciplined organic growth. Together, these efforts are creating meaningful opportunities to welcome new customers and deepen the relationship with those we already serve.

We are well on our way to reaching our goal of 500 new stores in 5 years with 29 new stores opened since May, and we are on track for more than 100 new locations in North America this fiscal year with many offering high-speed diesel to serve our B2B customers, and we continue to seize opportunities in rural communities, along with our traditional metro area sites. As of today, we have another 73 stores currently under construction, and our real estate team has 1,000 sites in the pipeline for potential future development. In Europe, our rebranding of TotalEnergies retail assets is progressing across our 4 new business units with the Circle K brand and programs now at 80 sites as of the first half of the year, and half of those sites feature the Circle K car wash offer.

Our rebrand of the EV offer in mid-Europe is now complete. In my recent visits to these stores, I've been very pleased to see our team members energized, embracing our programs, executing them with excellence and engaging with our customers who are responding enthusiastically. Along with our efforts to grow and optimize our network, we are also investing in capabilities to support our stores through best-in-class inventory management solutions and supply chain optimization, which Filipe will address later.

This past week, in Otsego, Minnesota, we cut the ribbon on the first of 3 new distribution centers in the U.S. that will open in the third quarter. These 3 facilities will support approximately 1,600 stores across 14 states. With these openings, combined with our existing facilities in Texas, Arizona and Quebec, approximately 3,200 stores across North America will be supported by self-distribution. It is an important milestone in our efforts to strengthen and better align our North American supply chain, enhancing speed, accuracy and product availability while enabling the broadening of product assortment.

Now let's turn to our convenience business. As I mentioned earlier, we're continuing positive trends in same-store sales across our geographies for the second straight quarter, with the U.S. up 1.2%, Canada up 5.4% and Europe and other regions up 0.5%. U.S. revenues increased on solid performance in food, packaged beverage and other nicotine products. Canada's growth benefited primarily from alcohol and food. Food also contributed to the positive sales results in Europe and other regions segment.

Given the challenging consumer environment, these results are especially meaningful, and we're seeing clear gains in customer traffic and share, which speaks to the strength of our offering and the compelling value and ease of our experience. We believe the disciplined focus on the customer is helping us distance ourselves from broader industry trends and continue delivering quality, sustainable growth. Looking at our food category, as consumers look for ways to stretch their dollars, our meal deals are meeting their needs with the choices and options they want at an attractive price point. Meal deals are winning with customers, thanks to effective communication across our in-store and digital platforms, along with a focus on simplicity and execution. Food penetration continues to rise, and the strong adoption of meal deals across markets further highlights the increasing contribution of food to our overall growth trajectory. In North America, same-store food growth had its best performance in well over a year, fueled by disciplined execution and the ongoing strength of our meal deals platform.

This quarter, we sold over 10 million bundles up from 8.6 million in Q1, averaging over 850,000 bundles per week. I'm even more excited to share that at the very start of Q3, we surpassed the 1 million meal deals mark sold per week in North America. This milestone underscores the growing relevance of our food offering and the value we are bringing to our customers, and we're just getting started. In the months ahead, we'll continue expanding the meal deals platform, introducing greater variety and innovation, strengthening vendor partnerships and offering customers unmatched optionality.

We are also seeing meaningful customer excitement and incremental sales growth from our exclusive partnership with Guy Fieri, which we announced in September. The Flavortown inspired menu rollout across the Northern Tier business unit is contributing to an increase in overall hot food weekly units alongside meaningful margin dollar contribution. We are encouraged by the customer response to this differentiated offer as we prepare for a broader North American expansion. In addition, our SKU reduction initiative launched in FY '25 continues to drive margin improvement in our U.S. business units, enabling us to focus on execution excellence and maintain reliable in-stock performance while also reducing spoilage.

In Europe, food continues to be a bright spot driven by increased in sales per store. Sweden, Norway, Ireland and the Baltics were key markets with substantial growth in hot dogs, burgers, sandwiches and bakery items. Building on our success in North America, we accelerated the European rollout of meal deals last quarter with 3 well-defined offers at tiered price points to capture a broader range of customer occasions, from smaller impulse buys to full meal solutions. The early results are promising.

Turning to our efforts to own thirst. U.S. packaged beverage category delivered solid performance with basket size and pricing offsetting category-wide declines in trip frequency. Energy drinks continue to lead the category with same-store sales growth in the mid-teens, supported by ongoing innovation, meal deal inclusion and exclusive vendor partnerships that are driving consumer engagement. Dispensed beverages are also seeing strong growth in the cold and frozen segments, lifted by our loyalty pricing strategies.

Meanwhile, we're launching new programs to drive excitement into the hot dispensed category. Earlier this month in the U.S., we kicked off our win free Coffee for a Year Sweepstakes in partnership with International Delight creamers, inviting customers to enter for a chance to win 1 of 14 prices. We are also piloting an aggressive Inner Circle price on hot coffee to complement our highly popular any size Polar Pop offer for loyalty members. In adult beverages, we continue to see healthy beer and wine growth in Canada. While we expect growth trends in this category to normalize, these results more than offset the declines in nicotine in Canada resulting from the illicit tobacco trade and government restrictions on pouches in the convenience channel.

In the U.S., our performance in nicotine is strong with mid-single-digit same-store sales growth. We've outpaced the convenience channel in cigarette sales and trips driven by market-centric pricing and affordability across premium and discount segments. Our September ZYN promotion sparked double-digit unit growth for ZYN as we distributed close to 8 million free cans. Not only did this offer increased total nicotine trips year-over-year and versus the pre-promotion period, but it also boosted the overall modern oral segment and sustained increased nicotine trips post-promotion. These results highlight our successful vendor collaboration and customer engagement as well as our ability to deliver value and maintain momentum in a complex regulatory landscape.

In Europe, amidst a challenging regulatory and market environment, our nicotine business continues to outperform the broader market with other tobacco products driving year-over-year category growth while we still see some volume gains versus last year from the supermarket bans on tobacco in the Netherlands and Belgium. Looking at our loyalty programs with our launch of Inner Circle in Texas in September, we added more than 1 million new customers in Inner Circle, surpassing 12.5 million members across the U.S. as of the end of the second quarter. With the completion of our rollout in the West Coast business unit earlier this month, Inner Circle is now available at more than 5,000 sites across the U.S., and we expect enrollments to continue to accelerate in the coming months.

As we bring Inner Circle to new customers across the U.S., our retention rates are sustained and healthy. More than 85% of members are active in fuel, 65% are active inside the store. We are leveraging some of our recent investments in our customer data platform and personalization capabilities to help drive repeat visits from Inner Circle members, and we are seeing existing members visit more frequently. Elsewhere in Europe, we've taken a major step forward with the rollout of our enhanced extra loyalty program, a unified visit-based model that rewards customers for every interaction, whether they fuel, charge, shop or wash their cars, the new platform delivers a more seamless personalized experience that strengthens engagement and customer loyalty across our network. Following a successful pilot in Sweden, we have now completed the expansion to Poland and the Baltics this quarter with other markets to follow.

Turning to our fuel business. Same-store road transportation fuel volumes were down 0.6% in the U.S. and 1.8% in Europe, but up 1.1% in Canada. Despite these declines, overall volumes remain healthy and are outperforming industry peers, and margins are holding steady compared to previous quarters. We remain focused on unlocking additional value from our fuel supply chain across our global operations with our supply, trading and logistics teams working to expand lower-cost supply options and execute programs that deliver meaningful value to our customers, such as our seasonal Fuel Day events.

Our October Fuel Day in Canada drove traffic and excitement to more than 1,100 sites across the country with savings of $0.10 per liter. In the U.S., we have tied recent Fuel Day events to Inner Circle not only providing great savings for our customers, but also driving sign-ups to the membership program and deepening customer engagement. In B2B, our European business continues to navigate a dynamic environment with mixed volume trends. Card volumes came in just below last year's levels, but this was offset by robust margin gains. Non-fuel income continues to be a strategic growth area as steady increases in B2B transit charging volumes helped counteract accelerated declines in traditional fuel and bulk fuel volumes remain healthy.

While slightly lower this quarter due to price competition among resellers and a volatile biofuels market, they were offset by improved margins. We are seeing sustained growth in mobile payment adoption, up 30% versus last year, with the Baltics leading in customer onboarding and transaction volume with rollout of new digital platforms and functionalities such as self-service enrollment and instant virtual card issuance, we are gaining market share and operational savings for our customers.

In the U.S., our B2B fuel share continues to grow as we build strong customer relationships, leverage the national scale and reach of our network and work to provide a reliable, seamless fueling and payment experience for drivers, focusing on direct partnerships, commercial diesel growth and strategic collaborations that have set us apart. We are seeing higher retention and increased usage among fleets of all sizes. We are also increasing Inner Circle penetration with B2B members as customers enjoy personal rewards for commercial fueling, enabling both acquisition and retention.

Shifting over to e-mobility. We are building on our market leadership in Europe adding more than 230 DC ultrafast Circle K branded charge points and 33 new sites added across our European network during the second quarter. Overall, we now have close to 630 locations with Circle K branded chargers up nearly 30% versus a year ago. And our fast-charging network now consists of just under 3,900 charge points. In addition, we saw nearly 2 million charging transactions on Circle K branded chargers in Europe, an increase of 55% versus same quarter last year. As we expand the network with an emphasis on Scandinavia, we are also increasing our focus on new markets in our mid-European business, where our sites contributed more than 300,000 charging transactions.

With that, I'll now turn the discussion over to Filipe, who will provide further details on our financial performance this quarter.

Good morning, everyone. We closed the second quarter with growing optimism, reflecting steady progress supported by consistent execution and effective cost management across our operations. Core operating expense growth remained under control, while we continue to advance our multiyear investment journey to unlock new capabilities that strengthen our network and create greater value for customers. As Alex outlined, this quarter extends the positive momentum we began in Q1, with U.S. same-store sales growing for the second consecutive quarter, reinforcing that our self-help initiatives are delivering steady measurable progress.

Food remained a bright spot, continuing its upward trajectory, supported by strong in-store execution. Shrink improved further, now at its lowest level in about 9 quarters, while food service gross margin expanded by more than 400 basis points year-over-year, providing an important lever in managing inflation and supporting margin resilience. This also marked the first full quarter from GetGo, which further broadens our food and convenience offering in the U.S. and unlocks new opportunities for customer engagement. For example, just this month, we're testing a small pilot in Ohio that lets myPerks members from Giant Eagle redeem point at Circle K. It gives customers more flexibility and helps connect directly with fuel shoppers. It's still very early days, and we'll watch how it performs before looking at next steps.

In Canada, performance remained robust, supported by the ongoing benefit from the alcohol legislation changes in Ontario. As we move closer to cycling last year's favorable impacts and face a more tempered retail environment, we are approaching the coming quarters with a prudent outlook with continued focus on execution and compelling food offerings. In Europe, all regions posted healthy results with broad-based category growth driven by compelling food offers and attractive meal deals, helping us to capture additional market share.

In Asia, operations were temporarily disrupted by the typhoon. However, the overall financial impact was minimal and did not materially affect EPS. Turning to our TotalEnergies assets, synergy delivery remains ahead of plan. That said, we did see a modest acceleration in the Netherlands, where the prior year benefit from the supermarket tobacco ban is not fully cycled. Overall, merchandise and service gross margin expanded by approximately 140 basis points year-over-year, and fuel margin also improved by nearly 600 basis points. These results demonstrated meaningful progress in both performance and integration. I will now go over some key figures for the quarter. For more details, please refer to our MD&A available on our website.

After nearly a year, net earnings attributable to shareholders of the corporation returned to positive territory in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, which stood at $741 million or $0.79 per share on a diluted basis. Excluding certain items described in more details in our MD&A, adjusted net earnings were approximately $734 million or $0.78 per share on an adjusted diluted basis, representing an increase of 5.4% compared to the corresponding quarter of last year.

Now let's review in detail each of our business segments on an FX-adjusted basis. The adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 increased by approximately $94 million or 6.2% compared with the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2025, mainly due to the contribution from acquisitions, which amounted to approximately $75 million, improved merchandise and service and road transportation fuel gross margin as well as organic growth in our convenience activities, partly offset by the impact of the regulatory divestiture related to the GetGo acquisition, which amounted to approximately $8 million. During the second quarter, merchandise and service revenues increased by approximately $254 million or 5.8%, primarily attributable to the contribution from acquisitions which amounted to approximately $163 million in organic growth, partly offset by the impact of regulatory divestiture related to the GetGo acquisition, which amounted to approximately $20 million.

Merchandise and service gross profit increased by approximately $126 million or 8.3%. This is primarily attributable to the contribution from acquisition, which amounted to approximately $56 million by organic growth as well as by improved merchandise and service gross margin in the United States partly offset by the impact of regulatory divestiture related to the GetGo acquisition, which amounted to approximately $7 million.

In a context where we are delivering increasing value to our customers across all regions, I am happy to report that our gross margin expanded this quarter. In the United States, our merchandise and service gross margin increased by 0.9% to 34.7%, favorably impacted by the Zyntember promotion as well as by strong food execution. On the food side, the margin lift also reflect a significant reduction in shrink of more than 400 basis points alongside our 2025 rationalization efforts, ensuring that our promotions and assortment are relevant to our customers. In Europe and other regions, our merchandise and gross margin increased by 0.7% to 38.9%, mostly driven by a favorable mix -- product mix from lower tobacco revenues and e-mobility continued momentum in Scandinavia. In Canada, our merchandise and service gross margin increased by 0.6% to 34.2%, driven by a favorable change in product mix from cigarette revenues.

Moving on to the fuel side of our business. Our road transportation fuel gas margin was $0.4586 per gallon in the United States, a modest decline of $0.0024, but overall consistent with previous quarters. In Canada, margin averaged an impressive CAD 0.1507 per liter, an increase of CAD 0.0172. Fuel margins remained healthy across the network, supported by ongoing supply chain optimization and strong in-store effectiveness. We're also advancing our data-driven approach to pricing and promotions, helping us stay agile and competitive in a dynamic retail environment. In Europe and other regions, our road transportation fuel gross profit was USD 0.1151 per liter, an increase of USD 0.01, driven by favorable foreign exchange translation and effective supply chain management, partly offset by the impact of lapping a onetime gain from a prior year fuel supply agreement adjustment.

Turning to SG&A. Normalized expenses increased by 3.4% year-over-year in the second quarter of fiscal 2026 driven by disciplined core operating costs and targeted investments. Roughly 2/3 of the increase came from our core operating expenses, which continue to be managed effectively and remain on pace with average inflation across our regions, supported by our fit-to-serve. This also reflects targeted effort to scale our food service offering with resources directed towards enhancing capabilities at the store level. The remaining 1/3 reflects planned investment in technology and operational capabilities to support long-term growth and enhance the customer experience.

I would like to emphasize that year-to-date, our normalized expense growth remains in line with inflation, aligned with our focus on cost discipline and maximizing operational leverage. I'm pleased to report that we exceeded our fit-to-serve target of $800 million ahead of schedule. This achievement reflects the collective commitment of our teams to deliver real measurable improvement. It's an important milestone that strengthens our ability to reinvest with purpose while maintaining disciplined expense control.

Moving on, we continue to see gains in more workforce productivity. In the U.S., overtime wages remain below 3% for the 23rd straight month and below 2.5% for the 12th consecutive month, landing at 2.1% in Q2 versus 2.7% last year. These results speak to the effectiveness of handheld devices, smarter labor scheduling and automation tools that are translating into more impactful customer-facing hours. We are also capturing incremental savings through our centralized procurement efforts for goods not for resale, further leveraging our global scale to reduce cost and drive efficiency.

Turning to strategic investment. We continue to advance our digital capabilities and operational tools to position the company for long-term growth. A key focus this quarter has been the North American pilot of our RELEX ordering and space planning platform now underway across 6 locations in 4 business units. Fuel scale deployment remains on track for the first half of calendar 2026. Early results are promising, with notable gain in product availability and inventory accuracy. As we scale, RELEX is expected to further reduce spoilage and also inventory efficiency, support margin resilience and strengthen vendor collaboration, all while streamlining in-store operation by simplifying ordering and optimizing shelf layouts.

Beyond RELEX, we are making solid progress on other elements of our digital road map. Our upgraded handheld devices and labor scheduler are now embedded in more locations, continuing to streamline operations and improve team productivity. We're also seeing early promise from our AI task management pilot, helping store manager quickly translate data into clear, actionable insights. These investments are sharpening execution at the store level and helping deliver a more seamless and personalized customer experience.

Turning over to depreciation and amortization expenses increased by approximately $59 million or 12.6% year-over-year, including the GetGo assets, which amounted to approximately $23 million, along with equipment upgrades, store remodel program, new store openings, technology enhancement and EV charger deployment. This initiative represents significant strategic investment made in recent quarters. From a tax perspective, the income tax rate for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 was 22.8% compared with 23.4% for the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2025. The decrease is mainly stemming from the impact of a different mix in our earnings across the various jurisdictions in which we operate.

As of October 12, 2025, we recorded a return on equity at 17.7%, and our return on capital employed stood at 11.9%. During the fiscal year, our leverage ratio stood at 2.21. We also had strong balance sheet ability with $2 billion in cash and an additional $3 billion available through our revolving unsecured operating credit facility. During the quarter, we issued Canadian dollar denominated and U.S. dollar denominated senior unsecured notes totaling CAD 500 million and USD 1.2 billion, respectively. The $1.6 billion net proceeds from the issuance were used to repay indebtedness under our United States commercial paper program. Additionally, we repurchased 16.6 million shares for an amount of nearly $900 million through the buyback program, while for the first half of the year, we invested close to $900 million in capital expenditure, reinforcing our balanced approach to capital allocation. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, 6.1 million shares were repurchased for an amount of approximately $306 million.

Turning to the dividend. The Board of Directors declared yesterday a quarterly dividend of CAD 0.215 per share, an increase of 10.3% for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 to shareholders on record as at December 3, 2025, and approved its payment effective December 17, 2025. In closing, our second quarter results reinforced the resilience of our business model and the operational excellence of our teams. We are encouraged by the continued top line momentum across key categories, particularly in food, packed beverage and fuel as well as by our progress in loyalty, underscoring the advancement of our customer initiatives.

Looking ahead, we remain committed to delivering earnings growth over the course of the year by maintaining our cost discipline, thanks to fit-to-serve initiatives and by enhancing our gross margin profile through continued progress on shrink and spoilage food growth and vendor-funded promotions. We are also deploying capital with purpose, investing in tools that optimize execution and elevate the customer experience to support long-term value creation and deliver best-in-class returns. I thank you all for your attention.

I will turn the call over again to our President and CEO, Alex Miller.

Thank you, Filipe. As we move forward, our priority remains clear, delivering meaningful value for our customers and making every visit to our stores and forecourts easy and enjoyable. We're strengthening our execution, making better use of our scale and sharpening our operations, so our sites consistently have what customers need. We're also elevating the loyalty experience in ways that make it more personal and more engaging, helping customers come back more often. I'm proud of the work our teams are doing across the network and the progress we're making together. As we move into the back half of the year, we're well positioned to keep serving customers reliably and to be the stop they trust most when they're on the go.

On that note, let's turn it over to the operator to answer analyst questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Martin Landry with Stifel.

I want to touch on your U.S. merchandise margins. They have expanded nicely on a year-over-year basis in the last 2 quarters. And they've reached levels that are near the highest in the last 10 years. And you seem to have good margin drivers. You've talked about white nicotine. You've talked about food, energy drink, vertical integration of your distribution and then even SKU reduction. But -- so I'm trying to understand a little bit where are we in that journey for your merchandise margin in the U.S. How much more upside do you see there? And if you can talk a little bit about what is left in terms of drivers to get these levels higher?

Yes. Thank you for the question. I'm pleased with the 90 bps improvement year-on-year for the quarter. I think the -- for this quarter specifically, about 38 of the bps came from white nic and our ZYN promotion. We continue to improve shrink, as Filipe talked about, that's contributing nice to our ongoing margin improvement. I think I've talked in past quarters about our improvements around promotions and our ability to analyze promotions and our data capability, doing less promotions but doing promotions that really add value to consumers and drive traffic and present real value to them.

We talked about the ongoing new distribution centers. We just opened one. I was -- last week, I was in Minnesota and saw our new facility. These facilities are going to improve our COGS as we go forward. They're going to help us service our stores better when our stores really want and need to be serviced for the less lease disruption. So we -- and then lastly is food, right? I mean we continue to grow food. Our food, we grow in the U.S., we improved food by 480 bps quarter on -- versus last year in the same quarter, and we believe we will continue to do these things. So we're executing quite well against the items we're very focused and feel good about the direction of our margin gains, really not just in the U.S., in all 3 of our big geographies.

Yes. And just to complement, Alex. So I think also, Martin, as we are integrating more the supply chain, we'll have the possibility also to get more control on the negotiation with suppliers. And we believe that there is also a nice potential upside there. Of course, we need to continue to reinvest in value, as mentioned by Alex, many times this morning. But yes, overall, the profile of the gross profit, we feel good about the prospect and what we can continue to build in this aspect.

Your next question comes from Irene Nattel with RBC Capital Markets.

Can you talk about the cadence of same-store sales improvements as you went through Q2 and where you're tracking Q3 to date, please?

Yes. Thanks, Irene. The quarter was pretty consistent. We continue to see pretty big variations across the United States. So an example would be our Midwest business unit, which is Iowa, Illinois and Indiana for the quarter. Same-store sales were up 5.3%. Same-store volume was up 2.3%. And we can send -- and that's offset by challenge along our Southern states. And the Midwest BU at 7% of our merch sales. Texas and Arizona specifically remain challenged. They were slightly negative in the quarter. And those 2 areas are 23% of our merch sales. So we continue to see those kind of large differences across the United States.

With that said, our teams in Texas and Arizona are performing very well from a market context and taking considerable share, and so then as we look forward, we did see a slight softening due to the government shutdown. And specifically, we believe the SNAP or EBT benefits, just slight softening for a couple, 3 weeks. Since the government has reopened and those programs are back, we've kind of pivoted back to really consistently where we've been this past quarter, Irene.

So then do you think this sort of 1% to 1.5% level, Alex, should be sustainable through the balance of the year? And then, I guess, how do you accelerate it from there?

We're going to -- we're feeling good. We've had several weeks and periods of success and seeing our business strengthening. And again, it's -- I'm never going to try and predict the future, Irene, but I feel really good about the activities of the team, the focus of the team. Our operating metrics are just extremely sound. Our food numbers continue to grow, and we're continuing to see that as we're into P3, our execution against those programs, our production availability. Our zero, zero for heroes, the products we sell the most, we have them in stock on the shelves, the proliferation of our meal deals really in all 3 of our geographies, consumers continue to really respond to those programs. And as I mentioned, we passed 1 million for a couple of weeks ago, which was a huge benchmark for all of us here, and we're celebrating that.

Our digital platforms continue to grow. We added 1 million members in the quarter. Our visits were 6.6 versus 6.1. we grew traffic by 7%. So the areas we're focused on, Irene, we're gaining momentum, and they're working. And other nic and energy -- other nicotine, specifically white nicotine and energy, our execution, our vendor relationships and partnerships, we feel like we're clearly winning in those spaces, and we will continue to lay into those spaces. So I remain -- I'm cautiously and positively optimistic as we go forward, Irene.

Your next question comes from Chris Li with [ Desjardins. ]

Sorry, can I just -- maybe a quick follow-up to Irene's question. So for Q3 to date in U.S. merchandise comps, Alex, is it trending more or less in line with what you achieved in Q2?

Yes. P7, we softened just a bit. And again, we're pretty sure that was the government shutdown and EBT and SNAP, not a lot. We softened a bit. But as we've gone into P8, the last 2 weeks and the government reopened in those programs, we've converted right back to the trends we were seeing and really see acceleration in those programs that we saw before.

Okay. That's helpful. And then, sorry, my main question is just maybe on the SG&A growth rate. It did sort of accelerate in Q2. And I wanted to ask, for the second half of the year, how should we think about the normalized growth rate?

Thanks, Chris, for the question. I think we feel good about the SG&A. Year-to-date, we are in line with the inflation, and I think we need to realize how much transformation we are doing in this company and investing for the long term. We have been talking a lot about supply chain, digital capabilities, RELEX. All these [ we mentioned ] that are really there to make us a better company. And we are doing all that, again, being able to match inflation. So it means that there is a lot going, and I have to recognize the hard work done by the team there, just to find ways to be more productive.

So just on the quarter, we have been very disciplined in terms of labor hours being down in hours by 0.8% compared to last year across the regions, a lot going on from the procurement side. So Chris, I think we are -- yes, we are very confident by the plan. As I mentioned earlier in the call, we already reached the ambition that we had on the 5-year plan regarding fit-to-serve. There is more there. So when you look at the full year, yes, that's -- our ambition is to continue to be kind of in line with inflation. And at the same time, making sure that we do the right thing for the business and investing for the future. We have a lot to do there. But again, confident that we'll keep our discipline in cost. That's what we have been in the past and we will continue to be, Chris.

Your next question comes from Michael Van Aelst with TD Cowen.

So in your OpEx discussion, it did pop up in terms of your normalized operating growth from Q1 to Q2. And I think you mentioned for the first time you segregate a comment about investments to accelerate growth in food service. So can you explain to us what these investments are? And should this drive -- is this something you expect to drive same-store sales in the U.S. north of 2% eventually?

I can take maybe on the expense side. So yes, we are investing, for example, in U.S. We are investing on the digital capabilities, helping to get a better forecasting. So we are investing on that. We are partnering there to get a tool. And that really makes a big difference, making sure that we have the food at the right time when the customer needs it and the employee knows when to put that in the shelf. So there has been a lot of investment there. And also, we are investing in -- on additional shifts from a labor standpoint to make sure that food is there when it's needed.

So again, here, when you look at the overall labor hours, we have reduced the number of hours versus last year, reducing from an administrative point of view, the hours used in stores, but redirecting that to customer-facing activities and part of it is food. So we'll continue to do that because that's the right thing to do for the business. So feeling confident that, again, looking at the overall expense profile, we will continue to invest in food for sure. But having in mind that we want to be in line with inflation as a whole in expense. So looking for productivity in other parts of the business. Alex, do you like to take the...

Yes. I can just build -- yes, build on that a little bit. I think that some onetime investments in food around production availability and the rollout of a specific program, I view those as onetime investments. We absolutely see food growing, and you see it in our results. And food, like anything, it's driving increased transactions and increased transactions are good. We continue to grow that percentage. And I think as I've shared with you previously, our goal is to get to 20% penetration in North America, and we believe we can do that, and we have a long runway to do that. I think from a cost perspective at the operating level, the last year has been absolutely focused on operations and back to our core, and our operating metrics are as good as I have ever seen them.

Our turnover levels, our retention levels are -- just continue to improve. We referenced our overtime percentage, our labor hour compliance, our scheduling compliance, our shrink continues to go down. So the focus on our core -- at our core, we are operators, we are focused on operations, providing the tools at our stores and to our customers to be successful, and it's resonating. And part of that core culture of ours is controlling cost. We are doing that at the operating level and offsetting these strategic investments. And we will very much aim to continue to do that.

Okay. And just to clarify, the meal deals, is that available throughout the U.S. network now?

Absolutely, it is. It's not just the U.S. network, it is available across our entire footprint now. We are growing them in Canada. We've launched them in Europe and feel pretty strongly. We're already hitting levels close to our U.S. levels in Europe, where our food penetration is higher. It's really one of the most exciting things when I'm out with our teams in stores, just hearing it resonate with customers and hearing our store teams talk about how customers relate to the value that we can provide. So we will continue to lay into meal deals. We think we've really found something here that is really resonating with consumers and consumers that are strapped for cash.

Your next question comes from Mark Petrie with CIBC.

Hoping to just go deeper on some of your comments with regards to U.S. same-store sales, specifically the regional performance. Could you talk more about the drivers there? Is that just a matter of traffic? Or are there other factors like loyalty penetration, category mix, food, et cetera? And then if you could also just expand on the market share comment. Are you taking more share in those slower-growth regions? Or would you say it's more generally consistent across regions?

Yes. I don't think -- I think our execution level continues really to improve across the company. I think it's more of a macro dynamic that's happening in the United States. The Texas and Arizona traditionally have been big growth states and big growth areas. We are very happy with our positions in these southern geographies. We absolutely believe this to be transitory. But we are seeing fairly significant differences in the Southern states versus our Midwest states currently. We think that will ultimately normalize as we go forward. And again, we're very happy to have those positions.

It's not -- our loyalty penetration, it differs by business unit, but they're -- it's growing everywhere. Our execution on food differ slightly, but it's growing everywhere. And again, I'm just really proud of the teams. We've been very focused. We're executing against programs, and we're taking market share not in every business unit. But clearly, in total, we are. And in most business units, we are taking share in merch and in fuel.

Okay. And sorry, just to clarify, when you talk about the slower growth in Arizona and Texas, for instance, is that mostly in traffic? Or does that show up in basket size as well?

Sorry, I didn't catch the last bit of your question there?

When you talk about the slower same-store sales growth in some of your regions like Arizona and Texas, is that mostly just in slower traffic versus like the Midwest? Or is it also in basket? Or how does that show up?

Yes. I think traffic is a little more challenged in those geographies. We're growing basket in pretty much every business unit. So it generally is traffic driven, yes.

Your next question comes from Bobby Griffin with Raymond James.

Congrats on the performance. Alex, I just -- I want to double-click into the food category as a whole, given some of the success here with the sales as well as the margin improvement? Ultimately, where is that category as we stand today from its full margin potential? Is there still hundreds of basis points left? Or is it getting close to something you would say is running from a margin side of things, best-in-class or up to where you would like it to be at?

So where we sit today, we are laser-focused on growing sales and continuing to grow sales. Our spoilage rates in our food category is about where we want them now. And obviously, we've improved 400 to 500 basis points versus previous year. So our spoilage rates are about where they want them. We are really focused on growing sales. As we go forward and as we grow sales and as we continue to improve our supply chain, we absolutely believe there is future margin expansion as we continue on this journey.

Your next question comes from Vishal Shreedhar with National Bank.

Alex, as it relates to food, Couche-Tard has been on a journey for food for, call it, more than a decade and sometimes the initiatives didn't necessarily come through as investors might have anticipated. So as you look at the -- your food programs right now and you've expressed confidence, what gives you more certainty that this confidence will be realized in actual performance and hitting your targets at this time?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I do have a great deal of confidence, and I think we've talked to you about it, we needed to reset. So we rationalized our SKUs. We really focused on the underlying processes and programs on the products, the taste of the products, what was resonating with consumers, and we've largely finished that reset. And you're seeing it in our results. You're seeing the growth in both traffic and sales and margin improvement, and we are now poised for significant growth.

Our production availability, our operating execution continues to improve, and we are reaching levels that we believe are very solid going forward. We've talked about our meal deals and the unique nature of us to be able to really offer value and to bundle products that are unique to QSRs. And candidly, we see a lot of people perhaps copying us or taking that. So we think we might be on to something there. But I've never had this much confidence in our journey in food. This organization, we are operators, when we get focused on things, we execute pretty well. I hope that doesn't sound arrogant. But our teams are focused on food. We are executing every period, every quarter at an improved level, and I think we're in for some really strong growth as we look at the quarters ahead across our footprint.

Okay. And could you just update us on the acquisition backdrop, maybe what you're seeing?

Yes. Thank you. Very active. We are active with files in all 3 of our large geographies in Canada and Europe and in the United States, both smaller and larger files out there today. We're engaged, and we continue to see quite a bit of deal flow. And I think we'll be able, as we have done historically, to continue to execute on M&A inside of our financial framework and at multiples and return levels that we have consistently delivered on, I think, in our 46-year history. So it remains very active. And hopefully, we'll be able to announce to you in the coming quarters that we've gotten some stuff done.

Your next question comes from Luke Hannan with Canaccord.

I wanted to go back to the discussion on meal deals. Alex, you talked about expanding that platform in the coming months. And I'm curious to know, what does that look like? Is that more availability of certain deals, let's say, within the existing price points? Do you anticipate there being an expansion of the price points available? And then maybe also sort of as a follow-up to that, introducing more complexity and SKUs naturally might also get to a point where similar in the past Couche-Tard has run into issues when it comes to spoilage, how do you make sure that you put the guardrails in place to ensure that you don't introduce too much complexity as part of expanding the meal deals platform?

Yes. I think when we think about meal deals, first and foremost, it's about value. So the value element is resonating with consumers who are increasingly stretched. And through our vendor partnerships, our procurement capabilities, we're able to offer these meal deals at margin profiles that work for us and that work for our partners. So as we look to the future, we will continue to offer value. We will continue to keep it simple and straightforward in what we are offering, and we will leverage down even harder with our vendor partners to give the products that our consumers want. The energy sector is growing rapidly, continues to grow rapidly across all 3 of our geographies. We have great relationships. Consumers look to us for those products. So continuing to make those various drink products with our best-selling food items at value will be our focus as we look to the future.

Your next question comes from John Zamparo with Scotiabank.

I'm wondering if you could add a bit more color on the Flavortown initiative? I know it's quite early, but can you say what level of growth you're seeing at those stores? And is there anything you can say to give a sense of how incremental this is and what impact it has on margins? And then lastly, can you remind us on the pace of that rollout, you've said national within a year, but I'm wondering when this will hit most of the U.S.?

Yes. Thanks for the question. This is a great example of making sure we stay disciplined on SKUs. So we added 11 Flavortown items in our Northern Tier business unit. We stopped selling 12 other items as part of that. We've reached about 65% to 70% of our goal of unit growth from those items. And I think more importantly, it is serving to grow hot food in Northern Tier, and we are growing hot food in Northern Tier as a result of Flavortown.

We're still working through some supply chain elements for the 10 states we're serving. We're still working with the Flavortown team around the various products and what -- how consumers are responding to those. But we feel good about where we're at this far into the journey, and we continue to see a strong likelihood that we will expand across the U.S. We've got a little bit more work to do. And probably we'll be able to update you more next quarter, I think, on where we're at on that and what the expansion plan will be.

Your next question comes from Bonnie Herzog with Goldman Sachs.

Alex, I wanted to ask a high level strategic question. You talked through a lot of your key initiatives this morning to accelerate growth and expand margins. So hoping you could give us a sense of the top maybe 1 or 2 initiatives that you believe will have the greatest positive impact on your business in the next, I don't know, 2-plus quarters. And then maybe drill down a little further on how impactful you expect these initiatives to be on your top and bottom lines? And then also, where do you see the biggest risk to your business in the next couple of plus quarters?

Thanks for the question, Bonnie. Our focus remains right where it's been. First and foremost, operations, execution, operating metrics, serving our customers, the equipment in our stores work friendly, customer ready. So that has been our focus the last year, and I'm really proud of the improvement. I have talked with you at length about food and the journey and meal deals, it remains right there. Growing our digital platforms is absolutely and increasingly personalizing our platforms. We are seeing just uptake in our programs, increased visits, increased basket. We're going to layer down into these programs and feel really good about those.

We have some tailwinds, right? The energy sector is great. We have some mix tailwinds. We've talked a lot about other nicotine and white nicotine specifically. Nicotine was positive in both Europe and the U.S. for this quarter. And we continue to see that transition, and our relationship with the vendors in these spaces and just how we work with them strategically, we feel really good about. So Bonnie, it's going to be more of the same. We're going to lay into those things. I guess the greatest risk, I feel strongly about our teams and our culture and how we're executing and the momentum we have. I continue to see us widen our gaps versus our data that we see from various markets.

It's the underlying environment and how the consumer is doing and just -- that is obviously impossible for me to predict. And that's -- I don't spend a ton of time worrying about that because it's not something I can control. We're focused on the things we can control. And we feel good about the momentum we have.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Mark Carden with UBS.

So you guys talked about opening the 3 new DCs to bring in some more self-distribution. How long would you expect the ramp to take at those locations? And then to what degree could you see yourself ultimately using self-distribution across even more of your footprint?

Yes. Thanks for the question. Our focus will -- we opened our one in Minnesota. It was great to go visit, and then we'll open our one in St. Louis and Columbus in the coming couple of months. And our focus for the first couple of 3 months is really just servicing our stores, making sure that we're getting the products to our stores in a timely way when we're supposed to. I think after those first couple of 3 months, we will then start to optimize around when we deliver to stores. We're obviously starting conversations and different things with vendors and our partners around products. We will continue to look to expand assortment and enable additional local assortment through these DCs.

And for us, I think I've spoken previously, we will go into our food supply chain as well. We believe the path of going into our supply chain on the merchant food side, we see a lot of incremental value both in the assortment we can carry, our underlying cost of goods, simplifying how we serve our stores and serving them when it makes sense for them and for our customers. So this is not a near-term thing for us. This is -- we've been planning this for a long time. It's great to get this first one open, and this will be a journey for us over the coming years.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to management for closing remarks.

Thank you, Alex and Filipe. That covers all the questions for today's call. Thank you all for joining us, and we wish you a great day and look forward to discussing our third quarter 2026 results in March. [Foreign Language]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.

Good morning, everybody. I am Alain Bouchard, Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board of Alimentation Couche-Tard. It is my pleasure to welcome you to our Annual Shareholder Meeting. I now declare the meeting open. In accordance with the corporation's bylaw as Executive Chairman of the Board, I will chair this meeting; and Melanie Charbonneau, Chief of Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary, will act as Secretary.

[Interpreted] Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. Some information, reminders and rules before starting the meeting. The agenda for the meeting includes the receipt of our audited consolidated financial statements for the fiscal year ended April 27, 2025, together with our auditor's report. The appointment of our independent auditor and to set its remuneration by the Board of Directors. The election of directors of the corporation, an advisory vote on our executive compensation policy and the review of and vote on 3 of 6 shareholder proposals received from 2 of our shareholders this year, provided that 3 of the shareholder proposal received from the MÉDAC Mouvement d'éducation et de défense des actionnaires for the education and defense of shareholders listed in the proxy circular will not be submitted to a vote.

Mr. Bouchard will present all proposals. They will not need to be sent on it. Only holders of record as of July 9, 2025, or their duly appointed proxies who are registered with our transfer agent and have obtained a control number prior to this meeting may participate, ask questions and vote at the meeting. All other persons may attend the meeting as guests. At the appropriate time, shareholders or their duly appointed proxies will be asked to vote on the meeting platform after all items on the agenda have been presented.

You will have only a limited time to do this. If you already voted and you vote again on the platform, it will change your previous vote. Registered shareholders and duly registered proxies who have already voted do not need to vote again unless they wish to change their vote. All duly registered shareholders and proxy holders may ask questions to the presenters during this meeting. There are 2 ways to proceed. Questions can be submitted in writing during the meeting using the dialogue box in the next function or by telephone by leaving the name telephone number and the subject of the question using the dialogue box in the message function to be contacted by telephone during the question period.

Questions received will be addressed at the end of the meeting during the question period. When asking a question, please state your name and who you represent if applicable and confirm that you are a registered shareholder or a duly appointed proxy holder. So that as many questions as possible are answers, shareholders and proxy holders are asked to be brief and concise and to address only one topic per question.

Questions from multiple shareholders on the same topic or that are otherwise related will be grouped, summarized and answered together. Answers will not be provided to questions that have already been answered or that are redundant or repetitive or are irrelevant to the corporation's operation or to the business of the meeting, nor will the corporation respond to questions that are related to nonpublic information about the corporation that are related to personal grievances or that are otherwise offensive. I must advise you that some of the topics discussed during these presentations following the legal part of the meeting may constitute forward-looking statements issued with the usual provisions. We cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statements will materialize. And accordingly, we urge our meeting attendees to consider the risks, uncertainties and assumptions carefully in evaluating the forward-looking statements and we caution you to not place undue reliance on these statements.

Details of the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements may be found in the Alimentation Couche-Tard management proxy circular for the 2025 fiscal year, which is available on SEDAR+ and on the corporation's website and in the presentation accompanying the shareholder meeting. We shall now proceed with Mr. Bouchard.

Thank you, Melanie. I now appoint TSX Trust Company as scrutineer of this meeting, represented today by Ms. [indiscernible] and [ Ms. Isabelle Vachon]. The Secretary has informed me that we have received confirmation from the TSX Trust Company that it has sent the documents regarding the meeting to all shareholders of records on the corporation's books on July 31, 2024. The scrutineers -- I am in instructor to -- instructing the secretary to keep these documents in the corporation's records with the affidavit from the TSX Trust Company, confirming that they have been sent to Couche-Tard shareholders.

The scrutineer has submitted to me its report on attendance at the meeting, showing that a quorum has been reached. I ask the secretary to attach the scrutineers' report to the minutes of this meeting. Accordingly, I declare this meeting duly convened and legally constituted. The first item on the agenda regards receipt of the corporation's financial statements. I now submit for receipt the consolidated financial statements of Alimentation Couche-Tard and its subsidiaries for the fiscal year ended April 27, 2025, as well as the auditor's report on these financial statements.

The next item on the agenda concerns the appointment of the auditor for the current fiscal year and the authorization provided to the Board of Directors to set its remuneration. As indicated in the circular, the corporation recommends the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers, a firm of chartered professional accountants until the next Annual Meeting of Alimentation Couche-Tard. I propose that PricewaterhouseCoopers be appointed auditor of the corporation and that the Board of Directors be authorized to set the auditor's compensation. As indicated in the circular, the Board of Directors has set the number of directors to be elected today at 16.

Biographical notes on the candidates are included in the management proxy circular made available to our shareholders. I shall now introduce the 16 people who have been nominated. Louis Vachon, Board member since 2021 and Lead Director; Jean Bernier, Board member since 2019; Karinne Bouchard, Board member since 2021; Eric Boyko, Board member since 2017; Marie-Eve D’Amours, Board member since 2023; Janice Fields Board member since 2020; Eric Fortin, Board member since 2021, Richard Fortin, Co-Founder and Board member since 1988; Stephen Harper, Board member since 2024. [ Milanico ] Board member since 2006; Marie-Josée Lamothe, Board member since 2019; Monique Leroux, Board member since 2015; Alex Miller, President and CEO and Board member since 2024, Réal Plourde Co-Founder and Board member since 1988; Louis Têtu, Board member since 2019; and myself, Alain Bouchard, Co-Founder, Board member since 1988 and Executive Chairman of the Board. Each candidate has indicated that they desire to serve as a director of the corporation. I propose that each of these individuals be elected as a director of the corporation until the close of the next Annual Shareholders Meeting or until a successor is duly elected and appointed. As mentioned at the start of the meeting, votes will be cast today through a single electronic ballot after the items on the agenda have been presented.

The next item on the agenda is the advisory vote on the Board of Directors' executive compensation policy. We are confident that you will judge the corporation's executive compensation program to be based on a performance-based approach aligned with our shareholders' long-term interest. As it is a consultative vote, the results of the vote will not be binding on the Board. However, the Board will take account of this result and other comments from shareholders.

The full text of the advisory resolution appears in the management proxy circular. I propose adopting the advisory resolution concerning the corporation's executive compensation practices set out in the management proxy circular. I will now hand over the mic to Melanie.

The next item on the agenda concerns the 5 shareholders proposal received this year from the Mouvement d'éducation et de défense des actionnaires the MÉDAC, represented by Mr. Willie Gagnon and the 1 shareholder proposal received this year by Share -- Shareholder Association for Research and Education, represented by Mrs. Delaney Greig, who is the Director, Investor Stewardship at University Pension Plan Ontario.

These proposals relate to minimizing all forms of waste, disclosure of languages mastered by employees, disclosure of languages mastered by executives, advisory vote on environmental policies, in-person annual shareholder meetings and emission reduction strategies. The corporation has reproduced in annex of this management proxy circular, the full text of this proposal.

Text has not been modified other than for translation purposes. The appendix state also the corporation's response to MEDAC and shares proposal. Relating to shareholder proposal 1, 2 and 3, the company has agreed with MEDAC not to submit this proposal to shareholder vote. As for shareholders' proposal 4, 5 and 6, which are submitted to vote, we refer you to the company's response in Appendix C of the management proxy circular. Although the corporation shares MEDAC and share positions on the importance of these issues, we believe that our current practices and disclosures in each area are adequate and meet regulatory requirements, and we invite our shareholders to vote against these 3 proposals. Mr. Gagnon would like to address the assembly and speak to the MEDAC proposal. Hi, Mr. Gagnon, you now have 4 minutes to talk about your 2 proposals.

Yes. Thank you. Can you hear me well?

Yes, we hear you very well.

So thank you. My name is Willie Gagnon. I work for MEDAC, which is a shareholder with Alimentation Couche-Tard since a few years. So the 3 proposals that we have agreed not to put to a vote because the state of discussions that we have had with the corporations on the [indiscernible] at the time of printing were not definitive. We are continuing our discussions with the company on those proposal, reduction of waste, the language required by for employers and employees, they are found in the circular, but they don't reflect our current conversation with the corporation.

And that is why we have decided and accepted to not go to a vote right now on these 3 proposals. So we are going to vote on a proposal for on environmental policies. Our arguments are there. They are the same as our arguments in favor on the advisory vote on compensation. For the environmental question, I won't talk about that further. If only to say that this proposal has gained 17% vote last year.

So 17% of shareholders agreed to that proposal last year. So proposal 5 on in-person AGMs. We are sad to not be there in person to talk to you today. I'm sure that the executive is together in a room. It would have been good for us to be there with them. So we invite you to bring back in-person AGMs. We can see what you say about lowering the carbon footprint, the reduction of carbon footprint that are gained through virtual meetings. We are not against virtual meetings. We would like to have information on these carbon footprint reductions and other reasons for having virtual meetings. We will remind you that last time, this proposal gained 30% approval. So we invite the majority of shareholders to support this proposal. And I would like to end by saying that we are happy with our dialogue with the company, and we are continuing to discuss these remaining issues. So thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Gagnon for your comments. So now madam [ Peg ] would like to speak to the Assembly about proposal #6. Hi, [ Mrs. Peg ] can you hear me well? You have 2 minutes to talk about your proposal.

So thank you, Madam Secretary. It's sad that we cannot see each other during this meeting. We can only discuss by phone University Pension Plan. UPP is a jointly sponsored pension plan for Ontario's university sector and a shareholder in Alimentation Couche-Tard. I will just correct that University Pension Plan is the filer of this proposal. It was submitted with the support of the Shareholder Association for Research and Education. The proposal comes after 3 years of engagement as part of the Climate Engagement Canada Investor and Led initiative.

Our proposal requests that Couche-Tard disclose a greenhouse gas emission reduction strategy, including midterm targets covering material operational emissions and an approach to Scope 3 value chain emissions. Over the term of our engagement, Couche-Tard has made progress in measuring its emissions and assessing its exposure to climate-related risks.

However, we believe that in order to remain competitive, attract international capital and address the transition risk impacting its business, particularly as a fuel retailer, Couche-Tard needs a coherent transition strategy, one that includes emission targets aligned with internationally in recognized methodologies. Many of Couche-Tard's self-identified peers, including Empire, Metro and Costco have already put in place such strategies and targets. In its disclosure, Couche-Tard identifies the many climate transition risks to which it is exposed, including regulatory, legal, technological, market and reputational risks related to climate change, all of which threaten shareholder value of less than addressed. We, therefore, believe that it is incumbent upon management to provide shareholders with a strategy to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions at the center of these risks.

I am sorry, Madam. Your time is now done. So I thank you for your comments. We are going to ask you to vote with your electronic system. I'll remind you that the items to be voted are the appointment of the auditor and to set its remuneration by the Board of Directors, the election of directors and advisory Board on our executive compensation policy and the 3 shareholders' proposals submittee.

You will now be asked to vote on each of the 4 items on the agenda. When you are asked to do so, please go to the voting page and press 4 or withhold button next to the resolution to appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers as the corporation's auditor. Press the 4 or withhold button for each candidate for director. Press the 4 or against button for the advisory resolution on the corporation's executive compensation practices. Press the 4 or against button for each of the 3 shareholder proposals. Once the electronic voting is complete, the voting page will disappear and your votes will automatically be recorded.

You will now have a few moments to fill out the electronic ballots, and we will resume the meeting once the voting has ended.

[Voting].

Thank you for your patience. I have received the scrutineers' report on the voting results, and I confirm the following: I confirm that the resolution on the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers has been adopted. Regarding the election of directors, Louis Vachon, Jean Bernier, Karinne Bouchard, Eric Boyko, Marie-Eve D’Amours, Janice Fields, Eric Fortin, Richard Fortin, Stephen Harper, Mélanie Kau, Marie-Josée Lamothe, Monique Leroux, Alex Miller, Réal Plourde, Louis Têtu and myself, Alain Bouchard have been elected as directors of the corporation. I am pleased to announce that the Board's approach to executive compensation has been adopted. Finally, regarding the 3 shareholder proposals submitted, I wish to announce that each proposal was rejected as recommended by the corporation. Details of the results will be available shortly on the SEDAR website and on the corporation's website.

With the legal portion of the meeting now completed, it is time to close the meeting and move on to the corporate presentations. I therefore declare the formal meeting closed.

I'm reflecting on the 45th anniversary of Couche-Tard, which took place in February of this year, 45 years that says a lot about my age. I was young at that time. When I opened my first store in Canada from day 1, it was all about our customers and our people. How to be a good manager, serve the customer, keep the store clean and have it ready for visitors. Sure, basic stuff, but I build my dream on those basics. And this year, we are reinforcing them so we can keep winning the customer for the next 45 years.

I'm not sure that I'll still be there, but still we all know that the retail sector is all about customer relationships and customer service. That is what I have always loved about this business. And it is why I decided to build a big chain. And today, it is indeed an impressive global network in 29 countries with over 149,500 team members and nearly 17,300 stores. Is it -- it is fair to say that this has exceeded even my wildest dream. However, I firmly believe that we are just getting started. We will continue on growing and serving a new customers as we build new stores and bring on new family members.

It is in our DNA, and we are good at this, and we will continue on this path in the months and years a year. Why am I so confident about our future and how we will continue to strive for excellence, easy. I am surrounded by an amazing group of leaders and team members. This year, Alex Miller became our third President and CEO, and the transition has been remarkably seamless. Alex has surrounded himself with an impressive group of executive leaders who, like him, are ready to take on the challenges of a demanding economic landscape.

The executive team is not only providing excellent leadership and vision to lead our business, but they are also deeply committed to protecting and promoting our special culture, which has been at the heart of this company from the day it started. I must also add that our team members across the globe never cease to amaze me. No doubt, daily realities are tough across our network from high prices to unprecedented climate events and shifting geopolitical conditions. Yet, our people are more engaged than ever, helping their communities, their customers and each other. And for that, we have been recognized as an exceptional workplace by Gallup for the fourth year in a row.

Each year, this recognition fills me with pride and never gets old. From the outset, I have always believed that our business, no matter how large it becomes, is built one store at a time. Our customers don't visit a chain. They visit one store, and they wanted to be ready to serve them quickly with a smile and a warm welcome. That is what convenience is all about. And it is what I have built my dreams on for the last 45 years. We sell time. I want to thank all our team members, customers and shareholders for sharing in that ambition and supporting us as we move forward in the road ahead. I will now hand over the mic to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Alex Miller.

Thank you, Alain. My first year as President and CEO coincides with the 45th anniversary of Couche-Tard. Few companies, large or small, make it as long and successfully as we have been able to do so. I have no doubt that this is because of our special culture of putting our people and customers first, an approach started by Alain when he opened our first store in Laval, Canada and one that continues to guide us today across our global network.

Like Alain, the favorite part of my job is being in our stores. I probably visit them close to 150 days a year, whether on a market pride tour or just dropping in casually for coffee and a snack. I love watching our people interact with our customers, seeing what they're doing in real time, and I couldn't be more proud of them. However, the reality is that it is more challenging than ever in the retail world as consumers are hurting and continue to carefully watch their spending.

That is why I've asked the entire company to make winning the customer our #1 priority as we begin the next 45 years of our company's journey. Over the last several months, we have been listening carefully to our customers to understand why they visit our locations and what they need from us to make them loyal customers. Not surprisingly, as Alain learned decades ago, to win the customer, we need to be good at the basics and keep our promise of easy. That is at the heart of the convenience business and our mission of making our customers' lives a little easier every day.

From introducing bundled meals deals in North America to expanding our loyalty programs in the U.S. and Europe and continuing our fuel day promotional events, we are relentlessly focused on providing ease and compelling value to win our customers. Last October, in the U.S., we launched our $3, $4 and $5 meal deals, bundling popular food items at value pack prices to create a satisfying and affordable meal option.

While meal deals have become common in QSRs, quick service restaurants, we have differentiated ourselves through partnerships with our suppliers by offering a variety of options, including energy drinks and chips that are not available at QSRs. These meal deals have been instantly popular with our customers. And in January, we expanded the offer across Canada. We are also providing more value and ease. In our growing loyalty membership programs. In the U.S., our efforts with Inner Circle have been on unlocking more savings for our customers through personalization and adding new capabilities that tailor our offers and content to different customer segments. In Europe, we are advancing our Extra program with new concepts designed to offer rewards across all products and services at our sites, whether a customer is looking to fill up with fuel, charge an electric vehicle or grab a snack. On our forecourt, we held numerous fuel promotional events at thousands of stations across the network, which offered our customers immediate discounts at the pump as well as fuel cards to use on future visits.

These events continue to bring impactful savings to our customers while driving more traffic to our locations. Owning food and thirst is fundamental to winning the customer. Quenching thirst is the main reason customers visit inside our stores, and we strive to be the #1 thirst stop across our markets. We are growing our beverage category by offering great assortment, innovation and value in both packaged and dispensed beverages at affordable price points. We are also increasing our exclusive beverage deals and promotions with our vendors and sponsors, driving excitement for our customers and bringing them back to our locations. In our Fresh Food Fast program, we have been listening closely to customer feedback and data.

This has led us to launching our North American meal deals as well as focusing more than ever on consistency and simplicity to improve execution and ensure that we have the right local products available at the right time. We are pleased with the performance of our fuel business in terms of both volumes and margins as we maintain market share and continue to build value for our customers through the optimization of our fuel supply chains globally. Our B2B work continues with solid results in Europe, and we are encouraged by its growth in the U.S. as new initiatives and strategic relationships bring in business and fleet customers.

Our network of truck accessible sites is growing as we expand our offer of high-speed diesel and relevant services for the long and short-haul truck driving customers. In e-mobility, we are proud to build on our established leadership position as a charging destination in Europe while expanding our charging network in North America. Perhaps the most exciting development this year for our e-mobility customers has been the opening of our biggest charging hub in Sweden, which has 26 high-power chargers for both passenger cars and heavy vehicles as well as sustainable forecourt concept for seamless and efficient charging. Our customers are thrilled with the experience, both on the forecourt and inside the store, where they can also enjoy our popular pizza offer. Growing the network in new communities and countries has been essential to our DNA over the last 45 years. This year, we reached new customers in Europe by bringing the Circle K brand to dozens of locations in our 4 new countries, which we acquired from TotalEnergies.

Our synergies are on track 1 year into the acquisition, and we are very encouraged by the positive reception by our customers to our services and products. We also created 4 new business units, led by local leaders who best know how to serve their customers and communities. In June, we closed on the acquisition of GetGo Café Markets from supermarket retailer, Giant Eagle. GetGo is an innovative food-first convenience store experience that operates approximately 270 convenience retail and fueling locations across Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland and Indiana.

We are excited to bring the GetGo team members into our family as we learn more about its made-to-order food and loyalty programs, which are extremely popular with customers. We are also making good progress in our ambition of building 500 new-to-industry stores in 5 years.

Here, we are reaching and delighting new customers in rural areas as well as those looking for a high-speed diesel offer. In our efforts to win the customer, we are determined to have store operations that are fast, friendly and customer-ready, and we know that customer-centric teams are critical to our success. Improving retention and lowering turnover is essential here, and we are making notable progress by investing in our store team members in areas they care about, including compensation, benefits, training and engagement.

We are also helping store team members with new scheduling tools and programs to simplify their workload and make it easier to operate our stores and take care of our customers. As a result, our turnover and retention metrics are at levels that we could not have imagined only a couple of years ago. For the fourth year in a row, we have been recognized as a Gallup exceptional workplace, which is a testament to our highly engaged customer-centric teams. There is nothing more important to me than protecting and promoting our special culture, and we are humbled that in a dynamic and demanding year, our team members continue to feel heard, valued and respected at work.

I am also deeply proud of how our global teams continue to support our customers and communities during times of crisis. This year, we had unparalleled weather emergencies in the U.S. from devastating hurricanes and historic winter storms across the South, catastrophic wildfires in Southern California and most recently, deadly floods in Texas. In each case, our team members showed incredible courage and dedication by keeping our stores open and providing essential supplies and services to customers.

Throughout our company's history, from pandemics to refugee crisis to climate disasters, we are always ready to support our customers and communities when they need us most. As a responsible retailer, sustainability continues to be very important to our customers and team members. Here, we remain disciplined and transparent in our approach as we navigate turbulent conditions and evolving stakeholder expectations.

We are steadfast in our global commitment and are pleased with our progress in our planet, people and prosperity framework. You can read all about our sustainability work in our 2025 report. No doubt, we are living through uncertain times with many geopolitical and economic headwinds. However, what is most important to me is that we stay relentlessly focused on our customers by getting the basics right, providing compelling value and ease and doing the right thing for them and our team members. As we have done for the last 45 years, I remain confident that by relying on the values we live by, global scale and proven ability to successfully grow the network, we will continue to win the customer and move forward in our vision to become the world's preferred destination for convenience and mobility. For that, I want to thank all team members, customers and stakeholders for their continued commitment and support of our business. Now we will turn next to our Chief Financial Officer, Filipe Da Silva.

[Interpreted]. Thank you, Alex. Let's begin with our overview of our financial performance since 2015. The following metrics illustrate the work our teams have done year after year to create value for our shareholders. As you can see, total gross profit has grown at an annualized rate of 9.5% since 2015 and by 7.6% over the past year to more than 13 billion. In addition, since 2015, our EBITDA has grown at an annualized rate of more than 12% and our adjusted diluted earnings per share have grown at an annualized rate of nearly 12% to more than 5.9 billion and 2.71 per share, respectively, which is a perfect demonstration of our consistent operation level. And finally, shareholders' equity, a good indication of value creation has grown by more than 14% per year since 2015. If you look at this chart showing EBITDA growth since 2000, you can see the long-lasting equation that has been in place for more than a decade.

The equation of strong revenue and gross profit generation, combined with structural operational execution and disciplined cost control has driven a sustained streak of excellent performance by generating EBITDA growth of nearly 18% annually since the year 2000. It is remarkable to see the starting point of 100 million in the year 2000 and how far we have come to achieve EBITDA of more than 5.9 billion this year.

Over the past 10 years, Alimentation Couche-Tard share have increased in value by more than 145%, outperforming the benchmark index in Canada. It is interesting to note that an investment of $1,000 in Alimentation Couche-Tard shares made 30 years ago, more precisely on June 30, 1995, would be worth more than 800,000 today based on the share price at the closest trading on July 31, not calling the return from dividends paid over the year. Once more, last year, we saw the resilience of our business model, including the strength of the cash flow generated. Our EBITDA increased by 6.1% over the previous years to approximately 5.9 billion.

In the same period, we generated fresh free cash flow of over 1.8 billion. Over the year, we have seen strong growth in free cash flow with a compound annual growth of 5.7% between 2015 and 2025. In fiscal 2025, we were able to maintain a strong return on capital employed, a particularly important metric for assessing our operational efficiency. A disciplined operation -- operating performance, combined with efficient capital allocation strategies enabled us to achieve a 12.2% return on capital employed this past year.

Finally, we look at -- we took advantage of our solid results and of the vision of our promising future to raise our quarterly dividend by more than 14% year-over-year. Notably, we have now increased our dividend every year since the first dividend payment on November 15, 2005. This demonstrates our commitment to rewarding our shareholders for the long term as our profit grows. In addition, on July 21, 2025, we announced the reinitiation of our shares repurchases program. Authorizing the buyback of up to 10% of our public float outstanding, representing 77.1 million shares in total. Based on the share price at July 14, 2025, completion of the program in full would represent a total investment of approximately CAD 4.2 billion or CAD 5.8 billion. At that time, there were slightly over 948 million shares issued and outstanding with a strong balance sheet and confidence in our operating model, we view this program as an efficient way to create a long-term shareholders. We will turn to discussion now and question.

What -- so we have one question about the of 7-Eleven and Couche-Tard. What can you say about that?

So Filipe, thank you for the question. As we said before, acquisitions have always been part of Couche-Tard's DNA, and we will continue to acquire and widen Couche-Tard's footprint via acquisitions. It's something that we are convinced we have know-how and we want to continue consolidating the market in the United States and Europe. The results that we have gained with the acquisition of total shows us that we have a good know-how. We will continue to work on acquisition. We have an interesting pipeline, and we believe that in the next years, you will see Couche-Tard acquiring new files.

So thank you, Filipe. So just to validate if we have other questions, I think not. So thank you to everybody for your questions, for your attention, and we can now close this meeting. So thank you, everybody. Thank you, and see you next year.

[Statements in English on this transcript were Spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]

Good morning. My name is Joelle, and I will be your conference operator today. [Foreign Language]

I will now introduce Mr. Mathieu Brunet, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury at Alimentation Couche-Tard. [Foreign Language]

English will follow.

[Foreign Language]

Good morning. I would like to welcome everyone to this web conference presenting Alimentation Couche-Tard's financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2026. [Operator Instructions] We would like to remind everyone that this webcast presentation will be available on our website for a 90-day period.

Also, please remember that some of the issues discussed during this webcast might be forward-looking statements, which are provided by the corporation with its usual caveats. These caveats or risks and uncertainties are outlined in our financial reporting. Therefore, our future results could differ from the information discussed today.

Our financial results will be presented by Mr. Alex Miller, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Filipe Da Silva, Chief Financial Officer. Alex, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Mathieu. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We are pleased by our improved performance in the first quarter of the new fiscal year. Across our network, we are reporting positive same-store sales, which includes our U.S. market for the first time in several quarters. This progress is driven by our focus on providing compelling value and ease, especially in our food and beverage offers to win our customers who continue to watch their spending. In our fuel business, we had overall good results, especially in Canada and our larger European markets. While in North America, fuel margins remained aligned with previous quarters. Later in this presentation, I will go into more detail on our convenience and mobility results and value-building initiatives.

However, before I do so, I first want to cover the support we provided for our Texas communities in need this quarter as well as our progress growing the network through both acquisitions and new store builds. Let me begin by briefly mentioning the courageous efforts by our Texas store and operations teams during the catastrophic floods in early July. We had only a few stores directly in the path of the storm with several more in the wider vicinity, and we are truly grateful that all Circle K team members are safe and that store damage was limited.

Our store teams operated 24/7 during the recovery period, providing free water and coffee to first responders and search and rescue teams as well as launching a statewide register campaign to raise funds for the American Red Cross. Supporting our communities is fundamental to our special culture, and we are committed to having our stores stay open, providing friendly, comforting service and needed goods during the most difficult of days. Our hearts go out to all those grieving the loss of loved ones.

Turning to brighter news. Early in this quarter, we closed on the acquisition of nearly 270 stores operating under the GetGo brand from supermarket retailer, Giant Eagle. In August, several members of the ACT leadership team and I had the great pleasure of meeting with over 300 GetGo store and operations team members. During that rally, I shared our excitement in having them as part of our growing family. We focused on our shared values, growth opportunities and the power of combining GetGo strengths in food service and loyalty with Couche-Tard's scale, technology and global reach.

Our food and loyalty teams have already spent a considerable amount of time at GetGo locations, deep diving into learnings on how we can become better together.

Moving to Europe and our 4 new business units there. We continue to expand Circle K branding and offers to the region. And by the end of the quarter, we had about 65 sites branded Circle K as well as over 30 car wash sites and EV charging dispensers at nearly 185 sites. We are clearly making a positive impact on our customers and communities as we grow in these new countries.

In organic growth, after record progress last year, we continue to make notable strides in our 500 new store ambition. We opened 10 new stores in Q1 and are on track to open over 100 in North America for this fiscal year. Our new stores include dozens of high-speed diesel and rural locations. And currently, we have nearly 65 stores under construction and 1,000 sites in our overall real estate development pipeline.

Now let me get back to our quarterly results, starting with convenience. Compared to the same quarter last year, same-store merchandise revenues increased by 0.4% in the United States by 3.8% in Europe and other regions and by 4.1% in Canada.

As I mentioned earlier, this positive performance of same-store sales in our U.S. market was a first in many quarters, and we continue to see positive momentum building up.

In Canada, same-store revenues continued to be driven by strong growth of the alcohol category, while Europe's standout convenience performance was further supported by cigarette sales in the Netherlands and Luxembourg as new legislation and conditions continue to be favorable to our industry. We are also pleased with the recovery that we are seeing in our Hong Kong convenience business, although it is still impacted by a decrease in cigarette units from outbound travel and increased sales taxes. However, normalizing for the impact of cigarette sales, our same-store merchandise revenue in Hong Kong would have increased by 2.7% compared to the same quarter last year, highlighting strong execution and our ability to grow market share.

I'll now go into more detail about our convenience offer and the ways in which we are focused on winning our customers by providing compelling value on products and services. Our meal deals in North America continue to deliver consistent quarter-over-quarter gains. At the end of Q1 in North America, we sold 8.6 million food bundles with a weekly average exceeding 750,000 from about 540,000 at the end of FY '25, nearly a 40% increase.

We continue to optimize our meal deal offers based on vendor engagement and customer purchasing behavior, and we are actively reviewing opportunities to expand the offering to drive incremental growth. The U.S. roller grill offer was our top performer alongside bakery and breakfast sandwiches. While smaller in scope, the initiative is very popular in Canada, where meal deal sales doubled in Q1 versus the prior quarter.

In our win in food strategy, we have been laser-focused on execution and SKU rationalization. We have significantly reduced the number of items freshly prepared in our stores to enhance operational excellence and ease while optimizing our assortment. And as we focus on execution, value and simplicity, we are also dialing up the fun, flavor and innovation with an exciting new collaboration announced just this morning. We are partnering with Emmy award-winning chef and food network personality, Guy Fieri, best known to many from his popular Diner, Drive-In and Dives TV show to launch 11 flavor town inspired menu offerings. The initial rollout this week in hundreds of our locations in 10 states across the Northern U.S. includes unique exclusive items such as Mac & Cheeseburger, Sweet Heat fried chicken and waffle sandwich and candy chaos cookie.

In our goal of owning thirst in the U.S., total packaged beverages were up this quarter with energy drinks continuing to lead category strength and profitability. Our differentiation here comes from exclusive launches and integrated campaigns that connect energy to meal deal bundles with over 20% of all sold breakfast bundles, including an energy drink.

Cold and frozen dispensed beverages in the U.S. continued their growth trajectory, benefiting from traffic driving promotional campaigns, popular flavor options and improved operational execution. In the adult beverage category, Canada continued to have a strong performance as our market-leading efforts are clearly resonating with our customers.

Following changes last year in legislation in Ontario our beer sales again experienced notable growth. In our Central Canada business unit, we more than doubled the sales in the wine category compared to last year. Liquor performance was equally robust. The impressive same-store sales growth in alcohol in Canada more than offset the decline in tobacco in the region, which continues to be impacted by illicit trade and removal of popular products in the other nicotine products category.

In the U.S., overall nicotine sales grew slightly versus last year and despite changes in the regulatory landscape, we also had modest growth in other nicotine product sales versus last year, led by modern oral growth innovation.

Our cigarette pricing optimization plan launched in June is showing promising results. Looking ahead, we are improving space productivity, deploying industry-leading promotions and expanding loyalty integration with age verified enrollment up quarter-over-quarter.

In Europe, we see signs of recovery in the nicotine category, driven by growth in other nicotine products, helping offset decline in combustibles, legislation changes in cigarettes in the Netherlands and favorable competition in Luxembourg have resulted in positive nicotine performance as consumers increasingly shift their spending toward our channel.

Turning to our loyalty membership programs. In the U.S., Inner circle enrollments continue to grow, and we're at nearly 11.5 million members at the end of the quarter. We expect to see significant growth in sign-ups as we expand the program this month to Texas, our largest U.S. market, leaning into recent advancements in personalization as well as gamification to drive urgency and excitement with our members. We have seen sustained growth in retention and repeat visits among our members. We also completed the implementation of a new customer data platform that allows us to engage with our customers at our physical sites in real time while they are filling up at the pump or shopping in our stores.

Early signs are positive, and we fully expect our digital penetration to grow, driving traffic to both our forecourt and inside our stores. With the extra loyalty program in Europe, we are on schedule to start rolling out the 2.0 loyalty concept this fall to Poland and quickly moved to the other European BUs in the following months. The new concept is designed to incentivize and reward traffic across all products and services at our locations. In our Sweden BU, which has had the new loyalty program for several months, we are seeing a lift in both traffic and increased value as our targeted campaigns and promotional offers have improved conversion and engagement. We are also working to expand our existing communication and personalization capabilities to our 4 new European business units.

Moving to our fuel business. Same-store road transportation fuel volumes decreased by 0.9% in the United States and by 1.3% in Europe and other regions, while it increased by 2.2% in Canada. Overall, given market conditions, we see these as good results especially in Canada and our larger European markets as well as in the complex U.S. environment as we continue to work on building value from our fuel supply chain and serving our customers through lower cost sourcing options.

Fuel margins in North America also remained aligned with previous quarters. We also continued our efforts to provide compelling value to our customers with our very popular fuel days, including 2 in August, coinciding with the beginning of school and the end of summer travel, which were held at over 4,700 participating U.S. locations. At the first one, we offered $0.40 off per gallon to Inner Circle members only including visitors who signed up instantly to access this exclusive event as a further way to reward our loyal customers.

Despite challenging market conditions and volume volatility the European B2B business demonstrated resilience. While overall card volumes slightly underperformed versus prior year, this was effectively offset by strong margin performance. The first quarter of our fiscal year is also materially impacted by summer seasonality that hits fuel B2B sales, and we expect the full year to recover to an overall even mix. Growing nonfuel income remains a strategic priority as B2B transit charging volumes grew steadily, offsetting a significant share of accelerated fuel shrinkage.

Bulk fuel volumes remained robust despite excise duty increase in Lithuania and intense price competition in Ireland and Norway. In the U.S., our B2B fuel share is growing as customers continue to see great value in our ability to offer consistency across our company-owned network to serve their business and provide a great experience for their drivers.

Additionally, we expanded our B2B customers active in Inner Circle, allowing them to receive personal rewards for commercial fueling. In our B2B Truck segment, we now have over 510 truck accessible sites, including 10 get-go sites. We are growing accessibility in parallel with our commercial diesel growth strategy, implementation of new strategic partners and optimization of existing partnerships.

Our European EV charging network now comprises nearly 3,660 charge points, up over 35% year-to-year. Out of these, over 2,970 are Circle K branded charge points and about 150 of those are chargers for trucks in Scandinavia. In Q1, we had more than 1 million charging transactions on Circle K branded transit chargers at our stations in Europe, which is a 50% increase from the same period last year. This increase is driven both by network expansion and improved utilization of our chargers.

With that, let me turn it over to Filipe to dive deeper into our financial performance this quarter.

Thank you, Alex, and good morning, everyone. We are encouraged by our first quarter results, which were partly driven by an enhanced gross profit margin resulting from better food program execution and reduced spoilage. Combined with our disciplined cost control and a sharp focus on efficiency, keeping expense growth below the rate of inflation, we are optimistic about our operational priorities.

Building on Alex remarks, we are pleased to report that we brought the negative trend in U.S. same-store sales with results accelerating as the quarter progressed. Food continued to post solid growth and shrink reached its lowest level in 8 quarters.

Canada once again delivered strong mid-single-digit results. Europe positive results, while Asia continued to improve with positive performance in same-store sales excluding the impact of declining cigarette volumes and notable gains across several categories.

Turning to our total energy assets. Performance continued to strengthen, with synergy delivery progressing ahead of plan. Same-store merchandise revenue grew at a remarkable high single digit, approximately 30% higher than Q4 on a sequential basis. Fuel margins expanded by over 33% year-over-year. These results highlight the strength of our execution and our continued success in integrating complex acquisitions.

I will now go over some key figures for the quarter. For more details, please refer to our MD&A available on our website. For the first quarter of fiscal 2026 net earnings attributable to shareholders of the corporation stood at $783 million or $0.82 per share on a diluted basis. Excluding certain items described in more detail in our MD&A, adjusted net earnings attributable to shareholders of the corporation where approximately $757 million or $0.78 per share on an adjusted diluted basis, representing a decrease of 6% compared to the corresponding quarter of last year. The adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 increased by approximately $25 million or 1.6% compared with the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2025, mainly due to the organic growth in our covenants activities and to the contribution from acquisitions, which amounted to approximately $19 million, partly offset by the gains on disposal of valuable assets in the prior year.

Now let's review in detail each of our business segments on an FX-adjusted basis. During the first quarter, merchandise and services revenues increased by approximately $158 million or 3.5%, primarily attributable to organic growth, the contribution from acquisitions, which amounted to approximately $59 million and the net impact from new store openings within our network. Merchandise and service gross profit increased by approximately $70 million or 4.4%. This is primarily attributable to organic growth in all regions and to the contribution from acquisitions, which amounted to approximately $90 million.

Our merchandise and service gross margin in the United States increased by 0.9% to 34.6%, driven by strong food execution efforts from our food captains at the store level, higher support from vendors on promotional offers and by the favorable shift in product mix. On the food side, margin improvement also reflects a significant reduction in shrink of more than 500 basis points as well as our 2025 rationalization initiatives ensuring that our promotions and products are relevant to our customers.

Our merchandise and selling gross margin decreased by 0.9% to 38.9% in Europe and other regions and by 0.9% to 33.9% in Canada, both impacted by changes in product mix with the implementation of new legislation in our various locations.

Moving on to the fuel side of our business. Our road transportation fuel gross margin was $0.44 per gallon in the United States, a decrease of $4.13 mainly due to a competitive pressure. Especially in our Southern markets. The impacts alone of Europe and other regions -- sorry, in Europe and other regions, margin averaged USD 0.1141 per liter an increase of $0.0273 due to improved fuel market conditions in certain of our regions. And in Canada, margin averaged CAD 0.1421 per liter, an increase of $0.011.

Fuel margin remained healthy throughout our network due to the continued work on the optimization of our supply chain and strong execution in our stores and leveraging our global scale.

Turning to SG&A. Normalized expenses for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 rose by 2.4% year-over-year, reflecting disciplined cost management on core operating expenses across all regions. Our teams continue to offset inflationary pressures with store level productivity improvement, allowing us to remain ahead of weighted inflation. A large part of this outcome reflects the ongoing success of our Fit to Serve program which is enabling us to run operations more efficiently while creating the capacity to fund a strategic investment that are driving our next phase of growth.

Within Fit to Serve to serve, labor productivity continues to improve. U.S. associated overtime wages remain 3%, marking 20 consecutive months and the ninth straight more below 0.5%. In first quarter, overtime stood at 2.3% versus 3% last year. These results are clear evidence that our investment in handheld devices, optimized labor scheduling and process automation are translating into greater efficiency and improved customer-facing hours.

We are also capturing further savings and making good progress through centralization of procurement for goods not for resale, making better use of our global purchasing scale. We also delivered solid progress on shrink and spoilage with total shrink improving by an impressive 13.3% compared to last year. These gains stem from new operating methods stronger processes and controls and more effective use of data analytics.

Shrink and spoilage improvements are becoming an important contributor to offsetting inflationary pressures and supporting margins. Turning to strategic investment, we are making deliberate investments in technology and operational tools to position the company for long-term growth. As Alex mentioned earlier, in Q1, we made significant progress on the North American rollout of Relex.

The pilot phase will begin in September across 4 business units with broader deployments slated for the first half of calendar 2026. We expect Relex to materially improve in-stock conditions, reduce inventory days on hand and lower spoilage while also bolstering collaboration with our vendor partners. Beyond Relex, we continue to build on the digital foundation we laid over the past year, our labor scheduler and upgraded handheld devices are now embedded in more stores, further streamlining, day-to-day execution and allowing teams to elevate customer experience. Early results from our AI task management pilot remain promising, helping store managers translate data into clear priorities with greater speed.

As we move forward, disciplined cost management remains our top priority. With Fit to Serve driving consistent efficiency shrink and spoilage improvement gaining traction and targeted technology investment advancing on schedule, we remain committed on delivering OpEx growth below weighted inflation as we move through fiscal 2026.

Turning over to depreciation and amortization. Expenses increased by $79 million or 17.9% year-over-year reflecting investments related to recent acquisitions, including the GetGo assets, which amounted to approximately $6 million, along with equipment upgrades, store remodel programs, new store openings, technology enhancement and EV charger deployments. This initiative represents significant strategic investment made in recent quarters.

From a tax perspective, the income tax rate for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 was 23.2% compared with 23.1% for the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2025.

The increase is mainly stemming from higher income tax rate due to the gain on regulatory divestiture related to business acquisitions, partly offset by the impact of the different mix in our earnings across a very much duration in which we operate. As of July 20, 2025, we recorded a return on equity at 17.5%, and our return on capital employed stood at 11.8%. During the quarter, our average ratio increased to 2.18.

We also had strong balance sheet liquidity with $2.2 billion in cash and an additional $2 billion available through our revolving unsecured operating credit facility. During the quarter, we repaid our Canadian dollar-denominated senior unsecured notes for CAD 700 million. Subsequent to the end of the first quarter, we repurchased 7.9 million common shares for an amount of $405.4 million following the July 21 announcement, authorizing our share buyback program. While the program now -- with the program now in full motion, we view repurchases as an effective way to create sustainable long-term shareholder value while optimizing our balance sheet.

Turning to the dividend. The Board of Directors declared yesterday a quarterly dividend of CAD 0.195 per share for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 to shareholders on record as at September 11, 2025 and approved its payment effective September 25, 2025.

To wrap up, the first quarter of fiscal 2026 highlights the strength of our business model and the discipline of our teams. We entered this year with solid momentum demonstrating our ability to manage costs effectively while investing the tools and capabilities that support the next phase of growth. We are very encouraged by the top line momentum we've seen across the business. Our initiatives in food, beverages, fuel and enhanced loyalty program are delivering positive results, reinforcing the benefits of our customer-focused strategy.

The diversity of our global network and the rigor of operating model continue to provide resilience in an evolving environment. Looking ahead, we remain focused on maintaining firm control of our expenses, deploying capital with purpose and prioritizing investment and enhance our competitive position and create long-term value. This balanced approach positions us to strengthen the fundamentals of our business and delivering consistent results in fiscal 2026.

I thank you all for your attention. I will turn the call over again to our President and CEO, Alex Miller.

Thank you, Filipe. After many challenging quarters in retail, we are pleased to see progress in our convenience business as our customers respond to our value-creating initiatives. We are focused on getting back to easy at our location. This includes having our forecourts and inside store operations ready for our customers, simplifying execution of our food program and increasing personalization and savings in our loyalty programs. While challenging geopolitical conditions persist across our network, we are confident that our global scale, diversified business and commitment to winning our customers will move us forward in our vision to become the preferred destination for convenience and mobility.

On that note, let's turn it over to the operator to answer analyst questions.

[Operator Instructions]

Your first question comes from Chris Li with Desjardins.

I wanted to ask, Alex, in the U.S. in the quarter, did you see an improvement even though U.S. merchandise in store sales through the quarter. If so, what drove the improvement? And did the momentum continuing? Is it continuing into Q2?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Chris. We did period 3 or the final month of the quarter was the strongest top line or a month or period we have had in well over 2 years and that has continued into Q2 through P4 and we're now into P5. We've had 10 straight weeks of positive same-store sales in the United States and Canada.

I think what's driving that is our kind of laser focus on our core initiatives, specifically around food. We grew foodservice 4.5% in the quarter, we grew food gross margin by 500 basis points -- just -- I talked in our -- in my comments about our food bundles and the continued trajectory of that and our ability to show and highlight value for our customers that they're really responding to.

Our digital platforms are continuing to scale with a great consumer response. We grew enrollment in Inner Circle in the U.S., 11% quarter-on-quarter. We continue to see increased visits and heightened baskets from these customers. Our customers within Inner Circle, we grew merch sales by 4%, and we grew fuel gallons by 3% in the quarter. So for us, the underlying environment, we haven't seen change much. We continue to see lower income, lower middle income consumers stretched, strained, really controlling their spending. That's really across all of our geographies. we fundamentally believe we're widening the gap to our competition and taking share. We took -- we grew cigarette sales 3% against the industry in sales in the quarter, as an example.

Perfect. Maybe just a quick follow-up on that. Just in terms of the competitive environment, we're seeing some increased competition from some of the large QSR peers. How is that sort of impacting your business right now? And I think you also made some reference about increased fuel competition in the South, if you can sort of elaborate on what driving that? That would be helpful.

Thanks, Chris. I think as we stated, we're pleased with our fuel performance in the quarter. We think it was solid. We beat OPUS in the U.S. by $0.045. That fits pretty well into the range of our outperformance against the industry, and we continue to invest in what we believe is our world-class supply and logistics piece. I think if you look for us, we're -- our portfolio is a little challenged right now and that we have heavy presence in southern border states, specifically Florida, Texas and Arizona. We have over 2,000 sites in those 3 states. Fuel transactions are down kind of mid- to high single digits in those 3 states. So when you consider our performance against that. Again, I think it highlights how we're taking share, and that's continued into P3 and P4. So we feel good.

We feel like we're widening the gap. We believe our investments in digital are working, are gaining traffic, gaining sales, pushing fuel volume and fundamentally on fuel margin in the U.S. costs continue to increase. Our balance sheet and our profit and loss statement is as strong as anyone's. And those cost increases and that need for fuel margin exists and we're going to price to the customer and our value proposition, that never changes, but we believe fuel margin will be there.

And on the first part of your question, Chris, on the QSR competition and I think the result that we are showing on Q1 and as mentioned by Alex, the momentum that we see also in Q2. We believe that our food program is really resonating to our customers when you see the evolution of the value meals and the quantity of that we have been able to sell. And you have seen also the GP profile. So we are able to do that, executing better, delivering higher food gross profit. So yes, very confident that we are in the right direction and that we're winning in our industry, actually.

Your next question comes from Irene Nattel with RBC Capital Markets.

Just continuing with questions around the inside store performance. Certainly great to see the value meal progression. Can you talk about some of the other initiatives that you have in place, however, to provide value to consumers. With aside for the meal bundles, whether it's private label or other types of vendor partnerships.

Yes. Thanks, Irene. I think I don't want to dismiss fuel bundles and the resonance that's happening with our customers and the breadth of our beverage offers that we are able to offer customers and our vendor partners that are leaning into those offers, specifically related to energy, which is the fastest-growing category in our stores today. I think to your question, private label remains a big focus for us. We're in a reset mode kind of similar to what we did in food where we kind of reset kind of rationalize SKUs and then that enabled us to grow I would say we're in that stage in private label. And we will continue to focus on private label and grow private label I think we also -- as you look at cigarettes and nicotine and the promotions that we are able to run with our vendors, we are able to offer meaningful value across those things. Just here in September, we have a promotion with white nicotine where if you buy a tobacco product from us with a couple of exceptions, you can get a free can of ZYN, which is a white nicotine product in the U.S. that is a compelling offer. So through those things, Irene, we are increasingly finding ways to promote value and leverage our scale and work with our vendor partners. And I think our digital platforms, our partners are responding to. It's how they want to talk to our joint consumers, and they are leaning in with us around promotions really across our box to target specific customers and specific segments with value offers.

That's really helpful. It would also seem that if we take a step back and look at the objectives of your CPG partners, now would be a very good time to continue to partner because they're really focused on driving volume as well. So as we look ahead through the year, presumably you have a series of these types of partnerships lined up to continue to support from a margin perspective?

Yes. I think -- Thanks, Irene, again. Absolutely, our relationships and our partnerships with our vendors are extremely strong. I think we're aligned in what we're looking to achieve. And they're looking to grow units and grow sales as well. I think I've talked in previous quarters about our use of data, our ability to gather data. I just referenced our new customer data platform. That data is extraordinarily valuable to us and it allows us to direct promotions at specific customers and promotions that resonate with consumers. That's part of the 90 basis point improvement you see in our U.S. margin merch performance.

So yes, our vendors are leaning in with us. They love our digital platforms. They love our scale. They love our operational focus and our ability to execute. When we say we're going to do something, we do it. And we are leaning in with them both really across all of our geographies. So -- and tying that into our food focus and our food bundles really resonates specifically with our vendor partners, our beverage vendor partners.

Your next question comes from Michael Van Aelst with TD Cowen.

Can you just start off, please by elaborating a little bit about the pressures you're seeing in the southern border states and what the key drivers of those demand pressures are?

I'm not going to hypothesize on what's driving that. We're just seeing reduced traffic specifically on our -- in our southern border states. We're seeing -- it's greater in fuel than it is in merch, but we're seeing reduced traffic in fuel and in merch, and our industry ride data suggest us that we are not alone in that reduced traffic. But for us, it's all about taking share. It's about winning the customer, that focus never changes for us.

So -- and we believe this to be temporary. We're very pleased with our large positions in those 3 states. And those are -- have obviously been large growth states over the previous years. We believe that trend will ultimately continue. And so we're just focused on our customers, our execution and widening the gap.

All right. And so turning to the Canadian same-store sales growth. You talked about it being lifted by the alcohol sales in Ontario, but I guess now that we're coming up on lapping the new regulations, I'm wondering if you're expecting to see the momentum continue, are you seeing the basket steadily increase as people add more items when they come in for that alcohol and any other observations you might see to give us a feeling that or give us some kind of comfort that the Canadian same-store sales can continue to grow?

Yes. We do lap that actually this month of the launch of alcohol in Central Canada in Ontario. We also lapped the removal of Zonnic or white nicotine from our stores in Canada across Canada, which has been a really fairly significant headwind. I think I commented a few quarters ago of just the execution of our Central Canadian business and how we were so much on our front foot in executing once alcohol became available. We were first out of the gate. We captured significant share and we continue to capture share. You heard me reference that we grew wine by greater than 100% in liquor by a similar amount. So we've continued to grow those categories and to increase the basket related to those categories. I think our teams in Central Canada are still -- they're still looking at data, still understanding adjacencies and what mix to put in with these alcohol sales, but we're continuing to drive basket. And we remain very positive on continued growth, traffic growth and sales within our new alcohol categories in Ontario.

Your next question comes from Vishal Shreedhar with National Bank.

I was just hoping to get your perspective on the acquisition backdrop and how you see that evolving in terms of prices? And also, types of files that you're interested in, be it adjacent to retail opportunities such as travel retailer, QSR, Dollar store, et cetera.

Thanks for the question. Yes, as we mentioned in the previous call with this challenging environment, very definitely actors players that are struggling. And we have seen this pipeline quite rich, actually, to be honest, across the geography we are. And as we mentioned, we'll continue to be one of the players that will be consolidating this market.

Priority for us is to continue to consolidate, of course, in North America. That's our priority #1. We are very pleased also at what we see in Europe and our ability to integrate, and we are very pleased by TotalEnergies. And we believe that here, we can continue to expand in Europe if the right opportunity. So that would -- I would say that the two main priorities for us. And we know that there with our financial playbook, we can have very strong returns. So that's definitely where we focus our priorities and to your point on the adjacent retail.

I think for us today, the priority is it's covenant. It's where we are with that. We have been acquiring a lot there. And we see that there's opportunity this again, this challenging environment, it's an opportunity actually for us. We have a strong balance sheet. We see much better momentum for us. So we're very encouraged by that. And I think that's, yes, any opportunity that will come, we will be there.

Okay. Sorry. So just to reiterate, the management is focused on adjacent retail opportunities in addition to the traditional C-store opportunities. That's correct characterization?

Yes. But I think our first priority, it's convenience. Let's be clear. I just said, what we have said is that, that's something that we could think about. But today, given the momentum, again, the fact that it's a very changing environment. We believe that there is a good opportunity to go actually to consolidate market share and consolidate particularly in the North American market. So that's our primary focus.

Okay. And with respect to SG&A trends on the organic basis, do you expect that rate of SG&A growth to maintain? I'm talking about your adjusted organic SG&A growth.

Yes. Definitely, we -- and here, we are very pleased by the teams are doing an amazing job here because as we mentioned a few times now, we are investing on the technology. We know that we need to deliver a much better digital experience to our customers, a more digital experience to our associated stores, and employees in stores. And so all the investment, we are able to more than offset it through the Fit to Serve program with the discipline that Couche-Tard has built this successful story over the last 4 decades. And we are confident that we'll be able to continue to deliver that on looking forward and for this year.

A lot of initiatives going on at store level, at a global functional level, just to making sure that we can continue to deliver this performance in OpEx.

Your next question comes from Mark Petrie with CIBC.

Alex, you've highlighted a few different pressures that the industry is under. And I guess to summarize briefly, maybe it's fair to say that cost inflation continues to exceed sales growth overall, at least for the industry. In the past, you've highlighted dynamics on industry fuel margins where they're supported by challenged profits and the lowest quartile operators.

At the same time, OPUS margins have been in the 30s, I guess, the last 3 quarters or so. So I'm just curious to hear your latest thinking on these dynamics. Do you think those dynamics are holding as strong as they have historically? And how do you think the profitability in the lowest quartile operators has changed over the last year?

Yes. I think Obviously, I think we've seen other retailers kind of suggest some increased competition as well as we saw in some geographies this period. Absolutely believe that, that will be transitory. Again, the cost and the investment levels, the regulatory cost, those are real. Those are not changing. And again, our balance sheet and our financial strength, we believe, positions us very well, and we believe that, that fuel margin needs to be there. I think this environment or this temporary, certainly, these are not bad fuel margins, but let's call it a plateauing of fuel margins for a couple of 3 quarters without questions, put these single operators under greater pressure.

As you look at industry data, and we believe there's a widening of the gap of the top performers and the bottom performers. We are pleased with our widening of the gap against these industry metrics that we stay very focused on day on day, week on week. So we continue to believe that the pressure on these individual operators and these smaller retailers is intensified. And I think as Filipe referenced, we believe there is a place for us to continue to consolidate these markets. We are -- we remain very focused on North America and are increasingly confident in our capabilities in Europe and very pleased with our Total acquisition and the progress of those 4 BUs that are well ahead of our investment model. So we believe that will ultimately give us opportunity and that fuel margin will be there.

Okay. I appreciate that comment. Just a follow-up. I know you've touched on it a couple of times, but I just want to be clear make sure I understand. With regards to the European fuel margins, can you just walk through the dynamics that led to the strong result this quarter? And then how should we think about that number sort of going forward more like Q1 or more like sort of previous quarters?

I think the day I can predict fuel margins is a day, I'll probably never find to be highly candid with you. I think I'll just focus on the strength of our European business. If you look not just at this quarter, if you look at many quarters in a row, we just continue to perform. We are taking market share in merch. We are growing food. We are growing our loyalty platforms. We referenced -- I referenced in my comments that we had 1 million charging transactions this quarter and that it grew 50%. What I didn't reference is that consumers rate are out really top of the line. We have passed Tesla in Sweden as an example.

Our utilization of chargers per charger is well ahead of the industry standard, those charge customers are -- they come into our stores at a rate of 1/3x greater than our traditional food customers. The basket is higher. They buy more car washes from us. Our strength in our world-class EV team is driving merch traffic in and it's also driving our liquid fuel demand. We have positive same-store volume liquid fuel in 2 of the 3 of our Scandinavian countries fiscal year-to-date. That's a pretty amazing number. So we are taking share. We are across merch and across fuel. We are delivering EBITDA growth, and while we're realizing these fuel margins, we are handily outperforming the industry in fuel volume. I think that bodes well for us as we go forward in Europe. And I really just could not be more complementary of our teams and the strength of our teams over in Europe.

Just -- sorry, just to complement, Alex, on your question on the CPL and I think something that you should expect at least for the next couple of following quarters is the renegotiation that we did in Germany on our fuel contract. And that's something that is helping us and is driving a better margin there. And one thing also that it's definitely making a difference is our trading activity, our supply chain integrity supply chain in Europe is making a difference there as well. So of course, I agree with Alex. That's definitely a challenge to forecast fuel margin. But yes, you should see some good momentum in Europe for the next coming at least 2, 3 quarters.

You predicted my follow-up question, Filipe well done, and thanks to both of you for all your comment.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from John Zamparo with Scotiabank.

I'd like to better understand the dynamics around the meal deals, both on traffic and same-store sales and I guess, margins as well. You're posting, I think you'd said around a 40% increase in meal deals in the U.S., you've made progress on the comp. It sounds like you're aspiring for even higher.

So is it that customers are trading off from other items? Or is the price investment meaningful enough that it offsets the additional volume? I just would like to better understand this. And is this ultimately going to be the biggest driver for the U.S. comp moving forward?

Yes. I think for food for us, we're pleased with our progress. We believe we have an exceptionally long runway. Our food conversion in the United States is about 11% now. Our best business units in the U.S. are 20% or greater than 20%. We crossed over 24% food conversion in Europe this quarter. That's the highest it's ever been, consumers are looking for value, full stop. That's just apparent as you read retail results and listen to consumers and watch their behavior with the meal bundles, we have found that needs to really show value in our channel. We are not compromising margin. As I referenced, our vendor partners are engaged. They are supporting us they are coming with offers with significant support in bundling their products with our food products and we will continue to grow, expand those offers. And we will fundamentally believe it will be margin accretive.

Again, we grew meal bundles by 40% in the quarter, and we improved food margin by almost 500 basis points in the quarter. So I think that shows or kind of underpins what I'm saying that as we grow food bundles, we can still support and grow food margin.

Your next question comes from Martin Landry with Stifel.

You announced a new collaboration with Guy Fieri this morning. I would like to know what the success looks like for that collaboration? Is that collaboration temporary? And then why did you choose those 10 states or those states locations where you have a lower food penetration? Just a little bit of color as to that new collaboration would be helpful.

Yes. Thanks for the question. I think we are just super excited to be able to partner with Guy Fieri and access his energy and his social media presence and his resonance with consumers. And we feel like we're ready. We paused a little bit. I think as I've talked to you, we needed to reset, we needed to come back. We needed to get our operational execution to a level that we felt like, hey, when we launched this differentiating program, we're ready. We feel we've reached that time. It is a unique relationship. It is an exclusive relationship. It is not a short-term relationship. And we fully plan to launch it across our U.S. portfolio. We are starting in those 10 states because that is our Northern Tier business unit.

Our Northern Tier business unit is historically from holiday that have over a 20-year food history. They have over 20% food conversion or food penetration. They have a deeply entrenched culture in food -- and I can tell you, Jony and her team are pumped to roll this partnership out with Guy Fieri and our 11 flavor town products. So we're excited. We think we're ready to gain additional awareness of our food programs and what we can bring. We believe this will do this and give us some additional energy and recognition in the food space.

Your next question comes from Luke Hannan with Canaccord.

Alex, I wanted to follow up on a comment you had earlier on the cigarette pricing optimization that you're doing. You mentioned it launched in June and thus far is showing promising results. Can you just share, I mean, what exactly does that program entail? And how widespread is it thus far? And what exactly do you mean by promising results?

Yes. I think I know I'm like a broken record talking with you guys about data and the use of data and bringing in data but this is all about utilizing our data to understand where our customers are and how they're responding to our price points and our offers against our competition and comparing market-by-market, state-by-state against our competitors, against our market share data. And we are making adjustments to where we price premium against value against the different tiers within that, and we are using our data to drive that.

I referenced in my previous comments that we outperformed the industry and sales in the United States by 3% in the quarter. That's good. We believe we can be better than that. It is across our business units in North America. And candidly, we have 4 business units that we still see opportunity in what -- in how we're positioning those things. And I can tell you our operators and our merch teams are actively pursuing those opportunities in that positioning as we speak.

So excited. Again, our scale and our ability to capture data and use that data. We are seeing it in our results. We are seeing it in our differentiation, and we're excited, and we believe that will grow the gap that we perform against our competitors.

Your next question comes from Corey Tarlowe with Jefferies.

Follow-up for Filipe. So just on the broader question, Alex, why not in today's environment, lean in more into value when it seems to be working very well and you're clearly gaining market share. So -- how do you think about the ability to -- and the balance between leaning in more into value and protecting margin.

I think you will see us lean into value everywhere we see the opportunity to do it. We believe we fundamentally found something in food that enables us to show real value that's resonating with consumers. And I want to be clear, we're doing that not just in North America. We're doing it in Europe as well. I was in Norway last week, Filipe and I both were. I saw us leaning into food value and winning, growing transactions. I talked earlier with Irene about private label.

We will continue to push on private label, grow those teams, grow that offering. So I think your challenge is a great one to us as an organization. I can tell you, we will lean into value everywhere we see the opportunity to do that in a compelling way that resonates with the customer.

Okay. Great. And then, Filipe, just on cost management and efficiency. What are some of the cost control measures or OpEx efficiencies that you see helping to benefit the business throughout the remainder of this fiscal year? And what might be the potential P&L impact?

Thanks for the question, Corey. So I would say, first, it's leveraging our scale on the GNFR procurement. We're just early stage centralizing the purchase of store supplies or negotiating of consulting fees, payment, everything CapEx also looking at differently outsourcing and having team that are just being a bit more strategic on where we buy our stuff. So there is a massive opportunity for us, and we are just at the beginning of the journey.

The second, I would say, focus for us is everything related to the back office. So you know that we have already built quite a strong shared service center, but we continue there, and we see some more opportunities leveraging the partnership that we have built with some of the -- I would say, specialists on this area, we believe that we can. We can continue to optimize that to centralize to offshore activities, that's something also that we see. And the third component is, of course, labor in stores and continue to optimize what we can do in stores there.

So helping our employees in stores to be much more efficient to focus on the customer-facing activities and trying to remove all the administrative stuff. So there is still a lot to do there. So very, very confident about the pipeline. And as we mentioned many times, we have this $800 million objective over 5 years, really believe that we'll exceed this target. We are encouraged by what the teams are accomplishing and the pipeline that we see.

Your next question comes from Etienne Ricard with BMO Capital Markets. I'm sorry. Your next question comes from Mark Carden with UBS.

So you guys mentioned that you're in a bit of a reset phase in private label. Could you provide some additional color on any particular categories that focus on this front? Have you seen any short-term headwinds to penetration? And then just when are you thinking about with respect to the time line to when you could see this becoming a more consistent contributor to your margin.

Yes, thanks for the question. I've talked with you in previous quarters about supply chain and supply chain matters for private label. So we'll open our 3 new warehouses next 6 months, then we'll go to Phase 2. Supply chain, our investments in supply chain will further underpin and enable our private label piece. I think we need to reset on what SKUs, placement of those SKUs, procurement of those SKUs, and we've done that now.

So within our plans, it was that resetting of those areas. And specifically, this is in the United States. I think we grew private label what, 8%, 9% in Europe this quarter. Canada continues to look good and we're growing private label. So when I talk about the reset, I'm really talking about the United States. I think we don't -- we will invest in private label and identify private label SKUs in any category that we see across our portfolio where we can provide a compelling consumers and the consumers respond to that, and we can realize a cost of goods basis that makes sense for us. At the end of the day, private label will be margin accretive. It will not be detrimental to our margins. We have never experienced that.

So I think the combination of investment in our supply chain, the resetting of our private label portfolio. And I think over the next, let's call it, 24 months, you will begin to see that penetration heighten. And it is an area we are talking about investing further in really with human resource across the group.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to management for closing remarks.

Thank you, Alex, and Filipe. That covers all the questions for today's call. Thank you all for joining. We wish you a great day and look forward to discussing our second quarter 2026 results in November. [Foreign Language]

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.

Good morning. My name is Joelle, and I will be your conference operator today. [Foreign Language] I will now introduce Mr. Mathieu Brunet, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury at Alimentation Couche-Tard. [Foreign Language]

English will follow. [Foreign Language] Good morning. I would like to welcome everyone to this web conference presenting Alimentation Couche-Tard's Financial Results for the Fourth Quarter of Fiscal Year 2025. [Operator Instructions]

We would like to remind everyone that this webcast presentation will be available on our website for a 90-day period. Also, please remember that some of the issues discussed during this webcast might be forward-looking statements, which are provided by the corporation with its usual caveats. These caveats or risks and uncertainties are outlined in our financial reporting. Therefore, our future results could differ from the information discussed today.

Our financial results will be presented by Mr. Alex Miller, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Filipe Da Silva, Chief Financial Officer. Alex, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Mathieu. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our presentation of our fourth quarter results. As we conclude this milestone year, the 45th year since we opened our first store, we are proud of the resilience of our business and the award-winning engagement of our team members. During the fourth quarter, in the face of difficult economic and geopolitical conditions, we held the line in same-store sales in the United States and had strong positive results in Canada and Europe. Our initiatives to provide compelling value to our customers with exclusive food and beverage offers are performing well across the network.

Compared to the same period last year, in our fuel business, we had positive volumes in Canada. And in the United States, we maintained market share and margins aligned with recent quarters. As we move into the new fiscal year, we remain confident in the strength of our global scale, long-term strategy and customer-centric teams. Later in this presentation, I will go into more detail on our convenience and mobility results and value-building initiatives. However, before I do so, I first want to address our global efforts to grow the network through M&A as well as our notable progress in organic growth.

Let me begin by briefly mentioning our ongoing commitment to acquire Seven & i Holdings. At the end of April, we announced that we had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Seven & i to progress transaction discussions, facilitate due diligence and collaborate on plans to engage with regulators. Over the last several weeks, we have begun those discussions and look forward to continuing to work with the special committee of Seven & i. We have also outlined what we believe is a clear path to U.S. regulatory approval, which you can find on our dedicated website, growingseven.com.

As we mentioned last quarter, and it is worth repeating that while there has been extensive media coverage of our interest in Seven & i, internally, a very small team is involved in these efforts as the vast majority of the business is laser-focused on our global operations. Also, as we discussed, we continue to consider other M&A opportunities as the strength of our globally diversified business allows us to pursue different tracks simultaneously as we have done so throughout our growth journey.

Moving to Europe. I recently returned from a terrific Pride tour to our new mid-European business units, visiting stores and team members and I was able to see firsthand the progress we have made in the region as we begin our second year since completing the acquisition. From the visit, it was abundantly clear that team members have embraced our culture, values and customer-focused approach to retail operations. We now have nearly 50 stores rebranded to Circle K and continue to see strong progress with store rebranding, both on the physical store layout as well as with product assortment and EV charging dispensers.

Synergies from the transaction continue to be on track with expectations, which Filipe will cover in more detail in his presentation.

While discussing M&A, let me briefly mention the ongoing progress we are making with GetGo, which we expect to close in the coming days. As we have always done with all our acquisitions, we have identified local management to lead the business as they know best how to serve local customers. We also continue to be excited about our learnings from GetGo's extremely popular food and loyalty programs and dedicated team members. In organic growth, we have made record progress with our 500 new store ambition. We have opened nearly 45 stores this quarter and over 110 stores in North America during this fiscal year. Our new stores include dozens of high-speed diesel and rural locations and are designed to win our customers by making it easy to enjoy our offers, both inside the store and on the forecourt.

As we start the new quarter, we have more than 40 stores currently under construction and 1,000 sites in our overall real estate development pipeline.

Now let me get back to our quarterly results, starting with convenience. Compared to the same quarter last year, same-store merchandise revenues decreased by 0.4% in the United States while they increased by 3.4% in Europe and other regions and by 3.5% here in Canada. The U.S. same-store performance continued to be impacted by challenging economic and inflationary conditions as consumers carefully watch their spending.

In Canada, same-store revenues were boosted by strong growth of the alcohol category. Europe's standout convenience performance was further supported by cigarette sales in the Netherlands as new legislation continues to be favorable to our industry.

I'll now go into more detail about our convenience offer and the ways in which we are focused on winning our customers by providing compelling value on products and services. Our meal deals in North America continued to deliver impressive sequential improvement. At the end of Q4, in the U.S., we topped over 500,000 meal deals sold each week, up over 35% from Q3. While on a smaller scale, Canada also showed good signs of growth with food bundle sales up over 50% from the previous quarter. I am proud to share that now, as we start the new fiscal year, we are already up to nearly 800,000 meal deals sold each week in North America.

Our win in food strategy continues to progress with nearly 6,200 fresh food fast stores opened globally by the end of the quarter. The focus of the food team is on execution simplification, SKU rationalization and consistency, margin improvement and spoilage control.

Back to the success of our meal deals, hot food units are increasing in percentage of those bundles as we strengthen the execution and popularity of our food offer.

Turning to our loyalty membership programs. In the U.S., full enrollments in Inner Circle continue to grow quarter-over-quarter. It is now nearly 10.5 million members, and we are seeing an uptick in sign-ups resulting from simplified enrollment features. We've also introduced new value campaigns and personalization efforts, which are driving incremental sales and traffic. We continue to be pleased with the linkage of Easy Pay and Inner Circle introduced last quarter, which is allowing customers a more frictionless experience at both our pumps and in our stores.

The extra loyalty program in Europe ended the year with a record number of active members and strong growth in both fuel and merchandise penetration. Plans are underway to roll out the 2.0 loyalty concept currently in Sweden to Poland and soon after to other European business units. This new concept is designed to offer rewards across all products and services at our site, whether a customer is looking to fill up with fuel, charge an electric vehicle or grab a snack. Work is also underway to bring some of the communication and personalization capabilities to our new mid-European business units during the new fiscal year.

In our goal of Owning Thirst, we are excited about our many recent exclusive product launches in the U.S., including Celsius Watermelon Ice and our first Go's brand. We also recently launched the second Gatorade exclusive, Summer Blaze, which is a bold refreshing flavor only available at Circle K in 28-ounce bottles. These limited edition offers help drive excitement, customer engagement and traffic with store teams rallying support and display activity, making the offers hard to miss in our stores.

While packaged beverages continue to face headwinds in the U.S., energy drinks help bolster the overall performance of the category. Cold and frozen dispensed beverages in the U.S continued impressive growth, benefiting from traffic driving promotional campaigns and popular flavor options.

In the adult beverage category, Canada continued to have a strong performance in beer sales following the recent change in legislation in Ontario, Canada's largest market. The impressive same-store sales growth in alcohol in Canada more than offset the decline in tobacco in the region, which continues to be impacted by illicit trade and removal of popular products in the other nicotine products category. In the U.S., overall nicotine performance was slightly negative with declines in cigarettes driven by lower demand. However, we continue to outperform the market due to our efforts around price optimization, assortment expansion and personalization programs for our age verified customers. Other nicotine product sales were up in the U.S. over the quarter as we deployed a series of initiatives across the segment.

In Europe, we see signs of recovery in the nicotine category, driven by growth in other nicotine products. helping offset decline in combustibles. Legislation changes in cigarettes in the Netherlands and favorable competition in Luxembourg have resulted in positive nicotine performance as consumers increasingly shift their spending toward our channel.

Moving to our fuel business. Same-store road transportation fuel volumes decreased by 1.9% in the United States by 0.6% in Europe and other regions, while an increase by 3.7% in Canada. As I mentioned earlier, we are maintaining market share in the United States and margins aligned with the trends of recent quarters as we continue to work on building value from our fuel supply chain and serving our customers through lower cost sourcing options. We also continued our efforts to provide compelling value to our customers with our very popular fuel days, including one in late May at over 7,000 locations in North America. We once again drove excitement for our brands while providing impactful savings on fuel and exciting promotional offers inside the store, especially for Inner Circle members. This fuel event also supported our communities with donations to the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation in the U.S. and Food Banks Canada.

Our European B2B fuel business demonstrated resilience this quarter despite adverse market conditions and volume volatility. Overall card volumes were slightly down. However, this was effectively offset by strong margin performance. Growing nonfuel income remains a strategic priority with B2B transit charging volumes growing steadily, up over 75% year-over-year. Integration and synergy delivery plans for the new business units in Benelux and Germany are advancing. B2B fuel share in the U.S. continued to grow quarter-over-quarter as we develop customer relationships with fleets of all sizes. As for our B2B truck segment, we saw significant growth across all business units, especially in northern and western states. This has been realized by continued execution of our commercial diesel growth strategy, implementation of new strategic partners and the optimization of existing partnerships.

Our EV fast charging network in Europe now consists of nearly 3,480 charge points, up nearly 40% from the same quarter last year with nearly 2,800 Circle K branded charge points. Our station, Circle K Järna, which is Sweden's largest ultrafast charging station located on a highway south of Stockholm, has been named 1 of the 3 best EV hubs in the world. We also just opened our first EV charging only convenience location in Europe in a high-traffic area of Gothenburg, Sweden.

With these notable EV developments, we are now the most preferred brand for charging in Sweden, surpassing Tesla and all other competitors, which is a testament to our brand strength and the quality of our product offering in winning local customers.

Before I turn the call over to Filipe, I want to mention some exciting recognition and game-changing investments in innovative technology, which are benefiting our recruitment and onboarding as well as inventory management. First, we have recently been awarded the 2025 NACS Convenience Retail Technology Award Europe for our AI-driven digital people platform. This solution designed to streamline recruitment, onboarding and ongoing training has been recognized as the industry's leading innovation in workforce technology.

We are also advancing on our deployment of RELEX in North America, which we aim to start piloting in September. RELEX is a unified end-to-end inventory planning system that applies AI and machine learning to retailer data to assist with determining where merchandise should be positioned across the entirety of each store. Our investment in RELEX is part of a historic multiyear inventory management modernization journey that stands to deliver significant improvement to our ordering and space planning capabilities in North America, similar to recent successes achieved in our Europe business.

With that, let me turn it over to Filipe to dive deeper into our financial performance this quarter.

Thank you, Alex, and good morning, everyone. We closed the fourth quarter and fiscal year with disciplined financial results, reflecting the strength of our operations, the dedication of our teams and continued investment in technology and customer value. Our focus on efficiency allowed us to advance strategic initiatives while preserving healthy margins. Building on Alex's comments, we held the line on same-store sales in the U.S. despite a more value-conscious consumer. This, along with strong same-store sales in Europe and Canada, highlights the advantage of having a globally diversified network. We stayed focused on the levers within our control, executing with discipline and advancing initiatives that resonated with customers. While we don't report monthly trends, we ended the year on a positive note with modest same-store sales improvement in the U.S. The integration of our TotalEnergies assets progressed according to plan, driven by strong performance across the board.

Same-store merchandise revenue grew at a solid mid-single digit, nearly 30% higher than Q3 on a sequential basis. Gross fuel margins have continued to improve year-over-year, while same-store road transportation fuel volumes remain positive. These results reflect our team's execution and ability to integrate complex acquisitions effectively.

As of the end of Q4, we have delivered approximately EUR 20 million in operating expense synergies, exceeding our initial target of EUR 80 million. On an annualized basis, this now represents over EUR 40 million in synergies. We remain on track to achieve EUR 120 million in synergies by fiscal 2027 and EUR 170 million by fiscal 2029. These benefits are expected to come from reductions in operating, selling and administrative expenses as well as top line uplift from the deployment of our industry-leading retail standards, operational practices and customer initiatives.

I will now go over some key figures for the quarter. For more details, please refer to our MD&A available on our website. For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, net earnings attributable to shareholders of the corporation stood at $439 million or $0.46 per share on a diluted basis. Excluding certain items described in more detail in our MD&A, adjusted net earnings attributable to shareholders of the corporation were approximately $441 million or $0.46 per share on an adjusted diluted basis, representing a decrease of 4.2% compared to the corresponding quarter of last year.

For fiscal 2025, net earnings stood at $2.6 billion, a decrease of $149.3 million or 5.5% compared with fiscal 2024. Diluted net earnings per share stood at $2.71 compared with $2.82 for the previous fiscal year. Adjusted net earnings stood at $2.6 billion, a decrease of $139 million or 5.1% compared with fiscal 2024. Adjusted diluted net earnings per share were $2.71 compared with $2.81 for fiscal 2024, a decrease of 3.6%. The decrease in net earnings was primarily driven by higher depreciation, finance and operating expenses linked to the acquisitions and strategic investments. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 increased by approximately $69 million or 6% compared with the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2024, mainly due to improved road transportation, fuel gross margin, partly offset by the impact of strategic investment on operating expenses.

During fiscal 2025, adjusted EBITDA increased by $345.2 million or 6.1% compared with fiscal 2024, mainly attributable to the contribution from acquisition which amounted to approximately $395 million. Softness in traffic and fuel demand in the United States as low income consumers were impacted by challenging economic conditions as well as what was just outlined for the fourth quarter.

Now let's review the detail of our business segments on an FX adjusted basis. During the fourth quarter, merchandise and service revenue increased by approximately $99 million or 2.4%, primarily attributable to organic growth, the net impact from organic changes to our network and the contribution from acquisitions, which amounted to approximately $22 million. During fiscal 2025, merchandise and service revenue increased by approximately $899 million or 5.1%. Merchandise and service gross profit increased by approximately $24 million or 1.7%. This is primarily attributable to organic growth in Europe and other regions and in Canada and into the contribution from acquisition, which amounted to approximately $7 million.

Our merchandise and service gross margin in the United States decreased by 0.2% to 33.9%, mainly driven by ongoing price investment and nonrecurring tobacco write-off and inventory optimization. On a positive note, we have seen the food spoilage decreasing by more than 500 basis points during the quarter compared to the previous year, which demonstrates the success of the store execution in -- the store execution of our food program. Our merchandise and service gross margin decreased by 0.6% to 38.6% in Europe and other regions and by 0.8% to 34.1% in Canada, both impacted by changes in product mix with the implementation of new legislation in our various locations. For fiscal 2025, merchandise and service gross profit increased by approximately $330 million or 5.2%. Our gross margin in the United States decreased by 0.1% to 33.9%, by 0.3% in Europe and other regions to 38.9% and by 0.3% in Canada to 33.7%.

Moving on to the fuel side of our business. Our transportation fuel gross margin was $0.4327 per gallon in the United States, an increase of $0.0448 per gallon. In Europe and other regions, it was per [ USD 0.0557 ] per liter, an increase of USD 0.0127 per liter. And in Canada, it was CAD 0.1405 per liter, an increase of CAD 0.0037 per liter.

Fuel margin remained healthy throughout our network due to the continued work on the optimization of our supply chain, our fuel trading teams and strong execution in our stores.

During fiscal 2025, our transportation fuel gross profit increased by approximately $620 million or 10.7%. Our road transportation fuel gross margin was $0.4539 per gallon in the United States, $0.095 per liter in Europe and other regions and CAD 0.1351 liter in Canada.

Now turning to SG&A. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, normalized expenses increased by 4.6% year-over-year, attributable to a mix of core operating expenses strategic incremental investment and by large changes in specific results. First, roughly 2% of the increase came from our core operating expenses. I want to emphasize that across all 3 regions, expense growth remain well controlled supported in part by our Fit to Serve initiatives and continue to track below the weighted average inflation across our network. This speaks to the discipline of our teams and our ongoing commitment on operational excellence.

Second, about 1.5% of the increase was tied to strategic incremental investments in the business, particularly in technology and operational tools that support our long-term growth.

And finally, the remaining increase, which was roughly $20 million in adjustment or about $0.02 on EPS is related to legal, general liabilities and environmental reserves tied to specific event in the quarter.

For the full fiscal year, normalized operating expenses rose by 3.3%.

Let me now turn to the work we're doing to modernize our operation and support future growth. Over the past year, we have continued to advance our digital road map, focused on enhancing the in-store experience and deepening engagement across our customer journey. Our loyalty platform investment are already helping us better connect with our customers while creating new personalized avenue for growth. We're also bolstering the underlying tech infrastructure needed to support this evolution. As Alex noted earlier, our rollout of RELEX in North America marks the next step in modernizing inventory management, improving forecasting and product availability. We are also scaling data capabilities and advancing the next phase of our new card platform in Europe, which will streamline onboarding, pricing and billing for our B2B customers.

Additionally, we are embedding smart tools to drive automation and efficiency across the network. In roughly 7,000 North American stores, new upgraded handheld devices are streamlining tasks like ordering and inventory management. We have also introduced a labor scheduler that tailors staffing plans to each store's expected traffic and sales pattern. In about 1,000 stores we are piloting an AI platform that converts raw data into clear actionable missions for store managers, enabling faster, more agile execution. And with the rollout of new floor cleaning equipment we're further reduce labor hours and time spent on routine tasks, allowing teams to focus on the in-store experience.

To support and fund some of these investments, we are delivering meaningful progress under our Fit to Serve program. Workforce productivity continues to improve when combining regular and overtime hours, total hours worked declined nearly 2% year-over-year. Overtime alone dropped by a remarkable 14%, 13% in the U.S., and we have reduced administrative task and associated store hours by nearly 50% over the past 4 years. Overtime for U.S. associated now remains below 2.5%, a clear reflection of our tools like handheld device, optimized labor scheduling and floor cleaning are helping teams operate more efficiently and dedicate more time on serving the customer.

We continue to drive cost improvement by centralizing procurement for goods not for resale, better leveraging our global scale. In parallel, through our global capability network, we have established a global customer care team supported by outsourced call center operation to enhance service consistency and efficiency. This structure also enables a stronger feedback loop, bringing valuable customer insights back into operations and offers.

In summary, the combination of thoughtful technology investment and our Fit to Serve initiative is strengthening execution, supporting growth and positioning us for long-term value creation. At the same time, disciplined cost management remains a priority, and we expect normalized expense growth to stay below inflation as we move into fiscal 2026.

Turning over to depreciation and amortization for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025. Our depreciation expense increased by $49 million or 9.9% year-over-year, mainly driven by the acquisition of TotalEnergies assets, equipment upgrade and store remodel program across our network and the strategic investment in new stores opening, technology and EV chargers.

For fiscal 2025, our depreciation expense increased by approximately $352 million or 20%, mainly driven by the impact from acquisition investment in global tech projects, which amounted to approximately $205 million.

From a tax perspective, the income tax rate for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 was 18.8% compared with 10.2% for the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2024. In the corresponding quarter of fiscal 2024, the income tax rate included a net tax benefit derived from an internal reorganization, which had a favorable impact of 6.5% on the tax rate corresponding to an approximate EPS benefit of $0.03. The remaining increase is mainly stemming from the impact of a different mix in our earnings across the various jurisdictions in which we operate. As of April 27, 2025, we recorded a return on equity at 18.3%, and our return on capital employed stood at 12.2%. During the fiscal year, our leverage ratio decreased to 1.96. We also had strong balance sheet liquidity with $2.3 billion in cash and an additional $3.4 billion available through our revolving unsecured operating credit facility.

Turning to the dividend. The Board of Directors declared yesterday a quarterly dividend of CAD 0.195 per share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 to shareholders on record as of July 7, 2025, and approved its payment effective July 21, 2025.

Let me conclude by briefly highlighting a few key points. Fiscal 2025 is now in the rearview mirror. Like many of our peers, we faced our share of challenges and uncertainties, but I'm very proud of how the team responded in a disciplined way and delivered solid performance. We held the line supported by the strength of our globally diversified network and the resilience of our operating model. We also delivered synergies while integrating a large acquisition, all while employing local teams through the discipline of our organization and the strength of our culture.

As we enter fiscal 2026, our focus is clear: control our costs, strong discipline on CapEx deployment to continue delivering best-in-class returns while investing in areas that support our long-term strategy.

I thank you all for your attention, and I will turn the call over again to our President and CEO, Alex Miller.

Thank you, Filipe. I'm truly honored that my first year as President and CEO has coincided with the 45th anniversary of Couche-Tard. Few companies, large or small, make it as long and successfully as we have been able to do so. I have no doubt that this is because of our special culture of putting our people and customers first, an approach started by Alain when he opened our first store in Laval, Canada, and one that continues to guide us today across our global network. This year has also been among the more challenging in retail as our consumers are hurting and carefully watching their spending. That is why I've asked the entire company to make winning the customer by focusing on compelling value, ease and readiness our #1 priority as we begin the next 45 years of our company's journey.

With our globally diversified business, long-term growth strategy and customer-centric team members, I remain confident that we will continue to play to win far into the future.

On that note, let's turn it over to the operator to answer analyst questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Irene Nattel with RBC Capital Markets.

Could you talk a little bit more about the demand profile you're seeing across geographies, notably in the U.S.? You talked a little bit about tobacco and meal deals, but more broadly speaking, category trends. And if we're talking about innings, where are you on key initiatives like Fit to Serve and Owning Thirst?

Irene, thanks for the question. Let me start with Europe. I think demand is okay, I would say, stable. I think the big piece for us is just our outperformance of market. You see that in fuel, we are significantly outperforming market, taking market share. The same can be said in convenience. We are actually growing nicotine in Europe and have done so period-on-period for a while now. So we are extraordinarily bullish on our European performance. And going forward, not so much that the underlying demand. It's tough over there as well, but just the performance of our business is really humming.

In Canada, strong fuel. We are seeing period over -- period over period, excuse me, fuel growth. I think we still have opportunities to execute and take additional share inside of that. And then the significant tailwind that we have from alcohol in Ontario is more than offsetting the nicotine losses. Again, the consumer demand profile, it's not overly rosy nearly stable but challenged, I would say. In the U.S. I would say more of the same, Irene. I wouldn't say we're seeing it getting worse, but I can't say that we're seeing it getting better. We see our consumers lower end, lower middle-end consumers continuing to be very selective with their dollars, consolidating trips. And we just need to continue to take market share.

Your question around where are we at? Food, we are early innings, but I am extraordinarily pleased about the direction. We have 14 straight weeks. We have grown units, food units in the United States. Our digital programs are growing. We are executing on personalization. Our trip frequency is up 9%. Our spend per member is up 2%. Our member growth is up 40% over 2 years. We're just -- we're -- I'm seeing the focus and the execution on the core initiatives paying off. Cold dispensed is [indiscernible] for us in North America around thirst, and we've got some big initiatives coming over the summer. You heard me mention Summer Blaze with Gatorade. We blew that out last summer. So we're excited about that. We've got a global activation with Monster around Formula 1 in the new F1 movie in McLaren, really excited about that. So we are focused on our core strategy, digital, thirst, food, and we are going to leverage those down to take market share, Irene.

Your next question comes from Chris Li with Desjardins.

Just maybe a quick follow-up question, maybe also in the U.S. Can you share with us how did merchandise comps trend through the quarter? Did it improve? And how is it trending Q1 to date?

Yes. We were soft at the end of Q3 and soft at the start of Q4, and that improved over the final periods of the quarter. And we have seen the start of this quarter kind of trend with more towards the end of last quarter.

And just to complement, Chris, what we see is definitely food improving. As mentioned earlier in the call by Alex, our food program, the meal program is really working a lot and driving traffic to our stores. So we feel very encouraged by that. And for sure, helping the overall performance of the business this quarter.

Your next question comes from Michael Van Aelst with TD Cowen.

I wanted to talk on the fresh food execution. It sounds like you're finally getting some really good traction on these meal deals. But I was hoping you could explain a little bit about why you think you were not getting traction on the fresh food to the extent that you wanted to in recent years and now what you're doing differently that's really driving the momentum in the last 14 weeks or so.

Yes, I think -- thanks for the question. Our focus is -- we have been laser-focused on execution and specifically SKU rationalization. I think I've mentioned on previous calls that we frankly had too many SKUs, and that was making it difficult for us to execute. So we've significantly reduced the number of SKUs We have focused on our operational execution, simplifying that execution, making it easier for our stores and we have launched our closed loop program that we have been piloting that really gets into detail across our processes to ensure that we are executing food on a day-to-day basis, and we are getting better and we have momentum.

I still think we're early innings on meal bundles. We set an initial target of 1 million. The team is telling me they are pretty hopeful that we can accomplish that in the next quarter. So I guess I'll be able to hopefully tell you that when I talk to you next time. But again, we -- our consumers are recognizing the value of our meal bundles and our partners are keen to partner with us across our drink options, which is differentiated against QSRs. So we continue to have really good conversations across our drink providers across categories and we will continue to build out those options.

Is your advertising and loyalty program also helping to drive this?

Yes. I think if you go into one of our stores, it's pretty tough to not see our meal bundles. So I think we are focused on digital. The progress we've made around personalization, being able to give customer offers that are relevant for them on their purchases, being able to know that our fuel customers are on the lot and give them an immediate deal to come into the store, which we're now converting at 20%. The team just continues to advance our capability. And I fully expect for our digital penetration to continue to grow up -- to go up to drive trips and to drive additional visits and to turn our traffic to positive.

And just so I understood clearly, you said you ended the fourth quarter in the U.S. with modest same-store sales growth?

Yes. That is accurate.

Your next question comes from Tamy Chen with BMO Capital Markets.

I just wanted to speak quickly with food here. So the improved spoilage you mentioned, it's quite significant year-over-year. I'm just wondering, has this also improved sequentially? And is that more from the SKU reductions or much more from uptake of the meal bundles by customers? And as you think about the level of spoilage now, like do you have the target you're trying to get to? Or are you still a bit far away from the target? If you can give us a sense of that, that would be helpful.

Yes, I can take this question. Tamy, thanks for the question. So on the spoilage, I think it's coming really from the SKU reduction. Definitely that helped to facilitate and to make simple the work and execution at store level. And we have kind of also implemented a program of zero-zero for [ EOS ] products. So just focusing and making sure that the merchandise that we need is available in stores when the customer needs it. So that need is helping. And providing tools also. So we are, as we mentioned a few quarters ago. So just helping the store to have a better idea about how much they need to produce sales forecasting.

So all that is combined help us actually to see across, I would say, our network in U.S. As you mentioned, a significant improvement in spoilage. There's still a lot to do there. We are not at the end of a journey. And we expect actually spoilage to continue to improve, okay? So difficult at this stage to tell you where we will land, but you should see some additional improvement on the food margin over the next coming quarters.

Your next question comes from Mark Petrie with CIBC.

Not to beat this too much more, but I do want to continue just asking about food. And I guess, specifically, the sort of production and distribution shifts that you're making. Could you just talk about the timing there? And how material you think the benefits will be, how those will how those will show up?

What do you mean here? In terms of supply chain and the way that we are -- in the store?

Yes, sure. Today, we have one commissary in the United States that supplies a fairly significant majority of our frozen items to 6 business units, I think, and the rest is provided by third-party vendors. For this next fiscal year, that model will continue from a supply chain, I think. We are active. We are adding 3 warehouses for our regular goods, not our food goods that we will add later this calendar year. And I believe we will add a couple of commissaries in the United States over the coming years and take more control of our supply chain, but that's not near-term activity.

Yes. supply chain is part of our strategic road map, Michael, and definitely, we are now wrapping up our capabilities on the dry side, on the -- on what is not nonfood. But definitely, we have in the road map as well to look at what we could potentially do on the fresh side. But more to come on that in the next coming quarters.

Your next question comes from John Zamparo with Scotiabank.

I wanted to come back to the U.S. same-store merch comp. Can you just confirm that the traffic was also negative in the quarter? Just to clarify that. And then the question is, you have specific drivers that are supporting same-store sales growth in Canada and Europe. And I wonder how material those are. If you normalize for the impact of those, how are Canada and Europe comparing to the U.S.? Is there still a meaningful delta there? And if so, what do you attribute that to?

Traffic was negative in the quarter, mid-1, 1.5 roughly. The Ontario beer is a massive driver for us and it's offsetting -- we lost Zonnic the white nicotine that's a real tailwind. We will cycle on both of those things in a quarter or 2 as we -- both loss of Zonnic and the initiation of alcohol and beer. But the amount of traffic that beer, and we are still learning our execution by our teams is so good. We are still learning about the basket, what's the mix. So having beer in our stores, the number of new customers is a real win in Canada, and we will continue to amplify that.

In Europe, it's -- we're just executing. We do have some headwinds or some -- excuse me, some tailwinds, as we mentioned in cigarettes. Specifically, Mid-Europe was up low 6% last quarter. And that, a good chunk of that is the change in cigarettes in the Netherlands that moved cigarettes from grocery stores into our channel. So that is a specific activity that's helping us. But again, across our European business, nicotine is positive. So the combination of cigarettes and other nicotine products is positive to our same-store results.

I think lastly, I mentioned Hong Kong has been a real drag on us because of the increased cigarette taxes. We have finally cycled on that. We have started to see positive same-store sales coming out of Hong Kong. Our -- we've got a make your own cup of coffee, cold coffee, iced coffee that is proven to be tremendously popular that we are continuing to roll out. So really excited for our Hong Kong business as we look to the future.

Just a bit more color on Europe. For example, Europe today, it's positive traffic overall. And something that Europe has done historically better than U.S. is food. Food penetration is strong there, and that's definitely helping. So that's indicating that existing and enhancing our food offer in the U.S. is the right path as you know.

But also, I think what we see also in the Scandinavian countries is the progress that we are making on the EV and being a very relevant and leading actor there, that's helping also driving traffic. And of course, on the forecourt, but in store as well. So there is all this combination for forecourt plus store that's helping driving traffic in Europe and making this business very, very resilient actually to the environment that remains quite challenging in Europe, to be honest.

Your next question comes from Vishal Shreedhar with National Bank.

I wanted to get your perspective on capital allocation as it relates to the acquisition backdrop. In the preliminary comments, you indicated that you'll continue to look for deals, notwithstanding your interest in Seven & i. So I wanted to get your perspective on how you perceive the acquisition backdrop and prices and opportunities and how we should think about that in the fiscal year ahead? And does your comment also relate to buying back your own stock? Is that something that is on the table as well?

Yes, sure. I think, first of all, let me reference GetGo. It's not a small transaction. I think we are very close to GetGo, and we expect to close that in the coming days. And we are really excited to bring GetGo over as a new business unit into the United States, and really understand their very strong food and loyalty programs. So we're excited about that.

Our focus on M&A, it hasn't changed. We have a defined playbook that our founders and Brian have given us. We deploy it across our business units. I would say activity has not been as pronounced in the recent weeks as it had been over the previous months, but we remain active on some things, and we will continue to look at those things as we have always done.

Capital allocation for us, I think with Seven & i, we are engaged. We've signed the NDA. We are engaged in diligence. We are engaged in management meetings. We are engaged on the divestiture. And I think the benefit of that is it's setting a timeline to bring clarity to both us and to Paul and their special committee if a transaction is going to be reached. And I believe that timeline will be shorter rather than longer.

Our deployment of capital across our base, we have a very disciplined way around how much we deploy traditionally. We've lowered that a little bit this year, really just for capital discipline practices. But we continue to invest in our business heavily. And you hear 40-plus openings this year, thousand stores in our NTI pipeline. Our new stores do phenomenally with great returns and our real estate group continues to ramp up the activity, and we will continue to do that.

Just on your question regarding the share buyback program. So as you know, we have stopped actually to this program due to [ Sapporo ]. And Sapporo would go and we conclude that, that will sorry, Seven & i -- 7-Eleven transaction will go at the end, we'll need cash. So that's why we have stopped the share buyback program. But we will re-initiate it if Sapporo -- if 7-Eleven does not continue. So that's the way that we believe that will -- is very optimum to use the share buyback program when it's needed. But today, given Seven & i, again, we are stopping it.

Your next question comes from Mark Carden with UBS.

On the food front, how is the rollout of meal deals going in Canada? It sounds like alcohol is a major driver, but did food contribute to the strength in your merch comps as well in the quarter? And how do you think about the long-term opportunity there relative to the U.S.?

We are committed to food across our geographies, and we are committed to meal deals and bundles across our geographies. And we are growing them in Canada at actually a faster percentage clip, not on an absolute clip than we are in the United States. And we are growing them in Europe as well where our food penetration is much deeper. So we are absolutely committed to meal deals in Canada. We grew food this quarter once again. And our intent is to grow at even greater basis than we did this quarter and to ramp that up.

We've talked a lot about our food margin. We had a great quarter. If you look quarter, Q4 versus Q4 last year, significant improvement in food margin. And we talked about our processes, the simplification. We, as Filipe said, we believe there's more runway to that. We believe food, along with digital is right at the center that's going to flip our traffic to positive.

Your next question comes from Luke Hannan with Canaccord.

I wanted to follow up on a couple of one-timers in the quarter. Firstly, it was mentioned the tobacco spoilage in the U.S. Can you just shed -- share more details on what exactly that entails? And was that broad-based across all your BUs or just focused on a couple and also across product lines? And then secondly, the $20 million in the provisions within OpEx. Just more details on what exactly that was and potentially whether there could be a release on that reserve in the relative near-term?

Yes. It was really a SKU rationalization in nicotine of products that we elected to exit and it was in 3 of our BUs, but it was significant. The second part of the question was...

Regarding the OpEx.

The one-offs. Go ahead.

Related on that. Yes. So on these 2, actually, those reserve, it's actually to anticipate a real expense coming. So half of the $20 million is coming from a settlement regarding U.S. litigation that happened during the quarter. So we have to reserve that and the payment will happen in Q1 of this year.

And the second component roughly also $10 million. It's linked to environmental reserve and linked to additional remediation that we have to do in a site in Canada. So again, here, a reserve on Q4 and expense to come in the next coming quarters. So no reserves or potential reserves that will ease the P&L in the next coming quarters to -- coming from these 2 reserves. It will be an expense.

Your next question comes from Corey Tarlowe with Jefferies.

Alex, you used the phrase compelling value a number of times in your script, and it's clear that what you're doing is working as a part of your strategy. So as you think about whether it's in the stores or at the pump, how do you think about leaning into value more to drive market share gains, given this strategy seems to be working so well?

Yes. I think value price perception is at the core of our focus. And it's more -- it's not a new trend. It's just been heightened, right, I think, in this environment. So it's not something that's new to us, but I think it's more important than ever.

How are we thinking about it. Again, I'll come back to our digital tools. Our digital tools and personalization allow us to understand customers and what drives their behavior and what value triggers they act upon. We are getting smarter and better in those places, and we will continue to deploy our extra 2.0 and our Inner Circle here in North America and to deliver value to customers. Our Fuel Days, where we offer -- that we do a few times a year. The response to that and the loyalty sign-up and the return visits from those customers that we can now see is very compelling. And private label, we have opportunity in private label to continue to expand our growth.

We have new products coming. We are actively looking at how we continue to position those products to get value recognition from our consumers for that. And then within our food and meal bundles that we've talked a lot about on this call, it is clearly resonating with consumers. For us to grow from about 100,000 meal deals to 800,000 really in a couple of quarters, certainly suggests that this resonates with our consumers.

So we are laser focused, but I also want to be clear, it wasn't a great -- in the U.S., it wasn't a great merch margin quarter. Some of that's, that nicotine piece. But I still believe we can offer value, grow traffic and sales while improving margins year-over-year in the U.S.

That's very helpful. Just as a follow-up, I think you talked about the trajectory for expense growth. I was curious to get your thoughts in terms of how you're thinking about leveraging technology and the ability to perhaps keep expense growth a little bit more controlled than the rate of inflation, perhaps, if that is a possibility, given the emphasis on investments in AI and technology.

Yes. That's our goal. Let's be very clear. We want expense to grow below inflation. That's what we ambition for this year and the next coming on. So there is definitely a strategic investment that we are doing that are not necessarily for the long-term. So I explained many of these tools that we believe that will make a huge difference for the customer and for teams in stores. But at the same time, we have the Fit to Serve program, the $800 million program that we have announced about 2 years ago. Just this year, we delivered more than $250 million savings. We are very confident that this year, we'll continue to execute on these plans. We have identified a lot of initiatives. We have just beginning -- just began the journey on the centralization of the non-COGS items. And we see already the benefits of that. And we are very confident that we'll be able to offset the necessary investment, that work within tech.

Yes. I'll build on that a little bit. And we talk about our culture a lot. Controlling cost is a cornerstone of our culture. And in this environment, it is an absolute. So we will continue to control costs. We have stated many times that our goal is to deliver cost at or under inflation, and we will continue to execute against that. We will do that while we are making investments into technology, data platforms, customer data platforms, back-end technology that enables the things that I've been talking about around this call. Those are investments in our future. Those are investments in future customers that we believe we need to make. We will offset those investments through efficiencies in Fit to Serve and through the operating improvements that you heard us mention. But thanks for the question.

Our last question comes from Martin Landry with Stifel.

I was wondering if we can return back to 7-Eleven quickly. What is the likelihood of a transaction happening at this point? Is it a high likelihood or is it low likelihood? And how engaged is 7-Eleven in the discussion? Is there a real willingness on their end to transact?

I'm not going to say more than what I previously said, which was we are engaged with them on due dil, on management meetings, on the FTC process. I believe that the good -- there's a lot good about that, but this gives us a definitive timeline for both us and Paul and the special committee at Seven & i to reach a conclusion on this transaction, and I anticipate that timeline being shorter rather than longer.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Mathieu for closing remarks.

Thank you, Alex and Filipe. That covers all the questions for today's call. Thank you all for joining us. We wish you a great day and look forward to discussing our first quarter 2026 results in September. [Foreign Language]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.