Grupo Bimbo, S.A.B. de C.V.

Welcome to the 1Q23 Grupo Bimbo results and conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal 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, then one on your telephone keyboard. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Daniel Ceviche. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Connected on the line today is our CFO, Diego Regiola, CFO, Rafael Paneas, Mark Bendix, Executive Vice President, and several members of our finance team. We kicked off the year with a very strong first quarter. We continue to see the benefit from the pricing strategy implemented during 2022, which enabled us to surpass our expectations and last year results. Our sales reached historic levels for the first quarter. Our EBITDA margin closed at 12.9%. We continue to post double-digit 10-year caps for sales and adopted EBITDA. And our operating margin, excluding the NEP's non-cash benefits, registered during the first quarter of 2022, strongly improved by 70 basis points, reaching 10%. It's a positive volume performance in some business units, including Brazil and Vivo PSI, and strong sales growth in local currencies in all the regions. Our innovation index keeps growing, in fact, We're back to the levels before the pandemic began. I am very proud of the hard work of our associates around the globe and their resilience to navigate in a difficult, high inflationary environment. We will continue to invest behind our brands and assets to capture growth opportunities and fully expect to continue gaining efficiencies throughout the supply chain.

So we remain optimistic about the remainder of the year.