Seven & i Holdings Co., Ltd. (3382) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Interpreted] Good morning. I am Dacus of Seven & i Holdings. Thank you all for coming out of your busy schedules. Today, I'd like to talk about how we are going to transform Seven & i into a leaner, faster, more focused business, delivering a better experience for our customers and superior returns to our shareholders. We have been the market leader for many, many years, and we still are by a wide margin. There are a lot of positive aspects to this, but it can also be a dangerous place to be. Long-term success can breed a certain complacency in the business, leading to slower innovation and slower execution. Others copy our strengths and catch up. Even before coming into our new roles, the management team knew we needed to transform the way we run the business and do it quickly with a strong sense of urgency. As soon as we were nominated by the Board, we began working with our leaders around the world to define how we do this. It is especially important now because we are at a turning point in our history. In September, for the first time since the establishment of Seven & i, we will be fully a convenience store-focused business. This is our opportunity to redefine and reinvent ourselves. The resulting plan is a first for us, a truly global plan that provides clarity around our key priorities and initiatives with clear time lines and trackable deliverables, underpinned by robust management processes to ensure disciplined execution. This represents a clear break from the past. This is what I would like to share with you today. First, I'd like to start with a bit of a history and context, then get into some specifics regarding our transformation. And finally, what this all means for our financial performance. A lot of things are going to change going forward. One thing that absolutely will not change is our fundamental values. Our founders had a very clear view on how our business should be run. They wanted us to always strive to be a sincere company that is trusted by all our stakeholders, our customers, first and foremost and including all our stakeholders. To do that, they wanted us to embrace change, not simply adapt to change, but to embrace it and drive it. If we do that and collaborate with our stakeholders in a mutually beneficial way, we will be able to grow and contribute to solving society's needs. I think one of our challenges today is that we have lost some of our founders' mentality. We are no longer as trusted by our customers as we once were, especially in Japan. We no longer aggressively embrace change the way our founders did. we have become a bit complacent, particularly at headquarters. Getting back to our founder's mentality is critically important, and this plan is an important step in that direction. From now, I would like to change in English. So if necessary, please use the receiver. So I'll start with a bit of our history. 7-Eleven invented the convenience store channel nearly 100 years ago in Texas. Along the way, we had lots of great innovations, including 24-hour operations, the Slurpee, Big Gulp, 7NOW digital delivery, just to name a few. And then 50 years ago, we brought 7-Eleven to Japan and reinvented the concept with an intense focus on high-quality fresh food. We created Tanpin Kanri and a unique supply chain, both of which continue to provide competitive advantage today. Unfortunately, with the exception of 7NOW, it's safe to say that our rate of fundamental innovation has slowed somewhat. And you can see the results on this slide. This highlights our growth over the last 20 years. Although both revenue and EBITDA have roughly tripled over this time frame, more recently, our performance has been flat. This highlights the need for us to challenge ourselves to think and act more aggressively, to embrace reinvention and innovation. In short, to think and act as our founders did. In addition to the cultural challenges I just described above in Japanese, we have a number of very specific business challenges that we need to address with urgency. These can be divided into 3 buckets. The first bucket is about how we manage the global business. This is pretty fundamental, perhaps it's even obvious, but it's also one we can make quick progress on. The second bucket includes macro challenges that are common across all of our geographies. With inflation and economic uncertainty picking up, consumers are tightening their grip on their wallets. We see customers consolidating trips to the store and being more careful about what they buy. In addition, we are also seeing a shift from the convenience channel to other channels, particularly the discounters. And all of this, along with wage inflation is impacting our franchisees' profitability. The last bucket reflects challenges that are specific to each of our operating companies, 7-Eleven, Inc., SEI, Seven-Eleven Japan, our Japanese business; and 7IN, which is everything outside of that. The right-hand side of this chart summarizes the various initiatives that are underway to address the key growth challenges I just referred to. I'll take you through each of these separately. First, I'll focus on how we manage our global business. We have not really operated as an integrated global entity in the past. Each business unit did its own thing without a great deal of central oversight or even attempts at global leverage and coordination. To put it bluntly, Seven & i, the parent company was relatively hands off. But then at the same time, we would periodically dive into micro management, telling our business units what they could or could not do without really understanding the local situation. This lack of consistency and clarity created real challenges for the operating units in terms of execution and speed. And at the same time, it made it difficult for the parent company to hold our leaders accountable. This has now changed. The operating company leadership teams have clarity regarding their KPIs, and they can operate with a high degree of autonomy within a clear framework of expectations. They know what is expected and progress is discussed and reviewed on a regular cadence. The holding company is evolving rapidly as well. The roles and responsibilities within the parent are being redefined as we are no longer a conglomerate. We will get fit for purpose with a leaner headquarters, but with new global functions, staffed with global quality talent to help us leverage our scale and our global capabilities in ways that we have not in the past. This is all being carried out with new leadership at both Seven & i and SEJ. The result of all of this is a new way of working. The transformation plan crystallizes this. The plan is global, it's concrete, it's time bound with clear ownership and accountability. And speaking of accountability, these are our key leaders around the globe. The Holdings leadership team there across the top of the page, consists of the 5 internal directors, Ito-san, Kimura-san, Maruyama-san, Wakita-san and myself. We meet every day, every day at 8:00 a.m. This allows us to share information, discuss, decide and move quickly. In addition, every month, the Holdings leadership team and the operating company teams meet to review each business' performance, their issues and their opportunities. I know this sounds pretty obvious, but this was not done before. We did not have monthly business reviews. Doing this now allows us to work together to address issues and move with speed. In addition, I personally speak with each operating company CEO on a weekly basis or a near weekly basis. Again, it's an obvious step, but it's new. We didn't use to do this. Doing it now ensures that we have strong two-way communication and a lot fewer surprises. This also allows me to make sure that I provide the support that our operating company leaders need to deliver on their KPIs. The folks with the green stars next to their photographs, they're new to the leadership team. So I'd like to take a bit -- talk a bit about their roles and how they are approaching things. So in the very top middle of the page is Kimura-san. Kimura-san has taken on the role of Chief Administrative Officer of Seven & i Holdings. In that capacity, he will be responsible for the transformation of the parent company into a leaner and more focused organization. His planning is well advanced, and we will see things start to take shape soon. Just below that is Akutsu-san. Akutsu-san is the new CEO of Seven-Eleven Japan. He, along with his right hand, Kuretani-san, represent a new generation of leadership at SEJ. Akutsu-san has spent his career close to the field, close to our [Foreign Language] and our customers. This has given him a clear view of what needs to change to regain the trust and confidence of both. He is moving rapidly to make changes, and I'm confident that we will soon see results. As I said previously, our headquarters organization was designed to support a diversified conglomerate. That's no longer what we are. So we will be creating a much leaner and focused support structure while at the same time establishing global leverage teams comprised of small numbers of talented individuals to drive competitive advantages in key areas such as technology, digital, talent management, supply chain and operations. These are all areas of existing or potential advantage that we have not exploited on a global basis. We will going forward. The result will be a leaner, more impactful headquarters and importantly, about JPY 40 billion in annual cost savings by 2030. Next, I'd like to talk about how we will maximize our existing opportunities across our 3 businesses. There are 7 really significant global initiatives that we believe will deliver significant value and growth over the next several years. We are aligning our businesses and resources around these initiatives. This list of initiatives is highly summarized, but each operating company has gone through an extensive bottom-up process to clarify the key deliverables, the milestones and accountability for each of the many activities that roll up to support these 7 initiatives and deliver this plan. As a result, we feel we have a very robust, deliverable plan. We have said many times in the past that we are focused on food. That is the reason why we sell 30% more food per store in Japan than our competitors do. That's a big deal. However, our differentiation in food has slipped a bit, and our competitors have made progress. In the U.S. as well, many of our smaller competitors are focusing more on food and doing it well. As the environment has changed, we need to step up. SEI has developed a very successful and profitable restaurant in-store format. This format delivers much higher sales and profit than our other formats, and it drives incremental attachment sales of $0.81 for every dollar spent in the restaurant. That's big. We currently have 1,100 of these stores. We will roughly double that number over the next 5 years. In addition, SEJ has developed a number of innovations to deliver fresh hot food to our customers. This includes our in-store bakeries and the 7 Café Tea. Over the next 5 years, we will invest JPY 300 billion to remodel our stores and install the equipment necessary to roll these and other innovations out. Next, I'd like to talk about our store network. In North America, our competitors have been expanding their store footprint at a faster rate than we have recently. Given the excellent returns on our new standard formats, which deliver 45% higher sales per store, we need to accelerate the pace of our rollout. In the U.S., we will accelerate from the current level of 125 new stores per year to over 250 new stores per year. This will result in an additional 1,300 stores over the next 5 years. However, given the amount of white space in North America, we believe there is an opportunity to accelerate even more over time as we develop the team and the infrastructure necessary to support a more aggressive rollout. The more aggressive rollout is not yet reflected in this plan. That's upside. Similarly, SEJ has a variety of formats that target different trade area dynamics, and they will leverage this capability to add another 1,000 stores. They will be increasing the pace of their store openings by 40%. Our customers are demanding ever more convenient shopping, and our franchisees need additional revenue streams. Especially today as people are consolidating shopping trips, it's even more important that we create more ways to reach our customers. Our digital delivery platform, 7NOW is one such way. It's been very successful in North America, where it is profitably growing at over 25% this year. We are on track to hit our $1 billion sales target for 2025. It is clear that 7NOW is really resonating with our customers. They're able to get a hot pizza, a drink or whatever they want delivered within 30 minutes or less on average. We are expanding this service and will soon cover 50% of the U.S. population. In addition, we're testing a marketplace concept for 7NOW, which could really enhance its attractiveness as well as subscription services such as 7 Gold Pass with free delivery. As we leverage our store base and cover more and more of the U.S. population, this has the potential to redefine convenience for the next generation. It is really exciting and none of our convenience competitors have anything like it yet. Now 7NOW, by the way, is a good example of leveraging successful ideas around the globe. It was developed jointly by SEJ and SEI, but it was rolled out and developed first in SEI, where it's been very successful. It is now being rolled out in Japan. It is early days yet, but our initial indicators are quite promising, and delivery is roughly about 20 minutes on average. As we gain scale, the potential of 7NOW to really differentiate us from our competitors is very exciting for me. In a difficult environment where there are so many things that are outside our direct control, we must tightly manage those things that are within our control. OSG&A is one of those things. I have to say that currently, OSG&A management is not a source of competitive advantage for us. We need to make it one. We need to invest our money where the customers can really feel it. To that end, both SEJ and SEI are undergoing a rigorous process to review all costs. SEI is much more advanced in the process as they began nearly a year ago and the benefit of all their hard work is starting to show up in the P&L as we saw in the last quarter's earnings release. SEI will continue to keep OSG&A growth to well below revenue and gross margin growth, allowing the savings to fall to the bottom line. SEJ is at the start of the process and is launching a company-wide program to transform OSG&A across the value chain. We expect this will contribute a 100 basis point improvement versus their current trend line. Our proprietary products and private brands are a real competitive differentiator for us in both Japan and North America. They have much higher margins, great quality and higher growth than national brands. We will lean into this in both regions, but especially in North America, where our private brand business is still relatively underdeveloped. The margins on our private brands in North America are over 18 percentage points higher than national brands with equivalent or better quality. The upside is enormous. But first, we need to get the people and processes in place. We need to build capability. We are doing this now, and that is reflected in this plan. Over the next few years, we expect private brands to grow 3x faster than the business overall. Going forward, there is much more, much more opportunity in both sales and margin. That additional upside is not yet reflected in this plan. Many of you may not realize this, but SEI is the largest fuel retailer in the United States. Because of our scale, we have an opportunity to build best-in-class vertical integration capabilities to improve the margin profile of our fuel business. We have been active in this area for several years already, but now it's time to accelerate our efforts to capture untapped profit pools within our supply chain. Leveraging a talented and capable team with strong governance and supported by technology, SEI can use its core assets to stretch into other supply chain opportunities to create incremental value. This is similar to what we see our competitors in the U.S. doing now. We will do this by strategically moving up the fuel supply chain, gaining access to logistics infrastructure and opportunistically supplying fuel to other customers while continuously optimizing our network. And as you can see, the EBITDA opportunity is quite significant. Now on to customer engagement. SEI -- or sorry, SEJ has fallen behind our competitors in terms of how we communicate with and engage with our customers. Frankly, we've been a bit passive compared to our competitors and haven't invested as much in communication and marketing as we should have. The result is that our brand perception has taken a bit of a hit, particularly with younger cohorts of customers. We are still strong with older customers, but have lost some traction with younger ones. The leadership of SEJ recognizes this and is moving quickly to address it. They are revamping and strengthening the communications team, including bringing in strong external talent. They are changing the way we operate by ensuring that we have an integrated approach to product development, store activity and communication. In addition, we've redirected some funds from Seven & i to SEJ, and you will soon see a more integrated and aggressive cadence of communications and customer engagement. So this next slide summarizes some of the operational KPIs that I just shared with you. We'll be using this to track our progress at a very high level. But in addition, as I mentioned before, there are a lot of detailed activities below this that roll up. We will be tracking those as well to make sure that we achieve these objectives. So this brings me to the last element on our transformation, which is creating a new model, leveraging technology as well as our immense volume of data to create a more convenient and exciting shopping experience for our customers, while at the same time, improving our stores and importantly, our franchisees productivity and profitability. With our global reach and industry-leading scale, we are uniquely positioned to do this. We have 21,000 stores in Japan and 13,000 stores in North America. We have an enormous customer base of 30 million people coming into our stores every single day just in those two geographies. We also have great strength in supply chain, merchandising and operations. But on the other hand, we are not strong in AI. We are not strong in utilizing automation or in data analytics. We need partners to help us do this. Fortunately, our competitors don't seem to be that far along either. So this is a real big opportunity for whoever gets there first. And I want to point out, this isn't about creating new technology. The technology is out there, and it's evolving rapidly every day. This is about leveraging technology to enable us to deliver a better experience for our customers and a new model for our partners. This won't happen overnight. But if we don't focus on it, it won't happen at all. We unfortunately are not currently organized for success with regard to technology adoption and implementation. There is no one responsible for this across the entire business. So to rectify that, we'll establish a technology center of excellence, which will be responsible for our global technology strategy, working with key external partners and supporting the transformation of our business. The nature of convenience is changing rapidly. We need to be at the forefront of that change. So now I'd like to share what this means for our financial performance. For some of you out there, this will be the money chart. There are a lot of numbers on this slide, but I'd like to focus first on the EBITDA numbers in the middle of the chart. We plan to expand EBITDA by about 45% over the next 5 years from JPY 0.9 trillion to JPY 1.3 trillion. That reflects both margin improvement, which I referred to and cost reduction impacting the bottom line. Earnings per share will nearly triple to JPY 210 per share, and ROIC will improve from 4.8% in our last fiscal year to 12.6% in 2030. This reflects the impact of our share buybacks, the paying down of our debt as well as our profit growth. Also, I should add, our debt leverage at 0.6 turns assumes no additional debt for acquisitions, for accelerated store expansion or shareholder returns. Clearly, we have significant debt capacity for any or all of these additional opportunities beyond what is in the plan. So all of the information I shared on the previous slide, that was presented on a J-GAAP basis. So we thought it would be informative to share with you our pro forma estimate of what our key numbers would look like on an IFRS basis, IFRS. This is meant to make a comparison with some of our international competitors a bit easier. Now I should point out, this is a preliminary estimate, primarily taking into account differences in the treatment of goodwill amortization and lease accounting between Japanese GAAP and IFRS. Under IFRS, our EBITDA would likely be JPY 400 billion higher, and our earnings per share would be JPY 40 higher by 2030 than on our current plan on a J-GAAP basis. Both are quite significant. So we have a project underway to convert our accounting to IFRS. This has kicked off. We believe it will take a couple of years due to significant systems changes that are going to be required. Our current target for conversion is fiscal year 2028. This next slide I shared with all of you back in March, and I'm repeating it here because I want to reiterate our commitment to disciplined capital allocation that drives growth and unlock shareholder -- that unlocks value for our shareholders. We plan to generate about JPY 7.5 trillion in funds coming from operations, the sale of York Holdings and the IPO of SEI over the next 5 years. We will invest JPY 3.2 trillion in growth. We will pay down JPY 1.4 trillion in debt and return JPY 2.8 trillion to our shareholders, including JPY 2 trillion in share repurchases. It's important to note that of the JPY 2 trillion in share repurchases that we've committed to, we are already actioning the first tranche of JPY 600 billion. And also, as I said on the other slide, this does not take into account the opportunity for additional borrowing to support M&A, to support accelerated investment in stores or enhance shareholder returns. Now I shared this slide with you in March as well. This is our shareholder return algorithm. The only difference between this slide and the March version is that the targets in our model have gone up in line with the plan that I've shared with you today. We are now targeting earnings per share growth in the high teens and total shareholder returns in excess of that. So I'm going to switch back to Japanese for my summary slide. So if you need to, please make use of the headphones. [Interpreted] So this is a brief summary of the key takeaways from our discussion today, specifically what our new leadership intends to do. First, I think it's really important that in a sense, we get back to our roots, focus on our core values on building trust with our customers and stakeholders and embracing change. These are the values that gave us decades of success, and they will continue to do so. Second, we will manage the business very differently. We are introducing robust management process and rigorous performance criteria at all levels. This framework will allow empowered operating company teams to make decisions and move faster, while the new leaders at the holding company provide coordinated oversight. Third, we will maximize our clear near-term opportunities. We will focus on those areas in which we have a clear advantage and invest to accelerate the expansion of new store formats, including QSRs to drive greater differentiation in food, private brands and proprietary products to rapidly expand 7NOW and to build the capabilities we need to capture more profit from our fuel business and to free up funds for investment, we will impose disciplined cost control throughout the organization. Lastly, I want to make it clear that we are committed to our capital allocation strategy and long-term growth algorithm for shareholder returns. We believe the strategy we shared with you today will deliver shareholder returns over the next few years that are far in excess of what we have experienced over the past few years. I look forward to providing an update on our progress at the IR Day scheduled for the end of October. Thank you for your time and attention. [Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]