SSP Group plc (SSPG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody, and you're going to see 5 Boroughs later on in JFK. But if I can just welcome everybody. Thank you to those of who are with us last night, thank you for coming back. It's a -- it was a great night actually. And hopefully, the objectives that we had as we kicked it off, which was to give everyone a sense for the food credentials and culinary features and credentials of SSP to meet the wider network of partners, clients that we're with. And just to get a sense for the kind of culture, capability, personalities of SSP America and SSP Group, hopefully, that came through in a nice fun and informal event. The focus for our event today is sustainable long-term growth. We are convinced that our business is poised to be able to drive forward post this COVID reset in a very strong and very exciting way in terms of how we deliver for all stakeholders, but in this context, particularly for shareholders, in the 5-year period from '24 through to '29 on to 2030. And so we're going to talk about that today. Jonathan and I will top and tail us with a group overview of our strategy and an overview of how our economic model and investment thesis comes together, respectively. But the center piece of our time together, which is why we're here in New York, is a profile and deep dive into all elements or many elements of our U.S. business. In fact, Jeremy Roloff said to me today, you've no idea how he could spend 3 hours talking about America. He clearly hasn't spent 3 hours with our U.S. leadership team. You could spend 3 hours just talking to Pat Murray, right, you don't -- but I think this is an event, if I could say so, that is not without operational risk. Michael will touch on that a little bit later in terms of some of the things we're going to try to do to bring the business to life in the showcases of the different capability areas, particularly around kitchens and cooking that you're going to see. So hopefully, you will learn a lot, but I think you'll have fun with us as well between now and 12 and then you'll see it all have come to life and what is our biggest single airport client, which Geoffrey leads day today, which is the Terminal 4 business in JFK. This, for me, you heard me mention it last night, the simplest way to put this is all roads to value creation and growth for SSP lead through North America. We are -- this is my seventh business in 15 months to the U.S. with the exception of going back and forward to the U.K., it is the country that I visited by far the most, since I joined business. And that's because understanding what we do here. I'm trying to make sure that we're capturing the potential of that in our strategy is so important. So sustainable long-term growth showcasing North America, they knit together perfectly, and hopefully, you'll get to see that over the course of today. So what we're going to do over the course of between now and in particular, between now and 12:00 is, I'm going to briefly touch on the trading statement that we've released today. Just to be clear, we are advised and almost required to issue a trading statements in advance of spending this amount of time with a group of equity analysts and shareholders. There is not a huge amount in it that's anyway new, but there are some nuances that I'll touch on in a second. I'm then going to provide an overview for some of you, elements of it will be -- will reinforce what you'll have heard us talk about over the course of the last year on what's happening at the group level. It will be relatively brief because the central piece, as I say, of the event is trying to understand what we're doing in North America, and I'll hand it over to Michael and Pat to lead that through. Then importantly, Jonathan will join this up in terms of what all this means for our economic model. We'll then take some Q&A, and we'll then try and get out here sharp at 12:00, so you get to see all of this come to life in JFK. So some brief highlights from the trading statement that we released this morning. As I say, this was -- it's only 4 weeks since we last updated the market. If there was anything profoundly different or new, it would be a surprise. But actually, if you look at the underlying trading momentum, it's a modest improvement on the 111% that we reported for the first 6 weeks of the second half back in May. It's disguised a little bit by currency movements throughout of 2019. And Sarah -- and Sarah can explain that to you. But the underlying trading momentum in the business continues to be very good. On this theme of momentum, the momentum in net gains also continues to be very good. In the first 10 weeks of the year, you've heard us talk quite explicitly about how that's coming together. And as we go forward, and we have certainly sustained that momentum and net gains through the first 10 weeks of the second half. We announced back in early May, the acquisition of Midfield Concessions. We anticipated that, that would complete through this summer. And we're pleased to confirm that in 6 of the 7 airports in which we have -- which we're acquired stakeholder supports and to execute and complete the transaction that's now done. So we are largely complete with Midfield Concessions, and we're on track to close the last airport later this summer. And there's quite a bit of information about our medium-term financial framework, which Jonathan will describe later on this morning. So that's the current trading bit. If we move on now to the kind of drivers of growth and returns for the business going forward. Let me just start by saying that there are many people here, who will understand and know the SSP of the pre-COVID year a much better than me. Obviously, many of those work for SSP, but also there's a group of people who have been researching SSP and invested in SSP, who go back well before COVID. The business had a very, very strong track record of growth and in particular, delivery for holders in that 5-year period from IPO up to the early stages of COVID. We then had the existential shock of COVID, which was absolutely brutal in terms of its impact on the economic model of the business, but is frankly, brutal on the people who worked for us and the clients that we worked with and many of the partners that we worked with as well. So the business responded by effectively protecting ourselves and putting the business into hibernation. And since the early 2022, we have been emerging from that in terms of how we recover. And I think it is worth -- me just pausing for 1 second to acknowledge the enormous skill and commitment of many of our U.S. team and group team who manage that very, very difficult set of circumstances. There's something about the -- at least for me, anyway, there's something about the human psyche, where you forget about these problems and move on quite quickly. It's -- I thought when we were in COVID, we never talk about anything else for decades to come, but it's almost gone in our memory now, but it's worth recognizing just how important it was in terms of how the SSP team manage through that -- and frankly, that couldn't have been done without the supports of our shareholders, many of you are here and giving us the resources to get through the business, to start to get through the shock, but also to come out of the COVID period as a stronger business, which we have a real conviction we are now doing. So I do want to acknowledge, I joined the business in March of 2022. I feel like I'm getting a good feel for the business in my time here. Part of how I do that is to get out and understand the business and meet clients, teams, partners of different kinds across the world. I'm heading towards having visited 30 of the 38 countries we're now in. Having met our stakeholders in those different places and I -- at least I'm starting, if I haven't quite finished to get a kind of deeper understanding as to what the essence of SSP is. But what I would say is that it's important to acknowledge that in some economic terms, we're not finished the recovery phase from COVID yet, right? We gave a set of quite specific. We didn't quite call it guidance back last December, but in substance, it was around how we would perform in a revenue and EBITDA basis for '23 and again for 2024. But it is worth noting that some of the other elements that sit below EBITDA in our business will still take through much of 2024 to fully recover. By that, I mean getting our refinancing done, re-establishing the provision and payment of some level of dividend, resetting some of the capital allocation and catch up post the hibernation phase of COVID. And getting our EPS into a place in 2024 from which we can then have the sustainable growth that we're going to talk about for the rest of the session and which Jonathan will then knit together in terms of what our forward-looking economic model looks like. In other words, we're in many, many elements, we are fully recovered already from COVID, but not all, but we will complete that journey in the next 9 to 12 months. And then that gives us the platform from which we will have the sorts of economic returns that Jonathan will outline in so far as we can a little bit later on. So to achieve sustainable growth, it has to build on a real sense of purpose and clarity of mission or vision in terms of what we're trying to do. We have pulled together as a leadership team and brought to life actually something that was somewhat nascent in SSP before, which is the sense of aligning on purpose across our group, which we call being best part of the journey. Each word in that is important in describing what our business is and what we aspire to be. So the notion of being best is very important. This is a competitive bunch of people, who have an aspiration to create a great business and to win in the marketplace in which we deliver and to provide a quality of proposition, service and excitement to all of our stakeholders. We want to set the standard for food travel expertise across the world. The notion had been part of something also matters because we sit in a complex aviation ecosystem. You will have heard some elements of that in the aviation expert panel last evening. But the simplest way to put this is we can only deliver if the system delivers. And so being part of a system and understanding how to actually perform within a system is very important. And obviously, the notion of journey resonates for us on several levels. It's a journey in other words, travel, which is core to what we are. But it's also about a journey in terms of the relationships that we're building, the careers that we're providing to people, the evolution of our business. We don't think about the business in a static way. We think about it is being in a dynamic way. And so those come together in this purpose of being best parts of the journey. And our vision is quite simple. We are -- we love food. We love travel, and we want to be the best at it. And it's that fusion of those 2 things, food and travel and the notion of winning that really comes through from that. So we're fulfilling that vision and living that purpose by actually delivering long-term sustainable growth. What we mean by that -- and I mean relative to the historic investment proposition for SSP is that we will be a faster-growing business than before. Would be faster because of where we choose to compete. Simply put, we will do more in air relative to rail, and we'll do more in North America and Rest of World relative to the U.K. and Continental Europe. And we are being choiceful about that. In terms of where we're putting resources to drive and support that growth. One of the fortunate features of this industry and this business model. And I mean, this isn't common across all businesses and all business models. Is it -- is that it so happens that the fastest-growing parts of the world are also the highest returning parts of the world. So it makes it even more importance to be choiceful and clear around where we're putting incremental capital and where we're building the business. In terms of how we compete to get after that, it's about strengthening the capability platform that we have to convert growth into profit and returns and to convert that profit into cash so we can reward shareholders, so also we can self-fund the growth and create this sort of virtuous circle of returns, investment, more returns, more investment that enables us to progress -- and we have to do that by balancing how we allocate capital across what we do to drive like-for-like performance in existing units, how we thoughtfully get after net gains or opportunities in the marketplace and where it makes sense to add to that with infill M&A, and Jonathan will describe about those knit together a little bit later on. A reminder just to go back to some kind of macro stats and sort of illustrate the -- how we're thinking about growth going forward. We operate in and indeed, we're increasing our exposure to the faster-growing parts of the global aviation market. We choose to be in travel. We like the travel market. And we think actually, if you do a stand back from global consumer markets, global F&B markets, travel is a very attractive place to be because of some of the dynamics and the complexity of it, but also because of the structural growth that is attached to it. So just let me for a second, bring you and bring us back to our customer. Probably a good place to spend a little bit of time in a consumer-facing business, who are the global or a local traveler. So in the early parts of this financial year, we went out to market. And we did -- we construct an environment what we called the food travel insight survey. We spoke to 18,000 travelers across every market in which we operate. And what we wanted to understand is what are the preferences, behaviors, what's the relationship of travelers with food as we're emerging from COVID and into a what we think is becoming a different set of travel missions in terms of waiting than before. And -- we can go into a lots of elements of this, but I think kind of 3 key things that are important, which run through on how we're thinking about the business, first of all, and Michael is going to talk about the notion of revenge travel a little bit later on. And there may be a near-term bump in travel because of that. But if you do a stand back from that and cut through that, it is unequivocal when you speak to consumers right now that they do anticipate spending and allocating more of their discretionary spend against travel, in other words, against travel experiences than against physical products as you look at anticipated future spend going forward. Second thing, which is very important in a inflationary world is consumers are less price-sensitive, when traveling than they are in living their day-to-day lives. That does not mean to use a global expression that we can take the p*** in that respect. We have to provide compelling propositions to customers. But if you -- if we have to recover pricing consumers are with us in that because they expect food to be somewhat more expensive in a travel environment and provided we deliver the quality and service proposition and address some of the sources of stress that you can sometimes find in a travel environment, then pricing is not the #1 concern. And thirdly, and consumers anticipate spending more money and having more -- consuming more food in airports going forward, and you would have heard that kind of aviation panel last night describe some of the rationale for that and the implications in terms of how space is being allocated in airports going forward. So -- last summer, we set about as a leadership team and as a Board to do a sort of stand back and watch our forward-looking strategy as a business should be. I should emphasize that we did that with a conviction that we had some very strong foundations on which to build in terms of the historic capability and insights that the business had across the market and some very strong beliefs, for example, and the need to be local, entrepreneurial and decentralized in terms of how you get after that opportunity and none of that has changed. But we didn't come out of that process with a conviction to be a bit more choiceful around where we wanted to grow, particularly in terms of geography and with a sense of some of the capability platforms in near-term areas of strategic focus, in particular, the opportunity to get after like-for-like performance of our existing units as we reopens them post-COVID. And so those elements in terms of where we choose to compete and how we are getting after competing in those markets are pretty important, and we've been quite consistent in how we've been running the business for the last 12 months in that respect. And we are increasingly confident that those areas of focus are actually delivering returns and are the right strategic choices that we're making as a business. So each element of this strategy actually is reflected in the different regions in which we compete. I'm not going to say any more about North America right now, because we're going to spend the rest of the day in that respect. But we do see significant growth opportunities and returns opportunities in selected -- important -- a lot of importance in the terms of selected -- they are selected markets in the Asia Pacific region and in the Middle East. And our business in India is a great example of that. Indeed, like -- since I've joined the business, I've already spent 2 full weeks in India, and Jonathan will know, where I'm going on this. But in addition to that, I probably had 10 or 12 face-to-face meetings with our Indian joint venture partner. And even as recently as last night, I've had sort of 3 WhatsApp exchange with Sunil Kapur around various aspects of what we're doing there. The positive piece of that behind that is that joint venture we have there has fabulous growth potential, very, very deep client relationships in a fast-growing aviation market and a number of concepts, particularly in relation to shared user lounges, which are world leading, not just in an Indian context, but more broadly across the business. If I step to Continental Europe for a second, we actually are growing in interesting ways in Continental Europe too, that I would say one is geographically in that we will, this year, enter Iceland and Italy is 2 new markets for SSP. We've already done Iceland, and we'll soon open in Italy. And secondly, we have some -- we're capitalizing on some interesting consumer trends. For example, the Southern Mediterranean airport sector is just absolutely on fire in terms of growth as consumers are taking short-haul holidays and some of them are for kind of annual holidays, but also kind of weekends away and so forth. We see very, very strong growth across the Balearic Islands, Southern Spain, the Greek Islands, Cypress and Athens, Thessaloniki and all that part of our business is growing very strongly. We're putting incremental resources into that. And in the U.K., actually, we're making some very nice progress in what is and always will be our flagship market. We feel very good about the path that we're on in the air channel in the U.K. We've got some cool new brands that we're bringing into the air environment there. In fact, as a Group Executive Committee last week, we were out with another brand that we think will bring to Heathrow over the course of the next 18 to 24 months. There is a lot of very, very positive momentum on proposition, brand access, client relationship and net gains momentum and renewal momentum across U.K. Air, it's really, really cool actually in terms of what we're doing and very important. Rail is a little slower. It's slower because consumers are coming back to rail a little bit more slowly. It's been compounded by the uncertainty associated with industrial action, but we are making progress there, too. And I think the combination of those 2 things is going to give SSP a very, very strong performing presence with some very, very good examples of best practice in our flagship market, which will be very, very important. Let me -- sorry, -- so this is the economic model that you would have heard me and Jonathan talk about quite a bit before. I'm just going to touch briefly on #1 and 2 here, which is what are we doing in terms of our like-for-like growth focus. And then how is business development activity coming together. Jonathan will pick up on profit conversion and cash flow generation after we've done the U.S. deep dive. I mean this might be a statement of the blindingly obvious, but strong like-for-like performance is absolutely compelling in terms of the economic returns for our business. Where we have the invested capital, where we have the client relationships, where we have a working brand, if we can drive those units harder the rewards for that, for all sorts of stakeholders are very, very strong. And I think we really latched on to that as we transitioned out of COVID last summer from this -- in a big focus on opening units, closing units, reopening, closing some of them reopening again. There was a lot of uncertainty through all of that, a lot of change through are on the ground, in airport and rail station teams. And the ability to actually stand back from that in an orchestrated way really put focus on driving like-for-like performance, particularly in our biggest units -- that's going to be a theme when -- which Michael will pick up a little bit later on. But 1 of the universal features of the SSP model across the 38 countries in which we're in, is we have a very, very disproportionate weighting of economic contribution from a relatively small number of units in each country. And if you get those units really, really firing it lifts everything in terms of the economic contribution in the business, and that's about being excellent in terms of like-for-like. A lot of that has to come from proposition. You're going to see that today in -- when you go to The Palm in JFK for lunch. I mean, you can see it behind me on -- if anyone has gone to LaGuardia. This is Mulberry Street there or Hunt & Fish again, big casual dining units that when we really get them fire and make a very, very strong difference. But you can also see it in the proposition, I know some people here are going to actually see Juniper in Gatwick tomorrow morning. It's a pretty impressive level of commitment to us, actually, by the way, that you come out here and then get on a flight, fly to Gatwick and go straight to see a bar tomorrow morning on arrival. But it is -- but actually, it's an example of us getting a premium bar really working. Point being, getting the proposition rise is essential to actually delivering unit level performance. And I think we've got a nice and increasing focus on that. And of course, in terms of like-for-like, the ability to price and to defend your position in the value chain, in an inflationary environment, very, very important. And again, I think we're doing that very nicely, and we touched on that a lot in our interim results last month. The second element then is business development. And I guess in simple terms, and it goes to some of the points I made around our kind of culture and vision earlier, which is, we've gone on the offensive as we've come out of COVID in terms of business development. We think there is an opportunity in the market for us to secure very valuable space at very compelling returns. And we've done that, though, using the capital discipline that you would expect from SSP. And it's been a wonder for me actually to observe that first hand since I come into the business, both the processes that we use to allocate capital and the culture and knowledge that we have behind that. In aggregate, we're growing in terms of net gains at about twice the raise in sterling terms that we were pre-COVID, lends itself to a simple question. Why is that, right? It's a combination of different circumstances. It's partly about the market. As the industry has come out from hibernation, you're starting to see more and more space being tendered. I think it's also about SSP. I think our financial resources is very helpful. The way in which we built our reputation and enhanced it through COVID, very helpful. The types of propositions and brand access that we're putting together, the types of partnerships we're assembling around the world are very helpful. And that is resonating with clients. When I talk to clients, when clients talk to our wider team, you get a real sense of enthusiasm and goodwill towards partnering and working with SSP. That doesn't mean we get a free pass in terms of economics, the returns still have to be good, but there's a -- there's that sentiment of wanting to do more with us that's very tangible when you actually get and talk to clients about that. And I think that sits at least for the moment, in contrast to some of what's happening across the competitive set, where either at the smaller end of the markets, you have people who -- for whom the seductive appeal of travel didn't turn out to be anything like as appealing as they expected through the COVID experience. And so you're seeing less small downtown businesses wanting to participate in tenders across the world. It's different country-on-country. And I think also we're finding that some of the traditional SSP competitive [ set ] are consumed with some very understandable, internal issues or focus right now, which again I think is giving us an opportunity to be more externally focused relative to them as we're pushing the business forward. So let me just briefly now talk about where we're winning in terms of net gains. So -- it's one of the reasons why we're here, right? So if you take the period from COVID to today, half of all the net gains that we've got are in North America. And a sort of a reasonably simple way to think about that is in terms of the -- what's happening to the mix of our business geographically is about 1/4 of our business is currently in North America, but today, about half of our growth it's actually a bit more than half of our growth actually because their like-for-like momentum is also a bit stronger here. But -- so you were seeing the natural flow-through of that will change the revenue mix by geography as we go forward. Indeed, I would say -- this charge is already out of date in that it uses a particularly understandable, but odd allocation methodology, which is effectively freezes business development at the end of March and assumes that no subsequent development of any kind, anywhere happens after that, which is obviously a somewhat unrealistic assumption. But if you do roll all that through, you'd end up with growth of businesses in 2026, but almost certainly you can take it that actually the contribution of North America in 2026 will be a lot more than 24% by virtue of even only the continuation of the sort of net gains weighting that you see on the left-hand side of the chart. And just to be specific, in the 2 months since the -- we actually assembled this data, we've continued to deliver net gains momentum of this sort of quantum on a monthly basis and with this sort of weighting. So as I said, it's already a little out of date at the middle part of that chart. M&A can play an important piece here. It's important to say that this is not a business that needs to do any M&A at all. It doesn't. We have an economic model that's actually working very well. We've got lots of organic growth, both like-for-like and net gains that are available to us. But we do think there will be some instances where M&A can fit with our strategy and where we can execute it with financial discipline. And Midfield is a very good example of that, right? It's focused on the U.S., it's focused on the air channel, it's centered on a desire to extend airport access in a way that gets us into airports earlier than we otherwise would be able to do so. And in some cases, into airports that we may ever be able to do so. And if you look at the 7 airports that Midfield operate in, 4 are brand new to SSP and 1, which is New York, we were in but in a very, very modest way before, and it gets us back into New York, which in the context of what we're doing in the totality of New York is going to be very, very good for us. And as I say, we're delighted to confirm today that the transaction is now largely complete by which I mean 6 of the 7 airports are now in SSP ownership and the seventh, which is Denver, we anticipate will close over the course of the next month or 2. And we'll have all of it fully on board and in our business as we finish out this year and into next year. Brief word on partnerships. I touched on this a little bit last night. We -- the way in which we're accessing the geographic growth opportunity that I've described uses a business model that works very collaboratively and extensively with local expertise and local partners. There are 2 broad models that we operate. It's a continuum really, but there are 2 broad ones. One is the level of in-country partnerships. So that's people like The Travel Food Service business in India, Regent in the Philippines, the Minor Food Group in Thailand, where in effect, we have a single partner for a single geography, a pretty traditional country-level joint venture agreement. Here in North America, the typical unit of partnership is the airport, right? And so you can see that's, I think, midway behind me. And so some of you will have met Sarah, [ Levi ] or the -- Robert, Brad and Martin from [ CLO ] last evening, who would be founding partners for us in the joint venture that's opened up this opportunity in Chicago and hopefully open up other opportunities in Chicago. The common features of all of this though are -- yes, there is a level of joint financial contribution. We are very demanding and pretty inflexible on that, which is if you come into a partnership with us, we're not lending you money. You have to pay your share in proportion to your equity participation with us in the growth of the business and everyone understands that. But beyond that, we are looking for people who add value, add value in terms of brand access, local community engagement, airport relationships, stakeholder engagements within the wider community and that matters a lot, and it's two-way. They bring value, we bring value and obviously, a notion of trust and an ability to work together over long periods of time are very important in terms of how we do that. The third element here is around profit conversion. And Jonathan is going to pick this up in more detail a little bit later on. But just to say, this goes to the processes by which we run the business. It goes to many of the tools and routines that we have across the business, but mindset is important on this, too. This is a business that's populated with a lot of people who know how to trade, people who understand the value of a pound and treat the resources in the business as if they are their own in the sense that we're not -- we're quite frugal in terms of how we allocate resources, spend money. Give you a good example, a tiny example this morning. So my assistant Nicolas, some of you may know her, Nathan Clements, who is our CPO and his assistant is leaving the business at the end of this week and she felt the need to e-mail me this morning to say, would it be okay for her to buy 1 round of drinks for -- at this leaving event this evening on her -- on my corporate credit card. So I went back and said, yes, 1 round is fine. But it goes a little bit to how we think about spending money, and that's important in a business that is always going to have to fight for its margin and it's an important element. So that's the kind of group level summary. It starts with a unifying purpose across our business, which is about being the best, being parts of an ecosystem that wins and focused on the journey in all sorts of ways. And when we get this right, we think we can deliver accelerated growth, we think we can deliver profit conversion. We can convert that profit into cash in a way that make rewards all stakeholders and self-funds the growth and returns from here and that's going to give us interesting and important options for capital allocation that Jonathan gonna talk about earlier. So Michael is now going to jump in and actually illustrate all of this in the context of what we're doing in North America. It's a pleasure for me to introduce Michael. It's also sparing his blushes -- it's been a privilege for me to work with Michael and to learn from him about this industry and about this business, but also about kind of leadership, and people leadership in particular, over the course of the last 15 months. So please join me in welcoming Michael to the stage.

So -- look at my shoes, right? So I have my trainers on today because in my recent holiday, I cut my right side toe and I'd tell you, it's the most painful thing ever. And for the Americans, trainers is sneakers in holidays vacation, just so to make sure you all get that. I just wanted to point that out. But I'm wearing these today, we are doing a lot of walking. So I just wanted to point that out because I'm very specific. Last thing is I would have my black belt on to match my black sneakers, but I didn't know, I was wearing sneakers today. But more importantly, North America, and thank you for that introduction, Patrick. It's been a pleasure working with you as well so far. So a little bit of the agenda. Aviation industry kind of talk a little bit high level about North American aviation industry, an overview on SSP America, the economic model, we'll get in a little more detail and then talk about what you're going to see in the showcases. And to Patrick's point, I'm really excited about the showcase is getting you that really touch and feel what we do in the business. And there is definitely some operational challenges. We actually have a full kitchen in there where we're going to cook and serve some great meals in 5 to 7 minutes. Not that easy trying to pull that off in a hotel. But I'm confident that the team will do it because of the great operational excellence that they definitely prove to me every day. And then Pat will come up and talk about business development. So just North America travel, domestic and business travel, 93% of the travel, which is big. Slightly, I'll come up talk about bleisure travel and how that's changing. 30% of the world's busiest airports sit in North America, and then 45% of the world's aviation sales. So massive market, which I know you've heard multiple times from Patrick and Jonathan over the last couple of years. I think this is the big one. It's forward-looking. It's the structural growth and the investment that's going into the North America market. You heard [ Sami ] last night talk about it about you saw in Asia Pac and different countries where they kept investing in their airports to be the best of the best. North America is a little behind. They are now catching up in it's huge investment we're talking this morning, just about the investment, you see $9 billion in just JFK alone, with additional 23 gates, which is huge investment of the business. And for me, the top bullet there Air PAX level North America anticipated to be 30% higher than pre-covid by 2030. So it just continues to grow and grow. Look at United, right, 200 planes, CAD 43 billion of supporting growth. So the major airlines are ordering planes. They know the growth is coming. We're ready for that growth, and you heard a lot today while we're doing our economic model to get there. And then U.S. government continues to invest in a development project as well. So again, it's good for us as that growth continues, very, very important. What's happening, the trends, very high domestic travels we talked about, working remotely increases bleisure travel. This has been very interesting to us, and I really like to give an example of my 30-year old daughter, she works for Publicist in the advertising business. Overseas Jimmy John's and Buffalo Wild Wings. And she works 3 days a week in the office. Her teams work 3 days a week in the office. Thursday evening, she lives in Atlanta -- she heads to Atlanta Airport -- she takes off, she flies somewhere in the United States. She goes to the West Coast a lot, has some friends there, literally works virtually there that morning. She's already in the West Coast and extends her weekend earlier because she's there because she knows she can work there remotely. Team, Zoom, everything else. She does the same exact thing on Monday. It's absolutely amazing, blows me away. I said, "What do you mean you're working? She goes, "Well, I go to the airport, I go in the lounge, I get on my laptop. I do some calls, set up Teams things. I then get on the WiFi, and I catch up on my e-mail, on my flight home, I land. I go back to my house. I do the same thing again. " And that new travel is bringing that new business travel to us and is really making our Sundays and Mondays stronger than they've done in the past, the same with our Thursdays because, again, it's just a different person out there. And 1 of the key things we need to learn too, that bleisure travel tends to be a little younger. We need to understand them very well, we do from a menu perspective and you hear that from the group coming up. The revenge travel, plenty of articles out there about it. If you have heard about it. There's the demand. Even though we had it last year even a bigger demand for people to go on holiday, go on vacation and really experience that travel, they've been missing and that's been pent up over the last 2.5 years. So -- we expect a good summer this year, and we continue to focus on that as well and then F&B, you heard it again from [ Ed and Sami ] last night. It keeps growing as a bigger and bigger focus and that overall high-quality experience is, again, a big, big focus of the consumer that's coming through every day in our airports, which gets us excited because -- you saw it last night, we're real focused on creating this great food experience, high-quality experience. You'll see again today, as I mentioned, how we do that efficiently, how we do that to really drive profit conversion, which is super important to all of us in this room. Then ownership. It's kind of interesting. Pat will talk about this a little bit more as it relates to our joint venture partners in ACDBE. But in the United States, all airports are owned by a city, county, state, port authority or a regional authority. That's why Pat and I wear ties all the time. We're dealing with public officials, it's public entities that wear their ties. So we have to be in the same environment as them. And then in Canada, different. It's owned by the transport of Canada, but they lease out all the airports to privately-owned companies. So it's a privately-owned business that's been a run up there, but the actual real estate, the land it's on and the airport is owned by Canada. So again, you'll see a little bit of that in the United States. As you know, outside of the United States, that's much bigger. But these cities and counties and states and local governments see this is a big asset to them and to Patrick's point, really tied to the community and how important that is. So we play a big part in that with our joint venture partners. Great slide. You heard it again. As you see, the overall percentage of sales continues to grow for F&B. In North America, every year, it just keeps ticking up. You see 2014, '18 and 2022. Expect that to continue to happen. Specialty Retail is kind of going away. Convenience is still strong as well as F&B and duty-free, but that Special Retail is really being filled in by F&B going forward. Little bit about now SSP America. So my executive team. You can see the years of experience in the food and beverage industry, very strong. You see the years of experience within SSP America. Great experience with mergers and acquisitions, everybody on the team. It's kind of interesting right now. Robert, Bob, Sheree and George have all worked for me in the past. So it's great to have them on my team, again, have great experience with the Compass Group, and then you see Pat with HMS Host as well as Copeland's. But I think 1 of the stats that I really love, every one of us started somewhere back as an hourly team member in the food and beverage industry. We all started in the grassroots of the young age. I mean I started in my dad's bakery, when I was 12 years old. So we have a very strong heritage of food and beverage, and we really know what it takes to drive a business, more importantly, connect with our hourly team members to make sure we're successful because they're 1 of our key part of our strategy. Our foundation. Patrick talked about our values and our mission and vision. One of the things we have here in North America is what we call our passion principles. And then, of course, there's our pitch. We're as? What do you do here in North America? And that's -- I'm a food travel expert from SSP America. We're passionate about bringing a cool authentic airport -- restaurants to airports that reflect the taste to place. That's what they want. That's what our clients are asking for, as the airports are asking for us every day to bring those cool authentic local restaurants in that reflect that taste of place. And I always say we're restaurateurs. There's nothing. There's nothing more or some of the conference and we'd call it concessionaires. Now we're restaurateurs. We are restaurant people. You look at the background of our team, look at the background of our operation teams. We're true restaurant people that know how to run great casual dining bars, QSRs, coffee and bakery with a huge vast of experience. In a PASSION principles, we use them how we operate our business. Passion for every detail. We're talking about a couple of the analysts out there this morning. They say, every detail counts, we agree. All of these top 2 things were created over 18-month period with our hourly team members, middle management and senior management. Wasn't done in an executive boardroom. We actually went out, the focus groups, talked to our people and say, who are we as an organization here in North America? And what are the key principles we have to run our business in? And it's super important, A, for authentic experiences, think about it. We have over 360-odd restaurants. We have about 250 brands because of the local brand [ combine. ] We have to create that authentic experience. Our brand partners expect that of us, because when we do a partnership with them, we have to drive the same experience or better than they do street side. Service from the heart. That's not only the service to our customers every day, but how we treat one another and having that high mindset of great service and then sincerity every step of the way. It's about being sincere with one another and also sincere with our customers because the worst thing you can do is not be your real self -- and make sure that your hourly team members, your management team know that you care about them, which is super important in the hospitality business and then innovation every day. You'll see innovation today in the showcases. And you can't be innovative if you're not open to new ideas. You have to consistently be open to new ideas. And then I always talk about noble at all times how we say, I wish passionate and with an age, you just got to be humble. We're a growing company. We're moving fast. We have competitors. And I always tell my team, we just need stay grounded and humble is they'll figure it out, they'll try to catch up to us. And if we ever get caught up in our own press, then they're going to pass us. And that humility is super important as you're a leader. Decade of growth, you can see the colored dots, pre-2013, where we're at, then what we opened from 2013 to '19 and what we opened after 2019, which is another 7 airports, which is fantastic, so a lot of new growth. And of course, the new Midfield airports that are on there. What I'm most excited about, we expected to open Midfield potentially in July and August, we opened at June 6. And what I read out of all that, you think about, we had to get consents from the 7 airports. We had to get consent for all the brands. We had to get consent from all the joint venture partners. We did that in about 3 weeks. That's a lot of conversations, a lot of legal documents and that showed me the confidence all of them had in SSP America and the fact that they wanted to get SSP America quickly into their business and quickly as new partners and quickly as running their brands, which I think, it says a volumes about my team, Pat Murray, who did the agreement, Jag Singh, my General Counsel; George Mboya, my CFO; and then my operations team under Amanda's leadership they were out there interacting with these people that immediately signed up and said, "I want to be part of SSP America. " So it happened very quickly. Strong track record. You've seen this slide before. I think the big thing is sharp rise in profitability in 2022 and you've already know the strong revenue first half of fiscal year '23, 127% over 2019 as we continue to grow here in North America. I think this is interesting. The mix of formats, you'll see we're heavily weighted towards casual dining and bar. And then as you take a look at the rest of the group, heavier towards coffee, bakery, kind of grab and go and retail. What that does for us in North America, our average unit sales, $2.5 million. Rest of the world, about $1 million. Going back to what Patrick said, we have a lot of large units that if we focus on them exceptionally well, we can make an incredible impact driving like-for-like sales as well as profit conversion. So it's really great for the mix we're in. It's a key focus that we have as we go after new business. Another one, unique brand proposition. You'll see, again, rest of the group heavy towards national brands, again, us towards local because that's what their consumer is looking for as well as that our clients are looking for and then you'll see a good mix of our proprietary brands. And this to me is very exciting because you'll see it actually JFK T-4. We have Camden Foods there. We have Boulevard Bistro, we have the 5 Borough Food Hall. We got LGC there as well and Pizza Vino, all our brands, but what we really do with our proprietary brands is we say, how do they fit into the local community? How do we make them feel like a local brand and use this as our key part of our strategy to grow as well. And then our approach, it was interesting to me, and we talk about this all the time in our annual conference there. It's about leadership and not management. It's super, super important to me. We have a great leadership program that is coming out of group, which is fantastic to develop future leaders of the business. And it's really about leading and motivating people and making sure they'll climb that wall for you instead of being a manager and telling them what to do. So the leadership programs and training we have make a huge difference to our company to do that and really having a people-first mindset. I'm asked all the time, what business you're in and I say them, I'm in the people business. Because if you think about it, it's about that 3-foot experience. It's about the server, the bartender, the host, our management team that really drives the profitability of the business. Yes, I'm in charge of the culture. Yes, I travel around the business, but ultimately, that's where it happens. And we have what we call an Ashburn, Virginia, our support center. It's not called Ashburn, not the [ corporates. ] It's our support center because we support the field. I always tell them, that's where we count the money and put it in the bank. It's made out in the field, so we need to support them to make sure they generate that, and we need to be a big partner of them. And having that people-first mindset isn't critical. Then, of course, it's a customer experience platform. You'll see the age of travel around the business, our management team and all of our hourly team members have what they call an FTX card on them. We do shift huddles every day. And key thing we focus on is the passion principles around there. But at the top, leading back to what Patrick said, there's a service message we call, it's called the best part of the journey begins with me. As a personal message that we train all of our [ entire hourly ] team members on is when that passenger, our customers coming through the airport stressed by TSA, their gate could have changed, all those different things. When they come in our restaurant, the best part of the journey begins with me. You need to have that mindset and make sure that their journey, the best part is going to be their experience in our restaurant. And then it has on there, as I said, our service styles and at the same time, how we upsell in the business. We have a standard shift title that goes out to every one of our airports every week, that's mailed out where we hit a certain service message. It's one of the passion principles and what we expect in that week. And we have a small section that they then fill in on the like of things that are going on in their business. That's critical to have a consistent customer service space. So if you think about it, you have people that are engaged, like working for you. Of course, they're going to bring a great customer experience. And then when Amanda Busby came on, operated at -- with Robin 19 years, Amanda? And then chose to come with us, which is a great deal for us, ran 450 restaurants. She's brought great success routines, which is how we operate the business day-to-day, which drives operational excellence. And then you'll hear from Pat Banducci and the team about what do we do with all that commercially and how do we drive profitability out of the business and maintain quality. And I'm a firm believer, we've got great leadership, people that like working through the organization who are driving a great customer experience, and we're doing it with operational excellence and efficient commercially, we retain our clients. Because we're driving great revenue. They're getting great rents. We have great people that are working for us, which is very focused. And ultimately, it helps with new business growth because we have great references and we have an incredible business development team. And then sustainability critical to us, huge platform coming out of the group. But at the same time, the community involvement we have with our joint venture partners and how we're engaged in community and you heard [ Ed Midgley ] talk about it last night which you'll hear Jeffrey talk about what we do from sustainability at T4 is a huge feat that we've accomplished there. Talking about people. I think this is just awesome. Approximately, this is a lot of stats we pulled out. Before I go -- 2,000 members we hired in the last 12 months. It's interesting to hear Ed talk a little bit about our difficulties in hiring people. Actually we do quite well here at T4. We had great success with hiring people. We have a few pockets across the business. It happens to be kind of in the Midwest. Indianapolis is a perfect example and then higher up in the Midwest and is pretty common why. UPS, Federal Express and Amazon, all kind of got in the center of the country. And they do that because, again, they're flying all over the place, and it's great for them to have distribution centers in the middle of the company -- country. So we compete against them. But outside of the middle of country, we do quite well with hiring people. We've taken a huge new focus on targeted advertising, including geo-target and social media. We've really increased our social media presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. And right now, we know we're filling about 45% of our positions because of that, and it's really helped us because of how well you can target certain individuals doing that. And then a colleague engagement. Again, we have an 83% participation rate, to me, which is fantastic that you have that many employees that are willing to fill the survey. Positivity score of 84%. We have a lot to do with that. A lot of work to do it. What I'm excited about, we actually have an action plan specific to every airport. Every airport about their issues or opportunities that we have there. And then we have one for each support center department. We then roll that up, have an overall plan for SSP America that we communicate on a quarterly basis, and we give updates exactly what we're doing with the survey responses they gave us. I always tell my team, the worst thing we do is survey our people and do nothing with it. The best thing you can do is actually communicate exactly what you're going to do with what the feedback they gave you. That again reduces turnover and at the same time, gets people engaged who want to create a great experience for our consumers. And then kind of interesting, we have our PASSION awards. We have a PASSION summit every year we celebrate. You see we gave about 2,400 awards in 2022. We have 5,000 employees in 2022. So it's 50% of our people that were recognized. People want to be recognized, they want to be thank you, which I think was a very impressive feat. Then career development. We have 2 programs -- well, 1 program called Cooking Up Experts. Today, this is a big focus of what I'm really passionate about as well as my executive team is this takes [ hourly ] team members and shows them the path of how they can get up to management. So how do they become an [ hourly ] supervisor, assistant restaurant manager, general manager, operations manager potentially directive operations 1 day. Also, what it does is how does the manager directive operations become a regionalized President like [ Jeffrey Lynch ] you'll see later today. And to me, this is critical because people who've worked for us as an [ hourly ] team member that know our systems and processes, and we can move them to management, that's a huge value for us because they're going to know how to execute the SSP America way, which is super, super critical. I have a video, I want to show up a small example, and you actually will see -- oh, you would have met [ Mamodo ] last night. He's one of our regional chefs. I go to the video. [Presentation]

Much longer version of that. So [ Mamado ] now, as I said, the regional chef works out in the West Coast, living in San Diego makes a huge difference in our organization. If you go on the SSP America website under employee testimonials, about 15 of those and how we really have done, I think, exceptionally well moving people up in the business. The last time I give you, which I think is fantastic, 45% of our management positions this year was filled by [ hourly ] team members because of the big focus on it. The economic model, you know it well. We live and breathe it here every day. It's a big part of our culture and what we do. I won't get into it too much on this slide. I'll talk about the next, but I think the big one I talk about is the customer insights. We've taken what's come out of group and combine it, we use a local company here called [ culinary tides ] and then both of them together really a big focus of ours. I was really understanding the consumer insights before you do anything in our business is absolutely critical. And then first, I want to talk about like-for-like sales. So interesting. So you'll see digital in one of the showcases today. Todd Kaufman, our VP of IT systems as well as Pat Banducci Head of Commercial and they'll talk about how it's driving ATV and they'll talk about how it's increasing the speed of service in our business. And then as you look at format and brands, you'll -- we'll talk about some of the food halls, which you see at JFK T4, and then menu and ranging, you have Robert Maluso, our VP of Culinary, and then Josh Barone, our VP of Commercial. They're going to talk about how we look at our menus, how we optimize them to drive like-for-like sales, which is super critical to our business. And then, of course, pricing, you'll hear Josh Barone, our VP of Commercial, talk about pricing and our pricing strategy to mitigate inflation which is super important to us, but at the same time, drives like-for-like sales. And then service, the seating initiatives. You'll hear Chris Gainey who is our VP of Design and Construction, talk about how important it is to add additional seating or our seating strategy is, again, the more seats we have, drive like-for-like sales. And then more importantly, you'll see the new kitchen design we have, which is really driving speed of service. Again, you're going to cook meals, some of you and 5 to 7 minutes great tasting food because, again, speed of service and turning tables is really critical because that's how you drive like-for-like sales. Profit conversion, again, it's the same things, right? Unit design and seating because, again, the more seats we have, same amount of servers, we're driving labor efficiencies with that, along with OAT, order at the table, which you'll see and how that works. As you've probably seen it out there over the last few years, again, helps us be more efficient but at the same time, if you think about it, with the digital ordering and the additional seating, you're putting a lot a load on the kitchen and how you do your menu optimization, how you design your kitchen to make sure you can handle that extra load is critical. And I think I feel like we mastered it. And I think it's a huge difference than what we're doing in the business. And of course, gross margins, again, you'll see in the menu optimization, how we do cross product utilization, which is very, very important and also to hear from procurement on how we continue to rationalize our products, but at the same time, make really cool venues because it's really important to do that and you can leverage that volume and labor efficiency. Already hit on OAT as well as the kitchen. You'll see the kitchen design, how it makes us more efficient. It's almost a Six Sigma process using a triangle, which is really critical. I tell you to do it in a home, my wife, every kitchen we've designed, we build 10 houses together. She always gets out and does the triangle because she wants to be efficient. It cracks me up when she does it. Then business development, Pat will talk about it more, but greater share on the 34 sites that we're in of the top 80 is our key focus, further penetration of top 80. And then the new smaller airport models. We are looking at that. We've added additional business development people to go after these smaller airports that are in the top 150. And the great news is, is the convenience retail opportunity there as well. Some of the times, it gets combined, and we have definitely the capability to do that. We do it in a couple of small airports right now in North America. We don't talk about it much, but I feel we have the expertise to do that. And adding the additional BD resources definitely help us get after it. And if you look at the stats of in 2019, again, approximately 10% of a $6 billion market, which is a huge opportunity. And it's a market, as you saw earlier, that's continuing to grow, which I think puts us in a good position for further growth. And then efficient management of cost inflation, kind of amazing. We all talk about costs went up as it relates to labor over the last couple of years due to COVID, we all read it. But you can see a kind of flatlined, and we've done a great job maintaining it. It's everything you're going to see today from kitchen design, additional seating, the rollout of digital that's helped us do that and really increase our sales per man hour. And then you'll see our cost of sales even with inflation, same thing. We've done a fantastic job between procurement, culinary, commercial and the operations team working together in what we call Phoenix 2.0, which again, you'll hear about and what Phoenix 2.0 was basically, everything you're going to see today and I've talked about, we focused on those top 50 to 60 restaurants in the last couple of years to make sure we drove every aspect of that in our business. And now we're getting to the next 60, the next 60, the next 60, driving it through the business. I won't go through this too much. You've probably seen this before, but we do have a rigorous investment process. Everything goes through group but at the same time, we follow that same exact process here before we even go to group because it's really important that where we're investing our money, we get a strong return and the process that Jonathan has put into place in the 10 years I've been here is fantastic. It gives a lot of different perspectives from the right people to make sure we're making good decisions. And if you look at my business development team, and Pat will talk about in your years of experience, that alone helps us do a very, very good job of making sure we're putting our money where it really can get the returns. I'll now pass it on to Pat Murray, our Deputy CEO and Executive Vice President of Business Development. Pat?

Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Michael. And I just want to start out. I know there are a few folks who weren't here last night. So I'll just say first, thanks for giving me the microphone again, guys. But I also just want to cover a few housekeeping things. Sarah did take the keys at 9:30, but then the group wisely moved on to other places, but she hung around and eventually scurried us all off. For those that weren't here last night, that's part of our pitch and Sarah, thanks for going along with that. Events like last night are something that we do maybe 20 times a year, and that's the first step in a sales tool. So if you think about that, that actual room, if you go in there on your way out when you're checking out of the hotel, that's going to look an awful lot like it's just solid concrete floor. It looks like an airport before we move into it. So being able to convert that into a space and then cook food that we do all over the country and serve drinks, that is sort of showing what we are. We're in the hospitality business, we should be good at that. And while there was a few people there who work at the hotel, almost all those folks actually work for us somewhere around the country and you get to here and see the real stories. That's pretty conditioning about what SSP is actually all about. So I'm going to touch on a couple of elements that Patrick and Michael talked about, which really has to do with what's it look like coming out of COVID. Why do we feel so good about this? And I can imagine, regardless of what we were doing as a business, somebody is going to stand up and say, "Hey, we have strong client relationships, right?" But what does that really mean? So embedded within the team that manage both development and the company, we have 4 people who were clients, 2 airport directors, 1 of whom was an airport director for over 20 years at 3 major U.S. airports. We have 2 people who were senior staff members of other major airports and today comprise a lot of the thinking of that. In our industry in North America, we have 5 trade associations that oversee various elements of the aviation business, whether it's training, how to actually operate an airport or lobby functions or minority elements and so on. In every case, the past chair of one of those associations works for us. The committee chairs work within our organization. So we're embedded within the aviation industry at every level. We have 7 individuals who work on the team who've been in the aviation business for over 40 years. I know you're thinking, I don't look old enough for that, right? I'm not. I've only been doing this for 20 years, but the 7 folks that have been doing it for 40 years, we live on some of that experience around the world. Last night, you got to meet several of our joint venture partners. I'll come back to that, but the real living people, you get the sense that are municipally engaged in business people in our world. And our local proposition is big. I didn't pay the guys who are on the panel last night, but every one of them at some level reminded everybody that airports here in the United States focus on their local communities. They want to reflect those communities. And having a proposition, which is really the restaurants that we operate that are local, is a key selling tool to all of us. And last, we can't really look forward and say, hey -- we can't go sell things. We actually don't know how to deliver it. So having the operating model that Michael just dissected there is pretty critical to us being able to go sell it. I'm going to touch on -- there's probably a lot of these terms depending on how long you've been looking at aviation that would make sense in terms of how an airport is leasing business. But really what I want to touch on is the notion that this is -- in the U.S., specifically, a business-to-government operation. And that business to government, that's to some folks, it presents barriers that say, gosh, why are we going to focus on these things. We want to make this a completely commercial conversation. So there's other elements, I'll call it. Some of them are ESG components that are rounding out the business itself. And if you look at that way, you can look at it in a pretty short side of sense. Other ways are to say the business itself has embedded within it, other things that we're going to sell that aren't strictly financially related. So when we're having conversations, governments are not motivated for the same reasons that individuals are. There's no U.S. airport that makes money. They don't make money. They actually have an independent business enterprise. The federal government actually restricts money going from an airport to a city. So what does that mean in simple terms? If we pay more rent, that rent doesn't go to pay for its city kids' school lunches. That money can't transfer back. The [ FAA ] provides base infrastructure funds every year. So among the other things, about $10 billion of U.S. money comes out of the general fund that goes into development of U.S. airports. And because of that, the federal government doesn't allow airports to support cities. It's important to think about it that way because the business is just going to be different. You're motivated for different reasons to actually transact and operate business. And it's -- the biggest difference in the U.S. between what happens in the High Street and what happens within an airport, how we go about winning that business. So I had a few questions last night. I'll just say to everybody, people ask, well, why is that? Well, probably like a lot of things, aviation, actually, modern aviation evolved after World War II. In the U.S., this is all about civil defense. But in the end, you're not going to see major privatization in the United States soon. You'll see elements. Sammy and Steve talked about on the panel last night where you see portions of capital coming into airports but actual control generally is going to reside within that local city and county government. And those people are real decision-makers. So when we go through -- I'm going to talk here about processes in a second, but when you go through actual pitching business to people, the end of that always results in having some legislative body actually vote and opine on how they feel that the airport staff did with whatever their evaluation was and a fair amount of the time that legislative body doesn't have anything to do with what the SaaS says. So you actually got to win all the time in each one of those things. So when we think about growing the business, RFPs commonly referred to around the world as tenders. We sort of have a vocabulary thing, Michael, listed on the wall of English and American terms. But generally, we call them and RFPs is the most common way for us to grow business. I also had a few questions last night and people say, so what does that look like? And there's sort of -- the question is kind of start out because this audience knows more than maybe people that might meet me at a cocktail party might know about the business. And they're saying, well, what is the difference between one company or another. I'll go back to that selling to a government element, right? The first selling tool is the company itself. It's everything you got to see last night. And you have to, as the salesperson predicate you are selling on the notion that the delivery of what you saw last night is not going to be the same by just anybody. It takes skills to be able to do that, and you have to gain recognition from the person you're selling that you have the skills to deliver those things. So it's not as simple as was the brand over the front door. So for one, in the RFP process, 50% of the bids that we respond to either don't have any financial component to it, meaning rent. We're not actually bidding on the rent or it's capped, and there's no more top-end rent that you can bid on. Generally speaking, that's because the airports aren't really looking for that. They're looking for all the other things that come into it. They want to know about how we're attached to the local community. You heard [ Ed Middle ] last night talk about that. He's in JFK. He's talking about actually Queens, not even New York City. He's talking about the out the front door local. Well, I think the airports are looking for that. They're looking for how the brands themselves represent the local community. And actually, somewhere down the line, you get into this conversation that says, well, what about the commercial element, where does the actual passenger, what are they doing? Well, the passengers are a part of the cell, but again, if you go back to the city of Chicago, the city of Houston, city of Los Angeles, to them, this is the welcome mat to the city. This is their opportunity to present things to the city. So it's a different shape. And over time, of course, we've embraced that and done well with it. There are other elements, too, to growing the business that are critical and are also -- have the same selling tools. So you have to have a relationship with people to do this. Most U.S. aviation directors came up somewhere in the aviation world. They're all known to us. So if we pull out the list and look at, hey, who are the top 100 airports being run by, we can go through every single one of them to tell you where they've been in their career and what they've done. So a lot of these things end up being things that you additionally negotiate for, we'll use that word, but it's really discuss how do we find a win-win in this for the airport, the city and ourselves. One of the -- I was going to bring it up last night, but I thought maybe it made more sense than we've been in here. One of the places when Robert Maluso was talking about the various restaurants that we represented. Anyway, we had the scallops last night. Those came from Harry and Izzy's in Indianapolis, one of the first restaurants we've actually built. And I think to Patrick's I'll call it, big rocks. It's a big rock. It's a relatively small airport and has a very high volume restaurant. Actually, I'm going to call it a destination restaurant and airport because the actual real estate itself isn't -- is not grade A, it's probably B minus real estate but it's volume overwhelms itself. It also is very unique because it's had a 15-year now lease. We just renewed that for 15 new years. And I will tell you I was trying to think about how many, but let's say, I've been to 150 airports in the world, I'm not sure, an awful lot of them. I spent most of the time since last night trying to think of another restaurant that's actually been there for 15 years, that's going to be there for another 15 years. Generally places that stay there that longer there by accident. In this case, we just had a press conference with the Mayor of Indianapolis, the City Council, the airport manager, et cetera. And it's all about the excitement that from Harry and Izzy's and that's because that brand is emblematic of the folks who are from Indi. So I think Patrick attempted because he talked a little bit more about this and about the acquisition and maybe left me a little less room here, but I'm going to say for us, we're super excited. Buying companies wasn't something we did for most of our evolution. And the opportunity to look at some other airports that we might be more challenged or might take more time to get into is a fantastic opportunity for the company. There's no way to say this, but when you look at the profit of the business, we're talking about big restaurants like Harry and Izzy's, big airports are the same kind of thing. They pour cash into the bottom of the business and allow us to do an awful lot of things. In this transaction, you're moving into 4 airports, in particular, we did have a very small business in New York, so we're already there. But adding Newark, Philadelphia, Denver and Detroit is just simply put massive. It's a great opportunity for the team to have something that we can work on. It puts us in a place to talk to those airports on a daily basis. And then the other ones, we're already in Minneapolis, so it kind of builds on the business there and same in San Francisco. Cleveland, actually in the acquisition, it's a relatively small business, but again, as a runway to what we can do in the future. And because we just simply have to interact with the airport in order to get everything done on the transaction, it creates this opportunity, it furthers a relationship and I think, at least in my mind, from a business terminology standpoint, this is what infill acquisition is, is perfect for what we needed. So when you think about what is Michael's statement earlier in the tagline for the company of Taste of Place, this is the bottom line of the selling tool for the entire business, as I said, what was last night all about, right? If anyone in the room ever gets an e-mail from someone here at SSP America, you realized that we ran the risk 15 years ago of having people misspell it occasionally, but the e-mail addresses is we all have our food travel experts. So we put it right out there on our forehead and say, this is what the business is, and we're making it about that. I've got a lot of the questions we got last night were sort of like we're looking for the trick. Like what is the trick? Is there one thing that's the business. Michael referenced, people are going to catch up with you. There's no actual trick. It's running restaurants and being able to articulate that well to the audience and making them to believe that we understand we're operating in a public setting. There are a lot of other things. I may have done the down by calling it ESG, but all of those selling components are part of what we do to advance the business overall. We talked about, and we wanted to personalize for everybody, the joint venture partners. If you had a conversation with one of them, I'm sure that you could tell there's a lot of commonality between the audience and them. There's -- I'll use in-kind relationship because they are also investors in the business. They're just investors in the specific businesses. Now they are also noteworthy individuals in their communities. And when you unpack what they do for a living at some level, you're going to find that they're committed to their local community in a governance manner. So they're involved municipally in some capacity. That's not like a business model we just invented. In the late '80s, the federal government passed parts of the Federal Aviation code that required ACDBE participation. And ACDBE participation is something that's determined by every airport and every community. They established a disparity study that says, in the community itself, how disparate are the businesses being run by what is federally determined to be a minority business. Generally speaking, airports make those goals somewhere between 15% and 35% or 40% depending on the municipality itself. But what that does is give us an opportunity to put something else on our selling list that says, hey, this is who we are. And you could tell that our partners that were here last night were as curious to meet you as you were to meet them because it's all a big family, and it's how we sell ourselves together that's a part of it. They themselves, you might imagine, feel like they've done fairly well in the business with us. And much like our relationship with TFS in India, they have the same kind of relationships in major U.S. cities. They also help along the way with how we are introduced into a municipality. So when I was suggesting the business, the government piece of this, you just got to remember what that means. We do have to sell people at the airport on why our business is going to help them. We also have to sell somebody in downtown. And if you spend any time watching sitcoms or movies, just try to think back to whatever one you got that envisions the Chicago City Council and what that chaotic environment looks like. When you have to meet those 50 council men and the mayor and the staff, you want to have somebody who's your friend helping to introduce you to that and say, hey, this is the selling tool. And this is a good company, and this is why it's a good company. So all of those things help us get to where we want to go. You could sit here and think, gosh, the world is perfect, and it's not -- there's no challenges out here. The challenges are big. So we responded to a bid in Atlanta, I think, about 6 weeks ago now. And as a part of our business, there's an awful lot of [ FOIAs ]. So Freedom of Information Act requests. In that case, they gave the Atlanta Journal Constitution not the actual responses, but who the bidders were. So there are 13 to give you an idea. So when you think of that and you say, gosh, there's an awful lot of stuff to work your way through. The business is racing and there are a lot of serious competitors. I had a lot of questions last night about how you differentiate those competitors. Actually, from the inside of it, looking out, I don't think any of the companies even look remotely alike. We're similar in the sense that we sell food and airports. That's about where it ends. And as you start to pull the companies apart, you start to realize the fabrics of them just look different. And those are the very selling tools we use to win our business. When you think about the structural -- I'll go back to that word because I'm kind of floating back and forth between a motion and factor. And this is an important thing. One of the differences going back to 2014, we didn't have something like this then. The company is now big enough so that we have the scale to actually attack all the markets. So the pipeline of business for us has now grown to about 150 U.S. airports and in Canada about 25. The reason for that is because we have the scale to both pursue it and develop it, eventually build it because you're going to construct things in all these places an then operate. You have to have that in order to be able to make the business work because otherwise, we'd be bidding on things without really knowing whether we could financially deliver them, and that's not really going to do anybody any good. We're just going to come back around. So as you think about that, I think we're kind of layering in things in a short fashion to what's important. But one thing I really would want to express to everybody, that I think you got someone last night to get some of the rest of the day. Certainly, the work the guys have next door will reflect all that. There are a lot of folks in this room and that work for the company have an awful lot of experience of this business. Most of them didn't get the experience here actually. They came up in the business somewhere else. SSP America is a first-generation business. There are a lot of businesses around the world. And when you think about it, what some of the challenges are the actual people running it today are not emotionally connected with what the original mission was. Here, when you go unpack everybody, you're going to find the energy, the passion, the drive, it's all palpable. You can saw them in half and there's a similarity to that. That's a part of what drives the business and makes us think that we're building something that's great. So really appreciate everyone for coming today. Thank you so much, guys. Michael?

Oh, one last slide before we go into the showcases. It's funny. I see ambition to accelerate growth. For me, is in our country in North America and Canada is a [ PASSION ] for it. If you go back to that slide, pre-COVID, our CAGR was 20%, asked multiple times, can you keep doing that. Pat says that we have the infrastructure for that. We're well positioned for it. We're going to grow in market. Just to remind you, M&A, Midfield, our first acquisition, very successful with it. Again, we did that very quickly because of the confidence people had on us. We're 10% of a $6 billion market which is exciting. 34 of the top 80 airports. We've expanded our reach to go after 150, so the growth opportunities there. As you heard Patrick said, he's been here 7 times. So I have a new best friend in Patrick. It's great. It's a great relationship. But the strategy is aligned. And we've talked about the strategy all the time. It's very clear in our group exec meetings. It's very clear in my executive meetings. It's very clear and Patrick and our is 1 on 1 of what the goal is. The structural growth there, again, the strong track record for performance. I think the big one is that third check is that experienced executive team and business development team is critical to that success, and we have that. With people have great experiences on bringing on new business and winning new business, which is really, really important. The unique local customer proposition or our competitors trying to do that, absolutely. They kind of relate to the party. We're ahead of them and are true restaurateurs. We're not concessionaires. I think that's critical to our growth strategy. And then you saw the strong partnerships last night. We have very strong partnerships with our brands as well. It just really positions us well. So very excited about that. Again, I hopefully enjoy this part of the day and then I want to talk a little bit about the showcases. So first of all, you all have a name badge with you, correct? At the bottom of the name badge, it tells you what showcase group you're in. They're very critical. So I am a #2. If you do not have a badge, please raise your hand. Okay. Just pick a group. There's only 2 people. That's fantastic, all right? In the back, you'll see people who have numbers that match the showcase number. I want you to head with them, and we'll go through the 3 different groups. You'll see there's one driving performance through menu optimization. We'll also talk about pricing. Digital solutions focused on the passenger experience, as I mentioned before, driving like-for-like sales as well as profit conversion and then driving sales through kitchen design and seating innovation. Each 20 minutes with 5 minutes Q&A, I'll try to tell them to get it down to about 17 minutes. They got a lot of passion and energy. Hopefully, they can get it down to 17 and then 5 for Q&A. But then we do come back to this room, what Jonathan is going to speak and then we'll have some Q&A. So write your questions if you don't get them in on the showcases, and we can deal with it then. So if you can all stand up and then see the people in the back and follow your group number on your tag, greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

Please welcome to the stage, Deputy CEO and CFO, SSP Group, Jonathan Davies.

Right. Good morning, everybody. And before I kick off, let me just add my own welcome to everyone and say thank you for joining us, particularly those of you who got a number who traveled some distance and hope you're having a good day so far. I hope you enjoyed the last few sessions. I'm afraid the excitement is over now. You've got the -- but only sort of 15 to 20 minutes. So I'll try to keep this fairly swift. The good news is that actually one of the topics I want to talk about is driving efficiencies across the business. So some of the stuff you've just seen has done a bit of the work for me, hopefully and illustrated the way we go about things. So Patrick has already spoken about how we plan to accelerate our sales growth by focusing on North America, the Asia Pacific region, both of which will provide higher levels of structural growth both in like-for-like sales and the opportunity for new business. So my job now is really to build on this and talk a little bit about our economic model, how we think about profit and cash conversion and then think about our financial strategy really as we look beyond 2024. So to help illustrate how the economic model works, I'm going to start by looking briefly at our historical performance. And again, no apologies to this because I think it's the best way to illustrate the economic model in the business. As most of you know, we had a very, very strong track record of financial performance prior to COVID and from our IPO in 2014. We delivered, as you can see from the chart here, a 2.7% EBITDA margin improvement, with improvements right across the cost base, albeit I'm going to come back to concessions in a moment. This chart, you can see shows the P&L broken down both on a reported basis, but also on an underlying basis. And underlying here means adjusted for channel mix. Why do we do that? Well, the air business has structurally higher gross profit margins than rail, but that's offset by higher rents and to some degree, higher labor and overhead costs as well. But it's principally about the gross profit margin and the rent. So that's what we've adjusted for here. So the column to look at really is the right hand one in terms of understanding the sort of real cost behavior in the P&L. So what were the drivers of the margin enhancement? Well, there's 2 drivers really here. The first is operating leverage. On the back of the fact that over this period of time, we saw about 3% like-for-like sales growth. And that's mainly on the labor line, and I'm going to come back to that in a moment. The second area is clearly our program of efficiency initiatives and you can see here that the biggest driver there was on the gross profit line, where we delivered a 3.6% improvement over that period of time. That was mainly driven by a lot of work on things like price and promotional elasticities, things like range and menu engineering and of course, procurement scale and efficiency. All of these are things that we continue to do. But the important message here is there's a muscle here that we've built over many years, and I'll come back to where we're going next. But it's important to take away the fact that there are savings right across the P&L, and it's a long, long list of initiatives, which delivered these results. Now concession fees. It's important to remember that the backdrop here is, and it has been the case for many years, rising concession fees. Typically, when you renew a contract, you are going to pay slightly higher rents. That's because sales have risen, it's because the business has become more efficient and it's also, of course, a reflection of the very competitive nature of the markets we operate in, as indeed, you've heard earlier. Importantly, we expect this trend to continue. And therefore, we need to think about that when we stare at the economics of the P&L. So picking up these areas into, first of all, on operating leverage. So this slide is a reminder of both the shape of the P&L, also what's included in the various categories of costs but also importantly, how they tend to vary with like-for-like sales and net contract gains. The real message from this slide, I'm not going to drain the whole slide, is that it's largely about the labor ratios. And we think that currently, if we look across the globe, the labor ratios are broadly -- labor costs are broadly 1/3 fixed and about 2/3 variable and that is sort of a fundamental driver of the economics and the way operating leverage with sales growth flows through into the P&L. The rest of the P&L is fairly variable in nature. Important to remember, we're talking in broad generalizations here because the ratios and the operating leverage can be very, very different depending on which market you're in, principally because you've got parts of the world where you've got very low labor costs, notably Asia Pacific, India, you've got other markets, Western Europe and the U.S. where you've got higher labor costs, of course. The other thing I want to comment on here is the impact of net contract gains and that really is all about the new unit opening. We -- these bring pre-opening costs, which as I think many of you know, we flow straight through the P&L in the year that they arise. So scale of new openings is very much an important driver of the margin on a year-to-year basis. And these, of course, are mainly labor costs. So it's really things like recruitment, training, and of course, these are really about the scale of new openings, and they will come with both brand-new business, but also they'll come with renewals. And again, they vary widely depending on the type of new business we're talking about. So clearly, lower when you add a single unit to an existing big site, when you're entering brand-new locations, brand new airports or you're entering brand-new countries, those pre-opening costs can be very material. The second part of the economic model is our efficiency program. Coming out of COVID, we've revitalized our efficiency program, much of which was really put on hold during COVID, where we took more drastic action, frankly. This is a slide that we talked about at the interim, so I'm not going to cover it in detail today. Suffice to say there's a long list of projects as there always was back in history. Helpfully, you've just seen some fantastic examples from the North American team of the sort of work we do. So I'm hoping that, that's brought it to life for you rather better than seeing words on a chart, which we tend to present to our city audience. But I want to stress that this is very much part of the DNA of the business right across the globe. And clearly, in this current climate of high inflation, it's increasingly important that we are on this efficiency agenda. And certain aspects are becoming super important. And you've heard about some of this today. Notably, being all over pricing and monitoring cost inflation as well as things like digital technology, which is clearly playing a role in helping us manage our labor cost down against a backdrop of recruitment issues in some parts of the world and rising labor costs. Final point on this. As you saw in our interims and I presented it a month ago, if you look at the P&L to date, if you look at the first half results, you look at last year's results, you will have seen that we've been doing a decent job in mitigating all of these cost inflation pressures through the margin and particularly if you look at the gross margin line, where we were still seeing a small improvement year-on-year. So I'm going to move on to cash now. And again, I'm going to illustrate the economic model with a brief look at history. You all know we have a cash-generative business model, and we've got a track record of funding our growth from free cash flow. So on the left-hand chart, you can see the pre-COVID period, again, from the IPO in 2014. And you can see the operating cash flow relative to the CapEx. And again, statement of the obvious, we funded the growth even as we accelerated the pace of growth in net new gains from our operating cash flow. More relevant really is the right-hand box which looks at 2017 to 2019, when we were growing through around 5% to 6% of net new gains annually. And therefore, investing more heavily in the business. And you can see, again, if you look at the numbers there, during this period, we were seeing sales growth of about 8% per annum, as I say, with 5% to 6% of new gains, but all of that was funded from free cash flow, where we invested about GBP 450 million in organic growth in CapEx, a further GBP 80 million in acquisitions and still we're able to return GBP 250 million to shareholders through a special dividend and held our leverage at 1.5x. So at the bottom of our range in terms of really how we saw the balance sheet. So the message here really is that, this is important. We demonstrated historically the capacity within our balance sheet to drive, frankly, more rapid growth if the opportunities have arisen. Clearly, this financial model only works if we deliver good returns on investment in each individual project, and that's a very important part of the way we run the business. Again, here, the fundamentals are unchanged. We still think we can accelerate growth and drive high returns on investment. And Michael talked earlier on about the way we run the business, in North America, the disciplines around the investment committee, the role that the local teams play, the group teams play, but that is replicated right across the group. And it's a very important part of what we do. So we think that the strength of our capital appraisal processes will help us continue to deliver these returns. But as we've also said, we think that as we come out of COVID, we are arguably better positioned competitively to win new business, albeit I think we do anticipate that in time, the historical levels of competition will, to some degree, be resumed. So looking at the CapEx expectations themselves now, and this is a recap on the interims. We set out expectations for CapEx through 2025 with about GBP 160 million of CapEx involved in mobilizing the secured pipeline that Patrick talked about earlier on, that's the GBP 625 million over the next 3 years and about another GBP 120 million which is really about the catch-up of renewal and maintenance CapEx, which really is the recovery of the deferrals from the COVID period. So to the right of the chart, if we look to 2025 and further on, we would expect the contract renewal and maintenance CapEx to run at about 4% of sales, which is in line really with our historical levels of depreciation. Importantly, that assumes that we maintain renewal rates at the historical run rate, something like 80% of contracts, which are expiring. On top of this, there, of course, will be expansionary CapEx. And clearly, that is, to some degree, unknown as we look into the future, albeit we set out the opportunity. But our long-standing financial model, we think, is very much intact. So broadly speaking, that's GBP 2 to GBP 3 of sales per pound of CapEx with delivering a site level EBITDA in the mid-teens by the second year of operation. And that really translates into the sort of 3- to 4-year discounted post-tax paybacks, which you've heard me talk about in the past. So illustratively, and this is just an illustration, that would be a steady-state run rate of about GBP 250 million per annum if we were to be running with about 4% to 6% net gains, for which [ we ] remember when you do the maths, that's really 6% to 8% of gross gains because we're covering circa 2% that would be lost at expiry. So hopefully, that gives you a flavor of how we see capital returns, what the expectations are around capital just to wrap it up really. Our capital allocation model remains absolutely unchanged. Organic growth still our #1 priority. Regarding M&A, we believe that opportunities will arise. We've talked about it earlier on. But as ever, we will remain disciplined in this regard. And our medium-term leverage target remains between 1.5 and 2x net debt to EBITDA. Clearly, any surplus that we see looking forward, we will return to shareholders. So to try and wrap up, firstly, look at our near-term planning assumptions. So at the interims, we indicated that expectations for this year will be towards the top end of the range of guidance we've previously given. So around GBP 3 billion of sales and about GBP 280 million of EBITDA, that would imply a margin just over 9% for the year. And importantly, it is bang on track really for the trajectory of the recovery in margin that we've been talking to you about as we've come through COVID, going back to the point where we were hitting breakeven. So we're on the right path back towards what I would regard as normal margins. And again, many of you have heard us talk about this before. Looking to '24. Clearly, the momentum in the business that we've talked about already, Patrick's talked about, together with actually the completion of the large part of the Midfield deal also gives us confidence as we look to 2024, albeit, I think, slightly early to be giving any adjusted guidance. And finally, looking forward beyond '24, this is really how we see the financial model. So higher top line growth as we've said, and sustainable margin enhancement contributing to the delivery of stronger operating growth. EPS will follow this, noting that there will be an increasing minority interest share which reflects the growth we anticipate in the parts of the world, including North America, where we have these joint venture partners. And hopefully, you've got a sense of the importance of those from last night and today. And as I showed you earlier, the cash generative nature of the business, it will be underpinned by strong returns on incremental CapEx. And just to finalize the picture, if we then look at the balance sheet, the pace of delevering that we see under normal circumstances clearly is dependent on the scale of investment in new business but we will continue to maintain an efficient balance sheet by returning surplus cash to shareholders as that opportunity arises. So that's all for me. I'm now going to pass back to Patrick to wrap up.

So Michael and Jonathan are going to join me and then I'll do a very quick wrap-up at the end. So the -- thank you for listening to us and for engaging with our wider team so comprehensively. And I'm not sure who on the -- who was keeping score on the buy side versus sell side cook-off. Anybody know? Of course, of course. But anyway, thank you for participating. So what we wanted to do now is to give 15, 20 minutes max opportunity for questions of the 3 of us. And then I'll give a very, very brief sort of wrap up at the end and hand over to Michael to segue us for JFK tour.

Can I say something real quick.

You can of course.

So passion for every detail as a reminder, just in case you weren't listening last night, do you have your passport and/or ID with you that you gave to SSP Group? I just want to make sure we can get the security. And if you make sure you have your luggage with you if you are leaving once the tour is, you're not coming back here. Thank you.

Good. Actually, for a change, Darragh question.

It was alluded to yesterday in the Q&A session that North American airports have seen a lower amount of investment versus rest of the world. And this is starting to change. What has been the catalyst for this change? And do you see this continuing to accelerate?

Well, it's basically the growth of the airlines and the growth of the traveler. But at the same time, as we go around from airport to airport, you talked -- you heard Pat earlier. The money that they're driving has to go back into the airport. They're driving more revenue because more passengers are flying and which is fantastic because they'll just be putting it right back into the infrastructure they said, well said as it can't go to the school systems, it can't go anywhere else, it goes back into it. So what the growth brings more money into them, helps them get bonds much each year. Therefore, they can expand their airports. And if it's the governor, the city council, the mayor, to them, it is the entry way to their city and/or state, and they want an incredible experience, and they want to compete with the Asian Pac market and everybody else, and they want to create an incredible experience. So it's really that simple. And there is some PPP, not much, as Pat said as well, and that's basically what's driving it.

Jamie?

Just a couple of connected questions on margins. You gave us some great examples of North America efficiencies, et cetera. And your first half margins were about 2 points above the first half of '19 in North America. Can that continue to grow from there? And then secondly, at the group level, you reminded us Jonathan you're 11.7% in '19, you're mid-10s next year. You've given the reasons why. Any reason why you shouldn't get back to the mid-11s or more at some point in the future?

Jonathan, do you want to pick that one?

Let me pick the second point up first. So the answer in a nutshell is no. As you say, Jamie, correctly, we've set out the impact of scaling up of new business. You see the amount we are investing and that's the reason for it, which brings those preopening costs I've talked about. We've talked about the impact of high inflation, which we broadly mitigated in cash terms. But from then on we think there should be consistent delivery of margin expansion over the coming years once the business is fundamentally back to normal, which is not necessarily at the same rate as we have delivered in the past, but we see no reason why there's any ceiling on margin.

Mike, do you want to talk about the -- just the evolution of margins and the drivers of that as you see it in North America.

It is budget seizing, so no.

Just for everyone else's purpose. We had -- yesterday morning, we did the -- our kind of draft multiyear financial plan for North America, and it was a tale of absolute low in terms of passenger numbers, everything was...

And the thing here, which is for Michael, every day, 365 days a year is budget day.

And so all of Pat's guests last night, and indeed, the presentation today is making it very difficult for Michael to hold the line and his expectations for a fair budget. But anyways.

Yes, I'll get a fair one. So but in all seriousness, I was raised with 7 sibling. So I do have a sense of humor. I'd like to have a little fun. I think it's important. We enjoy each other's company, which is even more important. I think you saw it today, right, everything that we're working on. And I think that answers the question within itself, Jamie. And there was a lot of great questions of how many airports -- sorry, how many restaurants have you done this in. On every one of the things we're done, we're not fully implemented everywhere, so the opportunity is there.

And I wanted to just sort of join that back, kind of Jamie, to the -- kind of strategic overview at the beginning, right, which is if you remember, I made the point that some -- the markets, which we believe have the greatest opportunity for market share gain and structural growth, both of those drivers actually also happen to be the markets in which our margin performance and margin trajectory is strongest, right? So the -- which makes this without trying to be too superficial on strategy, makes it relatively straightforward as to where we should be putting our incremental capital. And you see that in the composition of where the allocation of capital in the net gain slide was earlier. And I think, frankly, without embarrassing Michael and the team too much when you recognize the level of inflationary pressure on the system since 2019 on both cost of goods and on labor plus all of the disruption and restarting and relearning coming out of COVID to actually have a business which is running at a higher margin now than it was in 2019 and is stronger on both cost of goods and on labor than it was in 2019 is actually pretty remarkable and a testament to the scale and execution of the team as well as some of the attractive market dynamics.

Yes, just so you know it's also a raise time this time of the year.

Jason?

Yes. A couple of -- well, actually, 3 questions, if you don't mind. Just in terms of the North America business, and you alluded to margins and where you can see that developing. Can you maybe just put into context how the margin profile looks on some of the new business wins that you're bringing in, how the margin profile of Midfield and the impact that will have on the group. Second question is around M&A and the pipeline or what sort of visibility do you see around future M&A opportunities, both in North America and maybe elsewhere? And then the final question, back into the U.K. market, do you see opportunities to expand into some of the alternative channels in the U.K. market, whether that's motorway or out of town opportunities?

Mike, do you want to deal with the first one? And I will deal with the second and third.

Sure. As we mentioned earlier in my presentation, those are rigorous, as you all know who follow SSP, a rigorous investment process. Any new business that we're going to bring in meets those guidelines, which is super important to us to make sure we're getting the returns on the capital that you all have given us. So that's one. As it relates to Midfield, same thing, we wouldn't have done the deal if it didn't meet our margin guidelines. And of course, the synergies within Midfield that we'll go after. That's any part of any acquisition that we feel comfortable with as it relates to M&A. Pass over to you, Patrick.

Yes. Let me deal with the third question first and then come to the second one, right, which was about -- it's specific to the U.K., but I think, Jason, you can extend it beyond the U.K., right, which is we're pretty clear on our channel and geographic priorities, right? So we like the rail business, and I'll come back to in what context and why in a second. But the driver of growth from here for SSP is going to be the air channel. And the -- and so if you find us in the U.K. messing around in motorway service stations or out of town shopping centers, please remember that I made this statement. We just won't be doing that, right. And Jonathan, on my left has a particular version to out of town shopping centers. And with the greatest respect to everything the business has done historically, you can pretty much take almost every example of us entering the motorway service channel, motorway service station channel against an economic problem -- outcome. That is not to say we don't have 1 or 2 instances of that at the moment. We have an interesting business model of motorway service stations in Germany but it has a very different level of feature around who contributes the capital between us and the landlord. And has somewhat different economic model. It is something though that we're looking at hard as to whether even with those features, it makes sense strategically for us to be there. We will look in some of these emerging markets where we have tremendous in-market capability around opportunity in motorway service stations. But again, it will be at the periphery of what we're doing relative to air in those markets. So what we're trying to do on capital allocation is to combine being really clear on our strategic priorities in terms of channel and geography. We've been really disciplined on financial allocation, and we're looking for both, which is an appropriate segue actually to the question on M&A opportunities. So the -- you should take from this seminar, both by the fact that you're physically here. And also by all of the things that we've said that we have a very, very high level of ambition for the kind of business we can have in North America and the kind of contribution that North America can make to the SSP group overall. As I said earlier, the momentum that we have in terms of like-for-like performance and net gains and the fact that 50% of the net gains for the group in revenue terms are coming in North America already means we don't have to do any M&A at all. We have very, very nice and very attractive economic momentum on like-for-like and net gains. But we do think there will be opportunities for us to do infill M&A like Midfield and other things potentially like that on the assumption that they deliver a strategic benefit and the returns criteria are such that we can, first of all, defend them to each other and also defend them to our stakeholders. But if you read through all of that, we would like to try to find ways to complement the organic momentum of our North American business with things that enable us to step up our share and get access to airports more quickly but the timing, nature, frequency and scale of that is very hard to predict. And I'm going to combine our group processes with our North American expertise in terms of how we do that. We also signaled some other areas of strategic growth opportunity for us as a business, right? India, Malaysia, Thailand, some markets with features somewhat like that, that we're currently in, that we'd be interested in trying to find a way into. We're very interested in building the scale of our business in the Middle East and we've got some interesting momentum in some places there, too. So there are the sort of broad geographic priorities, air as the channel overlay across that and then being disciplined and clear on the financial criteria. If I could just add one last thing, right? If you take anything from the day and a half that you've spent with us, it should also be the importance of local expertise on the ground capability, real presence and influence within the travel network. And we will be mad to try to inject businesses into markets where we don't have confidence in that kind of infrastructure and team. So it matters. The third criteria really alongside strategic fit and financial discipline is do we have the integration capability, leadership capability in market to be able to integrate, absorb and drive on anything that we do, whether it's organic, frankly, accelerated organic or infill M&A. Ali?

Yes, thank you for the session today. You talked a lot about the initiatives in the U.S. and then maybe some of those you're applying to other parts of the world. How much of those are built into the guidance that you've currently set out? Or what is the scale of improvement that you could build to the margin once they're fully deployed?

It feels like a very natural CFO question there, Jonathan.

But you'll note, Ali, that we didn't actually put a number on the efficiency opportunity. Merely pointed out that it had been an important driver of historical performance. I think the objective of today, frankly, was to both in Michael's presentation, but importantly, in the workshops. Start to give you a little bit of the flavor of the sort of stuff that is happening throughout the business. And you've heard me say many times, there's a long, long list of this stuff. And one of the things that I think is the strength of the business is our ability to relentlessly keep on top of a long list of stuff and make sure that we deliver on our ambition, and we monitor performance. And we are doing it across the globe. I happen to think these guys do this stuff very, very well and to some degree, probably originate more of their own programs of efficiency locally. But -- and you heard Michael say before, there's a sort of -- there is a very, very important dynamic in the business whereby good ideas wherever they originate, get shared at our executive committee, and we look and deploy them as quickly as we can where appropriate, elsewhere. But this -- we could take you to other parts of the world, and they will be able to put on a similar sort of -- set of presentations. But again, what does all that will add up to? Well, hard to say, particularly at this point in time where we're still in the recovery phase.

Got it. And just a follow-up. From speaking to some of the panelists from yesterday's session, it sounded like the concession environment -- concession rate environment isn't going to be as aggressive as you're perhaps suggesting for the overall market. What is the delta? Also rather, what are you expecting in terms of the recovery in concession rates? Is it back to pre-2019 levels?

It's a really good question. Again, somewhat unknowable. And I think what we've definitely benefited from is a slightly more benign competitive environment over the last 12 or 18 months as we've really reengaged in the sort of competitive process both for new business and to extend businesses. We haven't seen the same level of competition. Again, Patrick's pointed to some of that earlier on. And I think we've seen many of our competitors, big and small, bidding more conservatively. So that's been helpful for us, albeit in many cases, we've not been extending contracts for the full term. We have been getting nice extensions with limited capital and at some point in time over the coming years, those will come back to market. I think we -- we're sort of at a [ cusp peer. ] I think that people have got short memories. And I think if I look at the clients and possibly the competitors they sort of feeded the COVID well in the rearview mirror. And we're starting to see to some degree, a resumption of the normal levels of competitive activity. I don't think we're quite back there yet. But I wouldn't sort of hold out and say it's never going to return. I think certainly, in a year's time, we'll be back there. Anything you may want to?

No, I think, it's -- yes...

Maybe Patrick or Michael, I was sort of intrigued by the comments about the -- some of your sites having sort of compelling unit economics just by the size of them in a specific area. Is that strategic in that you've tried to structure these opportunities like that? Or is it just luck in terms of the ones you've been successful at winning? And then just a second question, maybe for Jonathan. But on the -- from the trading update this morning, can you just give a bit more color on the under the -- the organic trends underneath the revenue progression from the 6 weeks to the 10-week period, just I guess it's splitting out the FX?

So to answer to your first question, yes, it's strategic. The way the RFPs and tenders come out, they come out in packages here. We take a hard look at them. We have the finance team that we have from business development, has a very extensive career within this industry in the airline industry as well as the concessions and understanding foot traffic and understanding the quality of the real estate? Is it A? Is it B+? Is it B- and C? So as we put tenders together, we know the ones we want, and we definitely make sure we put our best foot forward to win those because they become the anchors in the business, to Pat's point, then we penetrate it with a great anchor restaurant, and then we grow it from there which continues to make sense, but we absolutely put a lot of thought and strategic forefront to make sure that happens.

And with regard to current trading, I mean, we're talking about very, very small movements here, first up. But as Patrick said earlier, if you look at the most recent 4 weeks compared to the first 6 weeks, we talked about at the interims, there was an impact of another couple of percent or so from FX and a little bit from additional days of rail strikes in the U.K. So if you take that -- if you were to adjust for that, you would have seen the trading in the last 4 weeks was very slightly up. But we are -- I stress we're talking about very, very small numbers, which is why we didn't bother to share that. I think we -- this is sort of dangerous route to go down.

Okay. Tim?

Just firstly, I wanted to understand -- to check I understood right on concession fees. You were saying that although they're above pre-COVID levels as a percent, the environment is slightly more benign and it sounds like you're very pragmatic about that line item remaining tricky. Presumably, it shouldn't be as bad as the 50 basis points per annum that you had post-IPO.

Yes. Good question, Tim. So I think if you look at the concession fees in absolute terms as a percent of sales, of course, we're still not fully recovered from COVID. So there are still sites, parts of the world where you got -- you're still in minimum guarantees and so forth. So you can't really read the absolute numbers that you saw, particularly in the first half because remember, there's a big shift between first half and second half as well under normal circumstances. So you can't really draw anything from that at this stage. You can really only start to draw out that as you look forward another year or 2. In terms of the second part, the sort of the pace of concession fee increase. I would hope that for all the reasons I sort of mentioned in response to the point Ali raised, I think we'd hope that they are not going to increase at the same level as we saw in the pre-period. But again, there's a sort of important point here in the way we manage the business. We don't manage it for short-term margin first up. We will always look for cash returning projects. But to some degree, if we can afford through the economics of each deal to pay more rent, we'll do it, and you'll see the concession fee rise over the medium term. And I think that's always been a hallmark of the way we've run the business. Now the net of that has been, of course, that we've always -- we've been able to fund an increase in concession fee. Some of that's supported by the increased productivity and efficiency of the business. But the answer is it's unknowable, but I wouldn't assume it's going to revert to that sort of level, I would assume something lower.

I'm going to take this. This is going to be the last question actually. So just -- get a microphone.

Business development question. So in the U.S., just given the massive volume of RFPs over the next couple of years, do you feel that you have the business development team and the number of opportunities that meet your underwriting criteria and the win rate sort of necessary to consume your capital -- growth capital budget? Or is there more you can do building out your development team, modifying your approach to the market to do more and win more of that?

As it relates to the development team, we're in a good spot. We just hired Paul Brown, great individual who was an airport Director who had concessions background as well to our team recently. Maria Martinez from one of our competitors, again, great business development experience. Jen Juul another recent hire, again, great experience from one of our competitors and then Dawn Hunter, who was actually charged with the commercial program at Seattle Airport, prior to that at L.A., overseeing the concessions program, so understands our business well. So 4 key strategic hires done recently in the last 6 months, they're up, they're ready. Pat's orientated and got them ready to go, and so it positions us, and that's maintaining the current team that we've had because we knew, again, things were put on hold during COVID, it would be a push. We've done the same thing with our proposal team, put the right resources in there. So we have the bandwidth that respond to the RFPs as well which is kind of a hefty lifting because the proposals are quite large. So I feel very comfortable with that. One of the questions is to digress a little bit, and then I mentioned in my menu optimization plan as well. We've done the same thing with our culinary team because it was very important to reinvest on the possibility of getting those kitchens executed because the return is there and the same thing is keeping the menu optimization program going on because we know a couple of bodies can reduce that 2-month time period to do menu optimization down to one, you're going to get the return in second. So we're constantly investing in the business but being prudent about it and very smart about it. So just to make sure we're ready, absolutely.

And if I just build on that and we'll finish with this. If you and -- Michael shared the historic growth trajectory of our North American business, a compounded growth of about 20% to 2019, right? And jump in your minds to the slide I showed on net gains, right, which has the 625, 50% of which is North America, so call it, 315 or something of that sort of order, plus the growth we've had in the last couple of months. The truth is we've got close to $500 million of net gains that are rolling in North America. And the business is becoming much bigger, right? Delightfully so, it's where -- it's really cool that that's happening. And the level of opportunity is still there and still very, very large. The task of continuing to secure and onboard and generate returns at a maintenance of a 20% growth business that has become close to $1 billion business versus a $500 million business of 5 years ago is pretty material, and it needs more resource. And so as Michael talks are putting into, it's got some really, really strong anchor points in terms of leadership capability and relationships within the aviation ecosystem here. If I can just make a small internal joke for a second. So [ Mark Rengel ] comes up to me last night and goes which one of those 3 people I think Pat is going to hire this time. Our last experience of Pat moderating a panel of aviation experts, it turned into a recruitment exercise for SSP. So the -- so we will continue to strengthen and evolve our team, but I think we will be doing that off just really, really strong foundation points that we have here in North America. So listen, I'm going to bring the Q&A to an end. Just -- if I can just thank Michael and Jonathan for their comments in the Q&A and for your comments this morning.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So just before I do a very, very quick wrap-up. There's one question that at least 4 people in the room have asked me individually. So I'm just going to be explicit on the answer I gave them to everybody else, which is what do we think about the review of U.K. rail catering that was announced last Thursday evening. And what I would say is 3 points. First of all, for us, just to give it a kind of an emotional reaction, it's going to be a bit irritating, right? It's going to consume resource with our U.K. team. It's going to consume resource with our legal team in terms of meeting that submission, right? And I think that's going to be some resource that it's going to consume for, frankly, some time, and we've already ramped up to prepare our response for that. Second thing I would say is that the essence of what that review is seeking is something that we're enormously supportive of, right? Which is trying to find a way to get more variety, stronger and more innovative food propositions into the U.K. rail environment. There are all sorts of contextual factors around how the system works, which makes that difficult even as we have been trying to do it ourselves as one of the bigger players within the space. So we're fully aligned with the stated objective of that review, right, which is to try to have stronger, better, more innovative, better quality food propositions. The kind of food propositions, frankly, that you will see in some other parts of the rail system like HS1 and St Pancras, for example, in the U.K. And as far as any of you have a picture of the food and beverage environment there. And then the third thing to say is that while it is going to be a process for us to weigh into. This is not an unusual process for the ORR to rollout. Actually, there's been about 5 such processes of other aspects, commercial and operational aspects of U.K. rail that have been initiated within the last 12 months, right? So we are responding to a relatively normal process in a way that will consume some of our resource. The objective of which actually is not really misalign with what we're trying to do in U.K. rail at all. And I could go down a much kind of longer initial view on the nature of the risk that is associated with that. But the sort of risks that have been bounced at us [ field ] to us to fall into the category of highly, highly unlikely as we assess what some of the mitigants may be that may be sought on that. So just to say that's, it was new news to the system. It was new news to us last Thursday evening. We're fully engaged in it and as we know more, we'll share that with you as we need to. So I just want to say that right. Let me jump back to key takeaways from this event, and I'm including last night and today. Now first thing to note is, and just to say thank you for spending the time with us, right? Everyone is busy, people have -- in many cases, people have traveled across the Atlantic to be here. And even the people who've come from within North America to be with us as our guests, we really appreciate you spending the time with us since and hopefully learning more about the business and helping us to, by virtue of how you've engaged with us to understand and make our business better as well. I'm also conscious that we are pivoting for many of us to go to Terminal 4 and Geoffrey and Michael will pick that up in a second, but not all of us. So for those of you who are finishing up with us now, thank you again for spending the time with us. And hopefully, you've got to learn about the business. I did want to thank a group of people. So actually came up just there on that last question. So first of all, the clients who joined us last night, our joint venture partners who joined us last night. But in particular, I wanted to thank Michael and his team, [ Trish ], Lana in particular, for putting on all of this, it is a -- just to give one example. It's not for the faint-hearted to establish a kitchen next door, like I walked down yesterday to see the [indiscernible] the fire alarm was blaring, right? And so we were -- there was an element of fingers crossed as to whether or not we could actually operate a kitchen in the way that we did and the time that we did. But it goes a little bit to the point Pat made, right, which is the this is what we do, where restaurateurs, there's a bit of theater, there's a bit of flare to how it goes. And that is part of the hospitality experience. And I think for those of you who may not have seen that aspect of the SSP culture in other parts of the world and in other events like this before, hopefully, that's kind of resonated pretty strongly for you here. So to our -- my U.S. team colleagues in every sense who put this together and really, really thank you very much. I also just wanted to acknowledge our Investor Relations team, who are the other side of all of that, as Sarah John, Sarah Roff, Adam who's here, [ Miles ] who works with them in all sorts of ways for helping put this together and making sure that it met the kind of capital markets side and kind of investor side of the event as well. So they're the thank you. Just in content terms, hopefully, what you've got from spending the last day and a bit with us is that our business continues to trade well, right? That's the sort of bedrock or foundation for all the other things that we're talking about, right? We are -- you have seen me earlier talk about the different stages of our business as we're transitioning from pre-COVID, through COVID to recovering and then setting up the business post recovery to have strong, sustainable growth from 2024 on. We're doing that with real alignment across our leadership team and our Board and hopefully, you've got a sense for -- even from the kind of banter between Michael and I and Pat and Jonathan and the way in which we're working. We're very aligned in terms of what we're trying to do at the group. We're very aligned in terms of how that cascades into the different parts of our business in terms of the purpose, the vision, the strategic priorities of the business. And we are executing those elements in all parts of our group. As I said this morning, the somewhat simplistic way of putting it, but like all roads to value creation for SSP goes straight through North America, all right? That's why we're here. That's why we're allocating the capital that we are. That's why we're building the capability here. This is just about our highest sales country. It is already comfortably our most profitable country, and it's going to get bigger and more profitable than every other part of the group at an accelerated way. All right. That is the nature of the business that we are becoming, and we are delighted to become that on the back of the capability and platform and relationships that we have here. And we have -- Jonathan has just such an extraordinary level of corporate memory, right? I get to see it on a virtual daily basis when we do the group investment committees that he spoke about the way, some of you have heard me say this before, but we do about 20 investment committees a week times 50 weeks, 1,000 in a year, times 20 years for Jonathan, that's 20,000. He can pretty much remember every one of those investment committees in terms of the corporate memory and institutional recognition about what to think about this airport or that, that unit or that. And as a result, it flows very strongly into the economic model that he and our wider team share. But I would ask you to note that the last slide that Jonathan spoke to does describe a different economic model from what SSP was before. It is not the same. By coincidence, and fortunately, it's likely to deliver the same sort of earnings progression, but it will do so in different ways, right? And the essence of those different ways are our top line will grow faster. And the nature of where that growth is coming from, should be very attractive for us in terms of margin and returns but will be delivered with a greater weighting of partner participation than would have been the case historically. And as you flow all that through, that's very, very nice in terms of the earnings outcome that it should deliver, but it is driven by a somewhat different set of dynamics. And just I wanted to make that point in terms of the model going forward. And that really is our path to value creation. So if I join that back to finally to the kind of guidance we've given. Clearly, we've expressed a lot of confidence that we're on track for this year, and we've given a specific set of guidance as we can for that with 3.5 higher trading months still to go. We do feel nicely set up for next year and we recognize that some of the other elements that I referenced earlier around interest, minorities, resetting our earnings basis and so forth for next year. That's still the final stages of the -- well, I'm characterizing as the economic recovery post COVID. But that gives us a platform where when you layer on top from that platform, all of the elements we've spoken about in terms of strategy and illustrated hopefully very, very transparently by our business in North America. We think sets us up for just tremendous excitement. And I can say, just tremendous fund as a business as we crack on from '24 into '25 and build a path of sustainable returns out to 2030. So thank you for spending the time with us. I think Geoffrey, I am handing over to you next. Great, thank you.

Mike's not on, but there you go awesome. Super tough day to conclude. So I only have 4 slides, I'll try not to mess it up. My name is Geoffrey Lentz. I'm a Regional Vice President of the Northeast for SSP America. I'm a Cleveland, Ohio boy, a very humble beginnings that took a big leap of faith about 12 years ago and left to go to Houston, Texas to join SSP America. And through the growth and the opportunities that the company has provided, I've managed to work my way up to a Regional Vice President position, and I'm a nurse by schooling, so who'd have thought that, absolutely. I'm going to tell you a little bit about Terminal 4 real quick. Just a couple of housekeeping items, and then we're going to take a tour over to Terminal 4. Really proud of what Terminal 4 is. I'll weave in some of the different things that we talked about today. And through the tour, each of you will be paired with a tour guide with systemic knowledge of the operation in Terminal 4, should be able to answer a lot of the questions that might come up in some of the things that I might talk about today. So as we may or may not know, JFK, right, Gateway to America, Terminal 4 is the largest of JFK's terminals. It services nearly 60,000 passengers a day coming in and out. Operated by 34 major airlines. I'm curious enough, when we are touring JFK, today's employment totals are north of 35,000, so when we're in the terminal, it's going to be teaming with passengers. And what you're really going to witness is sort of a symphony of the integration of the menu enhancements and optimization, right? The digital platforms and solutions, the seating efficiencies and the kitchen efficiencies, all woven together by the operations team, they're in Terminal 4. So we'll meet them, we'll see them. They're going to rock it out. We, SSP America, operate 34 restaurants in Terminal 4, operated by 650, north of 650 team members. Same story for them as it was for me. Many of them joined SSP America, 5, 10, 15, some even 20 years ago in Terminal 4 as cashiers, as cooks, as dishwashers and have climbed the ranks to be our restaurant general managers, our assistant restaurant managers, even our terminal operations managers that are operating nice chunks of business in JFK, all have worked through the company coming from the same beginning that many of us have. A map of Terminal 4. So as I mentioned, 34 units all across the terminal from one end to the other. You're not more than likely going to see every one of them today just due to the brevity of the tour and announcement maneuvering over there. But what you will see is what I highlighted, right? Great operation, the integrated platforms that we discussed and seen the team performed very well today and a group of people that are just working in hospitality and care. And I always sort of think of a quote for me that's very important in leadership. And I think when you've heard every person speak on this stage, in the hallways at dinner last night, et cetera, which you heard is a group of individuals that have extreme care for humanity, for what we do for hospitality. There's a quote that I often use from Teddy Roosevelt that says no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. Safety, right, as many of us either know or can intuitively guess, right, airports are really safe and secure environments for obvious reasons, no different in Terminal 4. You'll see that, obviously, that has many life safety systems in Terminal 4. Should anything come up, right, please go to your tour guide. They will be knowledgeable of anything that we would need to do in the event of an emergency God forbid. The second piece that I would talk about is while we're on the tour, right? In order to be afforded the privilege of taking a group like this across the security threshold, we coordinated with the Transportation Security Administration and the JFK security team, really extensive planning and meetings why we all had to provide our passports and identifications, okay? It's going to be imperative that we stay with our tour escorts, okay? We'll talk about how to find those people in a minute, but those people have been tasked and charged with keeping you within a reasonable distance. So please try not to stray from them. If in the event someone has to use the restroom, let them know, they will know what to do, but we cannot deviate from those protocols. There are serious civil and professional penalties that we would have to endure. I don't envision any of that. I just have to remind everyone. We're going to tour over to JFK, as I mentioned. So I just want to talk about a couple of really brief housekeeping points. At the bottom of your badge, I don't have my badge, it's over there, but if I did, there'd be a number at the bottom of it, right? That number is going to correspond to a tour guide that you have that's waiting outside those doors to meet you, they all have a sign with the corresponding number, okay? So you're going to walk out after we conclude. You're going to find that person, and we're going to walk over to the air train to take us to Terminal 4. Might be a 5- to 7-minute walk to get to the air train. The air train schedules run 2 to 4 minutes, somewhere in there, and that will take us over to Terminal 4. We're going to grab our luggage -- sorry, I went ahead too fast. We're going to grab our luggage that's at the top of the steps. It's in alphabetical order from front to back. So depending on your last name, that's where it will be located. You're going to take that with us. We're going to walk over, get on the air train. We're going to get off the air train. Your tour guide is going to take you to a predesignated room in Terminal 4, where your luggage will remain while we go on tour and it will be safe and secure and monitored by someone who will not leave that room until we convene again and conclude the session. Three things that I also want to highlight. Michael already mentioned one of them. Please make sure you have the ID that you provided, super critical. It's going to match a gate pass that you're going to get that you must also keep with you. In the event TSA, really diligent about security, as we can imagine, they might even check on us, right? Just to do, just to make sure that we're doing what we need to do, so you'll need to have those 2 things, okay? The second thing is we're going to have to traverse the security checkpoint. It's going to be an abbreviated method, but we're all going to have to go through the body image scanners and we're going to have to divest ourselves of wallet, cell phones, et cetera. If you don't need it, I would ask or request leave it with your luggage, okay? Your luggage will be safe and secure. The less that we all have to sort of divest ourselves of, the quicker that we'll make it through the line and get to the third thing, which is going to be lunch. We will feed you again. The team in the Palm restaurant is really excited. Our regional chef team has prepared for you, dishes that are represented by all of our New York restaurants, not all of them, some of them, but they're all featured in New York restaurants and we'll go forward. Really excited about the tour. There was a question that came up that Michael highlighted about anchor restaurants right, in the broader context of developing right airports, JFK actually, you'll see the operation there. But behind the scenes in JFK, JFK serves as an anchor for all of our operations in New York and produces, procures, makes and ships to the other terminals that we operate in, almost 10,000 units a day are sent to our other terminals in New York. And all that's going to be going on while we go see the operations. So I appreciate the time. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to speak to you. We're going to walk outside again. Predicated on the number that's on the bottom of your badge, you're going to find your tour guide, off we go, stay close. I'll lead first, and then we're going to walk across. Thank you.