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

Please welcome the Chairman of the Board, Mike Owens.

Good morning, and welcome to Canadian Tire Corporation's Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Thank you for joining us today. When we met last, I ended my remarks by looking ahead to this company's next 100 years. Over a century of history bears witness to our ability to weather storms and emerge stronger from them. As you all know, the storms came in 2023. They surface challenges, including persistent inflation and interest rate hikes that stressed Canadians financially. When Canadians experience these hardships, Canadian Tire feels the financial impact, and this was clear in 2023. But also clear was another impact, a profound and lasting lesson learned, the recognition that our new normal is one of uncertainty and that this leadership team has a quiet confidence to rise to the challenge. The pandemic showcased the resilient spirit within CTC, evident in our capacity to adapt to shifting circumstances and excel in adversity. This resilience drives us to continually enhance our performance, which we have acknowledged fell short of expectations in 2023. Building on the lessons of last year, we are making operational enhancements to improve performance and prioritizing investments with the highest potential returns. And looking beyond this current economic cycle, top of mind for us are the strategic alternatives for our financial services business and continuing to surface value from our surplus property assets. We are also further honing our culture to optimize processes and maximize our people's potential. The Board's job, simply stated, is to ensure we have the right strategy and the right talent to execute that strategy within our risk framework. I've said it before and will say it again. Oversight is important, but insight is even more valuable, especially in rough weather. It is times like these when diverse experiences and perspectives matter most. The collective wealth of experience on our board coupled with the guidance provided by Martha and Owen Billes positions us to effectively support Canadian Tire through its ongoing evolution. This evolution encompasses everything for the integration of cutting-edge technologies like AI to the in-depth management of both existing and emerging risks to significant retail and digital transformations. I must thank my fellow directors for their utmost professionalism and an unrivaled commitment to this company. The external assessment of board effectiveness conducted in 2023, highlighted the many strengths of the Board and gave us a path forward to better. When we preach continuous improvement, we include ourselves in that expectation. As a Board, our primary focus remains on ensuring Canadian Tire has the proper organizational structure and talent to adapt in a dynamic operating environment and execute the strategy. In our competitive arena, having exceptional athletes is paramount. And Greg has and continues to build a strong team for now and the future. This is a tough year for the team with many obstacles in the past to performance. And while the outcome may not have aligned with our expectations, this is part of the journey. It is about agility, resilience, unwavering dedication and making diligent efforts to yield favorable results. I commend and thank Greg and his leadership team for navigating the rugged terrain of 2023. And I look forward to working with them as they lead us into an exciting future. I also want to recognize our dedicated team members, the dealers and their staff whose collective efforts bring our brand purpose to life for our customers and communities. The challenges of 2023 are just part of Canadian Tire's journey, one that has seen its share of obstacles, and will undoubtedly encounter more in the future. We know we have work ahead to get to where we want to be. We understand the job, continue to elevate performance as we transform this company for the next leg of the journey, we appreciate your trust that we will get that job done. I want to thank our valued shareholders for the sustained confidence in us. And with that, I am pleased to introduce the President and CEO of Canadian Tire Corporation, Greg Hicks.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. There is no question that 2023 was a tough year for Canadians and Canadian Tire Corporation. It was a year that saw interest rates and stubborn inflation take their toll on the Canadian consumer, a year characterized by increased geopolitical unrest and weather that was unseasonable at best and volatile at worst and it was a year in which our results fell well short of our expectations. Even when normalized for the unusual items that came our way in 2023, our quarterly and annual EPS ended well below 2022, but challenging as it was, 2023 was also a year where we continued to deliver for our stakeholders, including returning cash to our shareholders. We returned close to $740 million of capital through share buybacks and dividends and announced our 14th consecutive dividend increase. 2023 was also a year that reinforced my belief in our capabilities, strategic investments and most importantly, our team. Our teams rose to the occasion remaining ever-resilient and positive in the face of adversity. Our response to the fire at the A.J. Billes Distribution Centre exemplified the unwavering dedication that has sustained us through 101 years of challenges. And it's this commitment that reaffirms my belief in our ability to navigate the current economic cycle and ultimately prevail. We are balancing the short-term challenges with driving our long-term growth by controlling what we can, while mitigating what we can't. This includes continuing to manage our margins well as we did in 2023 and being diligent with our OpEx through a heightened focus on disciplined expense management. Given that the economic landscape looks much different than when we announced our better connected strategy in March 2022, we've slowed the pace of our investment and prioritize those with the best returns. At the same time, we placed a disciplined effort toward ensuring full value creation from the investments that we've already made. This morning, I'll speak about the progress we made against our focused investment areas in 2023. And then I'll outline how, by strategically building a foundation for the future, we have set ourselves up to manage through this ongoing uncertainty and foster our continued growth and evolution in the rapidly changing retail landscape. When we met last year, I spoke to you about our 4 focused investment areas, which are growing our own brands, creating a better omnichannel connected experience, strengthening our supply chain fulfillment and automation capabilities and modernizing our IT infrastructure. I'll start with our own brands. Since investing in a dedicated owned brands function for product development and brand marketing in 2016, our own brand penetration has grown by over 500 basis points and delivered compounded annual growth of 6% on our top line with significant margin differential relative to national brands. We continue to make progress against our longer-term objective of elevating our own brands. An excellent example of Sherwood, which continues to be a success story for us. And there is perhaps no better indicator of the quality of this brand then the quality of the players who use it. In addition to William Nylander and Matthew Tkachuk, the roster of Sherwood athletes has grown to include Connor Bedard as well as Canadian PWHL stars Emily Clark, and Saroya Tinker, among others. Sherwood is just 1 example. We currently have over 20,000 new SKUs in our forward-looking product development pipeline with significant innovations planned over the next several years. Second, we have made excellent progress in updating our omnichannel customer experience. We have refreshed, expanded or replaced more than 80 Canadian Tire stores since 2022. To provide a superior customer experience, we continue to invest in key omni-channel initiatives including pickup lockers, electronic shelf labels and scan and buy features across many of our retail banners. We've deployed new store formats for Mark's and Pro Hockey Life, and we are testing a new small format workwear focused store called Mark's WorkPro. This year, we're on track to complete our broadband network uplift across more than 1,700 locations with close to 500 fiber installations, including 100 major fiber builds. This investment does more than give our customers an improved in-store experience. It also helps expand Canada's fiber footprint, helping more communities and households participate in the digital economy. By completing the rollout of our enterprise-wide e-commerce digital platform, we have gained scalability, enhanced stability, improve the customer experience, and we are now laser-focused on serving customers the products they want and need across our group of companies. Across our store network, we are delivering a world-class click-and-collect experience with service times at less than 2 hours and some of the highest customer experience NPS scores that we measure. And following a successful pilot in early 2023, we expanded express home delivery nationally across all our banners, offering same-day delivery services to customers. Third, we have invested $360 million in transforming our network through our supply chain modernization program. While the significant logistics disruptions in the global supply chain over the last many years impacted our operations, we have been investing in parallel to build future capacity, efficiency and resiliency. We are deploying automated goods-to-person technology in our Montreal and Calgary distribution centers as well as our A.J. distribution center in Brampton. We also commenced operations of our fully automated apparel DC in the Greater Toronto area, an investment that enables us to serve our stores and customers better while driving operational efficiency across the network. Our ramp-up period is now behind us. And in its first full year of operations, the new GTA DC is delivering beyond our expected productivity improvements in managing 10% of CTC's total throughput. And for the ongoing investments we've made in upgrading our IT infrastructure are doing more than modernizing our business, they're helping us build for the future. When we came together last year, the realm of ChatGPT had been a nascent endeavor for less than 6 months. Concurrently, we were in the throes of negotiating a multiyear strategic partnership with Microsoft, which we subsequently solidified in June. Our Microsoft partnership gives us access to leading-edge technology, enormous computing power and expertise in both artificial intelligence and cloud transformation. It expedites our digital transformation and adaptability, critical components to succeed in today's retail industry and key drivers of our growth strategy and on that front, we've been very busy. We've effectively migrated 1,400 of our enterprise's most valuable data assets into an intelligence hub in the cloud powered by Microsoft Azure. We are swiftly integrating new and emerging technology into the strong data foundation we've built including AI, which is enabling a more data-driven culture. We are capitalizing on the power of large language models to help our teams work more efficiently, such as through our own AI chatbot, ChatCTC. Similar to ChatGPT, ChatCTC is a personal productivity tool that empowers our employees to leverage generative AI to improve their productivity and efficiency across numerous routine tasks. Unlike ChatGPT, ChatCTC is in a closed environment, ensuring compliance with our enterprise risk protocols. We are also implementing large language models to streamline the customer shopping journey with the introduction of CT, our new shopping assistant powered by Microsoft AI technology. We have numerous generative AI deployments across the organization, including GitHub CoPilot, which increases developer productivity and AI bots to support the software development life cycle. Entering the proof-of-concept phase, we're exploring how generative AI can expedite product on-boarding to our website by automating critical steps such as generating product descriptions, French translations and extracting pertinent information from product images. Additionally, we're reimagining the conventional digital flyer through AI, aiming to curate personalized and relevant customer experiences to drive increased foot traffic, conversion rate on basket sizes, transcending the limitations of traditional paper flyers. We have established responsible AI tenants to ensure safe and ethical deployment of AI, minimizing the risks associated with its adoption and advancement. We see competitive advantage emerging. We've developed a structured process to discover and scale high-value use cases and with our recognition that people are the foundation of our success, our goal is to change how we work and enable widespread usage of customer analytics and AI across the organization. Our approach to technology goes beyond point solutions. We are designing it to maximize CTC's strategic capabilities for enterprise agility, scale and adaptability to the future needs of our customers. So despite the economic challenges, we're making progress against our priorities and remain steadfast in our conviction for a better connected strategy, which is about more than improving customer experiences. It's about fostering trust and stronger emotional connection. Turning a business strategy built on emotional connection into action starts with putting the customer at the center of everything we do. This is very easy to say but a lot harder to accomplish. But we have the capabilities required to do it really well, specifically our first-party data and personalization capabilities. We have a wealth of first-party customer data, thanks to our 11 million active Triangle Rewards loyalty members. But more importantly, we have the capabilities required to generate insights from this data. Building this capability has been a multiyear journey of investing in the right building blocks that on their own were not an end in and of themselves, but rather a means to driving greater customer centricity. The process started back in 2018 when we began evolving Canadian Tire paper money into a digital cross banner loyalty program. This was a paradigm shift that required us to confidently forecast the long-term benefits of doing so especially to Canadian Tire dealers for whom paper money was a sacred cow. But digitization as significant as it was, was just the tip of the iceberg. The process included standardizing, structuring and formatting of our customer data and the development and transitioning of customer models and reporting into a real-time cloud environment. It also involved the integration of customer data to internal digital platforms like web, mobile, social and e-mail and to external channels and partners, including social media, all with the objective of being able to deliver relevant communications and offers to a single customer in their channel of choice. As Triangle members engage in our digital properties, we learn more about them, and the data insights we gleaned are used to continuously optimize the program, allowing us to provide a more contextual and relevant experience and the most appealing offers for each customer. Sustained loyalty requires hyper personalization through one-to-one offers and experiences that resonate with customers on a personal level, creating a strong emotional connection that keeps them coming back. The result of bringing all these building blocks together is the triangle is now so much more than a loyalty program. It's a flywheel that is greater than the sum of its parts. Our Triangle flywheel is a collection of businesses all acting in a system, whereby each component is driven by the 1 before it, and the flywheel grows in both strength and speed the more it turns. It's a process through which consumer trust begets more trust and connection begets more connection. All it needs is that first push, which we can provide in the form of Canadian Tire money. The more our members earn, the more they shop, which in turn makes them more likely to register, giving us more first-party data, which enables our personalization capabilities in our one-on-one offers. This then leads to customers earning more Canadian Tire money and the cycle continues. It's the essence of a new business model for us, a business model where more and more of our revenue can be recurring over time, acting somewhat like an annuity and creating a competitive moat around our business. If we do this right, the result is trust, the crux of our strategy. And as our flywheel continues to gain momentum, it facilitates our transformation from a holding company to an operating company, while at the same time, spinning out opportunities to create new products, partnerships and profit pools. Last year, we launched Triangle Select, our subscription loyalty product that delivers enhanced customer value. Our year 1 results prove that the product is working as we expected it would. In 2023, Select members visited our retail banners more often and spent almost 40% more than similar members who are part of our control group. Now we're focused on scaling membership, including launching a series of tests to over 2 million members that offer a subscription trial or the opportunity to sample some of Select's most valued benefits to encourage subscription, all with one click digital enrollment. We also see flywheel acceleration opportunities through strategic partnerships like our recently launched partnership with Petro-Canada. And so far, the results are extremely encouraging. To date, nearly 200,000 Canadians have linked their Triangle Rewards and Petro points, accounts in over $2.4 million of incremental Canadian Tire money has been issued to our membership. This increased issuance is coming back to our stores in the form of redemption and incremental basket attachment. And finally, a new profit pool, although still early days, we're very excited about the potential of our Retail Media business Triangle Retail Media. Data and more specifically, shopper data is the lifeblood of differentiation for emerging retail media networks as an advertising service to marketers. All of the investment we've made in our building blocks, including structuring our data for granular audience creation and our ability to personalize communications and our digital assets and channels are ideally suited to help brands provide more relevant ads to their customers. Triangle Retail Media also strengthens our connection to our existing vendor partners. That helps us to ensure we continue to have trusted, reliable brands, which further fuels our flywheel. As you'll recall, last year, we took an important step to accelerate the growth of Triangle Rewards with the repurchase of Scotiabank's 20% stake in Canadian Tire Financial Services. Over the past 6 months, we've considered the optimal ownership structure of CTFS and the benefit of a bank partner can deliver by driving sustained value in our Triangle Rewards program and credit card portfolio. We are currently in the middle of the process with no new updates to report at this time. As I've outlined this morning, we built Triangle into more than just a loyalty program. It's an engine for growth and operating transformation that drives trust and emotional connection and we intend to remain a leader in this space. But building trust with Canadians isn't just about what we do for our customers, it's also about what we do in our communities. And 2023, we put our purpose into action. We were there for our communities when natural disasters struck, including the deadly flooding on the East Coast and Canada's worst wildfire season in history. Canadian Tire Jumpstart charities dispersed over 1,000 grants to support community programming. They also completed construction on 7 new inclusive play spaces, bringing the total incremental square footage added since 2017 to more than 550,000 or the equivalent of 32 NHL hockey rinks. I'm proud to say that since 2005, Jumpstart has provided more than 3.5 million opportunities for kids to overcome the barriers to support and recreation, all thanks to the vision of Martha Billes. So Martha, on behalf of all the kids who benefited from your generosity, thank you. We also believe that sport can inspire social change which is why we're taking a lead role in driving gender equity and sport through our women's sport initiative. Our multimillion dollar investment through which we're committing 50% of our sponsorship dollars to women's professional sports. But supporting local communities is not a new idea for us. It was instilled by our founders and is brought to life every single day by Canadian Tire dealers and our tens of thousands of team members across the country. This team is why our brand purpose is more than just words. It's who we are and what we do day in and day out. And the result has not only increased trust and a deeper emotional connection but a stronger nation overall. And we have proof that it's working. Last month, CTC was ranked the top Canadian brand and third overall on Legere's annual list of most admired companies in Canada. In closing, I want to thank Mike Owens and our Board of Directors for their valuable insight and oversight this past year and Martha and Owen Billes for their continued support, and to our valued shareholders, thank you for maintaining your trust in us. Although 2023 did not produce the results we planned for, we remain on the right track and we can be confident in saying so because after 101 years in business, we've learned a few things. We know how to grow, from a single store to 3 segments, 11 retail banners and 1,700 locations across Canada. We know how to evolve, whether that's to meet the changing wants and needs of our customers or to harness the power of technology, data and AI. And we know how to weather an economic cycle because we've seen more than our fair share of downturns. That said, trust that the lessons of 2023 were not lost on us. We are adapting our playbooks. We must be more resilient and are tracking initiatives that enable us to deliver on this outcome. The great team that I have the pleasure of leading is working hard to continuously optimize our businesses and balance sheet, control our costs and deepen our customer relationships all in the pursuit of sustainable long-term growth and consistent returns for you, our valued shareholders. Thank you again for joining us this morning. I'll now pass it back to Mike Owens to continue with today's formal business.

Thank you, Greg. We will now move to the formal business for which this meeting has been called. In accordance with our bylaws, as Chairman of the Board, I will act as Chairman of this meeting. I have asked our Corporate Secretary, Eleni Damianakis, to act as Secretary to the meeting. And I appoint Paul Allen and Krish Seno of Computershare Trust Company of Canada to act as scrutineers of the meeting. Notice calling the meeting together with the management information circular were filed on SEDAR and posted to our website. In addition, the notification regarding how to access these materials and our 2023 report to shareholder -- shareholders, together with the proxy or voting instruction form were mailed to shareholders of record as of the close of business on March 21, 2024. The scrutineers' report has been received, and I am advised that a quorum of holders of both the common shares and Class A nonvoting shares of the corporation is present in-person or represented by proxy. I therefore declare this meeting duly constituted for the transaction of business. The scrutineers' report, which will indicate the number of shares represented at this meeting, will be read by the Secretary at the end of the meeting. We have a few guidelines for you on how the formal business of this meeting will proceed. To facilitate the introduction of motions, I have arranged in advance for certain employee shareholders to move and second the motions required at this meeting. These arrangements are in no way intended to influence or discourage discussion of the motions. The items to be voted on today are the election of directors and the appointment of the corporation's auditor. These items will be voted on by ordinary resolution, requiring a simple majority of the votes cast for approval, and voting will occur by show of hands. For shareholders who have voted in advance of the meeting, your voting instructions have been recorded, and you do not need to take any further steps. The items which you may vote on depend on whether you hold common shares or Class A nonvoting shares. If you hold common shares, you may vote on the election of 13 common share director nominees and the appointment of the corporation's auditor. If you hold Class A nonvoting shares, you may vote on the election of 3 Class A director nominees. As this is an in-person shareholders meeting only those shareholders or their duly appointed proxy holders who are present in person may ask questions in connection with the formal business. Once the formal business has been completed, we will open the meeting to general questions from our shareholders and proxy holders, including shareholders who are watching the live webcast of this meeting. Only questions of interest to all shareholders will be answered during the meeting. To ensure online questions are received in time, please submit those questions as early as possible during the meeting. We would ask that any person present at the meeting who wishes to speak, please come to a microphone and state your name and advise the meeting whether you are a shareholder or a proxy holder. The first item of business is to place before shareholders the consolidated financial statements of the corporation for the year ended December 30, 2023, and the auditor's report thereon, which can be found in our 2023 report to shareholders. The report was sent to shareholders who requested a copy and was also filed on SEDAR and posted on our website. The next item of business is the election of 13 directors by the holders of common shares. I will now ask for the 13 individuals named in the circular to be nominated.

I nominate Eric Anderson, Martha Billes, Owen Billes, Lyne Castonguay, Cathryn Cranston, Steve Frazier, Greg Hicks, Sylvain Leroux, Donald Murray, J. Michael Owens, Sue Paish, Christine Rupp and Sowmyanarayan Sampath for election as directors of the corporation by the holders of common shares to serve until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed.

Are there any further nominations? There being no further nominations, I declare that nominations are closed. Holders of common shares have been provided with the opportunity to vote for each director nominee or to withhold their vote. As a proxy holder, I'm advised that sufficient votes in favor of the election of each director nominee were cast prior to the meeting. Accordingly, I propose that we proceed with a single vote by show of hands to elect the persons nominated. Only registered holders of the common shares and their proxy holders are entitled to vote on the election of these director nominees. I remind shareholders that the Board of Directors and management recommend that you vote for all the common share director nominees named in the circular. Everyone in favor of the election of these director nominees, please raise your hand. [Voting]

Opposed, if any? [Voting]

I declare that the 13 individuals nominated for election by the holders of common shares are duly elected as directors of the corporation. The next item of business is the election of 3 directors by the holders of Class A nonvoting shares. I will now ask for the 3 individuals named in the circular to be nominated.

I nominate Norman Jaskolka, Nadir Patel and Cynthia Trudell for election as directors of the corporation by the holders of Class A nonvoting shares to hold office until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed.

Thank you. Are there any further nominations? There being no further nominations, I declare that nominations are closed. Holders of Class A nonvoting shares have been provided with the opportunity to vote for each director nominee or to withhold their vote. As proxy holder, I'm advised that sufficient votes in favor of the election of each director nominee were cast prior to the meeting. Accordingly, I propose that we proceed with a single vote by show of hands to elect the persons nominated. Only registered holders of Class A nonvoting shares and their proxy holders are entitled to vote on the election of these director nominees. I remind shareholders that the Board of Directors and management recommend that you vote for all the Class A director nominees set out in the circular. Everyone in favor of the election of these director nominees, please raise your hand. [Voting]

Opposed, if any? [Voting]