Koninklijke Ahold Del Ord

Good morning and welcome to the analyst conference call on the third quarter 2023 results of Aarhus Delhaize. Please note that this call is being webcast and recorded. Please note that in today's call forward looking statements may be made. All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward looking statements. Such statements may involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those included in the statements. Such risks and uncertainties are discussed in the interim report, third quarter 2023, and also in Aarhus Dalherza's public filings and other disclosures. Aarhus Dalherza disclosures are available on aarhusdalherza.com. Forward-looking statements reflect the current views of Ahoz al-Herza's management and assumptions based on information currently available to Ahoz al-Herza's management. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made and Ahoz al-Herza does not assume any obligation to update such statements as necessary. Such statements accept as required by law. The introduction will be followed by a Q&A session. Any views expressed by those asking questions are not necessarily the views of Aho Delherza. At this time, I would like to hand the call over to JP O'Meara, Senior Vice President, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, JP. Thank you.

Thank you, Sharon, and good morning, everybody. I'm delighted to welcome you to our Q3 2023 results conference call. On today's call are Franz Muller, our president and CEO, and Yolanda Putz-Bell, our CFO. After a brief presentation, we will open the call for questions. In case you haven't seen it, the earnings release and the accompanying presentation slides can be accessed through the investor section of our website, aholdeles.com, which provides extra disclosures and details for your convenience. To ensure everyone has the opportunity to get their questions answered today, I ask that you initially limit yourself to two questions. If you have further questions, then feel free to re-enter the queue. To ensure ease of speaking, all growth rates mentioned in today's prepared remarks will be at constant exchange rates unless otherwise stated. And with that, I hand over to Franz.

Yes, thank you very much, JP, and good morning, everyone. Of course, a special welcome to Yolanda, who is joining her first quarterly call as CFO of Alvarez. Yolanda has been on an extensive induction program that started in August and officially assumed the CEO role on October 1st. She will share some thoughts and take you through the financials in a few moments. As we head into the busy holiday season for our customers and associates, it's a good time to reflect on the environment we're operating in, as well as the important strategic and operational choices we are taking to drive long-term value creation. No doubt, times continue to be turbulent. The war in Ukraine already lasts almost two years, and in the Middle East we are facing another war between Israel and Hamas. In our markets, we also see firsthand some of the tragedies of the current political and social climate. On October the 25th, the city of Lewiston in the state of Maine, Hannaford's home state, experienced one of the darkest moments in its history. A mass shooting took the lives of 18 people and injured many more. We unfortunately know that mass shootings have become more frequent in the US, but this incident was particularly chilling because such events are unprecedented in Maine. Our thoughts are with our colleagues in Maine and everybody in Lewiston who will be dealing with this strategy for a long time. Reflecting on business trends, Many of the ones I outlined during our last quarterly call indeed materialized as expected. While inflation has passed its peak, customers' household budgets remain under pressure, as many of them are also experiencing higher interest rates, and in the case of the U.S., declining federal and state government assistance. With our strong portfolio of brands, we grew comparable store sales by 3.1% in the third quarter. We delivered an underlying operating margin of 3.8% and diluted underlying EPS of 58 cents. While both these metrics are lower year over year, from a margin perspective, around half of the decline is linked to insurance-related adjustments, with the other half resulting from lower margins in the U.S., which Yolanda will discuss in a few moments. Our formula for success, therefore, has continued to play an important role. First of all, being agile and adaptable to meet and exceed customer needs. Secondly, embracing transformation in an operating model. And third, continuing to advance our sustainability agenda. Today, I'm going to focus on the second point, embracing transformation. Here, there are four important moves I would like to highlight, each also underpinning our strong discipline focus on value creation. The first is the announcement of the planned addition of local Romanian supermarket chain Profi to our family, subject to approval from the regulatory authorities. Densing up existing markets is a tried and tested strategy of ours, where we have a proven track record of delivering highly accretive returns in a short space of time. This acquisition will more than double the size of our, the less existing Romanian business, which operates under the Mega E-Mice brand and has 969 stores, predominantly in urban areas. Profi operates 1,654 stores, mainly in rural areas and generated roughly 2.5 billion euro in sales for the 12-month ended 2023. Strong format fit and complementary propositions between the Profi and Mega E-Mice brands will allow them to better serve the Romanian customer, driving both sales and profitability. The combination with Profi is expected to be sales growth and EBIT margin accretive, post synergies and integration to Ahol de Les Europe and EPS accretive to Ahol de Les as a group in the first year after closing. The implied fully synergized acquisition multiple is approximately seven times on June 2023, last 12-month EBITDA basis, and that is in post-IFRS 16 number. Secondly, we thoroughly believe our strength lies in the seamless mix of in-store and online shopping, and that in our omnichannel strategy. To assess where we stand in this changing environment, we have done a thorough review and analysis as part of our Accelerate initiative. As customers' shopping preferences evolve in the U.S., one of the concrete outcomes is to orient our online fulfillment capabilities towards more efficient, less asset-intense same-day delivery models, such as Click and Collect. This has already led to the decision earlier this year to close the U.S. Jersey City and Hannover fulfillment centers, and focus on pick from stores and third-party partners. Based on the economics of the omnichannel business model and return on investment we are striving for, divesting fresh direct is an additional outcome of this analysis. This will enable us to focus on growth and investments in our broader based omnichannel businesses, where we have strong store density and online presence, leading market shares and a longstanding heritage of loyalty and deep relationships with customers. We believe Gatier, a pioneer in the tech industry and the ultra-fast online grocery delivery business, is the right company to carry FreshDirect forward. FreshDirect has been a trusted brand in the New York City area for more than 20 years, knowing for delivering the highest quality, freshest food, and deeply loyal customers who are passionate about the brand. We expect this legacy to continue under the new owner. The third, in Belgium, the Deles team continues to make excellent progress on the execution of its future plan. Today, Deles has announced that it signed agreements on 51 of its integrated stores to independent entrepreneurs, of which the first 12 stores have already opened their doors under the new entrepreneurs as of last Friday. and with a further three planned stores for conversions this week. I'm also pleased to report that impacts of Belgium on our Q3 results were rather minimal, with the market delivering positive comparable store sales and having only a minor 20 basis points impact on European sales and 10 basis point impact on European margins. Fourth, as you know, we have a long and strong track record of working hard with suppliers to mitigate price increases. and to swiftly reflect the price decreases where possible, ensuring our customers have access to affordable and healthy options. Ensuring we continue to provide fuel for our long-term safe for our customer program is another area where we invest time and energy. And to help tackle persistent price differences between European markets, Aho Deles has joined the European Retail Alliance, the joint venture Eurelec, which is a collaboration with Rewe Group and Leclerc Company. This is in addition to our already existing memberships in the AMS and Copernic Buying Alliances. But with this specific partnership, we aim to promote open and fair price negotiations with the largest FMCG brands across Europe, which ultimately benefits our customers. In the end, we owe it to our customers to keep our food affordable, especially during these challenging times. Speaking about things that are important to customers, let me spend a brief moment on health and sustainability. This area remains a priority for our brands with several examples from the quarter on slide 11. Albert Heijn and Bol were featured in a mini documentary powered by Kickstart AI. Albert Heijn explained how they are using artificial intelligence to reduce food waste using demand forecasting. This is a great proof point. of how they use innovation and technology to combine the reduction of food waste with providing customers access to affordable and healthy products, while at the same time reducing cost. Paul demonstrated how to use automatic packaging machines controlled by smart algorithms to ensure the use of less cardboard and smaller parcels. He also used AI to see if additional packaging is actually needed. And this results in less transparent movements and the use of smaller, more sustainable vehicles, like the bike couriers of Cyclone. Looking at reducing carbon emissions, every initiative, big and small, counts. For example, Deleuze and French fast-charging provider Elektra have plugged in the first six of a planned 1,200 fast-charging points. Food Lion, Hannaford, and The Giant Company were recognized for their programs to reduce emissions from the refrigerant systems. So as you can see, we have been very active over the past month, and I'm particularly excited by the building blocks for the future growth we are putting in place. More on that later, but let me now hand over to Jolanda to share your remarks on the financials.

Thank you so much, Frans, and good morning to everyone. I'm excited to be here and look forward to engaging with you in the years ahead. As Franz mentioned earlier, I had the pleasure to start in the middle of August with an extensive six-week induction program. This gave me the opportunity to dive into our business and visit almost all of our great local brands, and more importantly, meet many of our wonderful associates across the company. I'm impressed by the dedication and passion of my colleagues, their agility in managing dynamic times, and the pride in the strong results our business continues to deliver. We are a true people-for-people business that's well positioned in the heart of our society. Now let's go into our Q3 numbers and the key highlights. On slide 13, our net sales grew with 2.9% to €21.9 billion. This was mainly driven by the strong comparable sales growth in Europe of 7% and continued market share gains in our most important markets. Group underlying operating margin was 3.8% for Q3, a decrease of 60 base points versus last year, about half of which was related to insurance and interest-related changes. From an operational perspective, I'm proud of the work of our great local brands to limit the impact of cost inflation through the Save for Our Customer program and additional Accelerate initiatives, which helped to offset a large portion of these higher costs. Diluted underlying earnings per share for the quarter were 58 cents, down 17.1% at actual rates, two-thirds of which relates to unfavorable exchange rate and the one-off items I already mentioned. Slide 14 shows our results on an IFRS reported basis for Q3. Our group operating income was €625 million, representing an IFRS reported operating margin of 2.9%, mainly impacted by a 153 million impairment charge for FreshDirect, mainly related to revaluations of next-day delivery equipment and buildings, and 61 million euro in restructuring and related costs pertaining to Belgium and other Accelerate initiatives. On slide 15, you see comparable sales growth by region, including and excluding weather, calendar and other effects. These had a limited impact in the quarter. In the U.S., Hurricane Ian was a 40-base point headwind, which was offset by 20 base points from calendar and 10 base points from weather the year. In Europe, the Belgian test formation had a minor impact of 20 base points in the quarter. To share more detail on these developments, let's now turn to our regional performance. Slide 16. In the U.S., excluding the impact of weather and calendar shifts, comparable sales grew by 1%. and reported net sales were €13.6 billion. Online sales in the segment were up 4.4%, driven primarily by double-digit growth at Foodline and Hannaford, as they continued to invest in their omnichannel proposition. Two key highlights of the quarter were Foodline's 44th consecutive quarter of comparable store sales growth, as well as overall strong growth in omnichannel customers, which increased 8% compared to a year ago. The reduction in emergency federal SNAP benefits, higher interest rates, and the resumption of student loan repayments in October continue to weigh on customer sentiment. On its own, the reduction in SNAP benefits resulted in approximately a 4 percentage point headwind to sales growth in the third quarter. We were able to offset a large portion of this headwind through our strong value propositions and the ongoing momentum in online sales. An underlying operating margin in the US was 4.3%, down 80 base points from the prior year. This was due to the cycling of an insurance reserve release in the prior year that was 30 base points favorable. Wage inflation, an increase in shrink, and the unfavorable effect of a change in sales mix. The increase in shrink is a result of the current economic conditions and rise in social tensions. which is a real concern for both the safety of our associates and our customers. We are deploying additional solutions in stores, including upgraded camera systems, self-checkout monitoring, anti-push-out grocery carts, and in-store life surveillance to counter this negative trend. With the help of the measures we are putting in place through our Accelerate initiatives, in-store actions to reduce shrink, and further volume support incentives from vendors, we expect this modest margin pressure to be transitory and pass in a couple of quarters. Turning now to Europe on slide 17, sales increased by 7.1%, resulting in net sales of 8.3 billion euro. When looking at Europe, which has endured a lot of pressure in the last two years, I'm confident we're on the path to recovery, particularly on returning margins in the region to their historical averages. While inflation is also moderating in Europe, our major efforts to elevate and harmonize our customer value proposition also saw accelerated comparable sales growth compared to Q2, with volume improvement also playing an important role. Underlying operating margin in Europe was 3.5%, consistent with prior year. The impact of the Belgium transformation, energy and wage inflation in many of our markets were offset by strong cost controls. the successful execution of the Safe for Our Customer program and the decrease in non-cast service charges for the Dutch employee pension plan. To be consistent with prior quarter, Belgium and energy impacted the Q3 margin by around 15 base points. In the Netherlands, Albert Heijn and Bol had outstanding market share gains. At Albert Heijn, AHA Premium is now approaching 900,000 members and the brand launched the AHA Terra own brand, with around 200 plant-based products. We're also delighted to have completed the conversion of the first 15 Jan Binder stores to Albert Heijn in Q3. On slide 19, turning to bull, we saw healthy growth rates again in Q3, as gross merchandise value was 1.3 billion euro, an increase of 6.5% compared to the prior year. And we continue to see very strong growth in our highly profitable new service areas, with advertising services up almost 50% and logistic offerings up over 20% compared to last year. I expect growth to continue at a good pace over the remainder of the year, with bull well set up to gain further share during the holiday period. Moving on to our free cash flow. Q3 free cash flow was €512 million, up from €133 million in the prior year. The major increase in working capital year over year reflects the sub-S4H HANA to go live in the US last time. The optimization of netting processes in SAP were normalized by the end of Q4-22, so expect the counter-effects of this change in the upcoming Q4. Excluding this timing impact, we nonetheless see good progress on underlying working capital in both regions. and we will continue to look for further opportunities as we leverage our skill, supply chain transformation, and new data capabilities through AI and machine learning. To this end, on slide 21, we also need to ensure we maintain a good base in modernizing our infrastructure to support our omnichannel growth. We are a well-invested company, and we will be rigorous and disciplined in executing large-scale projects. During the quarter, we moved forward on many projects in Europe, including Albert Heijn's newly opened and technologically advanced mechanized home shop center in Barendrecht, powered by Swissloch. The new center will use 300 robots to collect non-perishable products, making the work easier for associates. Bol recently opened its second warehouse for extra-large items such as trampolines, TVs and airco's, a category with significant untapped market share potential. In Belgium, while a lot of focus this year has been on the transformation plan, Dell has also been diligently preparing for further growth online, building a new e-commerce center slated for early autumn of 2024. Finally, in the CSE region, we plan to go live with our first home shop center at Mega Image in Romania in the coming weeks. in this instance applying the successful Albert Heijn e-commerce model. In the US, our brands continue to update and modernize the local store networks and e-commerce platforms. For example, Food Lion launched omnichannel remodels in 47 stores in Greenville, North Carolina, with sales so far exceeding expectations. We continue to invest in Prism, our own propriety e-commerce platform. Because it's our own platform, we fully own the customer digital experience and the first-party customer data, which provides an unique opportunity for us to continue to learn about our customers and make changes to meet their needs. In summary, our strong and consistent financial performance gives us a great platform to unlock the many growth opportunities we see on the journey ahead. Optimizing and nurturing AholdoHair's long-term value creation will be one of our top priorities I look forward to the opportunity to meeting many of you all in person in the coming months. With that, I'd like to pass to Frans for our outlook.

Thank you very much, Jolanda. As we approach the halfway point of our Leading Together 2025 ambitions, we are on track and in many cases ahead of our ambitions. A lot has changed since we embarked on our Leading Together journey. Rest assured, our leadership team, which is now back to its full complement with Jolanda, has the energy and determination to keep this trajectory going. Taking stock of what we have learned so far, we are currently refreshing our priorities to calibrate to the macro and competitive environment. This will require some shifts in focus, but I also believe this will lead to faster growth rates and higher ROIs. For example, we will double down on our customer value proposition and our clearly winning omnichannel model. just to take a few proof points for the U.S. Online traffic was up 19% in Q3, including sessions with purchase intent also up 19% year-over-year. Omnichannel customers, our most profitable customers, grew by over 80% year-over-year in Q3. And long-term customer retention remains strong. Of the first time online shoppers during COVID the peak of COVID in the second quarter of 2020, 66% were still active shoppers online or in-store with us in the third quarter of 2023. With this strong pivot to digitally driven customers in our model, and there are also many European examples I could have used here as well. With that, I see tremendous opportunities to build further on our complementary revenue streams. In 2023, from a capacity and capability perspective, we had made solid ground and put in place best-in-class solutions to really accelerate growth. Together with the ad tech company Adhees, of which we acquired a 25% stake last year, the European team reached their first major milestone with the expansion of the self-service platform to include display campaigns on Aha.nl and in the Albert Heijn app. Simultaneously in the U.S., advertisers can now reach our 44 million customers all from one platform. And just recently, our U.S. AD Retail Media ranked the fifth best overall U.S. retail media network and scored the number two position in the area of omnichannel sales data. These are just a few examples to reiterate our excitement about the opportunities that are ahead of us. and I'm looking forward to sharing more on these and others at our Strategy Day in May 2024 in the Netherlands. In the meantime, you can continue to count on us to leverage our scale and position as market leaders, work closely with suppliers to mitigate price increases, and doing our homework, managing our costs and investments. As a responsible company, we will also continue to take action and create future-focused plans to tackle the challenges of climate change and sustainability. In terms of the 2023 outlook, we are updating as follows. We now expect free cash flow for 2023 in a range from 2.2 to 2.4 billion euro, reflecting the ongoing strong operating cash flows and improvements made by our brands in working capital management. Net capital expenditures are now expected to be around 2.4 billion euro. And underlying EPS is now expected to be slightly below 2022 levels as we see the reduction in federal government support having a more negative impact than we originally expected. In addition, we remain committed to our underlying operating margin of at least 4% for 2023 to our dividend policy and our share buyback program as we previously stated. We're also announcing today a new 1 billion euro share buyback program to start at the beginning of 2024. Thank you for your continued interest in our company and operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A queue. We will now go to our first question. One moment, please. And your first question comes from the line of Andrew Gwynne from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Hi there, good morning. Two questions if I can. So firstly, the expectation is that there's a couple of difficult quarters to come. So just to clarify, you mean sort of Q4, Q1, rather than already including Q3 in that. And sort of attached to that, Is it really just down to external factors or is there anything within the business that we should have in mind? So that's the first question. I appreciate it's part A, part B. And the second question, the thinking about fresh direct, it's not really been part of the group for very long. So just have us understand the decision to sell it.

Thank you very much. I've asked Yolanda to answer the first part of your first question. The second thing, Andrew, and thank you for... for your questions here. I think we called out a couple of topics on external factors. We have a good trend in Europe on our margin profile. You know that historically we have a 4 plus margin profile and we have now a slightly better trend in Europe. But of course the Europeans are doing a good job here and we see a positive trend also going into the next year. Let's not forget we have external factors, which you might call the Ukrainian war and therefore energy-related elements. There are some commodity topics which keep us busy with the war in the Ukraine. But the good news is there in Europe that we are trending very well with our project in the last in Belgium. We are running according to plan. And also our brands, if it's the Netherlands, as we mentioned already, Bull.com, Bull. I must say in the meantime with the new brand name and Albert Heijn are trending very well and gaining share. I think also there we will have to see positive momentum in the second half of 2024 also through Profi in Romania. On the US, on external factors, I think the snap reduction effect on sales, the 400 basis points, came in higher than we expected earlier. We were counting roughly on a 2% sales impact, and we see now a 4% sales impact. So that was a negative when the emergency snap disappeared. And like Yolanda already mentioned, we see also the consumer now, as from October, with an extra burden on the student loans, which have to be repaid after pausing for quite some time. On the U.S. margin, There are no external effects as such, apart from the fact that we have one-offs in the insurance release from last year, 30 basis points, and we have a shrink number, which is partly also driven by theft and a different type of culture of 20 basis points. Before Jolanda will answer the first part of your question, let's go to FreshDirect. You're right that we did acquire FreshDirect not that long ago. And we did a review of our total online omnichannel business lately. We see that customers' behavior changed quite a bit during and coming out of COVID. And we see that customers are very excited about our omnichannel, our store brands plus online proposition. And you see also that there's a shift in the timeliness of our total fulfillment where it used to be five years ago, only next day delivery. We see a very different profiling here with click and collect, but also same day. So having done that review, we looked at our fulfillment options in the U.S., and that's why we took the decision to close next year our Jersey City facility, which is also a next day facility. We are closing down Hanover in Maryland and D.C., and we'll bring the volumes to Manassas in the same market. And also in that total review, we also took the decision to sell Fresh Direct for the same reason. And those are not easy decisions, as you can imagine, but I think this is the right decision going forward based on customer behaviors, based on our omni-channel online strategy, changing customer behavior since COVID-19, but we also wanted to make sure that the new owner gate here is a solid owner, also not only for the customers of Fresh Direct in a brand which is 20 years there in the New York market, the New York City market, but also that for our employees there is a good new employer available. That on Fresh Direct, that on the review and the reasoning, and that on the logic on a different fulfillment model for changing customer behaviors. Over to you, Jolanda.

Thank you, Franz. Yes, well, as you all know, we don't give any guidance referring to next year, but we think it's transitory indeed because as we shared, as Franz also said, part of that margin decrease that we experienced in this quarter is cycling and insurance release last year, so our one-off effects. We are investing in growth, so we will count on the volume and growth to be restored And we also have a large, say, for our customers program and additional accelerate initiatives to offset any burden and pressure we feel on the margin currently.

Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. Thanks very much. Thank you. We will now go to your next question. And your next question comes from the line of Nick Coulter from Citi. Please go ahead.

Morning. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Two, if I may, please. First, I know there'll be a month lag, but could you talk to the trend in recent monthly periods for your US volume market shares by banner, please? It's obviously quite hard to discern your relative volume performance from your competitors, given price and mix. And then secondly, I guess coming back to Andrew's second question, could you update on your journey towards online channel profitability? Clearly from the slides, you're working with a number of partners, including AutoStore with Blue Robots. But it also seems like you're consolidating your fulfillment centers and moving away from same day from your comments. So just to understand how your thoughts are evolving in the context of driving the economics would be helpful, please. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Nick. And I understand your question on volume because when I just focus for the moment on the US markets, we said last quarter already that it's very important for both us and the CPG companies to get those positive volumes back into our system. We see in... Inflation coming down quite heavily in the US, CPI in the northeast of roughly 2% at the moment. And we see also that in the last weeks, we see also that at least two of our brands get into positive volume territory. So that's good news. We see also that for the CPG companies, they also say, hey, for us also volumes are important to be positive. So we see an increased investment in our brands. We see investment, trade funds, and promotional money coming into our business to boost the volumes. On market shares, I think you know that the Nielsen Company is for the U.S. well after the quarter, so we don't have those numbers yet. So we work with proxies, partly based from IRI, and we think that we see in our key markets market share gains. I can't do for you the metrics for the total East Coast, but in the second quarter, for example, We gained 50 basis points, 5-0 basis points of market share gain on the East Coast. And we think that also in the third quarter, in our key markets, we did pretty well. And we're quite competitive there.

So you're saying that there's a volume market share gains, are they?

Oh, those are nominal market share gains in dollars. And I think to have volume market share gains, although we don't report on these kind of things, and also Nielsen is almost not reporting on this, It will take a little bit more time. I think we have a sort of lagging investment and trade funds from suppliers. It's growing now, but it will take a little bit of time. On e-commerce profitability, we have a target to get e-commerce fully loaded profitable, and we're on the right trajectory and also in that light where the first priority is to grow customers share a wallet in an omni-channel fashion, so stores plus online, that is our first priority, to grow those customers, because those customers are bigger for us and also more profitable, that within that ambition, we still would like to make sure that our e-commerce as such, from a fulfillment perspective, also gets more cost-efficient. That's why we automate more, that's why we moved more to click and collect with 1,400 stores online, in our US network, which is a more profitable, but a very much highly adopted fulfillment methodology for our customer base. And that's why we also work partly with third party gig providers to deal with a part of our delivery sales. So Ecom is getting more profitable, Nick. And you said something like moving away from same day. I think that is not what we can support. We're moving away a little bit from next day delivery, company operated. So that we move away from. That's why you see Fresh Direct, Jersey and Hanover, what I mentioned before, but same day and faster delivery from our store network, click and collect and these kind of things. That is a trend now. And that's also more economical for us. So it will bring a positive contribution to the overall profitability of the segment and also e-commerce in itself as a fulfillment silo.

That's great. One quick one, if I may, just on the level of fresh direct sales, just to help us with our models, please.

Yeah. You know that we don't comment on these kinds of things on individual brands, but directionally $700 million is Perfect. Thank you, sir. In the New York, Christchurch area.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. We will now go to the next question. And your next question comes from the line of William Woods from Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Just to follow up on your US like-for-likes and the impact on Snap, I think you said you had a two-point headwind in Q2. I think you forecasted that would be low single digit in H2, and you've now seen four points in Q3. I suppose, why is it worse than you expected, and is it different at different brands? And to build on that, Is there, how do you disaggregate the effect of SNAP versus just being too expensive relative to peers and losing customers? And then the second one is obviously you're cutting capex and increasing your free cash flow guidance. Why do you think now is the right time to do this? And where are you pulling most of that capex from? Is it US store improvements or is it bowl.com investments? Thanks.

Thank you, William. Jolanda will comment on the CapEx question you have. I will briefly come back to SNAP. It's not so easy to predict government policies on these kind of nutritional support programs, but we made an assessment last time with the 2%, and that emergency SNAP, which was the SNAP on top of the normal running programs, have impacted us more than we expected. And I think we're not the only one in this field. So that's why we see an impact of four percentage points on our sales numbers from SNAP. And it means for roughly four customers and $100 per household less. And this is, of course, real money for people who have already a lower income base. So from two to 4%, that is a bigger impact than we expected originally. when we last time gave you the 2% assessment.

And the other question on the CAPEX. Well, if you look at the story we shared as an introduction, we are clearly investing in our future. We think that's really important. We are a well-invested company and we plan to remain so. So if you look at the CAPEX reduction guidance that was reduced, that's the net CAPEX. So from a gross CAPEX perspective, we're not reducing our investments It's the disposals that is driving that lower guidance. The increase in free cash flow is really related largely to our working capital improvements.

I was just going to follow up on the SNAP question. Is it that you're losing the less affluent consumer? Or is it that they're just spending less with you and you think that spend is going somewhere else? Are you losing them completely or just getting lower share of the basket, basically?

Let me give you the example of, for example, something like Foodline. Foodline has in its demography and customer base a relatively higher snap share. But we don't lose those customers. Those customers are within the store and make different choices. That's partly for and that with a lower SNAP budget. And SNAP is, of course, not the only budget they have to spend on groceries. But we see that they, within the store, make different choices, and mainly also to buy a higher share of their sales in private label. And that whole private label trend that own brands share, we see that everywhere going up in the U.S. and in Europe. So customers make different choices, and at Food Lion, A lower SNAP budget has an impact on customers, but FoodLine is able to mitigate this both in private label and the total customer value proposition. FoodLine has been and will be also one of those brands with a strong comparable sales growth and market share gain. And this is how we try to mitigate that. And one quick thing on CapEx, and Jolande was completely right with her analysis. But don't forget, with our roughly 3% over sales capex, we are high in the industry. So we are fully invested and fully modernized brands. And sometimes people forget that, that this is a high priority for now, but also for the future.

Understood.

Thank you.

Thank you. We will now go to the next question. And your next question comes from the line of Isabelle de Brova from Morgan Stanley, please go ahead.

Hello, good morning. I had a question around your outlook for US sales growth. You called out the snap impact, but I was wondering, considering the path of food inflation or disinflation, as well as the volume trajectory from the various components, Do you think it's realistic that the like-for-likes can stay above zero over the next two to three quarters, or should we now be thinking about a small negative, so like a minus one, minus one and a half type of like-for-like as we head into Q1? And then my second question is on the Romanian acquisition. I saw that you mentioned the seven times fullest, but within that, could you give us some color on what you are assuming regarding synergies And also, in general, why did you decide to pursue M&A and lever up the balance sheet, given where interest rates are? I saw that you've taken the revolving credit line. And why not increase the buyback instead?

Let me, Isabel, thank you. Let me take that last thing on Profi. And I would like to ask... Jolanda to give a few things more on what we expect on inflation and on sales rates for the U.S. On Profi, have a look at our balance sheet. You know, I mean, we have a very strong balance sheet, which is therefore also a great instrument to improve our market positions. And you know that we have in all the markets the strategy to be number one, two in those markets. And With this acquisition in Romania, we're exactly doing that. So it's completely on strategy, on a relatively big market in Europe, on the market which is growing GDP, and also a very complementary brand to our Mega Image brand. So on strategy, strong market, GDP growth. And if you look at the growth numbers of both our Profi and Mega Image brands, those are all double-digit growth numbers, so attractive markets. And what we always said is that although our free cash flow guidance is a number without M&A, and our capex numbers is a number without M&A, I think we have a very strong reason to do so. We serve at the same time, and you saw that later on, that we are also confirming our dividend payout ratio policy. We have a 1 billion share buyback this year, but also for 2024. And we have a strong balance sheet where we have a very strong ratings with B++ and BAA1. So also there, we kept to this kind of investment grade rating. So from a rating perspective, from a servicing all our commercial things like CapEx and dealing with our investments, but also investments not only in stores, but also investment in sustainability. After all these kinds of things, we still have room to also have a strong share buyback and strategically do the right thing by strengthening our business with Profi. So that is the whole thing. And you have seen with Profi, it has not a big impact on our total balance sheet nor on our ratings. And it has to do with a strong balance sheet and Profi, very good acquisition but relatively moderate in line with our total balance sheet.

And the first part of your question around U.S. and sales growth, well, we are optimistic for the holiday season ahead of us. And the trend we see so far in this period is that we are consistent with Q3.

And the last question, I think, Isabelle, was also on synergies on PROFI MegaImage. We gave you the multiple as an indication, synergized multiple. We are now in the phase that we brought the file forward to the authorities for approval, and we are just taking these kind of things first. before we come back to that. And I hope that that goes fast with the European and Romanian authorities. And there's another beautiful item to talk about during our strategy day in May, and then we give a much fuller update. We know more than... We have also a better view on timing when we might expect those approvals.

Thank you. We will now go to our next question. And your next question comes from the line of Robert Jan Foss from ABN, AMRO, Odo, BHF. Please go ahead.

Yes. Hi, good morning. I have a few follow-up questions. From Jolanda's comment on CAPEX, I understood that the delta of 100 million roughly is related to disposals and not so much to gross CAPEX. Should we conclude from that that this delta roughly represents the cash proceeds you expect from Fresh Direct? And related to that, are those proceeds included in your new free cash flow target? That's my first question. and I also have a follow-up on the Romanian acquisition. If you talk about seven times EBITDA, except post IFRS 16, I assume that you then also refer to the EV of 1.8 billion and not to the 1.3, which is excluding IFRS 16. Can you confirm that? And yeah, Did I understood correctly that you are not willing to give any kind of quantification of the synergies that you assume for this acquisition? Those are my questions. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you Robert-Jan. You are correct that we do not give at this stage further details about synergies and these kind of elements. There are a few more things to talk about. We are very excited about this acquisition. because it gives a leading position, complementarity, synergies are very respectful, and we also have very good managers on both sides, so strong management teams. And you are correct, the numbers I called you out are also based on the 1.8 billion, as you already indicated. CapEx, Jolanda, another question.

Thank you for the question. We don't disclose any more details on the Fresh Direct than was included in the press release. So in the press release you can see that in Q3 we had an impairment taken on in our numbers and in the subsequent event paragraph we disclosed that we expect a loss to be taken in the Q4 numbers between 275 and 325 million euros to be taken. So The disposal we referred to in the CAPEX was not related to FreshDirect.

Okay, but maybe can you confirm that there will be positive cash proceeds and is it included in the free cash flow target that was raised?

We can't give any disclosures on that, so we have to refer to the press release and the subsequent event paragraph at number 14, the last paragraph of our press release.

All right.

Thank you.

To give you a little bit of flavor here, we do not expect from this cash transaction a positive effect on our free cash flow. Our free cash flow is a very clean number. Exactly.

Oh, maybe that helps. The definition of a free cash flow doesn't include divestments or investments. So it's not in that number.

Free cash flow without M&A, Robert-Jan.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you. We will now go to the next question. And your next question comes from the line of Sridhar Ramakali from UBS. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Really coupled both on US, given the sort of magnitude of surprise clearly investors and us all seeing today, can you spend a bit more time maybe talking about if there is anything else beyond what we've discussed so far, particularly your price positions by Banner in France Also, talk to anything that's changing in terms of market share trends there as well. Related question is, I know the year has changed quite a lot from Q1 when we thought, or certainly some investors thought you were over-earning, now to have gone the other way around.

Apologies, Sridhar. Your line is very quiet. Would you be able to speak up a little bit?

Can you hear me now?

Thank you.

Hello, sorry about that. So listen, I think really the question was given the magnitude of surprise today on the US, can you spend a bit more time as in, you know, is there anything going on beyond what we've discussed so far? Can you perhaps elaborate a little bit around price positions, talk a little bit about market shares to give us a reassurance that it isn't a market share related issue. And again, then building on from there, margins, clearly, I think, I think in Q2 you were thinking about stable margins in the second half in the U.S., but clearly that's not been the outcome. Can you give us some reassurance that the margin picture with the self-help you have is improving into Q4 or into next year that you're able to continue to deliver that stable margin? Those are the two questions really related to the U.S.

Thank you. Thank you, Sridhar. On the margin in the U.S., we already mentioned that the 4-2 margin is indeed lower than last year, but we also shared with you that we have an insurance one-time release last year of 30 basis points, a shrink number of 20 basis points, which are higher mainly to theft and a changing climate in the U.S. overall for the total retail market. and that those things give you already a very healthy margin with those two corrections. There's operationally nothing different than we talked about. There are no different things on prices or market shares. We already mentioned that we expect that we have market share gains in the key markets in the U.S., but we have not seen our Nielsen numbers. The second quarter market share numbers of Nielsen were even more positive than we thought and than we anticipated. The teams are very well positioned. You know the brands. The team under JJ Fleeman is doing a very good job. We have everybody together and super focused. We have been safe for our customer program also in the U.S., but on top brought an Accelerate program, which is now coming to fruition and to production to be able to reinvest in our brands We have a customer value proposition, brand by brand, which is stronger and stronger. We have a supply chain, let's say self-distributed at the East Coast, where we had some hiccups during COVID, as you can imagine, not the ideal period to redo your supply chain. But we see also there that the shelf availability numbers are getting up. We also see that the costs are coming down. And let's not forget, we have... super strong brands in those markets with very strong positions. And that's also a reason for a number of vendors and suppliers who come back to us and say, okay, how can we partner up to together find those positive volumes? So nothing on prices and market shift than we talked in the last quarters. I think that snap sales number was a little bit disappointing to us, that effect there. And we also gave you – the full year group guidance of at least 4% where we kept that stable and that means also that our US business will also bring their strong contribution next to an improving European business.

I guess I was just trying to figure out if all the banners are seeing the snap impact student loan impact that you referred to in the release. In a similar way, I thought historically the food line was more exposed and hence has clearly been a very strong performer till now. Is that slowing down a bigger issue within the U.S. business or not necessarily?

I would say, Sherida, don't overdo it. Yes, Food Lion has a higher SNAP share compared to our friends of Hannaford because they're a very different demography. The 4% is total ADUSA. It's a market phenomenon. It's a level playing field for all the players in those markets. It's a federal program. And I think you'll hear other colleagues in the business talking about these kind of things as well. So... It's a market phenomenon. We are going to deal with this, and I would not attach more than that. I mean, we reported today the Greenville Wilmington markets for FoodLine. We talked about, hopefully we can confirm to you, the market share gains again for FoodLine, 11 years of comparable store sales growth. So there is not something fundamentally shifting in our performance compared to competitors or in market shares. That's not the case. And I think our investments we made in the last couple of years in omni-channel, in digital, in prism, in data and therefore also preparing ourselves for retail media income streams has only improved. So we did a lot of investments in the last years and I think accelerate and save for our customers are things which should protect us also for times where we see a lower inflation and that This would give us some protection to reinvest in our grants as we feel necessary.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. I will hand the call back for closing remarks.

So that concludes our call for today, ladies and gentlemen. We look forward to seeing you on the road over the next couple of weeks. And if you have any questions that we couldn't get to today, please feel free to reach out to the IR team. We're here at your disposal. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Thanks a lot. Bye-bye. Have a nice week. And some of you, see you tomorrow.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.