Murphy USA Inc. (MUSA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Bobby Griffin, cover consumer hardlines retail here at Raymond James, including the convenience store sector. Today, we are pleased to have Murphy USA with us. From the company is CEO, President, Mindy West; VP of Investor Relations and FP&A, Christian Pikul; Director of Investor Relations and FP&A, Ash Aulds; and Senior Vice President of Strategy and Analytics, Eric Bartko, all sitting over there. Today's format is going to be a presentation. Mindy is going to lead. But before we get started, I'd just like to, a, thank you for being here. You guys have been a long-time support and congratulate you on your first live presentation here as CEO. So with that, I'll turn it over.

Thank you, Bobby. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, guys, for attending, and thanks for your interest in Murphy USA. We love the industry that we are in. We are actually the fourth largest convenience store operator in a huge market that is highly fragmented and serving 160 million customers on a daily basis. And we see a lot of potential for growth as well. This industry is serving a growing population in this country, and these people are mobile. They're moving into our markets, which is good. This map may be a little bit hard to see from where you are but it shows that while the convenience store count is still hovering around 152,000 stores, there are actually fewer stores in the Midwest and the Northeast because new stores and more population are migrating to the Southeast and the Southwest. So that is a fantastic trend for us. This industry also has high trip frequency. 43% of us live within a mile of a convenience store and about 2/3 of us visit a convenience store at least once a week. Some visit even more than that. And as we like to say, all of those trips are not for quinoa salads or pepperoni pizzas. A lot of those trips are for nondiscretionary products that we major in, that we provide for our customers, and they reward us with their loyalty for having those products. So it is an amazing industry. We have been incredibly successful in that space since our spin, and we are confident that we will continue to be successful in the future. We built our first store in 1996, and we have grown to a network of 1,800 stores in 2025, so tremendous growth. And that's something in the past 30 years that we are really proud to have achieved. Today, I want to share with you some things that we are really excited about. We have a highly durable and repeatable growth model. We are building high-performing new stores that are earning attractive returns, and we are building more of them, and that is going to support our EBITDA growth in the future. We are also an everyday low pricer, and that is not going to change. That is the player that we are, and we're also enhancing our offer both inside and outside the store. We're also leveraging technology to do things more efficiently and effectively and to make our stores perform better. And despite a year that created a lot of headwinds on the fuel side of the business, our fuel performance last year was actually highly resilient, and we believe that fuel is going to be a major growth catalyst for us going forward. So we believe there's a lot of reasons to be excited to invest in Murphy USA. We have a really appealing value proposition. We have an incredibly strong foundation to build on. And we're improving store performance, building new stores and share repurchase, share buybacks continue to be a focus and deliver accretive value. I've been attending this conference for 13 years. And as Bobby said, this is the first time I'm actually presenting the company as the CEO, and I'm really excited about that. One of the most popular investor questions that I've been getting is what is going to change under my leadership. I think that's a fantastic question but I actually think a more important near-term question is what is going to stay the same. And a lot of things are going to stay the same. We remain committed to the core strategies that have allowed us to have a proven track record since our spin in 2013. So I want to lead off with these and talk about what they mean for us. These are the same 5 pillars, by the way, that you would have seen in our spin materials in 2013. They were resonating then. They continue to resonate now. Store growth. That has always been our first strategic pillar, and we have added about 600 stores to our network since we became a public company in 2013. And since building our very first store in 1996, we have now grown into, as I said, the fourth largest convenience store retailer. After a lull post COVID with the new store program, we are excited to tell you that we are going to be delivering new stores at a more robust pace and accelerating our growth over the next several years. And more importantly, it's not growth for growth's sake. We're building performing assets that are meeting our high return expectations and helping to expand our [Audio Gap] customers contribution and diversify our merchandise mix, which brings me to the second pillar, diversifying the merchandising mix. That is actually a strategy that I'm actually excited that we have not been able to execute because [Audio Gap]. And so that continues to be part of our foundation. And we have -- that has been a large contributor to our success. Our in-store sales contributes about 64% and on a margin basis, just under 50%. And as we build larger stores, though, that selling space is going to more center of the store, so those higher-margin products. So over time, we will continue to diversify our merchandise mix and grow our offer to our customers, optimizing our food and beverage offer, too. Sustaining our cost profile is a critical element to our long-term success. And there's no magic bullet here. We just have to grind it out and be better at everybody else. We have to live EDLP in order to succeed. And as we build bigger stores, I'm going to show you this in a minute, those will come with some higher store costs. But we are building a more enduring and resonating offer for our customers, which will result in higher merchandise dollars versus the additional expense dollars. Creating advantage for market volatility. Volatility, we always say is our friend. Our friend was absent last year, which was an exceptionally low volatile year with respect to gasoline prices. However, we know that volatility can introduce itself into the market at any time, and we have a really strong and competitive business model to capitalize on it when it does. We will also leverage our proprietary supply strategy to support our EDLP strategy at the gas pump. Lastly is investing for the long term. And when I think about that mindset, that has been one of the most impactful strategies that we have deployed in delivering shareholder value. It combines our preference for high rate of return growth and generated excellent shareholder returns since going public. So we make investments for the long term in those new stores that we expect to have a 30-plus year life and our free cash flow that those throw off, we also direct to building new stores but also investing in capabilities, investing in people, processes, technology, when those are executed with precision and scaled across the business, those can be some of the most valuable assets and valuable expenditures that we can make. And as I said, we continue to favor share repurchases. And that's not because there's nothing else to do with our cash. It's because we know what we can do with this business. We know the value that it can create. And as a result, that belief always underwrites an investment in ourselves, and that will continue to be a focal point of our capital strategy. All right. Let's get right to it and talk about the new stores. This is where we spend most of the capital, and we're very pleased with our new store performance. The data here that I'm showing you represents the last 3 years of stores, all 2,800 square feet that were built from 2021 to 2023. These stores are delivering higher merchandise dollars, higher fuel contribution. They do come with higher operating expenses but they also come with higher EBITDA. These store investments are meeting our return expectations. They have actually, in some cases, slightly outperformed their pro forma. And you can see the returns grow as the store ramps to maturity. And on the bottom left, from a volumetric perspective, all these stores are performing really well. So we remain pleased with our new store performance, and we will continue to do everything we can to push those returns even higher. As we're building more of these high-performing stores, they are growing square footage at an accelerated pace. So you can see over the past 5 years, we've actually grown our square footage by over 100%, and at roughly 50 stores per year going forward, we expect square footage to grow another 900,000 [ square ] feet coming off a higher base. So that's about 34% growth in square footage as we grow the network to over 2,000 stores. And remember, as I said earlier, the square footage is going to the center of the store space. So it's diversifying our mix, it's broadening the offer to our customers and increasing our contribution. In addition to the substantial investments we're making in the new stores, we're also investing in the customer experience, too. So we're going to be rolling out a fresh new look starting at midyear. This is what it looks like. We're going to introduce this. You can see it has a attractive new color scenes, it's very blue forward. You'll notice that the canopy matches the store. We also have a more modern look with the gray brick. On the inside of the store, we've done kind of the same thing. We've removed the wallpaper. It's now clean, white, bright space, much better signage inside the store to direct the customer where they want to go, better LED signage outside at the dispensers. We think these new stores are going to look great. We think this is really going to resonate with our customer. [Audio Gap] is really cost neutral. It's just a few thousand dollars of increase in cost we're able to roll this out. So we're really excited about this concept. We think this bright new features is going to make our brand even more appealing than it already is. I said, nicotine is important to us. We're very good at it. We have a differentiated advantage in nicotine and it's built on a large and very loyal customer base. And it's a category, quite honestly, that we invest in. We have the best people in our company working on this category. We've invested in advanced pricing sales. We also have tremendously strong relationships with our partners. And as a result, we own a large percent of the market. And as you can see here, we have grown our share [Audio Gap] 2019. So think about that. Every 5 packs sold in our market come from our stores. And a lot about how you get better at merchandising is really just about how do you manage executing on the basics. So as much as we would love to be the only retailer selling some unicorn product that customers want every day only we have, that's not going to happen. The fact is we honestly, in the convenience store space, we really pretty much sell the same stuff. So it's amplifying the basics that really make the difference in the business. So how we do that is very simple. We lead with price. We're going to lead with price on the things that matter to our customers, and we're also going to price competitively for the other products throughout the store. We provide value to our customer, and we reinforce that perception with our signage and with executed promotions. We also deliver quality. While our particular customers are not the wealthiest and they have to make their dollar stretch further, they still want quality. And that's why in our mix, we skew to the well-known national brands because for our customer, that reads quality to them. You also have to provide your customer with a good shopping experience. And that can mean a lot of things. It definitely means fast and friendly customer service, clean and well-maintained stores, products that they want in stock and priced correctly. Those are all impactful to the customer. And when you do that properly, those customers want to come back. So if you execute across all those areas, we believe that we will be successful. We're already good at these things but we know that we can get better. We're also refocusing on our food and beverage offer. And this is really about growing food contribution but it's also about driving traffic to the store and building bigger baskets. So at QC, we will be doubling down on our coffee offer to drive traffic to the store, which also will then support bakery and breakfast. We're also intent on driving complexity out of the prepared food offer. So we're going to strengthen the portfolio of what we're offering. We're going to reduce waste. And we're also going to be focused on the economics of things. So providing value and quality to the customer, but being very mindful of what margin, what price point do we need to be. We're also going to maximize promotional opportunities. We talk about our Murphy Drive Rewards and our QuickChek Rewards. Our digital capabilities are really allowing us to meet the customers where they are. And so how can we use those to economically change customer behavior? How do we get our customers to buy more of what they already buy? How do we get them to explore and buy other things in addition to that thing that they already buy. And our loyalty programs are very important to our customers. Last year alone, we delivered over $500 million of savings to the customers through our loyalty program, largely vendor funded. As I mentioned earlier, we are building larger, more productive stores but these larger stores do come with higher operating expenses. That does not mean that we are deviating from our everyday low-cost position at all. We are not departing from that mindset. And you can see here the new stores are driving about 2/3 of that OpEx. If you look at it from a same-store basis, the growth was only 2.2%. So that is representative of significant wins that we have made when it comes to driving down costs at the store level because really, it's all about simplifying operations, balancing efficiency and effectiveness. We ask our store managers to do a lot of things. If you spend a couple of hours in one of our stores, it is a beehive of activity. We are asking our store managers to do an awful lot. During my 2 years as COO, I spent a lot of time in our stores, and that really shocked me how much burden and how much expectation we really put on our store. So the trick is to make sure that they're busy translates into focus on the right things. We have leveraged our digital transformation efforts to make our labor model more efficient, using demand forecasting, historical data to properly staff the stores when they are at their busiest. So store labor is roughly 2/3 of store expense, and we've done a great job in optimizing that. Our labor costs were only up a little over 2% last year. Optimizing store hours not only allows us to drive labor costs from the business, it also means we have the right people inside the store focused on the right things. So we had a big win last year in shrink, reducing that by $4 million. We did that through a better check-in process, better inventory management, better merchandising of some high shrink items moving those closer to the register. And without the right labor model, we would have never been able to drive that efficiency. We're also investing in store maintenance. Store maintenance by far is the largest non-people cost that we have, and we're doing a couple of different things to address that. One is life cycle management. So we've designed an inventory database to help us predict when the most costly repairs will happen. That's driven by age of equipment, warranty expiration, where is the store, what is the velocity of the store, what is the weather that, that store is typically in. So rather than paying to fix the dispenser 3 different times and having all that downtime for customers, we're going to proactively go in and replace those ahead of that. So we will reduce our maintenance expense but we will also reduce downtime and customer frustration. We're improving our self-maintenance capability. We've taken a look at all the high-velocity tickets that are generating a lot of maintenance expense for things that we could do ourselves. So we can change out fuel hose couplings. We can change card reader batteries. Last year alone, that drove a benefit of about $2 million, and we're still identifying different opportunities to deploy that. Another subset of self-maintenance is when you call in a ticket. Our past operating procedure said, you call in a ticket anytime a single light bulb was down in a canopy. So that results in the tech coming out, a special charge for the scissor lift to get that technician to the top of the canopy. So it's a lot of expense for light bulb. So we've rethought about that. We've recognized that light bulb out in a canopy is not making material amounts of illumination change. So what if we waited until 2 light bulbs are out. So that is the procedure says now. And those sound like little things but little customers really do have enormous impact. And as you know, we also restructured the home office last year to create a leaner and more efficient organization. We talked a lot last year about the low price environment and the historically low volatility. I'm showing you here. Look at the minimal volatility that we had last year. We had on average of the first 3 quarters, $0.30 swing of volatility when we would normally see $0.70 to $1. We also had the lowest retail prices we've seen since COVID. Yet we still sold 28 million gallons. We continue to outperform Opus and retail margins held firm at $0.281 a gallon, which was flat to the last year. So we feel really good about what we were able to deliver in fuel. And as we said last year, data has shown that customers become less price sensitive at low prices. And we're showing you this here. This shows the relative volume changes against absolute changes in retail gasoline. What is important in this chart is you will notice it's not a straight line. Once you reach certain thresholds, you get exponential behavior. So certainly, below prices of $2.20, customers -- we see volume pressures. Customers are less price sensitive. When prices drift over $3, you start to see that price sensitivity behavior. Competition is also a reality that we face. There are some really strong competitors out there, and they are growing in markets in which we're growing too. In fact, we've seen 600 stores open within 3 miles of our stores since 2020. So roughly 1/3 of our network has been impacted by competitive intrusion. And a lot of that activity is happening in Texas, Florida, Colorado, North Carolina, places where we already have a strong incumbent position but we're also building new stores. You're probably thinking that doesn't sound very good. What I would tell you is we don't worry about it. Why it might be a pain early on, eventually, the markets normalize, and we are set to win our fair share of the customers. I'll show you what this looks like. When we see pockets of competition emerge, we see a recurring pattern, 3 different themes. The first stage is the emerging phase where the new entrant comes in, we see very aggressive pricing as they are trying to get their share, and that generally results in lower margins for the players in that trade area, us included. Eventually, though, the market stabilizes. The promotional pricing ends because that new entrant has to earn a rate of return on that store, and so they cannot continue to hold margins low or negative. And you see the volumes get redistributed across the market with the advantaged players such as ourselves holding on to our fair share. And then you see margins recover to more sustainable breakeven levels. And then over time, the market matures and you have steady volumes, predictable behavior and orderly gas pricing structure. So this is the analog we have seen. Obviously, it varies from market to market but I'm going to show you one particular market and what it looked like. I'm showing you an example of a competitor entry with a large store model entering one of our Texas markets where we had an incumbent position of 27 stores. We saw these same 3 phases. At first, yes, we felt the volume and margin pressure as the new competitor blanketed the market. And we didn't sit still from that. We were aggressive, too, trying to fight for our share. Eventually, though, we saw the market stabilize. Yes, it took a couple of years from the first store to the last store before we saw the behavior change. And during that period, we're investing in our store and our capabilities. After 6 years, you can see we still retain about 90% of the volume pre-entry. So our stores are performing well. And we see the competitors start to lean into margin beginning year 2. And they're usually inflating margin not just to pre-competition levels but even higher levels to account for their larger stores, higher wages, higher inflation in the market. And then over time, the market becomes orderly. So we know the end state is going to be incredibly advantageous to us in our winning business model. So while it hurts for a period of time, we know that we will win in the future. Now I want to talk briefly about our product supply and wholesale business. We get a lot of questions about this. I'm going to try to explain it really simply. We are really trying to strike an appropriate balance within 4 areas: ratability, flexibility, sustainability and low cost. So let me see if I can summarize for you what we do. We purchase fuel in 2 different ways, proprietary barrels that we buy at refinery gates and through contracts that we have with suppliers in our markets. Yes, we have a wholesale function, but it's not a high risk-taking organization. It's not a material profit center. We think about it as an inventory balancing function for the retail business. We also have a long shipper history major pipelines. This complements our ability to buy product at the refinery gate and move it where we need to. We own and operate several terminals -- 7 terminals where we process third-party volumes. Once the leaves the terminal, we use third-party carriers to get it where it needs to go. And lastly, given all the assets and capabilities, we are able to optimize sending the right logistics partner to the right store and sourcing supply for every store at the most optimal location. Over time, this set of assets earns $0.02 to $0.03 a gallon. I know it's hard to model because it can be volatile quarter-to-quarter but it does even out over time. It is really complex to own and to manage all these assets but that's what we expect it to deliver. We have delivered strong EBITDA growth over the years, and we acknowledge that it has been low since 2022 but we believe this is an inflection year. This is a bottoming year, and we're confident we can deliver [Audio Gap]. So confident, in fact, we continue to be active repurchasers of our stock. So what does all this mean for long-term value creation? We have inherent volatility in our business, and so that can result in a rather large expected result of outcomes. But we have a baseline view of the business, which we are showing with the Navy blue solid bars. We are also showing you potential upside for the business, too. Our baseline, however, is underwritten by our new stores, growing at a pace of 50 stores per year or 3% annually. We're also intent on growing our merchandise margin 3% to 4% a year also. So we are going to control our ratable growth driven by our NTIs, driven by our initiatives but also put ourselves in the best position to capitalize on volatility when it happens. Our strategies have endured the test of time, and they're going to serve us in the future. How we execute on the strategies, though is critically important. It's my job as CEO to enable leaders to run the business and drive results. And to do that, we need a culture that is intent on delivering those results. We've made some important leadership changes in the past several months, putting the right leaders in position to grow the business. And in conjunction, we have rethought about how do we refresh our focus, how do we need to work together. To help drive a culture of change, we've introduced what we like to call our ABCs. So accountability, being accountable to each other, to our customers, to our stores, to investors. We're still going to keep in our process but we need flexibility to move faster. And we had a lot of success over the years. So it will be easy to be complacent but we're not going to be. We're going to be curious because curiosity is the spark that is going to enable the idea that is going to drive shareholder value, the next thing that we need to be doing in the stores, and it keeps our team engaged. So in closing, the 5 strategic pillars that we've leaned on to grow this company since spin are still valid. They are still intact. We're undergoing a culture shift intended to make sure that we are agile and adaptable, unafraid to challenge ourselves while maintaining a relentless focus on delivering our results. I can assure you, as a management team, we are 100% not happy with flat EBITDA. But I can tell you, I believe that these days are behind us, and I feel fully confident that when we are at this conference next year, we will not be talking about why EBITDA is going to be lower again. We will be talking about how much growth and potential we have ahead of us, and we are happy to jump start that today right here. Thank you. We have time for question.

I think you might have time for one question. We got about 1 minute. I don't know if there's any from the audience.

So I guess it's a 2-part question. First, you said the new stores at full ramp generate like 16% returns. How does that compare to the old store formats?

How does it compare to what?

To the old store formats, like how much better is the 16%?

Well, it depends on what margin environment you're talking about. But the new stores we expect to deliver 16% return. In the past, when we first built kiosks, those were high performers too. So I'm not saying -- it's not that is any different. It's just that we have an even better store [Audio Gap] aging network that is continuing to hold its own but it's certainly not able to contribute the kind of value that the larger store formats can with the more expanded offer.

Got it. And the second part of the question, so you guys have talked about capital allocation kind of 50-50 shares. Is that still your goal?

It is still valid. It can differ from year-to-year period to period, right? So our capital is going to go to growth. [Audio Gap] are going to fund additional cash flow back into the business. We're also investing in initiatives that are going to drive value, too. And share repurchase is going to maintain is going to still be a critical component. But as you look year-to-year, we may be doing more of one less of the other, but that is certainly our intention.

Very good. I think that's right on time. Thank you, Mindy.