PriceSmart, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Price Marts, Inc. Earnings Release Conference Call for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, which ended on February 28, 2025. After remarks from our company's representatives, Robert Price, Interim Chief Executive Officer, and Michael McCleary, Chief Financial Officer, you will be given an opportunity to ask questions as time permits. As a reminder, this conference call is limited to one hour and is being recorded today, Thursday, April 10 of 2025. A digital replay will be available shortly following the conclusion of the call through April 17, 2025 by dialing 888-660-6264. For domestic callers are 646-517-3975. for international callers and entering replay access code 70282 and the pound key. For opening remarks, I would like to turn the call over to Pricemart's Chief Financial Officer, Michael McCleary. Please proceed, sir.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to Pricemart, Inc.' 's earnings call for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025, which ended on February 28, 2025. We will be discussing the information that we provided in our earnings press release and our 10-Q, which were both released on April 9, 2025. Also in these remarks, we refer to non-GAAP financial measures. You can find a reconciliation of our non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our earnings press release and our 10-Q. These documents are available on our investor relations website at investors.priceomart.com, where you can also sign up for email alerts. As a reminder, all statements made on this conference call, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements concerning the company's anticipated plans, revenues, and related matters. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements containing the words expect, believe, plan, will, may, should, estimate, and some other expressions. All forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions as of today, April 10, 2025. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including the risk detailed in the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K, the quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed yesterday, and other filings with the SEC, which are accessible on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. These risks may be updated from time to time. The company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements made during this call. Now I will turn the call over to Robert Price, Pricemart's interim chief executive officer.

Thank you, Michael, and good day, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. In a few minutes, Michael will present his report, but before he makes his remarks, I would like to begin my remarks today by thanking our 12,000 employees for their hard work and dedication to our company. We truly appreciate everything they do for Pricemart, and I am personally grateful for the opportunity to support our employees, their families, by providing competitive wages, comprehensive benefits, and a positive working environment that fosters growth and opportunity. This past week, I was in Costa Rica for the opening of our ninth Costa Rica location, which is located in the city of Cartago on the far east end of the Central Valley of Costa Rica. The opening went very well. I was impressed by the design of the building that provides an enhanced shopping experience and more efficient operational characteristics. Additionally, our buyers both in the U.S. and locally have done an excellent job procuring new and exciting merchandise as well as coordinating seamlessly with our distribution center in Costa Rica that has made our operation much more efficient. I also wanted to make brief remarks about the ongoing tariff challenges. which all merchants face, and particularly those of us who have some dependency on products from Asia. We have been developing contingency plans to try to be flexible and to adapt, but it's pretty tough right now because nobody really knows how this thing is going to play out. I think one benefit for Pricemart is that about 50% of the products we sell are sourced either locally or in the region, and about a third of the products we source come from the United States. So we're not as dependent on Asia and Europe as perhaps other merchants are. And the other thing is that we are able to bring product in through our distribution centers directly from Asia, which could give us some shelter from tariff issues that are more focused on the United States. But again, none of us really knows what's going to happen, and so we have to just try to be as smart and as adaptable as possible. So that's about the extent of my remarks. I do want to end by thanking our stockholders for their continued trust and support. And with that, I will turn the meeting back to Michael McCleary.