Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited ($CTCA)
Earnings Call Transcript · May 14, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
J. Owens
Executives[Presentation] Good morning, and welcome to Canadian Tire Corporation's Annual Meeting of Shareholders. When we gathered here last year, I remarked that we were meeting in complicated times, that as a nation, long-standing political norms and economic partnerships might no longer be reliable in the future. Well, that feature is upon us and the geopolitical and macroeconomic conditions before us are complex, but their arrival predictable. Similar to the challenges ahead for Canada, this new world order demands bold vision, clarity and disciplined execution from us. Against that backdrop, Canadian Tire has reset its path to a prosperous future with its True North strategy, a significant ambition to continue to perform while simultaneously transforming. Through disciplined execution and intentional collaboration between the Board and management, the company has moved through the first year of transformation. From the Board's perspective, this has been well executed. In 2025, Greg Hicks and his executive team introduced a redesigned leadership model, a new organizational structure, a streamlined asset portfolio and an enhanced focus on technology and AI. This work has established an important foundation for scaling the strategy and delivering long-term value. I thank them for their partnership and execution in this critical first year. Now while transforming for long-term prosperity is essential, performing in the day-to-day remains nonnegotiable. Notwithstanding external volatility and significant internal change, the company delivered strong financial results, reinforcing the Board's confidence in both the strategy and the team executing it. Now from a Board perspective, we remain closely focused on disciplined capital allocation, strong risk management and CTC's progress translating True North execution into measurable value for our shareholders. Our confidence in the next chapter for this company is grounded in the strength of CTC's unique retail system, its deep customer relationships and the capabilities being built through True North. These are complicated times for Canada and for us, but they're not unfamiliar. You don't become a century old company without facing volatility and change. The same can be said for our country and its journey that started a little more than 1.5 century ago. Our nation's history is full of volatility and change dating back even before confederation, with Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty, the Irish-American Fenian raids and then our gradual separation from British control, not to mention 2 world wars and the Great Depression. From those early moments, what eventually emerged was Canada, a True North, strong and free. Oh, and in the midst of all this, in 1922, the Billes family founded this organization. Performance and perseverance have been part of its DNA ever since. Those historic moments prompted a response from this country, a need to adapt, to strengthen and to ultimately unify. We are having another one of those moments now and the response once again will be grounded in those same actions. True North is this company's response to a changing world, strengthening the organization to be more connected, more focused and better positioned to compete and grow in the years ahead. Now the role of this board is to provide strong oversight of True North and a focus on shareholder value. I want to thank Martha and Owen Billes for their continued stewardship of this great Canadian company. To my fellow directors, our dealers and our team members who have helped ready this company for its next chapter, thank you for your dedication. Continuing to further strengthen the depth and perspective of our Board, we are pleased to welcome Colleen Johnston, former Chief Financial Officer of TD Bank; and Glenn Butt, a Canadian Tire Dealer. And to Greg and his team, thank you for continuing to lead with clarity and discipline in a highly complex environment. Greg and his team are performing today while building the capabilities to win for decades to come. And as you've already seen, Greg was recently named Canada's Outstanding CEO of the Year, recognition for his leadership in advancing True North while delivering strong performance. It's an immense and much deserved honor. So please join me in congratulating and welcoming Greg Hicks.
Greg Hicks
ExecutivesWell, thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. Over the past year, we've delivered strong performance and 20% total shareholder returns, growing sales to $16.7 billion, strengthening our market position and continuing to build momentum. We did this in a highly disrupted retail environment, shaped by global economic pressure, shifting consumer expectations and constant change. But disruption isn't determining our outcomes, we are, through our proactive response to external forces and our strategy for transformative growth. In the process, we're building a more connected, more disciplined retail system, performing our business today and transforming our company for tomorrow. And that's the foundation of the True North strategy. It starts with our performance. In 2025, we achieved strong retail sales and profitability. We improved our competitive position and market share with financial results that put us among the best of our North American peers. We grew our new concept stores, long-standing categories like auto service, which surpassed $1 billion in sales for the first time ever and convenient digital commerce. While these cash results matter, it also matters how we achieve them, which brings us to our transformation. Our True North strategy has caused us to lift our heads up above the day-to-day business to better understand our component parts and our customers. It's grounded in a simple idea: when our assets work not just well, but together, we create a system that is stronger, more resilient and harder to replicate. We create a system that is more valuable and more bespoke for Canadians. Our system is built on a unique set of strengths, a trusted national brand, a coast-to-coast dealer network embedded in local communities, one of the largest and most strategic retail real estate footprints in Canada, one of the most powerful loyalty ecosystems in the country, a financial services platform that drives retail engagement and a deep well of first-party customer data and new AI insights. Individually, our assets are strong, but connected and scale, they become a competitive advantage, a moat. Higher retail performance is a key component of our True North vision. Since we met here last year, we have continued to strengthen our core retail platform. Over the course of 2025, we refined the portfolio. We kept the bank and began to uncover its true retail driving capabilities. We divested Helly Hansen for $1.3 billion, and we acquired the Hudson's Bay Company brand assets, launching Stripes products to an exceptionally warm response. Our Canadian Tire Concept Connect, Sport Chek, Destination Sport and Mark's Bigger, Better, Boulder stores, are proven investable concepts that consistently outperform their networks. And our digital business continues to grow faster than our bricks and mortar through enhancements like conversational search and conveniences like same-day delivery for 90% of Canadians. All of this was supported by strong investments in our supply chain, including automated technologies, retrofits that our A.J. Billes Distribution Center and newly honed logistics nationwide. We are determined to keep advancing that foundation behind the scenes. Out in our stores, our dealer network remains one of our strongest and most defining features. Dealers combine local community-centric entrepreneurship with the strength and scale of our national brand, enabling us to deliver consistent caring value to customers from coast to coast. This commitment and connection to customers echoes in each of our banners across our increasingly connected retail system. As we look across our enterprise, Triangle Rewards is not only our loyalty program, it's the tie that binds. It bridges our brands, our banners, our bank. Loyalty and Canadian Tire money give customers a compelling reason to return to us. It earns their business with more personal offers, more everyday rewards, more big brand partnerships. We saw this in the fact that highly engaged Triangle members who are linked to our Petro-Points partner spent 10% more with us in 2025 than similar unlinked members. So we added new partners, giving customers more opportunities to earn Canadian Tire money while banking with RBC, traveling with WestJet and soon while grabbing a morning coffee with [ Tims ]. Greater loyalty and engagement strengthen top line growth, builds our privileged data sets and supports stronger marketing and promotional investments. It connects us to our customers. One of the core tenets of our True North vision is stronger connections with customers. After all, our generational relationship with Canadians set us apart. Add to that our unique and growing data advantage, and we have a real opportunity to distinguish CTC in the eyes of customers to grow our already industry-leading trust. And this is one of the reasons we are enthusiastically expanding our use of AI to elevate our retail fundamentals and understand customer expectations with greater fidelity. For example, our AI pricing and promotions tool, DaiVID, helped us sharpen our pricing and margins in 2025, delivering more precise and reliable value for customers, category by category. As a result, customer perceptions of our pricing grew a remarkable 15 points by Q4, a response we've simply never seen before. Similarly, last year, we worked with Microsoft on a successful pilot program of our custom retail intelligence platform, MOSaiC, a platform that we're now building and scaling across our stores and digital channels. MOSaiC synthesizes Triangle insights, our internal sales data and external inputs from weather to local event calendars to identify the real world moments that shape our customers' needs. Imagine a basement flood during the first spring thaw, a move-in weekend at a university residence or a runner prepping for a marathon, by predicting those moments and anticipating the corresponding product demand, AI will enable us to coordinate our assortments, our promotions, digital experiences and services across our banners so we're there when our customers need us. Ultimately, few organizations have the combination of trust, loyalty engagement and first-party data insights that we have, assets that we are coordinating across the CTC retail system. This gives me great confidence in our ongoing pivot from being individual retail stores that sell products to being a retail system that serves the occasions of Canadian life. And this is a shift for CTC. It has required new teams, new processes and new tools. It's a modernization for our company, but also for our people. Lately, I've spoken internally about something I call our coin of obligation. On one side of the coin, we have the obligation to provide our teams with the tools and training they will need in a world that increasingly expects AI capabilities. So we're doing that through a major Copilot rollout, related training and programs with organizations like Rotman's AI accelerator. On the other side of the coin, we're asking our employees and leaders to embrace new AI approaches and technology. And I've been blown away at the momentum. From best practice sharing to rapid enrollment for training to measurable productivity gains, this shared commitment and investment is a core piece of our modernization agenda. Our strategy only works if it is executed with discipline. That's why we've sharpened how we set priorities, how we allocate capital and how we measure progress. Across the organization, we are focused on outcomes, not activity, and we are holding ourselves accountable to delivering results that are not only strong, but repeatable, scalable and durable. True North is fundamentally about the long-term prosperity of this great company. In 2025, we learned how much that matters to Canadians with rising retail bankruptcies, patriotic purchasing or the ways communities continue to turn to CTC. For example, we have now invested more than $100 million in Canadian amateur sport, and through Canadian Tire Jumpstart charities, we have worked with organizations nationwide to remove barriers to sport and play for 4.5 million kids and counting. This summer, Jumpstart is driving a new infrastructure investment strategy to meet community needs and address accessibility gaps more sustainably. Further, alongside a new Canadian government commitment and against the World Cup backdrop, Jumpstart will help make soccer more accessible, inclusive and enduring in Canadian neighborhoods, a lasting legacy. Across our enterprise, we are determined to continue to build up our communities because we are part of them. Our stores span coast-to-coast. Our network employs tens of thousands of our neighbors with tens of thousands more out in our supply chain. When we grow stronger, the communities and industries around us grow stronger too, and that connection is no coincidence. I choose to believe that our national prosperity and the prosperity of long-standing Canadian companies like ours are inextricably linked. It strikes me that the growing Canadian imperative to build from legacy strengths to meet new challenges and opportunities is the Canadian Tire imperative. In fact, I believe that we can be a model. The environment we're operating in is not getting simpler, but we are building a company that is better equipped to navigate it, a company with strong fundamentals, a united enterprise with scale and the discipline to execute. At its core, our strategy is about turning our unique assets into a sustained competitive advantage that drives long-term growth. That is how we will compete, and that is how we will create long-term value for our shareholders. Thank you for your continued trust as we continue to transform, and thank you for joining us today. I'll now pass it back to Mike Owens to continue with today's formal business.
J. Owens
ExecutivesOkay. 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've asked our Corporate Secretary, Eleni Damianakis, to act as Secretary of the meeting. I appoint Daniella Munoz and Anup Das 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, a notification regarding how to access these materials and our 2025 report to shareholders, together with the proxy or voting instruction form are mailed to shareholders of record as of the close of business on March 19, 2026. The scrutineers' report has been received, and I am advised that a quorum of holders of both the common shares and the 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. Scrutineer's report, which will indicate the number of shares represented at the meeting will be read by the Secretary at the end of the meeting. Now 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 employees who are shareholders or proxy holders 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, the appointment of the corporation's external auditor and the advisory vote on the corporation's approach to executive compensation, which we are holding for the first time this year. This is commonly referred to as say-on-pay. 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 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 director nominees and the appointment of the corporation's external auditor. If you hold Class A nonvoting shares, you may vote on the election of 3 director nominees. Both holders of common shares and holders of Class A nonvoting shares may also vote on the executive compensation advisory resolution. For each item of business, voting will occur by show of hands. I remind shareholders that the Board of Directors recommends that you vote for the election of each of the director nominees set out in the circular, for the reappointment of the corporation's external auditor and for the executive compensation advisory resolution. 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. To ensure online questions are received in time, please submit those questions as early as possible during the meeting. Okay. The first item of business is to place before the shareholders the consolidated financial statements of the corporation for the year ended January 3, 2026, and external auditor's report thereon. These materials can be found in our 2025 report to shareholders, which 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.
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI nominate Martha Billes, Owen Billes, Glenn Butt, Lyne Castonguay, Cathryn Cranston, Steve Frazier, Greg Hicks, Colleen Johnston, Donald Murray, J. Michael Owens, Christine Rupp and Sowmyanarayan Sampath, and Justin Young.
J. Owens
ExecutivesAre there any further nominations? There being no further nominations, I declare that nominations are closed. I'm advised that sufficient votes in favor of the election of each director nominee were received by the company's proxy holders prior to the meeting. Accordingly, I propose that we proceed with a single motion. May I have a motion to elect the individuals nominated?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI move that the individuals nominated for election by the holders of common shares be elected as directors of the corporation to serve until the earlier of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or when their successors are elected or appointed.
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. May I have a seconder?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI second the motion.
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. Only registered holders of common shares and their proxy holders are entitled to vote on the motion. Everyone in favor of the motion, please raise your hand. [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesI declare -- sorry, opposed, if any? [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesI declare the motion carried. 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.
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI nominate Norman Jaskolka, Nadir Patel and Cynthia Trudell.
J. Owens
ExecutivesAre there any further nominations? There being no further nominations, I declare that nominations are closed. I am advised that sufficient votes in favor of the election of each director nominee were received by the company's proxy holders prior to the meeting. Accordingly, I propose that we proceed with a single motion. May I please have a motion to elect the individuals nominated?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI move that the individuals nominated for election by the holders of Class A nonvoting shares be elected as directors of the corporation to serve until the earlier of the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders or when their successors are elected or appointed.
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. May I have a seconder?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI second the motion.
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. Only registered holders of Class A nonvoting shares and their proxy holders are entitled to vote on the motion. Everyone in favor of the motion, please raise your hand. [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesOpposed, if any? [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesI declare the motion carried. And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce your directors for the coming year. I will call upon each of my fellow directors to stand and be recognized. Martha Billes, Owen Billes, Glenn Butt, Lyne Castonguay, Cathryn Cranston, Steve Frazier, Greg Hicks, Norman Jaskolka, Colleen Johnston, Donald Murray, Nadir Patel, Christine Rupp, Sowmyanarayan Sampath, Cynthia Trudell and Justin Young. The next item of business is the appointment of the corporation's external auditor and authorizing the Board of Directors to set the external auditor's compensation. I'm advised that sufficient votes in favor of the appointment of the external auditor were received by the company's proxy holders prior to the meeting. May I have please have a motion to appoint the external auditor?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI move that Deloitte LLP, chartered professional accountants, be appointed the external auditor of the corporation to serve until the next Annual Meeting of Shareholders, and that the Board of Directors be authorized to set the external auditors' compensation.
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. May I have a seconder?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI second the motion.
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. Only registered holders of common shares and their proxy holders are entitled to vote on the motion. Everyone in favor of the motion, please raise your hand. [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesOpposed, if any? [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesI declare the motion carried. The next item of business is the advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation. As part of our ongoing review of the company's corporate governance practices, the Board, on the recommendation of the Governance Committee, is providing shareholders with the opportunity to indicate whether they support the corporation's approach to executive compensation as disclosed in the circular. Both classes of shares will vote together on the resolution. While this is a nonbinding advisory resolution, the Board values the feedback of our shareholders and will take the results of this vote into account when considering future decisions regarding the corporation's executive compensation. I'm advised that sufficient votes to approve the advisory resolution have been received by the company's proxy holders prior to the meeting. May I have please have a motion to approve the advisory resolution?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI move that the advisory resolution regarding the corporation's approach to executive compensation as set out in the circular be approved.
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. May I have a seconder?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI second the motion.
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. Registered holders of both classes of shares and their proxy holders are entitled to vote on the resolution. Everyone in favor of the motion, please raise your hand. [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesOpposed, if any? [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesI declare the motion carried. I will now ask the secretary to read the scrutineer's report on attendance.
Eleni Damianakis
ExecutivesThere are 28 holders of common shares present in person or represented by proxy, representing 3,241,636 common shares or 94.69% of the issued common shares of the corporation. There are 194 holders of Class A nonvoting shares present in person or represented by proxy, representing 31,941,447 Class A nonvoting shares or 64.85% of the issued Class A nonvoting shares of the corporation. These figures are subject to amendment to cover late arrivals and to correct any clerical errors or omissions.
J. Owens
ExecutivesWe will announce -- this completes the formal business for which this meeting was called. May I please have a motion to terminate the formal business of this meeting?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI move that the formal business of the meeting be terminated.
J. Owens
ExecutivesMay I have a seconder?
Unknown Attendee
AttendeesI second the motion.
J. Owens
ExecutivesShareholders and proxy holders in favor of the motion, please raise your hand. [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesOpposed, if any? [Voting]
J. Owens
ExecutivesThank you. I declare the formal business of the meeting terminated. I will now take my seat, and we will open the floor to questions. If you have a question, please approach the microphone, state your name and indicate whether you are a shareholder or a proxy holder. We will also be taking online questions from our shareholders. Thank you. Nothing online?
Unknown Executive
ExecutivesNo.
J. Owens
ExecutivesOkay. We have reached the end of the meeting. Thank you to our shareholders, directors, management, employees and other guests for joining us today and for your continued support. Thanks, everybody.
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