Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited (CTCA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everybody. Canadian Tire is a more resilient business today than it was in past downturns with a stronger omnichannel presence and having made substantial inroads in loyalty and supply chain management, among other areas. To tell us more, please help me welcome Gregory Craig, EVP and CFO; and Susan O'Brien, Chief Brand and Customer Officer. Thanks for being here, guys.

Our pleasure. Thanks for having us.

You shared some insights into consumer data in Q2, and we saw traffic holding steady. We saw inventory down. We saw margins flat overall. But the consumer has weakened. So as you think of the balance of the year, can you maybe talk about how you're positioned and what actions you're taking in case we go through a softer patch?

Yes, George, let me take that one. Thanks for having us, and good morning, everybody. I will start off and say it's Gregory Craig. George has done what happens a lot with [ who's named Craig ]. So I just will -- first time I meet people, I go by Gregory just for that reason. But let me answer the kind of the question. I think what was important when we talked about Q2, I think there was some information, as you said, that was kind of lost in some of the headlines on consumer and all that other wonderful stuff. There was a lot about the quarter we, frankly, really liked. Our customer traffic at CTR, our biggest banner, was flat year-over-year. That was kind of point number one. As you mentioned, our margin rates, if you take out our Petroleum business, our gross margin rates actually accreted by 80 basis points. Our inventory position. If I take a look at where we started the quarter, corporately, we're up 30 -- 22%, excuse me, we ended up 6%. So we're able to kind of -- and we've got more work through as it relates to inventory. But in our minds, we were to kind of get that inventory back in check without really, frankly, having to give a lot away from a margin perspective. Our dealer strength, they're actually down 1% in inventory. If you take inflation out of it, units are actually down by greater than -- sorry, units are down by more than 1%. And then even operationally, things like we finally launched kind of our one digital platform across all of our banners. So thinking about operational efficiency as we move forward, we now have one e-commerce platform across all the banners that we have in our company, which we're thrilled about. And even as it relates to our distribution centers. We opened our Mississauga distribution center, which previously, there was 5 different DCs that we had kind of across Central Ontario. And now we've got this automated DC that is state-of-the-art, that's allowing us to ship kind of for check-and-marks directly to home. So it's filling kind of e-commerce. So a lot that we liked in the quarter. But as you said, the impact of interest rates, in our mind, kind of really showed its impact in the quarter. And we really wanted to kind of lead with that, in part to also show the strength we have in Triangle. You talked about resilience, that is going to be a theme we have. And we wouldn't have been able to do the analysis that we did and probably more important, take the actions that we've taken and continue to take this quickly, if not for the Triangle program. So what we were able to kind of get underneath the data and get a view to was, look, if you split our business between discretionary and essential and then do a further subdivide by geography, you saw kind of B.C. and weaknesses in Ontario. Then you took a different slice of the data and you looked at kind of level of indebtedness. And sure enough, as you had the higher levels of indebtedness, that was also kind of hurt on the discretionary business. So it gave us a plan on what we can do and how we can act from there. So what we would do first and foremost is think about your inventory buys. So are you going to spend as much money on discretionary as you're building inventory kind of in this environment? Probably not. You're going to want to spend it more kind of on the discretionary side of things. So my friend on the left, it really helps her thinking about where she wants to target either loyalty offerings, price discounts, promotions. As customers are looking for value, especially on the essentials, it really helps dictate, frankly, our loyalty efforts and where we're going to market as we move forward. So all that is kind of -- and the other thing, George, we've talked a lot about is our price, is our product architecture. The fact that we have this good, better, best architecture, we think, really is going to help us at this time. We didn't have that in 2008, 2009. So you wanted a vacuum, you would have got the Dyson, now we've got the Hoover, now we've got even a lower category, if that's what you need. That wasn't as well established in 2008 and 2009. So I think that's something that's going to help us as we're -- whatever the economic conditions are that we're rolling into. So I guess what I would say kind of in summary, look, yes, I think there's certainly an impact on our discretionary business. A bit over-indexed in the second quarter, discretionary tends to kind of punch above its weight on the yearly average in the second quarter. But it is something we're keeping an eye out for the balance of the year. We're targeting our marketing all towards kind of value for our customer. And if -- whatever this economic condition turns out to be, I think we're better served now than we would have been 10 years ago, point number one. And even if you look at the past recession in '08, '09, take a look at the comps. Yes, there were a few negative quarters, but the business bounced back pretty quick to kind of get to that long-term average comp that we've been seeing from an entire retail perspective. So that's how I'd answer your question, George.

Okay. And you think we're in the same environment this time like we could see a bounce back in the comps as well, somewhere to '08, '09?

Well, again, I think what you have to think about is -- I look at things like the unemployment rate. And the fact of the matter is we've got an unemployment rate that has creeped up, but it's at 5.5%. That's very different than where we were early days in '08 and '09. So I think -- I keep saying our job is to kind of present the customer in as frictionless manner as possible and allow them to shop us how they want to shop, and we think we're going to be competitive in that regard. Again, take a look at the quarter, traffic was essentially flat. What was happening? People just didn't put a discretionary product in their basket. That's really what we saw in the quarter.

Thanks for that. Susan, great to have you here. I know it's your first back-to-school conference. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of your role in your portfolio, please?

Yes, sure. Thanks, George, and thank you very much for having me here. So I do have -- I'm the Chief Brand and Customer Officer. It's a very broad portfolio, enterprise-wide. So I thought maybe the best thing to do was sort of put it in the context of our Better Connected strategy. So as you think about the term Better Connected, there's kind of 3 major areas of connection we talk about. And I'll give you a sense for how my team participates in each of those areas. So the first one is with respect to customer, just really making better and more insightful relevant customer connections. And so the cornerstone of being able to do this is our loyalty program, Triangle Rewards. It's an unbelievable program in terms of the penetration in households but also the value in the data that we get from it. It's really outstanding first-party data. So I have the team that runs that program, but you can have lots of data and not enough insight. So I also have the team that has all the data analytics, customer insight, et cetera. And so the goal there really is to use that customer data to help our customer experience be better, more marketing that is relevant and targeted. And then business decisions. We literally can use that data to better assortments, better real estate decisions, et cetera. So that's one big part of my team. If you go to the sort of second area of connection within that strategy, it's really around this idea of a seamless omnichannel connection. As Greg said, letting our customers shop when and how they want. And so I have the team that is -- call it the digital backing behind that, the team that -- through a mobile app, our e-com fulfillment options, we're able to connect that sort of really powerful retail footprint we have with our digital footprint. So our app is an amazing app at this point. We've got about 2.2 million users on it, 4.8 star rated. That's like our team's way to connect what happens when a customer walks in the store with that digital environment. So really making it seamless from a customer journey perspective. And then the third major area and really important to us is emotional connection. So when we talked about our strategy in the past, and Greg has described it, it always starts with this idea of our new brand purpose. It's an evolved one because we've always been about it, but it's been recodified in the company. And that's to be here to make life in Canada better. And so we talk about this one as the emotional connection, how do all of the things that we do, our actions and our communication support that idea of connecting more tightly with our consumer. And so I've got the team that does a lot of this work, the marketing teams for all the banners, I've got the communications team, the sponsorship team. And then in the last few years, I've taken on the ESG team as well. And that's very related to brand purpose in connecting emotionally with our customers. And so we really, in that domain, have always been a very ESG-focused company. This isn't like a new thing we're doing. What's new about it is that we're really thinking about in an integrated way. We're putting together strategies that aren't just doing it because we've always done it, very focused on where we want to win, compete, play, et cetera. And so I'll just do one plug on that. We just dropped our second annual ESG report. And it's quite an upgrade from last year, aligned to SASB index for the first time and just a really great summary of all the things that we do as a company in the space of ESG. So that's what I do.

Thanks for that. And you spoken about the differentiated model, customer data, loyalty assets. Can you help investors understand what's different with your customer-facing capabilities now versus past recessions?

Yes, that's for me, George?

Yes.

Yes. Greg started to talk about it, but I mean, I presume most people in this room have been or are customer of Canadian Tire, so...

Let's hope.

So when you think back to, call it, 2008, we kind of just had one tool with respect to delivering value to the customer. It was really that paper flyer that everyone is so familiar with. And before I move on to what else we have, I will say, we still have that tool, it's still incredibly effective. But again, it's just a different way we approach it. We're using so much data now, the sophistication and what goes into building that flyer with respect to knowledge of what drives traffic, what builds basket, what's truly incremental, it's just extraordinary. And then the second thing, of course, is we've digitized it. So we have a digital flyer. And we're investing a ton of money to be able to drive customers into that digital flyer, mainly because it's a better experience, overall. You get a sort of more personalized view of the things that you might want to buy from a week-to-week basis. So that's the paper flyer or the flyer in general, still really important. But similar to what Gregory said, if you think about the capabilities we've developed since the recession in 2008, '09, 10, that framework of time, we're a wholesale different company, on so many levels. I'll start with Triangle Rewards. It is a very powerful program for us to be able to deliver enhanced value to our customers. I mean the most engaged members of that program are earning significant Canadian Tire Money on an annual basis. And of course, that money is a flywheel effect. It comes back to us. We know who they are. We can market to them differently. And so we're really creating a much stickier form of engagement than we did in the past. And the second thing I'd say about us since 2008 is, I mean, quite literally, our digital capabilities were nascent back then. We really didn't have a significant ability to either do digital marketing very well or to be able to use our assets with the website and mobile to be able to draw customers in. So we have now got one of the most sophisticated digital marketing agencies in-house using all forms of digital marketing to put value in front of the customer in a different way, search engine marketing, social media marketing. And the power in our loyalty program is we can measure that, so we can see the ROI on that spend. And then the last thing I'd just point out relative to 2008, and Gregory's mentioned this, too, our assortment and what we sell people, it's just meaningfully better. You take quality. I mean I joined the company in 2008, and quality wasn't necessarily our strength. And here we are 15 years later, we had a program called Tested for Life in Canada, which was a great incentive for our buyers to bring better-quality products to the company, and they have delivered. It's actually a point of strength for us now when you look at our tracking. And that's translated into our own brand assortment, which really gives our customers a much better sort of range of options if they need them. And then as Gregory pointed out, it's that sort of good, better and best crisping up of that, so the customer really understands where they can get value within our portfolio. So all in all, I'd say we're just a much more resilient company than we were 15 years ago.

That's helpful. And I think you touched on credit card data. It's probably a good segue to talk a little bit about the bank. Gregory, can you help us -- talk to us a little bit about how we're navigating the bank and a more challenging, call it, macroeconomic environment.

And that's the first time we've had this question. I think what's important to kind of answer that question, I want to give you a little bit of background and a little bit of context because I think it really -- it helps kind of answer itself, to some extent. Canadian Tire Financial Services, [ CTAL ] in the old days, has lent small unsecured lending Canadians for almost 60 years. That's all they do. They don't have a business that runs mortgages or has investment opportunities. Like they lend small unsecured lending to Canadians that shop at Canadian Tire. And so as such, they've had to build kind of capabilities, that's their focus area, and they have to build capabilities in credit risk and collections because that's been their sole focus of business. So that's kind of the first point I'd want to make. The second point is a fundamental different way to go to market. And I'm not criticizing other ways to go to market, I'm trying to explain ours. We don't give dramatically high credit limits, period. There are probably 4 Canadians that have a credit limit in our credit card that's over $50,000. I'm one of them. So there's 3 other people around Canada that have a credit limit of $50,000 or more on our Triangle credit card. That's very different than other credit cards surrounding -- I'm not -- that's just a different philosophy. But what -- so if I think about that from -- as moving into kind of downturn or things as were -- slow down, our higher-risk customers don't have the available credit. They're going to be at 85%, 90% utilization. So when you see a downturn happen, maybe they spend to that 10%, but that's all it is. So it's not that meaningful of an increase relative to other credit card issuers. So that's kind of the first couple of points that I want to anchor people in. The second is, we've got a pretty tenured management team that have seen -- they've been through 2008, they went through Alberta in 2012. They've got a playbook of what to execute when and if kind of downturns happen. And so what's kind of happened in terms of where we are right now, what we've done is we've taken our foot off the gas on acquisition. And I look at our receivable number as evidence to that. So a year ago, our receivable number would have been growing mid-double digits, 15%, 14%. Look at the most recent quarter, we ended the quarter, ended the quarter with growth of about 6% to 7%. So a pretty big slowdown versus where we were. And that's self-conscious, that was us deciding to not capture go after that growth because new accounts typically are a little more uncertain. And typically, we'll have a little bit of a higher risk profile, overall. So we've consciously decided to kind of step away from that a little bit and leave some growth on the table. But if I then kind of keep pulling the string forward around what else we can do, there's a number of activities we still have. And what I look at -- I still look at it because I was the President of the bank for a while, I look at payment behavior. So I look at our customer segments, and I look at people that have been on the books for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, all from different vantage points over, say, a 10-year period. Are we seeing any change in the behavior on that 1-month tranche, on that 3-month tranche, on those key kind of payment metrics? And we're not. But we are seeing is, again, by risk profile, we're seeing more new accounts, which was a defined strategy at Investor Day to kind of reignite our account growth. So we are exactly, George, where we thought we would be in terms of the risk profiles. And as I keep saying on the calls, our PD2+ rate is basically back to historic kind of levels of pre-pandemic levels. Our write-off rate lags a little, but it's coming. That will get back to kind of the pre-pandemic levels as well. But again -- I guess probably I'll end on this to say, this is the advantage of running a monoline bank. You get data on a daily basis, and you're able to act incredibly quickly. So it's not like there's 50 decision criteria we have to go through. If we see things that we're worried about, be it the drivers I mentioned internally, unemployment rates for that matter, we can act tomorrow. We can stop kind of our new account growth tomorrow. What else can we do? Credit limits. So right now, we have -- every bank, we have an active credit limiting program. You slow that down or you stop it. In addition, what we will do is we will have a credit limit decrease program. So if somebody is not using their credit -- available credit, we will take it away from them. Now if they call us and ask for it back, we'll negotiate. But we have an active reduction program on credit limits. And then the last thing is collection strategies. What's really important during the downturn is having an ongoing relationship with that customer, so what kind of creative ways can we work with the customer on getting a continuing payment stream from them to keep them as a customer and keep their standing in good shape? So these are all things that we can evolve to if and when we see kind of the times warrant the need for it.

That's wholesome. Thanks for that. Moving on to the guidance. I think you guys were through your financial aspirations Q2, given the context of the consumer. Can you just remind us the rationale behind that? And perhaps what is the softer economic patch, help us realign focus, if at all?

Yes. So I want to start this by saying we are totally committed to our Better Connected strategy, as Susan talked about. So that was what we announced at Investor Day almost 3 years ago. And we're really pleased with the early returns on that. If I remember to do this at the end, George, I hope we're going to show a video of one of our stores in [ Tremblant ]. Now, it doesn't do a justice to see the video as wonderful as that is, you have to get to a store. We're opening one on 401 in [ Islington ] probably end of October, early November. So I encourage all of you -- or if you travel and you're around, and then I'll give you locations and other stores to visit. You have to go in and see the store and see what a different shopping experience it is. It's exceeded our expectations in sales behavior, it's exceeding our expectations in employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction. Like it's a very different Canadian Tire in our mind. And we're very proud of what's been built, and the early thesis, I think, has come to life. So first thing, again, just to remind everybody, we are totally committed to the strategy. It was the aspirations we withdrew. Why did we withdraw the aspirations? Almost 2.5, 3 years ago, it was a radically different environment, as you can all remember. Where was GDP almost 3 years ago? How many interest rate increases have we had? I guess I'm a boring account because I actually know there's been 11 since we did our aspirations. We've had persistent stubborn inflation. It's a different time. And then as we talk, seeing that bifurcation a little bit of essential versus discretionary in June, just made us feel it's the right time to kind of withdraw the aspiration. So it's just a very different time. What we said is we were hoping that kind of this environment, this macro backdrop will hopefully settle down, and then we can get back into the aspiration business, if you will. But that's what we've tied this to exactly, George, it's just we wanted to kind of have that backdrop come back to normal rather than always be chasing it. I'd rather have that settle down and then come forward with what we think our aspirations look like as we move forward. And I just want to kind of talk on this resilient theme a little bit more and actions we're taking. Susan has done a great job listing all the things. I'm not going to say them again. But what I will say is we are looking more carefully at our spend right now. We are committed to our strategy, and we're not going to take short-term action that's going to harm Canadian Tire. We've been around 100 years. My job is to make sure we're here for another 100 years. And so I think it's important for us to continue to invest where we need to invest. Having said that, we are looking more critically now at all the elements of spend and saying, can we slow it down a little? Is it really required in the next 12 or 24 months? That goes for capital, that goes for operating expense. We are looking at all the elements of the P&L to try to find ways to kind of just protect us as we go through this a little bit a period of uncertainty. But again, I want to reiterate, we're committed to our strategies. We're not going to do anything to harm those, but we're looking a bit more ruthlessly I guess, at things that maybe are a bit more on the edges of supporting the strategy. That's the kind of the key thing I want to get across, George.

Can you just [ give ] a little bit of sneak peek into what those areas could be to reduce spend a little bit?

I think we're looking -- well, looking carefully, capital, looking carefully at kind of our operating expenses and just where do we want to invest? I think I'm not going to give Susan mic on that one because she will...

Consumer marketing.

She'll have lots of opinions. No. And that's where we're trying to be very careful. There's an example, right? Traditional finance responses, we're going to cut marketing. That is traditional, but I've been really pleased with the returns we've been seeing. And so we want to continue to find ways to fund that. But to do that, what are the other things we want to be a bit more careful about? And I think that's all we're trying to do, is be very careful on items that don't kind of add long-term strategic value.

Great. And then you mentioned that you oversee the digital experience for the organization. Can you tell us a little bit more about where we are on that journey and what we're doing to stay relevant, perhaps?

Yes, for sure. So maybe I'll just anchor on what we're in service of in our digital journey. So we talked about, I mentioned earlier, that seamlessly connected omnichannel experience. And that really is in service of letting our customers shop anyway, at any time and any -- how they want. So everything we do kind of flows from there. And I think we've made significant progress on that aspiration with a lot of the investments we've made since we launched the Better Connected strategy. And there's just a couple I might highlight. We used to talk a little bit about the fact that we were using an old car as our platform for most of our business, in terms of a web platform. And that just made it really difficult to create the experiences we really wanted, the stability of it and the scalability. So a big milestone was reached a year ago when we launched ODP, one digital platform, at CTR. So this is the complete replatforming of our -- of all our web and mobile apps, and it also just launched in the spring at Mark's and Sport Chek. So now we have this like one platform that gives us the stability we need to create new experiences. And it's paying off already. I mean there's been a few that like we've been wanting to do an online auto service appointment tool for a long time. We couldn't do it on that old platform. Within months of having launched ODP, we're able to do that. And then just last 2 weeks ago, we launched our [ gift ] registry. Both things we just couldn't have done. So you can imagine what we can now do that we have that sort of more stable platform. The second thing I'd talk about in terms of progress is if you really want customers to be able to shop any way they want, you've got to really spend a lot of time on your e-comm experience. And I would say, we have spent a lot of time on our e-com experience. We did not waste the crisis that happened over the last several years. And I think we're standing up an unbelievable experience, particularly click-and-collect, which is -- at the end of the day, what we've seen happen is that once sort of pandemic was coming to an end, we saw customers going back to shopping, but where they maintain their sort of e-comm action at our company has primarily been with click-and-collect. So we've invested a lot in that experience. We've got lockers in the store to make it easier. Our mobile app helps you collect that thing much easier. So a lot of investment there. But of course, there are customers who want to shop -- want stuff delivered to their home. So we're spending time on that as well. We just finished up a pilot with an express delivery partnership with DoorDash for CTR. So looking forward to rolling that out soon. So lots of options there. And then the last thing I would say is when you think about omnichannel, it has to include the store, like the physical store. And so digital is really the connector of what happens in the store and is able to take that full customer experience and make it real in store. So again, I mentioned our mobile app. It is becoming quickly the center of that store experience and really creating a much better experience for those who have it. So we're spending a lot of time and energy on getting customers into that app. We're really proud of it. That as well as the Triangle app, which offers, I call it, our best loyalty experience, lots of options you can sort of do on that. If anyone is a member of our loyalty program and has our app, there's a swap feature, where if you didn't like the offers you got, you can switch for the one you might want for your weekend job or whatever is happening for you. So just significant progress in all areas, I would say. Maybe what I'd leave you with is this, I feel like we've just rounded the corner in being, call it, like a more traditional retailer trying to get into digital retailing. And we're now a retailer that thinks digital first. And we're putting together experiences that are relevant for the customer across the entire journey.

Great. Thanks a lot for that. Capital allocation question for you. I know we're going to get more details in Q3. But if you had an extra $1 to spend today, where would you spend it?

We've been pretty consistent since Greg became CEO about 3 years ago, I'm about -- I think it was a month or 2 before. And I think we've been very consistent with our philosophy. And frankly, I think this philosophy, it's the same philosophy the executive team had prior to Greg and I, which is we are big proponents of a balanced approach to capital allocation. Our priority has and will always continue to be the business. We think there's great opportunities to continue to invest. And so we will always look to that as the first avenue of investment. I will say we've been pretty active on our return to capital program over the last 10 years, and we know what important that is for shareholders. But just look at our track record. We've had 13 dividend increases, dividend has gone from $1.25 a year to about [ $6.90 ] per year -- per share. A return of share buyback program. I remember probably 10 years ago, so we've probably taken about 25% of the share count out in terms of active share buybacks. So I would say, to answer your question specifically, first and foremost, will be invested in business, recognizing kind of what an important role will return to capital plays. And if you're really asking about M&A, which I'm not sure if that's what you're asking, but if you're really asking about M&A, look, you can never say never. It would have to be something that would really advance our strategy around Better Connected. Do I see us remaining active in tuck-in acquisitions for own brands? We do those all day. But those won't be all that material, all that significant. They would just help us, again, build that differentiated experience that kind of Susan has alluded to. So that's -- that would be the philosophy on capital allocation.

Great place to leave it. So thank you very much, Gregory. I appreciate it.

So before we go, video -- we're going to show you guys the video. I would encourage you, again, if you can get to 401, [ Islington ], that will give you a chance to see in real-life. And Susan has applications for Triangle Select on the way out for those of you that want to join. So we're not proud, we'll take back accounts where we get them. So thank you for your time. Happy to answer any questions as we get in the one-on-ones. And thank you for the time this morning.

Thank you.

So who's got the video? [Presentation]