Restaurant Brands International Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Restaurant Brands International Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please say no to a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star and then one using your telephone keypads. You will hear a tone to confirm that you are in the question queue. To answer the question queue, you may press star and then two. Please note that all callers will be limited to one question. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Steven Lichtner, RBI's Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Restaurant Brands International's earnings call for the third quarter ended September 30th, 2021. As a reminder, a live broadcast of this call may be accessed through the Investor Relations webpage at investor.rbi.com and a recording will be available for replay. Joining me on the call today are Restaurant Brands International's CEO, Jose Sill, COO, Josh Kobza, and CFO, Matt Dunnigan. Today's earnings call contains forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks set forth in the press release issued this morning and in our SEC filings. In addition, this earnings call includes non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures are included in the press release available on our website. Throughout the call today, we will be referencing two-year comparisons for system-wide sales growth and comparable sales to provide a cleaner indication of how the business is trending versus a more normalized period. These two-year comparisons are calculated on a geometric, stacked basis by using the 2020 and 2021 disclosed growth metrics. And now, I'll turn the call over to Jose. Good morning, everyone.

Thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss our third quarter of 2021. I hope everyone is doing well. Before I dive into our results for the quarter, I'd like to highlight an important milestone for our company. In 2020, we launched our Restaurant Brands for Good sustainability framework to address our food, the planet, and the people and communities we serve. During the quarter, we announced our goal to achieve a 50% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030, which was approved by the Science-Based Targets Initiative, and reach net zero emissions by 2050 or sooner. These targets are a good example of the action-oriented approach we're taking to do our part to tackle climate change. The moment for action is now, and I'm personally extremely proud of the team's efforts so far. getting us started on this important journey. Beyond doing right by the planet, we believe we're doing right by our guests, employees, and shareholders, who we know increasingly value brands that take sustainability seriously. And this progress is really important because our value proposition starts with our brands, Tim Hortons, Burger King, and Popeyes, all of which generate resilient, growing, high margin revenue streams through comparable sales growth and restaurant development, allowing us to reinvest in our business while also returning capital to shareholders. During the third quarter, we once again grew global comparable sales year over year, driven by worldwide growth at Tim Hortons and strong results from Burger King and Popeyes international business, which offset softer performance from Burger King and Popeyes home markets. As compared to 2019, our system-wide sales growth accelerated to 5% versus 4% in Q2, driven by positive overall comparable sales growth and continued progress in our development pipelines. With 264 net new restaurants delivered during the quarter, keeping us on track to return to 2018-2019 levels of growth this year. And looking ahead to 2022, based on our current pipeline, we believe we're well positioned to accelerate our net unit growth across all three brands and continue on our path to 40,000 restaurants. Our efficient operating model helps convert the system-wide sales growth to the bottom line, contributing to robust recast flow generation that provides significant optionality allowing us to reinvest in the business and return capital to shareholders to do both dividends and open market share repurchases. We're making investments in key areas of the business, such as building in-house technology and digital teams that we believe position us to add value directly to our guests and improve restaurant operations, investing behind our marketing plan at Tim Hortons in Canada, accelerating the rollout of outdoor digital menu boards, and investing in our people, especially in areas like technology, operations, and marketing. We also returned roughly $240 million to our shareholders on October 5th in the form of a 53 cent per share quarterly dividend. Once again, maintaining the highest payout ratio in our industry. In addition, since announcing our expanded $1 billion buyback program at the end of July, we've repurchased and retired approximately 2.8 million shares in open market transactions, totaling just over $180 million. These robust capital returns reflect the confidence we have in our brands, our view of our underlying intrinsic value, and our outlook for the business. Before I turn to our brand-level performance, I'd like to hand it over to Josh to provide you with a more detailed update on our development framework, a key driver of our long-term growth prospects, then also share an update on technology. Josh?