Andrew Clyde
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Your line is open
Thank you, Christian. Good morning and thank you all for joining our call. I would like to start off by noting this quarter is the fifth anniversary of our first earnings release in the third quarter of 2013. And as I review the results, it’s really remarkable how much our business has improved since the span. Detailing all our improvements would take too much time and put us well outside the scope of this call, but let me sum it up in three key points. First, we took a strong cash flowing business and made it even better. We grew contribution margin per store from roughly 220,000 annually in 2013 to nearly 260,000 in 2018. We have added roughly $120 million of incremental merchandise margin, reduced the operating cost at the store level by 10%, all while continuing to make investments in our store, our home office capabilities and our people. We grew fuel volumes by 100 million gallons a year, while sustaining through the highs and lows of fuel price and margin volatility. Second, we started with a well-capitalized balance sheet and spend in a sense optimize our capital structure to support our strategic objectives. We extracted significant value from non-core assets totaling $365 million. We added appropriate leverage to the business supported by higher earnings and cash flow and we made a bet on ourselves repurchasing nearly $1 billion of our own stock at prices that approximated 30% return today. Third, while past performance isn’t always indicative of future results, our strategic mindset around improving the business and allocating capital sets us up nicely for the next 5 years. We are focused on winning the game we are playing. We are relentless around cost leadership. We are innovating and pursuing new opportunities to win with our customers and we will remain patient and disciplined with our capital allocation strategy as we pursue an equally rich opportunity set of objectives over the next 5 years. I would like to thank our team, our Board of Directors and our shareholders who have supported us on this exciting journey. I will now address third quarter performance and keep my comments brief. Looking at fuel results, we had higher same-store volumes in 2018 owing largely to the timing and relative severity of hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017 versus 2018 events. However, these volumes were not accompanied by the same margins we saw in the year ago period. Nevertheless, retail margins of $0.142 per gallon were actually fairly resilient given the rising price environment witnessed through most of the second half of the year. While volumes show 1% improvement over the prior year, these results do not meet our expectations. A year ago, we talked about various elements impacting fuel volumes beyond competition and market externalities. We have made good progress on some of these like dispenser uptime. We have held our ground and other areas like carrier outages despite driver shortages, but we have not made the progress expected around fuel pricing execution where we believe the largest opportunity exists. As a consequence, we reorganized our fuel business with new leadership in pricing to address this longstanding priority and are developing a laser focused on sharpening our pricing tactics at the store level. As a result, we expect to see better results going forward as we do not believe we are fully optimizing the margin and volume opportunities within our markets. Meanwhile, the merchandise business delivered exceptional results, gaining momentum sequentially from what was already a great second quarter performance. Merchandise sales were up on a same-store basis driving higher margins and growing total contribution dollars. Average unit margins were 16.8%, a new record and a 70-basis point improvement over the prior year quarter. Results were exceptionally strong in the tobacco category where we are maximizing our participation and manufacturer programs provide the best values to our customers. Due to the strength in our merchandise business, our fuel breakeven for the quarter continues to improve, coming in at 53 basis points, a remarkable $0.005 improvement in the year-over-year results. Importantly, this improvement more than offsets a 35 basis point increase in credit card fees which are an unavoidable outcome of the high price environment we have seen for most of the year. Strong merchandise results also help to offset a slight uptick in site level operating expenses excluding payment fees, which were up 2.8% for the quarter. Some of the increase we saw this quarter was attributable to timing around certain maintenance expenses as year-to-date per-site costs are still just below prior year on a per store basis. While the merchandising team in our store associates crushed it, these results still do not reflect the impact we expect from our Murphy Drive Rewards loyalty program. While it is too early to see a material impact on our financials, allow me to highlight some of the insights we are already seeing from the pilot program. First, we believe the app and technology are providing a simple, frictionless interface that customers like and it is highly scalable. Customer and SKU level data is providing significant insights for how to engage unique customer segments and target offers. Our most loyal customers have embraced the program with great enthusiasm. We are seeing extra trips from this group. From our lower share wallet customers, we are also seeing an impact as early indication shows we’re seeing about an extra gallon per month from this group. Across some of our largest merchandising categories, we are seeing more units sold per engaged customer. And across all transactions, we are seeing a larger basket size. Based on this encouraging data, we expect to begin nationwide rollout in the first quarter of 2019. We remain very encouraged by the high level of engagement our customers have shown for the program as we continue to evaluate the data from the pilot. We’re seeing early indications of higher fuel usage and higher merchandise spend from active customers. Importantly, we are seeing this behavior pattern even before we begin to engage and communicate with our customers to deliver target value offers, an effort now underway. We are pleased that the technology works and connects us with our customers in a meaningful way. Our customers and equally our supplier partners are interested and engaged in the program and we are very excited about the opportunities we look into 2019 and plan a network-wide launch of the program. On share buybacks, we had a 10b5-1 plan in place during the third quarter. However, the start price did not reach levels that trigger repurchase activity. As a result, we did not repurchase any shares this past quarter. The share repurchases remain our preferred use of free cash flow and we will continue to be opportunistic in the market going forward. And with that, I will turn it over to Mindy.