Parkland Corporation

Good morning. My name is Joelle, now your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Parkland Q1 analyst conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then the number two. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Valerie Roberts, Director, Investor Relations for Parkland. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. With me today on the call are Bob Espy, President and CEO, and Marcel Tunison, Chief Financial Officer. This call is webcast and I encourage listeners to follow along with the supporting slides. We will go through our prepared remarks and then open it up for questions from the investment community. Please limit yourself to one question and a follow-up is necessary. and if you have other questions, re-enter the queue. We would ask analysts to follow up directly with the investor relations team afterwards for any detailed modeling questions. During our call today, we may make forward-looking statements related to expected future performance. These statements are based on current views and assumptions and are subject to uncertainties which are difficult to predict. These uncertainties include, but are not limited to, expected operating results and industry conditions, among other factors. Risk factors applicable to our business are set out in our annual information form in management's discussion and analysis. We will also be discussing non-GAAP and other financial measures, which do not have any standardized meanings prescribed by IFRS. These measures are identified and defined in Parkland's continuous disclosure documents, which are available on our website or on CDAR. Please refer to these documents as they identify factors which may cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements. Dollar amounts discussed in today's call are expressed in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. I will now turn the call over to Bob.

Thank you, Val, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. The Parkland team has a lot to be proud of in the first few months of the year. I'd like to highlight a couple of accomplishments. First, I want to thank and congratulate the entire team for safely completing our scheduled turnaround at the Burnaby refinery. Our team has a track record of consistent execution, and they completed this eight-week process on time and on budget. I'd next like to highlight our Journey Rewards loyalty program, which is partnering with Air Canada's Aeroplan. Journey Reward links our family of fuel and on-the-run convenience brands. In addition to building closer relationships with our customers, Journey's goal is to drive organic growth by incentivizing loyalty, In the three years since its launch, we have grown our cardholders to over 4.5 million in Canada. The past few years have proven that Journey members are loyal, higher spending customers, and they are now responsible for a quarter of our retail fuel transactions. Members on average pump 20% more gasoline each fill and spend 7% more in our stores. During the quarter, Journey members have contributed over 20% of the same store sales volume growth we experienced. In the past few months, we have made significant platform enhancements to our Journey app. These strengthened our digital connection to our customer and set the foundation to support our new loyalty partnerships. Our partnership with Aeroplan is exciting for many reasons. Firstly, our customers will benefit. By bringing these two leading loyalty brands together, We will deliver Canadians greater value, greater choice, and greater rewards. Secondly, it significantly expands our reach with over 10 million combined members. Thirdly, it accelerates momentum in our organic growth strategies, building on our relationship with CIBC. The addition of Aeroplan will further strengthen our loyalty growth platform. We continue to explore additional partnerships for our journey program, to offer more to our customers and extract greater value. Journey is quickly becoming one of Canada's top retail loyalty programs. If you are not already a Journey member, I encourage you to sign up and download the app. With that, let's move to slide three. Before we discuss the quarter in detail, let me step back to provide a brief overview of our business, as well as some high-level observations. As followers of Parkland, you know that our purpose is to power journeys and energize communities. With operations in 25 countries, we are a fuel distributor, marketer, and convenience retailer. We meet the needs of over 1 million customers every day. We operate in two channels. Our retail business satisfies the fuel and convenient needs of consumers, and our commercial business provides companies with industrial fuels. These businesses are complementary. Our retail and commercial businesses are backed by our multi-product integrated supply chain. By operating in all three parts of the value chain, we secure cost competitive supply for our customers and at the same time capture attractive margins. This is our supply advantage. Parkland is a growth company. Through consistent execution, strategic acquisitions, successful integration, and our talented team, we have built a portfolio of leading brands that provide our customers with their daily energy and convenience needs. We bring these together through our on-the-run food and convenience offer and with our journey loyalty platform. Acquisitions have played a big part in our growth. We are now focused on integrating the companies we purchased, capturing synergies and driving organic growth. We are exercising strict capital discipline by prioritizing lowering leverage, followed by enhancing shareholder distributions and organic growth. Our first quarter results are excellent. We have lots of good news to share, including exceptional same-store volumes and sales in our retail business, and robust growth in our international business from organic initiatives, synergies, and recovery in tourism. We continue to work on the reset of our U.S. business. Donna Sanker moved from our Canadian business to be president of our U.S. operations. She has simplified its structure, recruited external talent, and placed proven parkland leaders into our U.S. organization. I am confident the changes we have made over the past several months sets the U.S. on course to deliver the consistent and improved performance we expect. With that, I will hand it over to Marcel to discuss our segmented results in more detail on slide four.