Kura Sushi USA, Inc.

At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and the lines will be open for your questions following the presentation. Please note that this call is being recorded. On the call today, we have Hajime Jimmy Uba, President and CEO, Jeff Ute, Chief Financial Officer, and Benjamin Porton, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and System Development. And now, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Porton.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining. By now, everyone should have access to our fiscal third quarter 2025 earnings release. It can be found at www.CurseIssue.com in the investor relations section. A copy of the earnings release has also been included in the 8K we submitted to the SEC. Before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements as defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore you should not put on your reliance on them. These statements are also subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. We refer all of you to our SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact our future operating results and financial condition. Also during today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation, nor is a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP, and the reconciliations to comparable GAAP measures are available in our initial release. With that out of the way, I would like to turn the call over to Jimmy.

Thanks, Ben, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. The last quarter has been a busy one for us, between rolling out the new reservation system, investigating new market opportunities, and building out our IP pipeline, and strategizing on how to get the most out of our collaborations. We completed the system-wide rollout of the reservation system ahead of schedule, made meaningful progress on building a restaurant pipeline that leverages the opportunities demonstrated by Bakersfield, and have built our business marketing calendar yet for the upcoming fiscal year. I'm extremely pleased with the result on all three fronts, and very proud of the efforts by our team members to maximize summer sales and set our sales up for Great Fiscal 26. Total sales for the fiscal third quarter were $74 million, representing comparable sales growth of negative 2.1%, with price and mix of 0.8%, offset by negative traffic of 2.9%. We are pleased to see the business moving in the right direction with sequential improvement in comp performance each month of the quarter. Cost of goods sold as a percentage of sales were 28.3%, representing an improvement of 90 basis points over the prior year quarters, 29.2%, due to pricing and ongoing efforts by the supply chain team. Labor as a percentage of sales increased by 50 basis points due to high single-digit wage inflation, partially offset by pricing and incremental operational efficiencies. Restaurant-level operating profit margin was 18.2 percent as compared to 20 percent in the prior year due to higher labor, occupancy, and other costs. During the third quarter, we opened three new restaurants, North Scottsdale, Arizona, Greenwood, Washington State, and McKinney, Texas. Subsequent to quarter end, we opened two more units, one in Woodlands, Texas, and one in Salt Lake City, Utah. We are very pleased with the class of 2025, with many of our restaurant openings exceeding our expectations. Linwood joined our top five restaurants shortly after opening. At the beginning of the fiscal year, we provided unit development guidance of 14 new restaurants, which we achieved with last week's Salt Lake City opening. I'll leave it to Jeff to share our thoughts on guidance for the remainder of the year, but I will mention that we have currently five units under construction. Over the last several calls, we have been discussing the opportunity in smaller DMAs demonstrated by the success of this year's opening in Bakersfield, California, and how the greater optionality created by these smaller markets can not only expand our white space potential, but also serve as a functional comp tailwind by reducing the number of openings in markets that can cannibalize sales. We have mentioned that we hope to get back to a 50-50 split between new and existing markets by fiscal 2027, and that we've been hard at work developing previously unexplored DMAs like Des Moines, Richmond, and Tulsa. I'm very pleased to say that we now have properties under negotiation at each of these markets. Turning to marketing, we have seven to eight IP collaborations lined up for Fiscal 2026, which, as we mentioned in the previous call, is a record for us. Fiscal 2026 We have no interactions between IP campaigns, and we will be wrapping this risk area with included a four to five month stretch without IP collaborations. We have a renewed appreciation for the role that collaborations play in our sales and have made investments to better utilize this opportunity that is unique to Gura. In addition to creating a new role in our marketing team, which will be fully dedicated to researching and negotiating with new licensors, We have also established an International Property Committee to facilitate the development of longer-term strategies as it relates to our IP collaborations. To close, I would like to provide an update on our system development efforts. While we had originally expected to complete the implementation of the reservation system by the end of the fiscal year, we were able to roll out reservations across all restaurants by early June. The response from guests and team members has been uniformly positive. While it's too early for us to quantify the impact of the reservation system, we believe it has great potential as a comp driver and have identified system improvement opportunities, which we believe could drive operational efficiencies as well. Although the implementation of these improvements will take some time, We are pleased with the strong start and look forward to being able to share more quantified expectations in future calls regarding potential traffic lift and labor improvement through the reservation system. As a final note, I'm pleased to also announce the introduction of a new light rice option, which will give guests even more control over how they experience Kula by introducing the The third quarter has been a very busy one for us, and it's exciting to see so many of our initiatives come online or across the finish line. All of our team members, both at our restaurants and our chief support center, have been doing incredible work to make this happen. Thank you, everyone. Jeff, I'll hand it over to you to discuss our financial results and liquidity.