J. Patrick Doyle
Analyst · Jefferies
Thanks, Mike. As you heard, we delivered yet another strong quarter with excellent sales and store growth, as well as a very strong 17.5% increase in our EPS over last year. Our dependable franchise model, robust global business, and leading digital strategy worked together to drive great consistent results. Here in the US, we drove both traffic and ticket in the quarter. We were primarily marketing our new specialty chicken which is boneless chicken covered with pizza toppings. This product was embraced by our customers and drove good margins for our franchisees. So overall we’re very pleased with our latest addition to the menu. We also had good adoption of our store reimaging campaign this quarter. Between re-images, new builds and relocations of existing stores, we now have almost 10% of our US stores and just over 20% of our international stores already in our new image. Our goal is to substantially complete remodeling all corporate stores by the end of 2015. Our franchisees will generally have until the end of 2017 to remodel. We’re pleased to see that our franchisees are adopting and embracing the store remodels, despite the cost environment that remains uncertain for small businesses across the US. They are holding the line and remaining disciplined on prices despite rising wages and the potential for further increases in many places, as well as higher food costs among other cost pressures. As the system, we’ve been very successful which is a credit to our franchisees and their buy-in of our vision and brand strategies. They are working hard to run stores that are part of their local economy serving millions of hot pizzas a day, employing tens of thousands of great people all of which is a testament to the strength of our system. Our international business thrived in the second quarter with accelerating same-store sales over last year's results and plenty of momentum in markets across the globe. We had one of our largest net store openings for any second quarter period, which means in the first half of this year, hundreds of new image stores have been going up all around the world. In May, we opened our 11,000th store in Brantford, Ontario in Canada, the country where our international business began 30 years ago, continues to be an important market for Domino's and the recent focus on value promotion drove double-digit year-over-year order count increases for the fourth consecutive quarter. Our international success this quarter was based on promotions that resonated, expanding the brand through new stores and executing well on service and quality. Some notable performances include: South Korea where promotions focused on digital ordering and new product news helped drive strong results. Robust order count growth in Spain was largely a result of product innovation and value driven carryout promotions. They’ve also had a strong start to the year on store growth. And finally, in Brazil, double-digit sales in the second quarter were driven by strong value promotions as their brand continues to expand through excellent store growth. The market is nearly at a hundred store mark. And many of you probably still have World Cup on your mind, and I’d like to point out that only four days of World Cup overlapped with Q2 results but as with most events like this, we would not expect that this event would have a material impact on full quarter results. Both our domestic and international markets continued to keep their attention focused on digital access. Our goal is always to be able to take an order whenever and however a customer wants, whether they need a pizza in the UK through their cell phone, whether they want to order from their laptop in Australia or from their Ford sync system here in the US, we want to be everywhere our customers want us to be with hot delicious food. In the US, we announced a number of new digital initiatives, including the iPad app that I talked about in May. We logged over $1 million in sales through this app in its first four weeks alone. Since then we also became the first company to launch voice ordering through our iPhone and Android apps. The voice ordering is similar to Siri on your iPhone, only our computer-aided -- computer-generated voice is called Dom. We feel this was a trailblazing move in the direction the technology is headed. Around 45% of our overall sales now come through digital channels, and we’re fast approaching half of that coming through mobile in particular. It reinforces for us the convenience is key for our customers. Even the simple customer convenience issues can be solved with a technological fix. For example, during the quarter we launched our group ordering tool online, helping customers determine how many pizzas they need for a large group order along with recommendations for the most popular pizzas. We’re always looking for ways to make ordering easier for customers and the digital experience a richer one. We recently moved our website to responsive design which automatically rearranges page layouts to fit any screen size and results in a great experience for our customers whether they are ordering from a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. At a roughly $3 billion run rate on worldwide digital sales, we believe we are the global digital leader in our industry with an innovation oriented mindset in everything we do. For us technology is not an add-on or a nice to have, it’s a core part of our global strategy and central to the great experience our customers have with Domino’s. Let me just use my final few minutes to highlight our use of cash this quarter which largely went towards dividend payments and very active share repurchases. With around 2 million a week in free cash generated, we remain focused on deploying our cash to benefit shareholders. In conclusion, it was just another boring great quarter here at Domino’s. Our team remains focused on driving consistent strong results which come from leading innovation, delivering a great experience to each and every one of our customers, building new stores and executing our reimage campaign. Thank you for your time today. Operator, I am ready for questions.