ARKO Corp.

Today's call are Ari Kotler, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Rob Giammatteo, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Our earnings press release annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2023, as filed with the SEC, and our earnings presentation are available on ARCO's website at www.arcocorp.com. During our call today, unless otherwise stated, management will compare results to the same period in 2022. Before we begin, please note that all fourth quarter 2023 financial information is unaudited. During this call, management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Please review the forward-looking and cautionary statements section at the end of our fourth quarter 2023 earnings release for various factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements made during our call today. Any forward-looking statements made during this call reflect our current views with respect to future events, and ARCA will not update or revise forward-looking statements made on this call. whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. On this call, management will share operating results on both a GAAP basis and a non-GAAP basis. Descriptions of those non-GAAP financial measures that we use, such as adjusted operating income and adjusted EBITDA, and reconciliations of these measures to our results as reported in accordance with GAAP are detailed in our earnings release. in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31st, 2023, or in our 2023 fourth quarter earnings presentation posted on our website. Additionally, management will share profit measures of our individual business segments along with fuel contribution, which is calculated as fuel revenue less fuel costs and exclude intercompany charges by GPMP. And now, I would like to turn the call over to Ari.

Thank you, Jordan. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Before getting into our financial results, I would like to start off with a few opening remarks. First, as I'm sure you saw earlier this year, we welcome Rob Giammatteo to the company to serve as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We believe that Rob's experience in directly relevant financial and transformation roles in retail and convenience would be extremely additive to the company that Don Basel, our former CFO, has helped build over the years and will help drive announced financial performance as we continue to strengthen our business. To that end, I would like to personally welcome Rob to the ARCO team and have already seen the value his experience has brought to the team since joining in January. I would also like to thank Don for his contribution to the company, which have enabled the company to achieve significant growth and excellent performance. As we reported, Don will remain with the company until April 2024 to ensure a smooth transition to Rob. Second, reflecting on our first three years as a public company, we have significantly broadened our geographic footprint through acquisition, and have delivered approximately $166 million in net income that results in approximately $850 million in cumulative adjusted EBITDA over this period. In the past 18 months alone, we've closed on five acquisitions, adding almost 200 retail stores and approximately 520 new sites across our wholesale and fleet fueling segments. I'm very proud of our team and their incredible work to successfully integrate these assets. We are confident that we bought attractive assets at attractive prices, delivered meaningful cash-on-cash returns, and provided us with scale and related synergies that have improved our relative competitive positioning. I wanted to touch briefly on our prize acquisition, which we completed in December 2022, and included 31 Pride retail convenience stores and one store under construction that is now open. Since closing the acquisition in just over one year, we have earned back in adjusted EBITDA approximately 65% of ARCO's consideration paid for that transaction. This was driven by our successful integration, including the additional of over 1,000 items on average to the stores and the transition of Pride loyalty members to our Fast Rewards program. We were able to increase merchandise margin in our Pride location by approximately 260 basis points from Q1 2023 to Q4 2023. We believe that rapid return and integration of Pride reflect the acquisition of good assets at a good price. As we move into 2024, We are focusing more of our management attention and other resources to further push, refine, and improve our organic growth strategy to drive performance at our retail stores and unlock the value of our retail segment, which is core to our business. I believe we have many levers to pull. Our team is focused on executing on our initiative and later this year, we are planning to us an investor day in which we will share with you our multi-year roadmap and specific milestones to enhance organic performance and drive shareholder value. Turning to our full year results, we delivered $290.4 million in adjusted EBITDA for 2023, holding performance within 3.5% of 2022, which had a record retail CPG of over 41 cents per gallon. We delivered this result in the context of a 3.4% decline in national Opus fuel gallon demand, with a more pronounced decline in the fourth quarter. Annuli acquired businesses and continued momentum with our in-store merchandising efforts served to mostly offset lower gallon demand. As we have discussed in the past, we have directed our retail fuel pricing team to optimize fuel contribution at the site level. While we recognize this pricing strategy results in a tradeoff between gallon demand and CPG, we believe this is the correct strategy currently given market and consumer trends in the areas in which we operate. We plan to maintain this pricing methodology while we evaluated in the context of our overall multi-year roadmap. Total retail fuel contribution for the year was $435 million, up close to 5% for the year. Turning to inside store sales, many of our 2023 initiatives continue to show momentum due to our focus on our three key merchandising and marketing pillars. Our Fast Rewards Loyalty Program, growing sales in core destination categories, and expanding our food and beverage service. I want to take a moment to touch on each of these pillars now. First, on our Fast Rewards loyalty program. We exceeded the 2 million enrolled member mark in the fourth quarter, and we continue to invest to drive new enrollment growth, deepen our relationship with existing customers, and offer our enrolled members valuable discounts that help address the ongoing inflationary pressure they're facing. We are pleased with what we are seeing from our loyal customers and believe there is significant untapped opportunity as we continue to evolve our loyalty program. In the fourth quarter of 2023, transaction size associated with enrolled loyalty members averaged $12.70 per transaction or approximately 32% more than the $9.62 per transaction for non-enrolled members. As an example of the opportunity we see in front of us, in 2022, we enrolled approximately 283,000 members. In 2023, we enrolled another approximately 730,000 members. We believe this background underpins the opportunity of our loyalty program. We continue to work to accelerate new member involvement and are leveraging our recently launched PISA program to deliver meaningful value for our enrolled loyalty members. I will touch more on our PISA program in a moment. Turning now to our core destination categories, which are packaged beverages, candy, salty snacks, packaged sweet snacks, alternative snacks, and beer, these six categories accounted for over 50% of our merchandise contribution this quarter and for the full year. This concentration allows us to focus our assortment initiative on a narrow group of categories and leverage strong supplier partnerships that help drive total store sales. As a result of our ongoing work, Penetration of the company's core destination categories represents close to 43% of merchandise sales for the year. Food service proposition as a multi-year process with wins along the way. We are already building the foundation to support our long-term journey to establish ourselves as a food destination and establishing food service credibility. In 2023, we added bean-to-cup coffee in 391 locations, including newly acquired stores bringing the offering to 945 locations. At the end of 2023, we collaborated with Tyson and launched a value-oriented chicken sandwich available for $2.99 for our enrolled loyalty members and available in 300 selected locations. And then, next, I'm very excited about our most recent food service launch. After almost a year of research and development, in January of this year, we launched our pizza offering as a take-and-bake at more than 1,000 stores and hot in approximately 225 of those stores. We have seen very positive customer reaction to the pizza, with over 70% of those stores saying they will definitely purchase again. Our goal over the next several months is to have as many consumers as possible try this pizza and to roll out our pizza offering both take and bake and hot to significantly more stores. The pizza is available to our enrolled loyalty members at the value-oriented price of $4.99 for a high-quality whole pie. In addition, as we shared in October 2023, We created and filled a new senior leadership role that is responsible for developing a company-wide cross-functional food strategy and scaling it across our stores. We look forward to sharing more on this work as we move through the year. Starting this year, we are beginning to build three new stores, with the first expected to break ground in the next few weeks. These new stores will offer a great customer experience, including food service. As we continue to explore opportunities to expand our retail footprint, take a look at the cover of our presentation, where you can see a picture of an unmanned express store on one of our Quals Cardlock locations in the Richmond, Virginia area that just opened two weeks ago. I will now turn the call over to Rob to review financial results and share our thinking on 2024.

Thank you, Ari. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to take a brief moment to thank the talented ARCO team for the warm welcome over these past two months. I'm excited to join the company on its journey toward realizing its full potential and very much look forward to meeting our recovering analysts and speaking with many of you soon. Starting with full year 2023 results, As Ari referenced earlier, total company EBITDA of $290.4 million was down just over 3.5% in 2022. At the segment level, our retail segment delivered approximately $315 million in adjusted operating income, essentially in line with 2022 results with the contribution from our recent acquisitions and continued same-store merchandise contribution growth offsetting reduced same-store fuel contribution. Total merchandise revenue was $1.84 billion, up from $1.65 billion in 2022. Same-store merchandise sales were up 0.4%, with same-store merchandise contribution up over 4%. Excluding cigarettes, same-store merchandise sales were up 2.5%. Same-store fuel gallon demand was down 5.3% for the year, compared to national OPUS, which was down 3.4%. Same store fuel margin of 38.6 CPG was down 2.7 CPG from a record 2022. The combined impact of lower fuel gallons and reduced CPG resulted in a same store fuel contribution decline of approximately 46 million from full year 2022. Full year 2023 adjusted operating income of 79 million at our wholesale segment was essentially in line with 2022, with contributions from acquisitions offsetting the impact of decline in fuel contribution from a record 2022. Full year 2023 adjusted operating income at our fleet segment of approximately $41 million was up just over $20 million from 2022, reflecting a full year of operations from quarrels versus a partial year last year, and our WTG acquisition. Full year 2023 total company general and administrative expenses increased approximately 25 million compared to 2022, primarily due to our recent acquisitions. Full year 2023 net interest and other financial expenses increased by approximately 12 million compared to 2022, primarily due to a higher average outstanding debt balance and a higher average interest rate. And finally, full year 2023 net income was approximately 35 million compared to $72 million for 2022. Turning to fourth quarter 2023 results, our retail operating segment delivered approximately $72 million in adjusted operating income for the quarter, which was down 3.3% from the year-ago period. Merchandise sales and merchandise contribution were up 10.8% and 19.6% respectively, reflecting a 240 basis point expansion in margin rate. Retail segment fuel gallons and fuel contribution were up 10.9% and 4.8% respectively to the year-ago period. Operating expense was up 18.2% for the quarter, with the increase related almost entirely to our acquisitions. Growth in all aforementioned segment results was driven by our acquired businesses, which delivered in excess of $12 million in adjusted operating income to our retail segment for the quarter. Same-store merchandise sales excluding cigarettes were down 1.8% versus the year-ago period, while total same-store merchandise sales were down 2.8%. Same-store merchandise contribution was up 3.9% to the year-ago period, reflecting the strong underlying organic margin expansion related to our ongoing merchandise assortment work. Same-store fuel gallon demand was down 7.5% for the quarter compared to National Opus, which was down 4.6%. Same store fuel margin of 38.2 CPG was down 2.7 CPG from a record 2022. The combined impact of lower fuel gallons and reduced CPG resulted in a same store fuel contribution decline of approximately 14 million from the year ago period. Same store operating expenses were up less than 2%. Moving on to our wholesale segment, adjusted operating income was 18.1 million for the quarter versus 17.5 million in the year-ago period, with total gallons up 7.2%. Growth was driven by acquisitions that closed in 2023, which delivered 2.4 million in adjusted operating income for the quarter. For our fleet segment, adjusted operating income was 9.7 million for the quarter versus 13.3 million in the year-ago period, with total gallons up 11.8%. reflecting performance against abnormally high diesel margin per gallon and fuel volatility that we referenced in our 2022 year-end call. Acquisitions that closed in 2023 delivered $2.2 million in adjusted operating income for the quarter. Total company general administrative expense for the quarter was $38.1 million versus $39.3 million in the year-ago period. Total company adjusted EBITDA of $65.5 million for the quarter was down $6.9 million from the prior year period, with the decline primarily due to reduced same-store fuel contribution. Net interest and other financial expenses for the quarter were $22.9 million compared to $16.3 million in the year-ago period. Net income for the quarter was $1.1 million compared to $12.9 million for the year-ago period. Please reference our press release for a detailed reconciliation from total company net income to adjusted EBITDA. Turning to the balance sheet, excluding lease-related financing liabilities, we ended the fourth quarter with $845 million in long-term debt, comprised of our 2029 senior notes, the draw on our Capital One line, and the remainder primarily related to real estate and equipment financing. Our 140 million ABL remains completely undrawn as we manage working capital needs from operating cash flow. We maintain substantial liquidity of approximately 830 million, including 218 million in cash on hand at year end, along with the remaining availability on our line of credit. Of this total liquidity, approximately 460 million is attached to our Capital One line, which is reserved for M&A activity. Together with our outstanding Oak Street commitment of almost 1.5 billion, we are comfortable that our balance sheet has more than adequate flexibility to support both ongoing organic growth initiatives and M&A. Including investment capital, total capital expenditures for the quarter and full year 2023 were $35.6 million and $111.2 million, respectively. Turning to 2024, as you may have seen in our press release, we have initiated full-year earnings guidance this quarter to help investors better understand our earnings outlook. We are currently modeling total company full year adjusted EBITDA in a range of 250 to 290 million versus 290.4 million for 2023. Our full year earnings outlook corresponds to an average retail fuel margin of 36 CPG on the lower end and 40 CPG on the higher end of our guidance range. Please reference our press release for a full reconciliation of net income to adjusted EBITDA. And finally, some detail on our first quarter, which has historically contributed approximately 16.5% of our full year results. Based on quarter to date trends, we expect our first quarter to contribute less to the full year adjusted EBITDA than in prior years, representing 12 to 14% of our full year adjusted EBITDA guidance. Our guidance framework reflects our expectations for current trends to normalize coming out of the first quarter, along with our ability to leverage our food initiatives, loyalty program, and fuel pricing strategy during the higher traffic summer period. Our first quarter outlook corresponds to an average retail fuel margin of 35 CPG on the lower end and 39 CPG on the higher end of our guidance range. And with that, I'll hand it back to Ari for closing remarks.

Thanks, Rob. I will close by saying that I'm extremely proud of the team here for all of the hard work in identifying, executing, and integrating FIBA acquisition over the past 18 months. As I discussed earlier, 2024 is a year for us to focus on unlocking the value of our current assets for our stockholders. I'm excited about the work we are doing on our multi-year strategy roadmap, and I'm looking forward to sharing with you later this year. I want to end by thanking the company's almost 13,500 employees for their hard work and dedication. With that, we will open it up to questions.

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. The confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for your questions. Our first questions come from the line of Bobby Griffin with Raymond James. Please proceed with your questions.

Good morning, buddy. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess first up for me, Ari, can you elaborate a little bit on the current trends you're seeing, 1Q, that is driving the delta and your expectations of the business versus the historical? standards that we're kind of used to seeing in 1Q. And I guess I ask this in context, you know, even versus our model, the retail margins that you guys are forecasting are not much off where we were forecasting 1Q retail margins, but the EBITDA performance is different than what we were thinking. So maybe any details around what is going on from a current trend standpoint driving that?

Sure. So you're referring, Bobby, first of all, good morning, Bobby. Are you referring to Q4 or you're referring to Q1?

Q1. Q1, you know, you guys are forecasting for the first quarter to be a lower percentage of the total year than it historically is. And the retail margins look pretty fine in the forecast for the first quarter. but you referenced some current trends that are giving you pause or driving some of the lower benefit from the first quarter. So I'm just curious if you can elaborate on what these current trends are. Is it weakness in volume? Is it merchandise weakness? What is driving the delta here in the first quarter?

I think I will start, first of all, with fuel. And then I'll let Rob, maybe Jim, and Amy relate it to the merchandise. But related to fuel, as you know, Bobby, you know, OPI's nationality is down. close to 7% for the first quarter. This is something that we're seeing over here. And we are also seeing a little of that softness when it comes to CPG. That's, of course, always a trade-off. So I think CPG and demand and low demand in the first quarter, it's actually attributed a lot to that. We don't like to blame the weather, but as you know, first quarter in January this year, we had some weather events across the country in the middle of January. And usually the first quarter is the slowest quarter in this industry. And we saw the same thing, by the way, happening to us last year. But I think one of the biggest things over here is, of course, fuel, fuel drive. You know, the demand down and CPG a little bit light, it's something that drives it. But again, I can only speak based off today. You know, today we are still in February. You know, we are heading next week, you know, into March, you know, getting very, very close, you know, to the season. And, you know, things of course, you know, can change, you know, up and down during basically first quarter, beginning of second quarter.

Yeah, Bobby, good morning. Just add a little color to the guide. So quarter to date, the guide is based on a trend coming out of the fourth quarter, so we've got it positioned down high single digits for retail gallons. Again, we're not stepping out on the trend right now. We're going to position things where the trend are given we're in a kind of a January, February period. From a fuel margin range, we shared sequentially that we were $0.35 to $0.39 for the quarter. We have seen modest Sequential improvement from December to January to February, but it has been modest. So again, we're holding at that range that we shared in the prepared remarks. And then on the merchandising side, quarter to date, same store sales are down mid-single digits. On note, we're up against a strong period last year. So on a two-year stack, we're running roughly flat. And you should be thinking about that for the full year. We're using that two-year run rate as we look at Q2 through Q4.

Thank you, Robin. Nice to meet you as well. Appreciate the details. Sorry, I should have started the question Q&A with that, but welcome to ARCO. I guess on the merchandise side of things, can you maybe unpack that a little further and what you kind of think is going on? Is it just a general weakness trend in the industry, or is there some levers that you guys need to pull to maybe grow faster or in line with the industry? Just kind of anything there on that category and if you believe you're maintaining share there.

I can only tell you what I believe. I believe that this is a general trend in the industry. I mean, as I said, when you see the fuel demand down in the first quarter, we just see some softness in the market. And again, we're talking right now about January and we're talking during the first seven weeks of the quarter. And, you know, as you can expect, you know, this is like the slowest town, the slowest town basically of the year. And given that, you know, we are providing guidance first time over here, we can only, you know, advise what do we see over the past, you know, few weeks. You know, things, as I said, as we move towards March, April, you know, May, towards the summer, you know, we believe things will actually start to pick up again. As we saw, you know, almost every year. We see the same thing.

Thank you. I'll jump back in the queue and turn it over to somebody else.

Thank you, Bobby. Appreciate the questions.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Anthony Bonadio with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah. Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. So I just wanted to dig in a little bit. on the fuel margin guidance. I guess what I'm trying to understand is why 36 to 40 cents per annum is the right number. Maybe you can just walk us through the assumptions that got you to that and what you think might drive a decline versus what you saw in 23.

Anthony, as I mentioned earlier, we're using trends and we're looking at the full year. The reason why we've got a little bit of a disconnect between quarter and year is we're using trends for the first quarter. We're seeing quarter to date, and we're using 2023 trends for the full year. So Q2 through Q4 position on a slightly different basis. So you know that for last year, you know, our fuel margin was off. CPG was off modestly versus the prior year, and our gallons were down 5% for the year. So the trend we're using, again, on a full year basis for Q2 through Q4 is having that gallon demand down a single digit and the CPG midpoint down about a penny from 2023 levels. Okay, got it.

And then just a little more on guidance. I know you kind of mentioned that like two-year flattish stack on merch comps, but I guess just how should we think about the other underlying assumptions there as we think about gallons, merch margins?

And then I think the answer is no here, but are you assuming any M&A in this? expansion of merge margins.

I would not be modeling at the same rate you did for last year, but we are expecting it up. So, again, we do intend to have that continue. And then, again, to reiterate the same sort of balance, we have down mid-single digits consistent with what we had for fiscal 23.

And I will answer the question regarding M&A, Anthony. So, as you know, we have over $2 billion in available liquidity to continue M&A. We're going to continue to be disciplined. But the one thing that I mentioned during this call, and I want to reiterate, in the past nine years, we closed over 25 acquisitions. Just in the past 18 months, we closed five large acquisitions. We had a scale. I can say that we probably declared victory when it comes to M&A. We bought a lot. And, you know, as much as I spend time on acquisition, you know, my plan for 2024 is, again, let the M&A team continue to do what they're doing on a regular basis. But, you know, my team, including myself, you know, this is the time for us to peel the onion. I believe there is a lot of leverage that we can pull. I believe there is a lot of untapped opportunities that we have, you know, inside the stores given the scale that we build over here. And this is what we are going to do and this is what we are concentrating, you know, starting with the pizza lounge just, you know, three weeks ago and actually a month ago, you know, starting with the pizza lounge. You know, we are going to invest in our stores. We are going to spend a lot of time in our stores to start basically, you know, to get into the weed and, you know, get all of those opportunities that are out there and just make sure that we are tapping on them.

Got it. Thanks, guys. Thank you, Anthony.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Kelly Baena with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning, and thanks for taking our questions, and welcome, Rob. I was wondering if you can maybe elaborate. I know you're talking about an analyst day, but just elaborate a little bit more on the on the opportunities to drive organic growth. You talked about the retail segment. We've seen the announcements about the pizza program, but should we expect that there's going to be a pause on M&A for some time? And just help us understand kind of where the opportunities are from an organic perspective.

Sure, sure, sure, sure. So you probably saw, Kelly, I'll start with the three pillars. Pillar number one, of course, is the loyalty. As you guys saw in 2023, we added over 730,000 members to our loyalty program. Just in Q4, and this is just an example, and Q4, this is not the biggest Q, but just in Q4, as you can see, enrolled members spent $12.70 versus non-enrolled members that spent $9.62 per transaction, which is approximately 32% more. This is an opportunity for us, and this is something that we're going to continue to work really, really hard. We're going to continue to, you know, we have a goal over here. The goal was to get to 2 million members, and we actually achieved our goal in 2023. As I mentioned, our goal is to get to 3 million members, and this is something that we are going to concentrate and work really hard. I believe the pizza program, by the way, that I mentioned earlier, It's a great opportunity just for everybody's benefit. The whole pie pizza that we created over here for $4.99, it's only for enrolled members. And if you're not an enrolled member, you're going to pay $7.99 per pizza. So we created the opportunity for enrolled members to come in the store and grab this great tasty pizza for $4.99. I mean, $3 is different, we believe, it's going to create the opportunity for people to actually to enroll. So that's, I think, the first pillar. The second one is, of course, the core destination. As you guys see, we continue to increase margin quarter after quarter. And the increase in margin is, of course, because of the basket. Our assumption is that people are going to come in the stores and buy this great pizza and some other opportunity, like I mentioned, like the $2.99 for a chicken sandwich. Just for everybody's benefit, a chicken sandwich in a convenience store costs more than $2.99. The non-enrolled member are paying $3.99. And again, this is a great quality sandwich. And the idea is, again, how do we increase the basket? Going back to the core categories, we believe that with those items, as we get into food service and invest more time and heavy in food service, we believe that the core destination will grow, which will grow, of course, the margin. And the last basically point was related to, of course, to M&A. We're not going to slow down M&A, but we are going to, as I say, to concentrate probably on a little bit larger transaction to make sure that the team is not distracted. But as I said, my plan this year, 2024, Ari is to spend more time in the stores, make sure that the food programs that we are putting in is basically going to tap into those opportunities that we see out there. I believe that loyalty, the increase in loyalty and loyal members over here is a tremendous opportunity for us To work with those members, you know, we are, you know, our job is, of course, to provide value to those members. We've been doing that, you know, this year. And, you know, with that, we were able still to increase margin quarter after quarter, year over year. And if you go back, and I'm finished with that, if you go back just in, you know, between 2022 to 2023, we were able to increase margin 140 basis points.

Can I just follow up on the loyalty? You talked about the bigger basket sizes, which is impressive given the lower price points, but can you maybe parse out if there's any traffic benefit from those loyal customers, maybe just traffic versus customers on the loyalty program and then traffic for non-loyalty customers?

The loyal members are coming more often to the store. versus the non-loyal member. And I think that would drive the traffic. That's the reason why we keep saying that the loyal members are spending 32% more. But it's not only spending more, it's also basically coming more often to the store. And the reason they're coming more often to the stores is because on a regular basis, on a daily basis, we send the loyal members. Every enrolled member on a loyal basis is getting very valuable promotions that only enrolled members can actually get. And that's what drives them. And this is, you know, right now, if you're looking on the, basically on the basket right now, or on the trend, you know, in 2021, when we basically just started, you know, if you're looking on our basically sales, you know, which was around 13.9% loyal members, today it's around 19.3%. When it's come to, you know, to basically to merchandise sales, from a contribution standpoint, You know, in 2021, the contribution just from merchandise contribution just from loyal members was around 12.9%. Today, it's 17.6% in basically Q4 23 versus Q4 21 when we just started. So, we believe that not only they're coming more often, they're actually spending more because of that, and they increase the traffic.

Thank you. Can I just ask one more about fuel? I think the comment was that you're planning for gallon demand at retail down about mid-single-digit, and with the midpoint of the CPG kind of range down about a penny, that's another 2%. So sort of a high single-digit decline in retail fuel profits from the same store perspective. I guess is that – do you see that kind of just maybe – You know, 2024 is a year to kind of get back to stabilization and then return to growth beyond that. I'm just curious if you look at the structural factors that maybe investors were expecting to drive fuel margins higher. Are those still at play? Is there something else going on? Is it just kind of a reversion year? Maybe just help us think about or understand how you're thinking about that.

You know, we're just at the beginning of 2024. And if you remember, last year, 2023, we also saw Q1 with a lower CPG versus what we saw during the year. And because we are providing first-time guidance right now, we can only talk about trends of what we see over the past six to seven weeks. I can't forecast the year, I don't see any reason, by the way, this is my belief, Ari, I don't see any reason for CPG to decline. I still believe that all of the operators out there, you know, from a structure standpoint, everybody has the same expenses and everybody has the same issues dealing with expenses. So, again, given where we are today, you know, based on the trend over the past seven weeks, that's what we had to put out there. I believe that things shouldn't change basically from 2023. I think 2022 was a very high CPG, a record CPG year of over 41 cents for the year. But at the end of the day, we finish 2023 two pennies below, which is not significant. So I don't see any reason for those things to change. But again, it's too early in the year. There's so many things, you know, can happen, you know, during the year.

But that's where I stand today.

Thank you.

Thank you, Kelly.

Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Mark Astrakhan with Steeple. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, thanks. Morning, everybody. I guess to start, Maybe can you talk about the flow-through impact or correlation from retail fuel gallons to the in-store merchandise sales?

In terms of?

Well, in terms of just the correlation, right? It seems from the outside in that if fuel gallons are weak, fewer people are visiting stores, and therefore the merchandise sales in the store are weaker. Is that reasonable?

Not necessarily. Not necessarily. I mean, again, I mean, you know, what we're doing, just to be clear, you know, we keep talking about optimizing gross profit outside, but I can tell you that we are absolutely focusing on our market share inside the store. So, you know, by definition, when people are driving less, you have less people, of course, coming in, but I mean, overall, this is an area that we concentrate. We are competitive outside. We are pricing fuel side by side, location by location, market by market. This is not going across the board. And the one thing that we are watching when we price fuel, while we're trying to maximize gross profit and optimize gallons, we are making sure that we are watching the trend inside the store. I believe that the market that we do business, I think I mentioned it last year, 40% of our stores are in town that have 20,000 people or less. 20% of our stores are in town that have 20,000 to 50,000 people. And again, some of those areas are more areas, a little bit maybe low income areas, and I think some of those people are just being impacted by the inflation. And that's the reason why we are coming up with all of those valuable promotion. You know, for example, pizza for $4.99, you can today feed a family for less than $10. And those are the things that we are concentrating and those are the things that we bring to market. And I think those are the things that are going to help us to actually to grab more traffic inside the store.

In markets, say, you know, if you look at the fourth quarter where we had a pretty large spread, right, the same store sales were down low single digits, the gallons were down high single digits. So, Our job is to figure out how we leverage the loyalty program, how we talk to our customers, how we continue to drive to the inside and control the things that we can control. And I think that's what we're going to be focused on going forward.

Yeah, that's helpful. I guess it's really more getting at just whether the strategy that you've talked about in terms of managing the dynamics around fuel profitability and fuel volumes, and then obviously how that translates into in-store sales is the right one. Obviously, I respect that you're running a business. It's your company to do that. The stock obviously would suggest that there are challenges seen by the market, which isn't necessarily the right or the wrong thing. It is what it is. It's a report card that the market is telling you, hey, maybe there's something going on here. I guess, how do you balance that, you know, your long-term strategy, what you've seen in the results and how that translates into the stock with whether you pivot to some extent on that strategy or if none of that is correct, is it just partly the markets in which you operate? You know, Ari, you like to talk about what you just said in terms of smaller cities, towns that you operate in, more economically sensitive consumers. Is it just this is what we all have to deal with because your consumer base is different than some of your competitors?

Sure. So, you know, Mark, I've been around the block for 20 years, over 20 years in this industry. You know, in this industry, you know, you have one quarter that is great, one quarter that is maybe not great. But at the end of the day, overall, you're looking on a full year. If you're looking on our company, you know, year over year, you know, We, uh, you know, we're basically down 3.5% from prior year 2022, which was a high record year of 40 over 41 cents CPG. Everybody knows that there's a, that was a high record year. At the end of the day, we managed the business and as you can see, yeah, fuel contribution is down. Uh, around, you know, if you're looking for the full year, $46 million. But at the end of the day, if you're looking on a market, a merchandise contribution inside the stores, You know, we actually finished the year, sales excluding cigarettes, 2.5% for the year. You know, so we can't just watch one quarter or another. We actually finished the year with 2.5%, you know, same, I mean, basically same-store sales excluding cigarettes, including cigarettes, which was 0.4. But the reason I keep talking about excluding cigarettes, and I think that's something that the market needs to appreciate, this is what drives basically the margin. The margin is being driven by sales excluding cigarettes. Everybody knows that cigarette consumption is down, and that's, by the way, one of the reasons that quarter after quarter you see that the percentage of cigarette contribution inside basically our total contribution continues to actually come down, and sales from other categories, which are the core categories that I mentioned, continue to increase. At the end of the day, we managed the business on a yearly basis. And, you know, coming off 41.4 cents per gallon year, you know, we managed, you know, the business ending up with $290 million, which is only 3.5% below the, you know, the high record year. So I think we did a very good job on that.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Crew Martinson with Jeffrey.

Please proceed with your question. Good morning. I heard some new store openings there.

No, we're not going to give CapEx guidance. It's early in the year, and as I already mentioned, we're working on a number of things internally, and so we want to give ourselves the time to fully develop that strategy. But I would expect we would be at or above prior year levels, but we're not issuing specific guidance on that front.

Okay. And then in terms of operating costs, I remember a few quarters ago you had talked to the fact that just, you know, costs have gone up here. You have to grow, you know, the merchandise side of the business to kind of offset that. And I was wondering, you know, what's the opportunity there to see those costs come down as a percentage of sales or stabilize? And what's the outlook for the markets that you serve?

I think if we look at OpEx for the year, I think it was fairly well managed, right, around 2% or so for the year. So I think we're doing a good job with that. I think we're managing our business to the trends that we see. We've seen the average wage rate, which was growing rapidly, is still growing but at a lower rate. So I think we're starting to see some of the normalization on that front. And, again, we're just going to continue to focus on making sure we have the right labor for the demand in the stores. I think that's an ongoing activity that we continue to work. In a larger scale, I think, you know, we haven't talked about G&A, and I think there are, you know, one of the reasons I think that I'm here is to start to look at some structural opportunities on the G&A side as well. So I think one of the things we'll be looking at is how we can leverage the margin that we do bring in on the expense side, and that's going to be an ongoing activity through 2024.

Okay. And then just lastly, I would love to say that, you know, hey, open up some locations here in New York because the $2.99 chicken sandwich for loyalty members is an incredible bargain to us city dwellers. Thank you very much, guys.

Appreciate that. Maybe I can just comment on the NTI, because you mentioned NTI. And I think that's going back to what I think the rest of the team actually asked earlier, including Kelly, about opportunities. And I just want to be maybe mentioning that. We have three NTIs. We are breaking down on the first one in the next few weeks. We have three NTIs for 2024. And one of the things that we never discussed before, in all of those acquisitions that we did, a lot of those acquisitions came with additional land and additional opportunities. And this is the opportunity for us right now to tap into those opportunities that we bought in the past. That's one thing. The other thing, as I mentioned, is the Express. store that we just opened on a quality location. Remember, when we bought the quality location over a year and a half ago, which was a great deal for us, great transaction for us, unmanned locations for diesel, 180 sites that we bought in 2022, in July 2022, And, you know, we told people that our goal at the end of the day is to figure out a way how to tap into those unmanned locations, how to, you know, tap our retail business because, you know, the retail business brings a large contribution. We just opened an express stop unmanned location on one of the core stores in Richmond, Virginia. And the idea is to continue to expand those opportunities. The idea is to continue to expand retail tap into all of those acquisitions that we did in the past and expand them with our loyalty, with our food service. Because at the end of the day, that's what actually drives the margin. That's what actually drives the contribution over here. And I can tell you that we are laser focused on that, especially now in 2024, coming off so many acquisitions that we did over the past few years. Thank you very much, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of William Reuter with Bank of America. Please proceed with your questions.

Good morning. The first question, I know that historically, given that you do focus on the smaller markets, which are you highlighted in a previous response, there haven't been tons of competitive openings. There are many C-store concepts that are pretty aggressively expanding at this point. Are you seeing any of those openings in your existing markets that are impacting certain stores?

You know, I can't talk about a certain store or, you know, talking just on the market. We are watching, of course, the market. We are seeing some competitors coming, you know, into different markets and some of them that we are operating, of course. But this is not something new to us. I mean, we always, you know, have competitors coming to some market. You know, we are coming to some market as well. So I don't see anything over here that is different than what we actually saw in the past.

Got it. Then my follow-up question, in terms of the store base, you mentioned you're not providing CapEx guidance for the year, but how do you feel about the health of the stores in general in terms of need for either remodels or changes to their size to allow them to offer some of these new merchandise products that you're introducing?

So, you know, this is one of the things that I mentioned about Investor Day going and basically providing everybody our strategy. This is something we are evaluating at the moment. There is no question that, you know, we made our first step, heavy step, into food service, and we're going to continue to do that. And this is one of the things that we are evaluating. You know, the idea is to invest in stores that receive potential and opportunities, And this is something that we are going to present to everybody just a little bit later in the year.

Great. Look forward to that. All right. That's all from me. Thank you.

Appreciate that. Thank you.

Thank you. We have reached the end of our question and answer session. I would now like to turn the floor back over to Ari Kotler for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. Thank you all for joining the call this morning. Great questions from everybody. Really appreciate that. We're looking forward to continue to discuss with you later in the year. And we hope that you guys are going to stop in our stores, especially, you know, we don't have in New York, but, you know, we have 30-some other states that you guys can go in and buy the valuable pizza for $4.99 as long as you are an enrolled member. Don't forget that. Thank you, everybody. Have a great day.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We appreciate your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.