Domino's Pizza, Inc. (DPZ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. I'm David Tarantino, the restaurant's analyst at Baird, and I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to welcome you today to the session for Domino's. As you likely already know, Domino's is the world's largest pizza chain with a system that includes more than 18,000 locations across over 90 markets. And with us today to give us an update, I'm pleased to introduce CEO, Rich Allison. I know Rich has a lot of ground to cover in a formal presentation here. So I'll turn it over to him to get started. Rich, welcome.

Thanks so much, David, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. It's great to be with you virtually. Wish we could be together in Orlando. It would have been nice to see all of you again. And also, it was 5 degrees when I got out of bed in Ann Arbor here this morning. So I'd much rather be in that lovely Orlando weather. We're going to try to cover a little ground today, share a little bit about Domino's Pizza and about what I think makes our business pretty special. We'll start just with -- as we always do, with just a little legal disclaimer upfront relative to forward-looking statements, trademarks, industry and market data and certain metrics. So let's get started. For those of you that don't know the Domino's story, we are the #1 player in global QSR pizza. And I've included on this page a few of the relevant stats. When you take a look on a trailing 12-month basis, almost $18 billion in global retail sales, a 22% share in the U.S. of QSR pizza and 20% globally. Through the third quarter of 2021, we had 18,380 stores operating in more than 90 markets around the world. And we are a predominantly franchised business, with 98% of our global stores owned and operated by our terrific franchisees. We play in a large, growing and fragmented category. The global pizza industry is about $120 billion. And the QSR component of that, where we play directly, is about $81 billion. And interestingly split roughly equally across the U.S. and international markets. And with the U.S. growing low-single digits, international growing a little faster on a long-term basis, mid-single digits, obviously, with 2020 impacted a bit by the pandemic. And we're in the 2 sectors, carryout and delivery that are growing faster than the dine-in portion of the business. I think importantly also, as we think about the share opportunity out into the future, you look at the U.S., for example, the top 4 players only make up about a 52% share. So more fragmented than some of the other QSR categories out there. It's important to understand that while we're a one-brand company, each of our stores around the globe effectively operates 2 businesses, both a delivery business, which is really what Domino's Pizza was founded on 61 years ago and the carryout business. And today, in the U.S., delivery makes up about 57% of our transactions and about 2/3 of our sales, carryout making up the rest. And outside the U.S. also, the mix is pretty similar, still roughly about 2/3 of the business being delivery and 1/3 of the business being carryout, with these being the largest segments of QSR pizza. When we talk about Domino's and the track record that we've established over time, it really is a proven model for success. And I'm going to spend my time with you today talking about these 3 elements of that model. It really begins with leading with innovation, leveraging our global scale and then driving superior returns for our shareholders. So let's get started with innovation, and I'll talk a little bit about how we've led with innovation across several areas of our business model. When you talk about Domino's, one of the things that comes first to mind is technology. And we have, indeed, been leaders in technology innovation, not just within the pizza category, but broadly across the restaurant and retail sectors. And I've tried to highlight a few of those areas on the page here. Our Piece of the Pie Rewards program, where we have over 29 million active users. Digital sales north of 75% of our total sales in the U.S. And we have markets outside the U.S. where our digital sales percentage is significantly higher than that 75%. We've launched anywhere ordering platforms, really allowing our customers to access Domino's Pizza anytime and anywhere they want. In the U.S., that's over a dozen and a half different ways that customers can order. And then more recently, our GPS delivery technology, that not only allows customers to understand where their pizzas are on their journey to their houses, but very importantly, this serves as a critical operational tool within our stores to help us get more efficient as we continue to up the game on our delivery service. We also have led with service innovation, and I've shared a couple examples here. Contactless delivery, which we launched at the beginning of the pandemic back in early 2020; HotSpots, which we rolled out a few years prior to that to be able to bring pizzas to customers in parks or by the beach or wherever they happen to be. And most recently, our Carside Delivery, where our customers can order online, just let us know when they pull into the parking lot and we run the pizza out safely and contact-free to put it in the customer's trunk or wherever in the car they would like it. We've led with product and value innovation. A big part of the Domino's story over the last decade was our new and inspired pizza, which was a significant innovation around our product. But since then, we've launched a number of product innovations most recently, our Dips & Twists. You see the 3 offerings that we have here, Five Cheese, Cheesy Marinara and Baked Apple Dip. And then previously, some of our new specialty pizzas, Chicken Taco and Cheeseburger. We've also been an innovator and very consistent provider of everyday value to our customers. And the Mix & Match deal that we've offered now for over a decade has been a critical part of our success, along with our everyday carryout specials at $7.99 that have really helped us to grow our share of that carryout business. Shifting now to innovation around image. Back in the 2012-'13 time frame, we decided to reimage all of our stores around the world. And we basically completed that process. So we're now -- our image is updated globally into what we call pizza theater, which really opens up the kitchen and allows the customer to see the fresh dough that is such a critical part of our product and the fact that our pizzas are made specifically to that customer's order each and every time. We've also led with innovation and image around how we get pizzas to our customers. From our DXP delivery vehicle that you see in the upper right here on the slide, most recently, the work that we've been doing with Nuro around autonomous delivery, where we've been making actual autonomous deliveries to customers in stores in Houston. And then here in the U.S., but really even more so in our international markets, the use of e-bikes to deliver to customers, which is a great efficient way to deliver pizzas, but also a great image enhancer for Domino's as well. I'll shift gears now from leading with innovation to leveraging our global scale. And the ability to leverage this scale has been a critical driver of our success over the course of the last couple of years as we have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic. It has most certainly been a great benefit to have that scale. And scale for us, on a global basis, includes more than 18,000 stores in over 90 markets that you see on the map here, all across the globe. But scale also matters at the national level. And here in the U.S., our scale, as the #1 player in the pizza -- QSR pizza category, a 22% market share, as you see on the left, and the scale position that we have in delivery at 31% share and in carryout at 16% share. This gives us significant wherewithal around purchasing, around marketing and other advantages that, frankly, during COVID-19, really helped us as we maintained supply and also maintained strong economics across our system during a very difficult operating time. And as we look forward to growing the business well into the future, the muscle that comes from that substantial marketing fund is also an important part of our scale advantage. Scale then also matters down at the local level. And for those of you that have followed Domino's for a while now, you've heard me talk about fortressing. And fortressing is really building new stores inside of our existing territories, such that we can get closer to our customers, bringing them better service, bringing us incremental carryout business because customers simply won't drive as far to pick up a pizza as they'll allow us to drive to deliver one to them. It also means busier drivers, which means more tips and higher wages helps us lower delivery costs and allows our franchisees to continue to grow their enterprise and deliver more overall profitability for their systems. We also think about scale at Domino's in the context of our international business, and we are very fortunate to have a phenomenal network of strong international master franchisees. And I've listed some of our publicly traded master franchisees here on this slide, several of which would be as large or larger than many of the companies that you'll hear present at ICR this week. And the scale of these international master franchise partners brings capital. It brings expertise. It brings management talent and a significant amount of capability that has really been a very important driver of the incredible success that we've seen in our international business now for several decades. And we look forward to continuing to grow alongside these terrific partners well into the future. We also have significant runway in our international business for future growth and scale. If you take a look first on the U.S. side, at almost 6,500 stores through the third quarter of 2021, we look forward and continue to see the potential for 8,000 or more stores in the U.S., giving us runway for growth here at home. And then as we look out around the world, we've listed for you here some of our top international markets by store count today. In these markets alone, we see the potential for an incremental 10,000 plus stores. And some of the notable highlights here among our emerging markets would include India, which is our largest international market by store count today, where we see the potential to more than double that business. China, where we've just recently begun to build significant momentum in our growth in the China market, we and our master franchise partner, Dash Brands, see extraordinary potential to continue to grow in China. And 5,000 units we see as an achievable target there. Elsewhere across the globe, you'll see not only in other emerging markets like Brazil, but also in markets like Japan and France and Germany, we see the opportunity to achieve Domino's Pizza businesses with 1,000 or more units. I'll now shift gears and talk a bit about how we drive superior returns with the business model that we've built over time at Domino's. And I talk about a lot of these individual elements and have over the years, but I'm going to try to share the formula with you here. And I'll build it up for you, and then I'll talk through each of these individual components in a little bit more detail. First and foremost, it starts with industry-leading unit economics. And you've heard me talk about this. For several years you've heard us talk about it at Domino's for well over a decade. But this is really the foundation of any franchise business' opportunity to grow going forward. Fundamentally, is you have to have great unit level economics. If you don't, then you will not continue to attract the franchisee investment necessary to grow your brand. When you have those unit level economics, that drives net store growth. Store growth doesn't happen without great unit level economics. And then when you take store growth and you combine same-store sales growth over time, you get retail sales growth. And retail sales growth is another metric that you've heard me talk about consistently because this is really what drives the economics for DPZ. Retail sales drive royalties. Retail sales drive digital and other transaction-related fees, and retail sales drive supply chain revenues. So this is the engine that drives the economics for DPZ. Yielding the operating income growth that we've been able to demonstrate over time, you take those retail sales and you augment it with some margin expansion over time and you get great operating income growth. Combine that with an efficient capital structure, which, as those of you that have followed us know, we operate the business in that range of 3 to 6x debt to EBITDA. Combine that efficient capital structure with operating income growth and you get EPS growth and superior total shareholder returns over time. So I'm going to dig into this formula and talk about each of these elements in turn for a few minutes. Let's start with industry-leading unit economics. I'm giving you a 10-year view here, from 2010 at $67,000 in average EBITDA per U.S. franchise store to 2020, where we saw our best year ever with franchisee unit-level economics, $177,000 estimated store level EBITDA. That's a 10% compound annual growth over a 10-year period. We don't have our final results in for 2021 yet, but our preliminary estimate is that franchisee unit-level economics remained very strong. And our current estimate is $170,000 plus. If we didn't have these unit-level economics, we wouldn't get the robust global net store growth that you see here on this slide. I had the pleasure in 2012 of attending our 10,000th store opening in Istanbul, Turkey. And you look today, through the third quarter, and we're at over 18,300 stores. So you can see the acceleration in store growth that we've seen over time with a 10-year compound annual growth rate from 2010 to 2020 of 6.6%. So a tremendous store growth story over time built on those industry-leading unit economics. You combine that with same-store sales growth, and we've got a strong track record of same-store sales growth. You see both our U.S. and international businesses here on a 20-year time horizon. You look over the last 10 years, the average is north of 7% in the U.S. and north of 5% in the international business, with 111 straight positive quarters of same-store sales growth on the international business, really an unprecedented achievement within the QSR industry. So store growth and same-store sales growth drives retail sales growth, almost a 10% compound annual growth rate from 2010 when we were just north of a $6 billion brand to 2020. If you take a look at retail sales on a trailing 12-month basis, through the third quarter of 2021, we're almost to the $18 billion mark. I think importantly, as you see on this chart, driven both by both businesses, both our U.S. business and our international businesses have contributed significantly toward that global retail sales growth. And as I mentioned earlier, retail sales growth is really what drives the economics for DPZ. So you take roughly a 10% compound annual growth rate in retail sales. You get some margin expansion along the way through the efficient franchise business model that we operate, and you end up with operating income growth of almost 12% over that 10-year period. And I've also shown on the slide here for you that operating income growth on a trailing 12-month basis through the third quarter of 2021 at $780 million. Take that operating income growth, combine it with leverage, we operate between 3 and 6x. You see it consistently here over the 10-year window. And as those of you know, who follow us, we did another recap in 2021 to continue to bring that leverage ratio back up. Take that combined, operating income growth with the use of leverage and you see the EPS growth that we've been able to generate here over the 10-year period of just north of a 24% compound annual growth rate. Now important to note on our EPS growth over time. This does factor out the 53rd week. We have one of those about every 5 years. And we had one of those back in 2020, which as we shared with you back then, contributed about $0.39 of EPS growth in the fourth quarter of 2020. 2021 is a 52-week year. So we will not have that factor in the fourth quarter of 2021. The EPS growth has helped us to drive superior total shareholder returns. We're sharing a 10-year, a 5-year and a 3-year view with you here. And also trying to give you a sense for the capital that we returned to shareholders over time. A consistent part of our philosophy and the way we run the business has to -- has been to efficiently return capital to our shareholders over time. About $6 billion over the 10-year period, $4.3 billion of that over the last 5 years and on a 3-year view, and this 3-year view just goes through the third quarter of 2021, $2.4 billion returned to shareholders. In all 3 of those windows, significantly exceeding the return of the S&P 500. So that's the model. Leading with innovation, leveraging our global scale and driving superior returns for our shareholders. I'm going to shift gears now and give you a window, as we typically do at this time of year, into some of our guidance for fiscal 2022. I'm going to start with some of the investments that we're going to make to continue to drive growth. G&A, we expect to fall in the $445 million to $455 million range for our 2022 fiscal year. And our CapEx for this year, we expect to be at around $120 million. As we continue to invest in our business, we'll continue to invest in technology that's helped us to drive growth. We are going to continue to invest in our supply chain infrastructure. We have a new supply chain center in Merrillville, Indiana that's currently under construction and that will open this year, and we've got ongoing investments in our existing infrastructure and supply chain to modernize our legacy facilities, along with continuing to build new corporate stores. I also want to share some of the anticipated external market impact. We expect FX across our basket of currencies to be a $4 million to $8 million negative impact in 2021. And we expect unprecedented increases in our food basket costs versus 2021 of 8% to 10%, which is 3 to 4x what we might normally see in a year. I think many of you are aware of the significant inflation across the U.S. economy and how that is hitting many of the inputs that we have for our business from meats, to cheese, to some of the grains that go into the production of our products. So 8% to 10% versus 2021. We also expect to continue to see wage inflation across the industry, and that will certainly impact us at Domino's as well. In light of some of these increases in costs, we are going to make some changes to our national offers in 2022. The first of those you will see in just a couple of weeks related to our $7.99 week-long carryout offer. And it's interesting, we're not going to change the headline number because the equity around that $7.99 is so important, but we are going to move that offer to online-only, and we are going to change the count on our chicken, our wings and boneless from 10-piece to 8-piece to recognize some of these costs that we're incurring. Moving the offer to online has several benefits. One is a higher ticket. Two is a lower cost to serve because we're not having to answer the phones. And third is that we get access to critical data. So that's one of the changes you'll see from us this year. Our 2- to 3-year outlook, I'll reiterate, net unit growth of 6% to 8%, retail sales growth of 6% to 10%. Finally, I hope you'll take a look at our new corporate stewardship report that we just published. I'm very proud of what the work the team has done here. And while we don't have time during this session for Q&A, I invite you to join us at 1:00 for our Q&A session, where I'll have Russell Weiner, President of our U.S. business and COO, joining me along with Joe Jordan, Executive Vice President of our International business. Thank you so much for joining us today, and I hope to see you at the 1:00 Q&A.