Fomento Economico Mexicano S.A.B. de C.V.

Hello and welcome to FEMSA's fourth quarter 2023 results conference call. My name is Melissa and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this conference is being recorded and for the duration of the call your lines will be in a listen-only mode. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, please press star zero and you will be connected to an operator. I'll now turn the call over to Juan Foseca, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to FEMSA's fourth quarter and full year 2023 results conference call. Today, we are joined by José Antonio Fernández, FEMSA CEO and Executive Chairman of the Board, Paco Camacho, our Chief Corporate Officer, Eugenio Garza, our CFO, and Jorge Collazo, who heads the Office of Investor Relations. The plan today is for Jose Antonio to open the conversation with some high-level comments on the full year, as well as the senior organizational changes announced today. Then we'll get a bit more into our strategic progress and business trends, followed by Eugenio, who will focus on the results. Finally, we will turn it back to Jose Antonio for some closing remarks and open the call for your questions. Jose Antonio, please go ahead.

Thank you, Juan. Good morning, everyone. Let me begin by reflecting on a year that was like no other in recent memory, full of activity and news for the company. We kicked things off with a transformational announcement of PEMSA Forward, through which we focused our strategy on our three core business verticals. of retail, what we call also proximity of health, Coca-Cola FEMSA, and digital. We then proceeded to execute on most of its related transactions in record time and with great success by investing our investment in Heineken through two successful transactions, as well as our minority stake in Jethro Restaurant Depot, merging Envoy Solutions with Brady IFS, while reducing our capital exposure to that asset. The effort is still ongoing as we are in the process of finalizing the remaining divestments. Furthermore, we are poised to begin deploying the capital allocation strategy announced last week that will allow us to increase our leverage towards our stated objective and to avoid capital idle to avoid to have idle capital on our balance sheet. During 2023, we made significant progresses, executing on the long-range plan of all our business units and in line with our three strategic priorities of accelerating growth, going increasingly digital, and balancing our rate return profile. We achieved these strong results by combining the right strategies with the hard work of our remarkable team. On that front, and in order to better leverage the FEMSA Forward Strategy, back in September, we made important changes to better align the corporate organization with our more focused structure built around our three core business verticals. In that context, And given the strengthening of the management teams of the three verticals, today we announced two important changes in our leadership team. Paco Camacho and Eugenio Garza have both made the personal decision that this is the right time for them to finish their cycle at FENSA and move on to seek new professional challenges with effect at the end of April. Their contributions to our company have been many and substantial, and we thank and appreciate them today, wishing them continued success in their future endeavors. Martin Arias, who many of you know from his 25 years of fruitful association with FEMSA, will become CFO, working closely with Eugenio to ensure a seamless transition, and with that, Let me turn it over to Paco.