Bbb Foods Inc (TBBB) 2025 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, everyone. My name is Leonard, and I will be your conference operator. Welcome to Tiendas 3B second-quarter 2025 conference call. (Operator Instructions) Also, please note that this call is for investors and analysts only. Questions from the media will not be taken nor should the call be reported.

Any forward-looking statements made during this conference call are based on information that is currently available to us.

Today, we're joined by Tiendas 3B's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Hatoum; and Chief Financial Officer, Eduardo Pizzuto.

I will now turn the call over to Anthony. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Tiendas 3B's second-quarter 2025 earnings call. I will begin with a review of our operating results for the quarter and will be followed by our CFO, Eduardo Pizzuto, who will provide an overview of our financial performance. We will conclude with a Q&A session to answer any questions you may have.

We continue to add breadth and depth to our management team. Today, I would like to take the opportunity to welcome to the team two new members, Amparo Martinez, who joins us as General Counsel; and Joaquín Ley, who will head Investor Relations. Welcome.

We delivered another quarter of exceptional growth, far outperforming other listed grocery retailers in Mexico, due to our unrivaled value proposition. In Q2, we opened 142 net new stores for a total of 3,031 stores. Our store opening rate is accelerating.

Together with this acceleration of store openings, we have invested in four new regions that we will open in the second half of this year. That means four new distribution centers, logistics, and all the personnel required to run it and its operations.

Same-store sales grew by 17.7% versus 10.7% in the second quarter of last year. Total revenues increased by 38.3% to reach MXN18.8 billion. EBITDA increased by 22.5% to reach MXN844 million. If we exclude our share-based payment expense, which is non-cash, then our EBITDA would have increased by 32%.

During this first semester, cash flow generated by operating activities reached MXN1.9 billion or a 56% increase versus 2024. We ended with a net local cash position of approximately MXN1.1 billion, and we have a $150 million cash position, mostly from funds we raised at the IPO.

Let's turn to operational performance. We are increasing the number and the rate of store openings. In the first six months of this year, we opened 259 stores compared to the 215 stores we opened in the first half of the previous year. If we look at this on a 12-month basis, we opened 528 stores versus 460 stores in the previous 12 months.

Our revenue growth remains rapid. We continue to be one of the fastest growing retailers in Mexico and possibly globally. Total revenues reached MXN18.8 billion, an increase of 38% year over year, with very strong same-store sales growth rates of 17.7%. Same-store sales growth continues to be driven by continuous improvements in our value proposition to our customers. And we are seeing an increasing number of tickets as well as an increasing number of items per ticket.

When compared to ANTAD, we appear to be increasing the gap in the growth rate of same-store sales. We see in the second quarter a larger gap of 15 percentage points.

I will now pass the mic to Eduardo.

Thank you, Anthony. Good morning, everyone. Sales expenses as a percentage of revenue slightly increased from 10.4% to 10.5%. This increase had two main drivers. Due to our accelerating rate of store openings, we see higher store personnel and D&A expenses. This is normal. 45% of our total store base was opened during the last three years. As more store vintages mature, sales expenses naturally decreased as a percentage of revenue. This is what happened with our older vintages.

Moving on to admin expenses. Admin expenses as a percentage of revenue increased by 31 basis points from 3.6% to 3.9%. This includes recognizing an incremental MXN111 million in non-cash share-based payment expenses.

To recap our share-based compensation plans, it consists of a legacy plans of 20 years that terminated at IPO and a new standard plan that started at IPO. In addition, this June, our Board granted share-based awards tied to our IPO. This award announced in our IPO and follow-on documentation does not change our fully diluted share account. It was already factoring. It just results now in an accounting recognition of a non-cash expenses upon granting.

For those investors who prefer to look at this non-cash expense, we have made it easy to review by providing a breakdown in the appendix of our earnings release. We encourage you to read it.

Moving on to EBITDA. EBITDA reached MXN844 million, a 22.5% increase year over year. EBITDA margin was 4.5%, down 58 basis points. The margin impact mainly comes from higher logistics costs associated with the opening of four new regions in the second half of this year, non-cash share-based payment expenses, and the acceleration of our store opening rate.

If we exclude non-cash share-based payments, then the EBITDA margin would have been 5.8%, down 27 basis points, and our EBITDA would have increased 32% year over year.

I would like to anticipate the very normal question about operating leverage. It is real, but hard to see when viewed on a consolidated basis, that given the increasing rate of store openings. But when we look at it on a store vintage faces, we see it clearly. And therefore, we're confident that when our store opening rates flatten, it will become very evident. However, we choose to go for the higher growth rates, and this is what is going to maximize shareholder value creation.

Finally, our working capital. Our business is a business model that generates significant negative working capital. And in turn, we generate significant cash flow from the changes in negative working capital. We can see, for example, that in June '24, we had MXN5 billion compared to a negative working capital of MXN7 billion in the second quarter of '25 excluding IPO proceeds. We are roughly at 10.5% of total revenue LTM excluding IPO proceeds. Our accelerated growth continues to be self-funded.

I will now turn the call back to Anthony for final remarks.

We are exceeding our targets. We are accelerating the rate of store openings. This, along with related investments, affects our consolidated margin. But across the board and especially at the vintage level, we continue to see the benefits of scale and operating leverage.

Sales and same-store sales are booming, reflecting our unrivaled value proposition, and we are funding all this growth and investment internally from increasing cash flows.

We continue to invest to sustain accelerating growth because by doing so, we are creating additional shareholder value, and we are increasing our lead versus the rest of the market.

Ours is a winning business model. We will keep on executing, and we will continue to do it just faster and better.

We will now move to start the Q&A session. Please go ahead, operator.

(Operator Instructions)

Robert Ford, Bank of America.

Good day, everybody. Bob Ford, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Hi Anthony. Hi Eduardo. Congratulations on the quarter. What do you attribute the acceleration in same-store sales to? And how should we think about ticket, traffic, items per basket trends in the quarter, the inflation rates in your assortments, and maybe the momentum as you come out of the shift of Easter into July and early August?

Hi, Bob. Many parts to your question, so I'll try to segregate it. I think fundamentally, it's an amazing value proposition that we keep on improving in everything we offer our customers. And that has not changed at all since inception. We continue to improve on our products, whether it's quality or price or packaging or the assortment. And fundamentally, that's what's driving more traffic into our stores and for existing customers, enticing them to pick up one more item.

And in terms of where is that same-store sales coming from from a more numerical point of view, we're seeing a notable increase in the number of tickets. We are seeing a real increase in the ticket size. And when we look at it in more detail, part of it is a number of items that you pick up and also the mix has changed and made the ticket a little bit bigger. And of course, we always look at inflation, but in our case, it's a minimal part of the ticket increase. In fact, I might even say that internally, we have deflation of prices.

Did I cover all parts of the question?

I think you did. And I was just curious, if you look at the your meat and produce pilots, I think they're creating a lot of excitement. How are those developing? And to what extent, just scaling that, having an impact, if at all? And how should we think about it moving forward?

Look, we're cautiously optimistic and we're fairly conservative when we look at it. And keep in mind that this is still at a test level, so by no means is it impacting the sales numbers that you see today. And even I believe if we never introduced fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats, in the future, you would still see significant and notable same-store sales growth.

Having said that, there's absolutely no doubt that when you do introduce a new category such as meat or vegetables, you are going to see automatically an increase in the ticket.

Coming back to the test results, I would be, I would say, cautiously optimistic. Again, we're very conservative when it comes to rolling out a new category. We want it not only to work on the top line, but to make sure that everything behind is working perfectly, that our logistics are efficient, that our sourcing is efficient, that we can scale without problems.

Keep in mind that this is a company that's been growing now for many years at 30% plus with no hiccups. And I think part of that is due to the fact that we're cautious and optimistic in how we do things, and we'd like to make sure that things are running well before we scale them up.

Makes sense. Thank you so much and again, congratulations on the quarter.

Thanks.

Andrew Ruben, Morgan Stanley.

Hi. Andrew Ruben at Morgan Stanley. Thanks for all the colors so far. You mentioned the four new regional openings. It's pretty sizable. So I'm curious about some of the opening and ramp-up expenses. You mentioned logistics, but when we think about maybe the marketing to build the brand, the hiring, is there anything different in terms of the intensity for new regions versus existing stores or kind of your existing regions? And then when we think about the ramp-up period, should we consider kind of similar or or longer, just really any implications given that you have the four planned for the back half? Thank you again.

Let me take the first part of this question and then, I'll let Eduardo comment on ramp-ups and costs. I think there is absolutely no change in how we've been doing things since inception. We stretch; we don't leap. And therefore, when we do open a new region, as you know, our region is a distribution center together with all the associated stores and all the functional areas to support these stores, running as an autonomous, mini company, if you want to think of it that way, we tend to open that new region next to an existing region.

So by doing that, we have mitigated any risk of branding and name recognition. On the contrary, when we do open it, people already know who we are. And we shorten the ramp-up of this new region. It's not starting from scratch. It inherits a number of stores from existing regions. And typically, the stores that get transferred are closer to the new regions, so you get another benefit which is more efficient logistics. You've compacted the distances.

Of course, this region doesn't open with all the stores that can run and typically, a region can run up to 150 stores, but say, it opens with 40 to 60 stores. And then, as it adds stores, then it becomes efficient. So basically, we're talking about going from these 40, 60 stores at start, to what we call a cruising speed at 150 stores where we think we've reached an optimal point in terms of running a region.

I don't think we've seen any change in the time of ramp-up. And I don't think that we've seen any change in how we operate it, so it's all been very smooth. It just happens that this year, the four new regions are more lumped together in terms of when we opened them, and that happens to be in the second half of this year.

Eduardo, do you want to add something to this?

Yeah. I would just add that, Andrew, for reference, yes, the additional expenses on this, it's mainly on additional personnel, transportation, and training for all these people that are going to be managing these four new regions. But then in terms of the ramp-up, really, no major changes from what you've seen in the past.

The only thing that I would add is that adding more regions, for us, it's a great thing because at the end, we become much more efficient. As Anthony mentioned, we compact the distances between the DC and the stores. And in addition to that, we also gained one more new real estate team which positions us better for our continuous expansion. So all in all, good things for the rest of the year in terms of these four new regions.

All right. Thank you both for the color. We look forward to it.

Joseph Giordano, J.P. Morgan.

Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, Anthony and Eduardo. Thanks for taking my question. I would like to explore two things here. So first on the top line, I would like to understand a little bit the evolution of the private label here. You mentioned you have larger baskets or more items. So to understand here, how the penetration of private label is evolving into this first half of the year and if the value proposition is really making a big difference here when it comes to same-store acceleration versus the market?

The second question is a more technical one concerning leases. So if you look at the total lease, not just the rental lease, it was a little bit higher than what we saw last quarter. So I'd like to understand a little bit how the refrigeration equipment and potentially, those new DCs, are actually affecting that and what could be the recurring level because we understand that maybe you have some higher upfront lease payments when you have those new contracts coming. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Joe. In terms of private label development, this is our bread and butter. We are continuously improving the portfolio of private labels and all the other products that we sell. And it's a dynamic process.

What you've seen between, let's say, 2023 and 2024 was a major increase in private label penetration. And I wouldn't be surprised that this trend continues in 2025. We will, typically, give you the number in Q4 of this year as to what we reached in terms of PL penetration. But no doubt, it's a main driver of the increase in same-store sales because fundamentally, what you're doing is you're just giving more for your money and an improving private label. It's as simple as that really. Eduardo, do you want to give some color on leases?

Joe, you broke up a little bit. Can you repeat your second question, please?

Yes. When we look at the total lease expenses, so we take the interest and lease payments, the level was a notch higher than everyone was expecting this quarter. So I would attribute that to refrigeration since we have the four new leases. But I would like to understand, do you have any kind of upfront payments to understand where this expense should stabilize going forward.

Okay. Thank you. Yes, it did went up a little bit. It has to do with actually more leases coming from growth of stores, equipment at the stores, and also the future new regions, which is we're equipping them with cold rooms and frozen rooms as well. So the combination of that makes that increase in leases, Joe.

Is there any kind of upfront payment, Eduardo, here to understand if this is the new level?

Not from payments.

All right. Thank you very much, Eduardo and Anthony.

Thank you, Joe.

Alvaro Garcia, BTG Pactual.

Alvaro Garcia from Pactual. A couple of questions, two questions. One on the equity incentive plan, the 2024 equity incentive plan. We saw that in 2Q '25 you've increased the number of both RSUs and options related to the 2024 plan. And I was wondering if that was performance specific or what drove that increase into 2Q. And maybe if you have some sort of -- I know it's difficult to give guidance, but what a full-year '24 number might look like? And then I'll ask my second question afterwards.

Yeah. We typically would prefer to leave all of this until the end of the year. But sometimes, there are events like hiring key personnel that require you to give options or RSU midstream. I wouldn't think that this would be more the exception than the rule.

And in terms of guidance for the year, all I can say is that we're well within our market parameters for what you would expect a high-growth company to be distributing for a total year in terms of awards that are equity linked.

Cool. Thank you. And then my second question is on sales. My sense sort of speaking to people on the ground is that across income cohorts, the brand is really resonating with the higher income segments. And I was wondering if you're seeing some of that in the data. I know you've discussed the higher ticket and the drivers behind that ticket. But I was wondering if there was a comment to be had on the higher income cohorts driving performance at 3B at the moment. Maybe a comment on (inaudible) outperforming other private label. That's my question. Thank you.

Yes. And let me say that the stores that we have as a percentage of total stores that are in neighborhoods with higher economic power remain relatively a smaller segment of our total stores. But there's no doubt that the higher the purchasing power, the more you can buy. And therefore, you see typically a little bit higher ticket sizes, more frequency of purchase.

And at the end of the day, we've seen it also -- you see it at BIM, where BIM is present today in all sorts of neighborhoods. So anybody who's looking for value for money, irrespective of social economic status, is going to be attracted to our store. And our criteria for opening stores does not -- there's no limit. I mean, as long as we have clients and we think that we will find a client, we will open a store. And yeah, it's been quite successful in all social economic levels in which we've operated.

It's very clear. Thank you very much, Anthony.

Thank you.

Alejandro Fuchs, Itau.

Ola, Anthony, Eduardo. Alejandro Fuchs from Itau BBA. Thank you for the space for question and congratulations on the results. I have two very brief ones, if I may. The first one is, in terms of competition, you guys have been outperforming the market quite consistently. I wanted to see if you see anything different in terms of competitors reacting to this, let's say, or you expect anything different for the next second half of the year. That'll be the first one.

And then the second one on the new regions that you're entering, I wanted to understand if this is north or south of Mexico. And if you expect competitive dynamics and performance of the stores to be similar to the ones that you already have maybe more towards the center of the country. Thank you.

Hi. In terms of competition, we have seen no real change in the environment. The market in Mexico has always been highly competitive, and that's a good thing. It's good for the consumer at the end of the day that it pushes us to always try to offer them more for their money.

But at a granular level, I see no change in the dynamics of the environment or the competitive level that we've seen in the last two quarters. It seems to be more of the same.

In terms of seeing a change as we enter new geographical areas or we expand from where we are outwards because remember, we're always expanding by stretching as opposed to jumping to a new area where we have zero presence, again, it's been very consistent in terms of buying habits. And fundamentally, when we think about it in more detail, we are selling basic goods, things that everybody pretty much consumes irrespective of geography and almost irrespective of social economic level. And the wrap-ups of our stores, our client behaviors, our client reactions have all been very consistent.

I would say, at an extreme, possibly, when one day we reach the US border, we might see some changes in purchasing behavior just because tastes will probably change as we get closer to the US. But for the foreseeable future, it remains stable and predictable.

Super clear. Thank you, Anthony.

(inaudible).

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to touch upon the gross margin pressure which I think was largely expected given the branching out into new regions. But I was wondering if you could just help us think through a little bit of how we should think about the ramp-up or the dilution into the back half of those expenses that you've layered on in anticipation of this build-out this quarter. If it's correct to think that we should relatively swiftly, as you laid out, as you grow the store base at the rate that you're growing, I should think that relatively quickly, you grow into those new expenses that you've layered on.

And the second question I had, if I may, is if you could just comment a little bit about the mature stores, same-store sales growth, what you're observing there in terms of just magnitude, because it's obviously a little bit hard to parse it out from your same-store sales which, obviously, still is also seeing the benefits of stores that continue to ramp up the mature ratio curve. Thank you.

Hi, [Irma]. Let me start with your last question which is same-store sales growth. Well, there's no doubt that given that we have a large number of new stores. When you think about it, in the last three years, we opened more than 40% of our stores that would buy us the same-store sales numbers upwards. But I can also tell everybody that even when we look at our oldest vintages, stores that are 20 years old, they're still growing extremely healthy, much better than inflation, posting a very solid same-store sales growth.

And fundamentally, what drives that, again, is that the portfolio of products that we sell across all our stores has been continuously improving. And so in that very old store, the customer that comes in today sees something that is significantly better than what they used to see five years ago. And that drives in more purchase from that client and possibly even more clients that we were not reaching before.

On the matter of margin, I can say that our commercial margin is very healthy and that, as Eduardo had mentioned, the decrease in margin that we're seeing is driven by the acceleration in store openings and the expenses that it generates. And of course, you have to pay upfront for all these expenses before you see the sales materialize. And as you said correctly, eventually, you achieve these sales and this expense gets diluted.

But here's the perverse thing, the faster we accelerate, the more we have these expenses, even though we're creating tremendous value for the shareholder. And at the end of the day, we've chosen to go that route. We'll try to accelerate our growth rates and create tremendous value for the shareholder, even though optically, on a consolidated basis, you're going to see a margin that is possibly not growing as fast as you want. But I think it's very worthwhile because at the end of the day, what's important is for us to create more value and also to put more distance between us and the rest of the market.

It's very helpful. May I just follow up? If I do the math of the stores that are in four or five of your entire store base, so much closer to, I guess, sort of the mature margin, if I may say so, that percentage is actually up a little bit year over year, you're accelerating at the margin, but it's also a much larger store based and there's past cohorts continuing to mature. So I was just wondering if why that wouldn't already sort of drive some benefits in terms of the dilution of the selling expenses. At least, I understand that G&A also is seeing some upgrades that you're making to internal structures and that's well understood already from last quarters. But on selling, I was just a little bit curious about that.

Yeah. I wouldn't see much into that more than the fact that when you do accelerate, you're going to get that expense upfront. Take the extreme case, of course, if we reduce our store opening rate to zero, you will immediately see a pop in margin and in EBITDA. But of course, we're not going to do that. We're going to continue to try and open as many stores, as many healthy stores as we can because every store we open that is successful is value accretive.

But I don't know, Eduardo, if you want to add some more color to this, exactly as to what our four- or five-year cohorts are doing versus and how much they represent of the total number of stores.

Irma, are you there?

Yeah, I'm here.

Sorry, we lost you for a second.

Thanks. I think we can pick it up afterwards. Thank you.

No problem, Irma. We'll follow up. Eduardo, we're not hearing your mic. Operator, please go ahead with the next question.

Hector Maya, Scotiabank.

Thank you very much. Hi, Anthony, Eduardo. Always a pleasure. Congrats on the results. Just wondering if you see that the same-store sales performance could be sustainable at these levels during the second half of 2025 or if you are having any signs of moderation. Anything that concerns you? And also, even with the further opening acceleration and level of acceptance that you are seeing from consumers, still, I believe that there are lots of people that maybe are not yet familiar with Tiendas 3B. So I just wanted to understand, is there any point in the future in which you would be open to allocate a budget for marketing to create more awareness for the brand? Thank you.

Hector, you're asking extremely tough questions and hard. Let's start with same-store sales expectations going forward. I'm not going to answer this directly, but I'm going to tell you that we don't see anything right now that would say that this would flatten out or decrease. But at the same time, I can't tell you if it's going to be 17% next quarter or 16% or 15%. But let me just say that it's been consistently healthy, and I do expect it to continue to be healthy for the next quarter.

In terms of spending on marketing, again, a very tough call. I think our best marketing has been word of mouth. And when you think about it, we have great marketing coming from social media which is not generated by us. It's just another way -- a modern way of doing word of mouth. And I think that that has driven a lot of new customers to our stores.

In terms of formally spending on marketing, we've done so in the past in many tests and we don't exclude it from the future. But what we found to be extremely challenging is to link this marketing dollar spent to the increase in sales. We're getting the increase in sales, but we cannot tell you that it was the marketing dollar. And fundamentally, I believe that it's the value proposition improvement by itself that drives the vast majority of the increase. And that of course, in turn, generates the word of mouth. And that, in turn, creates that virtuous circle of increasing same-store sales. Bottom line, we don't exclude it, but it has its challenges.

Excellent. Very clear. Thank you very much, Anthony, Eduardo.

Ulises Argote, Santander.

Hi, Anthony, Eduardo. Thanks for the space for questions. Ulises Argote from Santander. A couple of questions from my side. The first one on the supply chain side of the equation. As you continue to expand here further through the country and at this faster pace, are your private label suppliers mostly keeping up with this expansion or are you bringing new suppliers on board? Just trying to get a sense of how things are evolving on this side.

And the second one, I think it's kind of a bit obvious, but is there space to revise the store opening guidance you provided at the start of the year given the current run rate of store openings? Thank you very much.

Hi, Ulises. I'll start with the last one. We're not revising our guidance. We usually don't. But I think we're confident that whatever we gave as guidance is going to be met.

In terms of your question about supply chain, again, as we improve, our suppliers also need to improve. And I think in the past, I've talked about how we do it. Everything is long-term planned. So we can predict with a fair degree of accuracy how many stores we're going to have in the future and the volumes of products we would need to have to meet demand.

And as such, we start working on ensuring that we have that supply and the quality and the price that we want way ahead of time, think about a three-year lead time to ensure that you have everything ready. And by doing so, you mitigate a lot of the risk and you can ensure that your growth, even though it's very high growth rates, is smooth and continuous. And again by thinking ahead, you mitigate a significant amount of risks, not only on the supply chain, but in human resources and technology, and anything you can think of.

That's very clear. Thank you very much for that, Anthony.

Andres Ortiz.

Hello. Andres Ortiz from BTG Pactual Asset Management. Thank you, Anthony, Eduardo. I would like to ask about compensation once the 2024 Equity Incentive Plan ends. Per your release, you expect that the non-cash expenses finish by 2028. But how should we think about management compensation once this plan ends? Should we expect additional equity incentive plans going forward or higher wages? Just to get that sense. Thank you.

Hi Andres. I'm going to answer the question at a conceptual level and then, I'll let Eduardo talk about the expenses.

Since inception, we've always believed in that equity-linked compensation is key to attracting the right profile that we want and motivating and aligning anybody who works at 3B with the interests of shareholders. And I can say unequivocally that our success today is, in large part, because we attracted the right profile of somebody with a can-do attitude that is working towards creating value. And I think we'll continue to do so, looking forward.

Our new equity-linked compensation plan, the 2024 plan, is one that goes forward. It doesn't -- I sort of understood from you that it might end. No, it doesn't. These are yearly allocations of equity that the Board approves and gives out to people in 3B who have demonstrated leadership. And also as I mentioned before, to attract and retain people who we think are the right profile for a high-growth company like ours.

And I would say that our Board is also very conscious about this matter of how much equity-linked compensation to give out and does it within market parameters going forward. And so that the benefits -- if you ask me personally, I'd say the benefits of equity-linked compensation outweigh the equivalent benefit of just giving out cash compensation.

The only thing that I would add, Andres, is, and Anthony briefly touched on it and just clarifying, that table that we disclosed on Appendix 2 is the non-cash expenses for the next four years for what has been granted. So anything on top of that will affect this table. But just for everybody to have clarity on what will happen with these non-cash expenses, that's why we laid out this table.

Understood. Thank you very much to both. Congratulations. Bye.

We will now pause for further questions. We have not received any further questions. I would like to hand the call back over to Anthony for his closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. Thank you, all, for participating and for your interest in our company. Much appreciated. Until next time. Please don't hesitate if you have any questions to reach out to myself, Eduardo, Joaquín now who is part of our Investor Relations team.

That concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.