Good morning, everyone. For those that do not know me, I'm Flavio Burgato, Head of Latin sales at Citi. It's a great pleasure today that we are hosting the Alsea Day here in Citi office in this beautiful day in Tribeca. You know, Tribeca, cool place, good restaurants, expensive housing. Hey, here we are. Anyways, thanks to all the Alsea management that are here today, and thanks for our consumer analyst, Sergio Matsumoto, for pushing this to get done. We have a great program ahead of us today, and I'll pass the word to Salvador Villaseñor, Alsea Investor Relations Officer. Thank you.
Thank you, Flavio. Hi. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. First of all, I would like to thank Citi for hosting the event as well. It's been a while since we've been in presence, so it's glad to be here hosting this event as well. Today we'll have presentations. Who wants to click?
Okay.
Thank you very much. Today, we will have presentations from our CEO and broader management team. One of the things that we wanna introduce you is the quality of our management team that we have behind the people that you often see in meetings. We will have presentations from our CEO, Armando Torrado, from Pablo de Brito, our Commercial and Business Development Director, Cory Guajardo, Human Resources Director, Miguel Cavazza, Supply Chain Director, José Luis Portela, CEO of Alsea Europe, Rafael Contreras, our CFO. Finally, Alberto Torrado is gonna give some comments, our chairman, giving some comments in the end before we enter Q&A. Before starting up with the presentations, I would like to start off with a video of what we are, what Alsea is.
When Pedro grows up, he'll be a renowned chef. Anna will be a chemist in food science. Matt, an environmental engineer. This tiny seed will be a part of a wonderful forest. This path will become a highway. Very soon, this small bird will learn to fly. The future is our responsibility. We build it with each idea, with each dream, and with each choice. At Alsea, we choose to continue developing our brands and consolidating our leadership in every market and segment where we have presence. Being the best place to work, developing the talent of our people in an atmosphere of quality, inclusion, and safeness. Becoming an increasingly efficient operation in our supply chain, and making our decisions based on business intelligence, innovation, and technology.
We choose to drive our growth strategy with sustainable facilities and efficient processes to continue supporting our community through productive projects, education, and employment opportunities, and to continue with our efforts against food poverty. Above all, we choose to be where, when, and how our customers need us most. Be there as a craving, during a celebration, a family dining, a business brunch, or simply enjoying a get-together with friends. For us, being able to bring happiness and experience its full flavor is choosing to do all within our reach so that each challenge becomes a dream come true. Each dream, the reason that gets us up in the morning. Each morning, the opportunity to build a better future.
Okay. Now I'll leave you with Armando Torrado.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Hi. Thanks for coming. Thanks for joining us this morning. I think it's gonna be. You're gonna see some new things that I hope you like it. Thanks for all the people that is also connected online. We are very pleased to be here and excited to present you what will be the future of Alsea. Thanks for Citigroup. Thanks for Sergio and all the group for hosting us here this morning. Thank you all. Today I'm gonna talk about the prominent future and the opportunities that we have and that Alsea has ahead.
Some of the topics that I will cover in this conversation this morning will be the key strategy for the company, the business model that we are deeply going through, our Alsea culture, and then some growth opportunities that we have ahead. Why not, I'll say, Rafa will give a financial update of the company, and later on I'm gonna present you how we're doing a little bit to week 12 of that. We are one week away to finalize acquire, I'm gonna give you a little bit update how we're doing. First, I am honored also to have here part of my leadership team.
They will give a deep dive, a little bit deep dive in the four pillars that I think are more important in the company. I want you to hear from them what are those four pillars, how we're gonna do a double click and a deep dive in those areas. First, let me present myself. I know some of you, not everybody, I'm Armando Torrado. I'm 53 years old. I've been working in this company since I'm 19 years old, I've been most of my life here, almost 33 years in this company. I'm married with four daughters. I started with Domino's Pizza long time ago in the corporate stores. Working there like around seven years. I was a CEO for Domino's for around seven years more.
As soon as we made this company public, I went to development, store development, where I really were there five years, knowing the whole niche of Mexico, all the cities. We were opening 90-95 stores a year in Domino's. That was a big walkaround from all the cities, all the streets. I really have a knowledge of the country that I am from. I became the CEO for the casual division. I was starting with the casual division, where we brought Chili's, our first brand for casual. I was there for five years, joining and bringing some other brands of casual dining. When I was appointed, I, well, I was appointed CEO in July of last year.
Before, I was in international for four years. I was running first, Latin America, and then I managed the whole area, including Europe for five years. First of all, I'm very pleased to and honored to lead this company. I feel this is, of course, my house, your house. I mean, I know the company very well, deeply. Being in several positions in the support center and being managing some brands, it give me a little bit good knowledge of what we need in both sides as a company, you know, as a company. It's given a much broader perspective of the needs and an opportunity that this company has, no? Since July that I started, I put a plan, and I said, "Let's roll out.
Let's I make a plan, said, "Let's go to 100 stores in a 100 days." I did that challenge. It was possible. I went to all geographies. I went to most of the brands, all the stores. The only good word that I saw was opportunity, you know, opportunity in all the cases. I saw a big energy team, thankful for the past 18 months that we had before that it was closing stores, some bad situation in our, in our segment. Everybody that I went to store was just thankful for giving the work, "Thanks for having us here. Thanks for letting us be part of this journey." In all the stores that we saw, in all the brands, was an opportunity moment. No?
I'm pleased that now that we are coming back, that is, the road is ahead for a nice future. Just to tell you that we have the team, and we have excellent brands to develop that future, no? As a leader of this organization, I have a clear mission, no, of where we need to go, what we need to achieve, and of course, the results that we need to deliver. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. First, I would like to talk of our purpose. It's important to let you know that this stands in all the company, in everywhere that we are. We are a people-based company. There's no doubt.
We're a people-based company with a single purpose of delivering happiness to our consumers, to our clients, and our partners, our team members, no. We wanna serve a top every day, one by one, a pizza one by one, and let all those customers to be glad on serving the best service and the best product that we are. Here, I would like to talk about the Alsea culture. How we can maximize this Alsea value, no. This is six pillars that are super strategic, super important for us. First is have the best talent. I think Scott is gonna talk a little bit more about how we're doing in talent and what's going on about turnovers, how we're doing. I think that's the best and more important thing for us, our success in the future.
Second, operational excellence. We are an operational company. We have KPI, KPIs. We have the road ahead to, so to have the best excellence in operations. Digital transformations and cutting-edge marketing, super important in these days. Then, of course, the portfolio profitability. I'm gonna talk later on a little bit how we're doing the portfolio profitability, where we're going, how it's gonna be standing in the 2027, in four more years, with a percentage of brands and geographies. Talk about a little innovation, and I would say innovation in technology, innovation also in products, and, of course, sustainability, no, pillar right now for our future. The values When I chat with my team, I am very proud to say this is, the, the values that we strive for.
Of course, a winning attitude, engagements leadership, amazing service. That's what we are standing here for. A collaborative spirit in our team, and attention to all the details, no? That means Alsea translated in Spanish. Doing a commitment of what we strive for, no? We need to develop the best team in order to grow, in order to handle to the operation of the stores. Always making the best decisions for our customers and teams, always thinking in a way if that customer is gonna like this, if that customer is gonna be ready for the this, if it's okay for the customer. We need to think about first the customer and then our team members.
Of course, increasing the potential great value of the customer and then, of course, maximize the value of all of our shareholders. Since I joined the company with this new role in July, and being in two parts of the game, in the corporate position and then in operational side, I said, "Let's do a different model of working." I saw with all a lot of my team people doing more transactions and businesses-wise, so I try to say, "Let's move separately all the transactions that we do in the support center, and let the leaders that do the business wise every day, just focusing on that.
We have here the customer-centric just in the center of our flywheel of a strategic model. All the brands abroad. We have the accelerated growth. That is our people that is in the field, real estate growing, seeing opportunities on the field. A wide space for us to still grow in the company. Therefore, these four pillars that as people capability that Cory is gonna talk a little bit more, what do we strive for the people capability. Operational capability, there Miguel is gonna talk a little bit more how we do it, how we give them those support in order them to focus in sales, in the customer, and in human resources to each brand. We're gonna talk about the management capability.
Rafa is gonna talk a little bit more about that. Pablo's gonna talk about the commercial digital capability that we strive in the company, no? We wanna make sure of course the same we translate it in the people capability, commercial, operational, and management. How can we attract better talent and with compensations, work flexibility? Very important right now, the transformation that we have in the human resources side of the table. I would say we are not that complicated to get people, it's getting a little bit different. It's different ways to attract talent, especially in Mexico, we didn't have that problem before. It was just easy. You put an ad in the news, there's 1,000 people now there.
There's not 1,000, probably 150, well, in what details we need to really focus to have the best talent in our stores. We're going to talk about commercial digital capability. A lot of change, a lot of movement. Starbucks is moving to a SDS system platform that Pablo's going to talk. How we're doing in Domino's with technology, and also in the restaurant segment. That's going to be interesting to talk. Of course, the data analytics now is a good way to track our customers, personalize our customer experience. Data, I mean the price revenue management with this inflation that we just pass by, price and management are super key for results. We're going to talk about that.
Operational capability, how can we continue to improve the performance? What are we doing in our distribution centers? What are we doing in Soma, in especially Mexico, Colombia and Europe regarding producing some sandwiches and capabilities of manufacturing some products that we are aligned to? Of course, Rafael is gonna talk a little bit and myself of portfolio management, where are we going in brands, how the geography looks, and how is the portfolio looks, no? I'm gonna pass the microphone here to Corey in order to start talking about human resources a little bit, where we're going in people. Thank you, Cory.
Thank you, Armando. When we talk about people capability, we like to think about the results and the value that we have to provide to the business. It's not about what we do in HR, but what's the result of that? What the brands need, so what do we have to work on? That value is basically expressed in three main resources, and I'm gonna talk about the first one. Full staffing at the stores to deliver superior service. I know that this might seem pretty basic, but at the end of the day, that's what sustains business performance.
As Armando was saying, we are taking a very close look at what the market is telling us, what we're learning from our partners, from our franchise source and make sure that we do this all the time, and we do it in a very good and effective way. Of course it all starts with a purpose. When we decided to include the word happiness in the purpose, this idea of bringing happiness, of course it represents a lot of commitment in terms of the quality of the working experience for Alsea. How is working for Alsea, and how do we make sure that working for Alsea and its brands is really a very positive experience for people? The purpose is inspiring significant change to the way we traditionally manage people.
This idea that we are a high turnover industry, we have to live with that, we're really challenging that. It's not only HR, but influencing the business, influencing the business leaders, that we really think about this differently. Think of Alsea not only as a big employer, which we already are, but as a good employer and employer of choice in making sure that the jobs that we offer are jobs where people wanna stay, where they can grow, they can learn, and they can continue developing. The people promise across markets, this happiness issue means that we offer jobs where people are treated with dignity. That's the main thing. Where we foster well-being and promote development opportunities.
All HR initiatives are connected to that, so that we really offer our people reasons to stay, not just to join Alsea, but to stay in Alsea. At the same time, we know and we acknowledge that we must have a very effective recruiting model. I'm so proud of what the team in Mexico is the biggest market, I'm so proud of what they've done in terms of the recruitment process using artificial intelligence. We wanna transfer that model to the rest of the countries. You wouldn't believe it, but we only have a team of 33 recruiters in Mexico that work hand-in-hand with our store managers, and we are able to hire and recruit high volume every month, around 2,000 people per month. The KPIs that you see there, 98% of coverage.
Critical store, those are the stores that have a coverage below 80%. Those stores should not be more than 5%, and when that store gets to that level, we always help them directly to recruit and complete the staff. The time to fill, seven days, to complete the open positions that we have within the operation. We wanna share this model with the rest of the countries, mainly with those where we are seeing challenge in order to hire the people that we need. As part of this process, we are focusing on the critical zones per market. We are learning that in certain cities, it's been challenging to get the people that we need.
At the end of the day, I could tell you a lot of examples of the regional approaches that our store managers are having, but the most important thing is to provide them with the authority and tools so that they connect to their people, they learn about their needs. Every person is gonna have a different need, a different motivation. What we say to store manager is just try to meet that. If somebody is asking you for a fixed shift, which is something that we're not very used to, well, try to do it, because that's the best way to provide the value that the people is expecting. I connect with the next one, this personalization of the working experience.
At the end of the day, we know that these challenges have to be addressed store by store. Provide them with the authority, the tools, and this process of test new solutions and learn. Let's keep the communication so we can really identify where should be addressing the most important initiatives, institutional initiatives across all the brands. In fair income, this concept of ingreso digno, which is a core element of the HR and ESG strategy. The main gap that we have is in Mexico, and we're working on that. We're really taking very seriously this idea that the main reason why people work for us is because they need the job.
Those jobs have to be well-compensated, and we're always talking about this with Alberto in the board that we are really committed to investing in better salaries, mainly where we have the main gaps, which is Domino's, Burger King, and making sure that all of our people meet this idea of fair income, okay? We talk about income, not only salary, because we know that in our industry, tipping is important, so we're also enabling this tipping through all the channels and the different brands in order to help them to have a better income. The key metric that we are taking care of is, of course, turnover. Turnover is going to be always the main result through which we can help the business offer a better service and have always the customers preferring our brands.
As you can see, Alsea global looks pretty good, and I'm comparing to what we have in 2019, because of course, 2020, 2021 are not good references because of the pandemic. If you see the results of Mexico, the Mexico team made an extraordinary job here from 85%- 66%. This is like breaking all of these paradigms regarding the level of turnover that we can have. Of course, learning from all the markets, Argentina always with the best turnover result. Colombia, pretty good. Chile. We are making this like a turnover committee. Each brand in every market, they have their own plans. Of course, the plan has to see comprehensive in terms of the way we treat people and the compensation that we offer and the store environment. It has a lot of things.
At the end of the day, when we see this, and even though when we have extraordinary results, as I was telling you in Mexico, 66% turnover means more than 20,000 people that leave the company every year. We always wonder, well, what's behind those stories? How can we better learn about what we should be doing? Again, the same artificial intelligence technology that we are using to hire, to screen candidates, to schedule job interviews, and to streamline the process, that same technology we're using it now from this year on in order to connect directly to every person that we hire and be asking them through the chatbot, "How are you feeling? What do you need? Are you receiving the proper training?" That we can anticipate the potential problems that are happening store by store and by district.
We provide those reports, of course, to our business leaders, managers, so that they can learn in order to solve the problems store by store. We are confident that we're gonna continue improving this and making sure that the business is able to really offer customers the extraordinary service experience that we want to. Very connected to this, the second result that we're looking for in terms of people capability means to have the best store managers in the industry to increase sales. We have extraordinary store managers. Actually, in a couple of weeks, we are gonna give this award that we've been giving since 2016 to the store manager of the year. When we receive nominations, those are incredible stories, inspiring stories.
We have wonderful people. We want to make sure that that wonderful people is in every store, and we still have, of course, room for opportunity. When you walk in a store, you immediately can tell if you have a good store manager or not. Of course, we've always known this. We've always said that the store manager is the most important position for the company, but we wanna strengthen that, and we wanna approach it with a different perspective. This business, it's all about the store manager. The store manager guarantees the good experience for the people and for the customer. We would always look at it as how do we have to prepare them in order for them to provide to the business all these things that we need. We're changing that now.
We want to make sure that if we want them to take care of the people, the first that has to be felt that we are taking care of them is the store manager. That's a switch in the strategy, and it's important. What we're doing is defining, building a governance framework that we're going to provide to all of the markets and all of the brands regarding how we should manage that position in terms of the success profile, the personal development and wellbeing, the professional development, and making sure that compensation is very competitive and strong enough for the store manager to build equity for the future for their family. We're very excited about this.
It's like reimagining the roles and making sure that no matter the brand, no matter the country, all of the store managers for Alsea really have the best experience working for us. When we have that, of course, we can expect the results in terms of people and customer. These KPIs that you see here are only from Mexico. We're still building this across the rest of the markets. How are we gonna measure the result of if we have the successful store manager, of course, with their performance, which right now is around 87% store manager turnover. We have a lot to learn here. For example, if we take a look at Burger King Argentina, extraordinary turnover with 9%, but Burger King Mexico, 38% turnover.
We have a lot to collect and learn from each other in order to do this better. The competitive compensation package. We compare in how much do we pay in base salary, in total compensation, and we still have room for opportunity. We are gonna be taking a very close look at all this, having the store manager as a key element of the people capability. Finally, the top team, the top management team. We want a diverse and competent team in order to continue driving profitability. We are building a global talent database and taking a much closer look to the development opportunities for the top 30 group and the top 100, which would be basically all of the director-level positions in all of the countries.
We know that we have to strengthen our talent management process and that we have opportunities in building a successful succession plan for the CEO and for the C-level positions. That's a top priority for the board, we allocate a lot of the time to that. We're trying to learn and strengthen that process each day. Basically what we're gonna focus on is learning about the gaps that we have versus best practices in terms of talent discussion, talent development, and continue making external benchmark with potential candidates that we might be interested in having them within the company.
The board takes a very active role here, all of us, you know, every year, we are accountable to presenting them what's my potential successor and what am I doing to develop him or her, so that really we can assure that continuity of the strategy. A third pillar of that is continue working with Armando in the redesign of the organization to build bigger roles. The CEO of Alsea is a very complex role, big role, we have to make sure that there's more than one feeder potential position where we can have that potential CEO and the C-level positions covered. Okay? Our main, the key KPIs for the talent strategy, top management positions with succession plan, these are the results for 2022. 81%. If we are between 80% and 85%, I think we're making a good job.
The internal sourcing of director-level positions, 79%, that's excellent. We have 24 appointments last year, director level, from the top management and one level below, and 79% were appointed internally, and that's great because that's a very good indicator that we're developing internal people. Key talent retention, we have opportunity there, 83%, but we would like to be around 95. Female directors, to have more women represented in leadership positions. Right now, that's the metric, 23%, but we already made this public announcement that by 2030 we wanna have 40% of women in leadership positions. Leadership impact, this is a metric that we have where everybody's direct reports evaluate us as leaders and to measure the impact. We have 13 attributes where we have to set the example.
Again, 3.8 out of five, and we would like to have 3.9 by 2026. A couple of years to strengthen that. Finally, in terms of the top team alignment... I'm not sure if this... There we are. How are we making sure that we are all aligned to the main success metrics of the business? This is an overview of how we do this. In general terms, the compensation mix for the top management, 50% fixed compensation and 50% variable. 35 in the annual bonus and 15 with the long-term incentive. How do we pay the annual bonus? It's based depending on your role and your place in the organization, but more or less it's 25% of that on group performance indicators, financial indicators, and then 50, what we call the perimeter. The perimeter depends.
It's the business unit where you have the most, the biggest impact or the most important impact. Finally, your performance, depending on the role that you execute. Based on that, the payout of the annual bonus. Last year, we launched a long-term incentive, which we are calling Bono Crece, three-year based on return on equity and earnings per share.
Thank you. Thank you, Cory. Good morning, everybody. For Alsea, supply chain is a key pillar of the strategy and a competitive advantage for our stores and brands. Now I want to share with you a video.
At Alsea, we know that happiness and flavor are reflected in each detail, experience, and visit to any of our restaurants. For these to happen, we have a team of professionals who work to guarantee that each dish, each pizza, each cup of coffee, and each get-together is a super experience for our customers each day, every day. For over 30 years, we have provided specialized service to our units in the processes of planning and replenishment, purchasing, manufacturing, quality control, new product development, logistics, and distribution. Thanks to Alsea's shared service center, we get support in human resources, finance, technology, and security processes. Our supply chain generates important efficiencies and represents a strategic advantage for our brands.
We integrate a network of 11 distribution centers and 11 production plants, some operated by ourselves and others through specialized third parties, which are selected and certified under the highest quality and food safety standards, ensuring they meet our requirements and those of our global strategic partners. This is where we produce pizza dough, pastry, bakery, sandwiches, processed foods, meat products, and sauces, among other products. We serve over 4,400 of our units, producing more than 44,000 tons of pizza dough per year, replenishing more than 16,000 SKUs, distributing in more than 350 cities in 12 countries, making more than 6,300 deliveries per week, and traveling over 60,000 km each day. Think global and act local has been key to our growth success. We know our customers never see these efforts, but they enjoy the results during each experience.
That's what motivates us each and every day. We at Alsea will continue working with passion and putting our hearts into every detail to make this magic happen and to bring happiness and experiences full of flavor.
Like it? Okay.
Yes.
Thank you.
Yes, Miguel. I'm fan of your job and your team.
Thank you. In Mexico, we operate a 5PL operations integrated by DCs, transportation, manufacturing, replenishment, and also procurement. We operate more than 2,080 stores, and we serve more than 252 cities around the Republic. Today, we just finished our immigration to Oracle Cloud. That will allow us to update our warehouse management system, transportation systems, and also we're implementing voice picking that will allow us to increase productivity at the same time to be more efficient to our stores service. Also, we're working very close to our vendor community to increase our backhaul program. Today, our backhaul program has an impact of 3.5%, but we have a plan to take it to 10% in the following two years. For network planning and design, we use LLamasoft. That is the most updated system around the world.
As we're committed to sustainability, this system not only will help us to reduce the weight average distance, increase our drop size, and also be more efficient, it also will help us to reduce the amount of fuel and make an impact on the CO2. As we operate a multi-temperature and a multi-brand operation, definitely this is a competitive advantage in the market. Also, to control this, we have a control tower that allow us not only to work the localization of the truck, also will track the amount of coal that we have in each truck and also the amount of speed and make more efficient our truck drivers.
We have a plan with the school of driving inside Alsea to develop the new truck drivers of the future. Today, 90% of the hiring is inside and 10% is outside for truck drivers. Also, we work with world-class KPIs. Let me show you that, for instance, for the price list for the last four years, Alsea has beat the market, having a better price, comparing with the food and beverage index in Mexico. Also, we have a better in-stock. It's availability of product and service to our stores. We have increased 100 basic points for the last four years. Productivity, something very key for our business, have improved more than 44%, the transportation costs have been reduced 21%. Very good figures for the team.
Here, I want to show you how the global supply chain is integrated. As I just told you, Mexico is a 5PL, and in the rest of the regions we have third parties, they operate 2PL and 3PL. All the operations are selected and certified under high standards of operations, but much better of quality and food safety. We have been doing benchmarks since last October to elevate the bar of all the operation. We have quarterly reviews, and also we are sharing best practices, aligning practices, and make a much better use of the scale of Alsea today. In procurement since last October, we're working a global strategy under the promise, "Think global, but act local." Okay? Our total expense of all the countries is around $1 billion.
We found out that 30% is representative of the top 20 global raw materials. This year for 2023, we are focusing on the value of the cost. We already have some hedgings for around $240 million in raw materials that will impact this year. We try to control the cost and also have a positive financial impact. Globally, last year, Alsea have a -3% in weight average inflation in all the countries with a global food verdict index, and in Mexico, 13.5%. The main key raw materials are cheese, wheat, oil, proteins, and also we included packaging. On the manufacturing efficiency, we have 11 plants around the world, four in Mexico, four in Europe, and three in Colombia.
Our main goal is to provide outstanding products to our customers and stores, at the same time, reduce complexity of the operation at store level, and also maximizing the standardization and quality of the products. Maintenance, availability, new products development are key for providing optimal capacity and innovation. This year, we launched three new lines, was tortillas, chicken, and ribs. We just signed an agreement with Europastry to really increase our expertise and new products innovation, especially for Starbucks to improve our food attachment. Europastry is well-known to be one of top four global frozen bakery in the sector and operates in more than 80 countries. On the food quality, we have a very strong program on quality assurance. There is a supplier program approval development that implement for food and packaging too, that take consideration for safety, quality, and also social responsibility.
We're pushing that all our vendors have a Global Food Safety Initiative. There's also, we have a surveillance program that really to follow up after the inbound, after they open the product with our labs, that we have our own labs and also with third parties. We do some tests of microbiology, psycho-medical, and also application for product suppliers randomly. All our disease are certified with SPF. Our internal system of quality assurance has been proved to be up to the challenge with international standards. Afterwards, I think we're very happy and proud to share with you that the logistics team has been named as... with Award 2022 with the Mexico Logistics Award based on the supply chain network redesign that we did it in 2021 and we applied it in 2022. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Hi, good morning, everyone. It's great to be here and the idea is on this chapter to talk about the overall and global commercial strategy for the company. Before getting started, three key messages that I wanted to share. The first piece is usually when we talk about digital, it might get complex, so I will try to keep it simple, connective, and down-to-earth to the business through our part, to our team members and our customers. The second key message is Armando shared the importance on the evolution of our strategic business model, and one of the key pillars is a commercial strategy. We need to further drive our commercial strategy to become progressively more global. That is important to drive conversions, to accelerate opportunities, and to actually drive further growth.
We've got opportunities on the same brand across geographies. On benchmarking best practices and within the same geographies across brands. The third message is, it's not only about what we've got and what we have done, but it's also to have the right balance between what we have done right and the opportunities to come and how we can do it better. In a nutshell, I'm getting down into the presentation, when we think about digital customers and KPIs, first, let's get back to the key concept: Digital customers are the ones related to our delivery pillar, either being on our own delivery or through aggregators. Also digital customers are the ones considered through our loyalty or CRM programs. In total, in the three geographies, we've got in simple numbers around 10 million customers.
40% of those are in Mexico. The rest is evenly spread between South America and Europe. Those digital customers today account for around 30% of our total sales in Alsea, adding up in 2022 of around MXN 19 billion, growing around almost 32% year-over-year and representing around 50 million orders in 2022. Now, again, talking about brands and which are our key businesses. Thinking about Starbucks, well, we have grown almost 44% in our digital sales, and today our sales penetration in Starbucks is around 22%. When we look at Domino's, we have grown around 19%, clearly more penetrated as we do have our own delivery, and we do have around 42% sales penetration.
We will highlight also the restaurant segment, high penetration in Europe, quite good in Mexico, and growing 36% with 25% penetration on the final segment around Burger King or our hamburger business. When we think about digital, it is mostly about data. When we think about data, it's how do we get analytics and insights behind the data. Within that, it's important for us to have a focus on simple agenda again. There are mainly three pillars that we need to further drive with the scale across the brands and the geography. The first one is market research, and we need to have a clear, deep understanding. It's not only about the general market share. We know our general market share, Mexico 17%, South America 10%, Europe 14%.
It's all about how do we get more granular. Within each country, each brand, we need to get further down to each geography and each location and the channel and the moment of consumption and understand which consumers are buying our brands, which consumers are not buying our brands. Which consumers are not buying our brands, which is the bottleneck on them having a relationship with us. Are they stuck on the consideration? Have they tried our brands and they have not become loyal? How do we make our regular customers even more loyal? Understand how our brands are strong on some attributes, and we've got opportunities on some others. Make sure again, that this pillar is clearly consistent across brands and across geographies, so we are able to have a full market reading on a global consolidated footprint.
The second pillar, Armando clearly highlighted that at the beginning, and pricing and revenue management is key. We do recognize that inflation has been challenging, but it's also important to have a more evolved structured pricing and revenue management strategy that clearly will impact as an opportunity to improve our profitability. It's mostly about making sure that our price lists are optimized. When we do tiering, we clearly become more structured between socioeconomic level, location, competitor presence, and even we segment that. It's not the same for Starbucks on the price elasticity of a latte that the price elasticity for a high-end iced beverage. Clearly, depending on the structure, product segment, consumer location, and moment of consumption, we can get that opportunity on an improved basis, and that's another key pillar.
The third piece, it is mostly when we talk about customer and digital analytics, it is mostly about how do we move from transactions into relations, and how do we move it from transactions to relations and to drive customer growth through frequency. What we are going to see is how we are moving to customer lifetime value segmentation or recency, frequency, and monetary segmentation, and how we are evolving through understanding better preferences and moments of consumptions, and how do we get into better personalized marketing, either being product communication or personalized offers and promotions. Connecting the third chapter on the CRM and loyalty strategy, and again, in simple terms, which are the key pillars.
The first piece is let's locate where CRM and loyalty is on the customer journey. Clearly we've got an overall on the upper right, we've got acquisition. Actually, we drive marketing campaigns, we are becoming more and more efficient. Since the moment the customer has the first transaction in one of our stores with one of our brands, that's the moment the CRM and loyalty chapter starts. The CRM and loyalty chapter, it's all about how we grow the value of the relationships of our customers.
Usually, there is around 2x-2.5x more frequency on a customer that we do have the data, and we do have the relationship, and we do have those customers on a digital platform, compared to a non-digital customer when we only know the transaction, but we don't know who the customer is. The way we are going to evolve is, the first pillar is recency, frequency, or monetary. In simple terms, customer lifetime value. It's all about, in simple terms, the value of a customer is how much the customer has spent with us on a period of one year to give the value of that customer. Obviously, we measure frequency in a shorter period of time, and we look to low, medium, and high frequency, depending on the brand.
We measure that in simple terms, in monetary, by the average ticket being below the average and being above the average. The full high-value customer is going to be the top value with high frequency and high average ticket. You can see a simplified segmentation between low, medium, and high value. The importance of this is that we are evolving on this segmentation strategy for all of our brands and for all of our geographies. We are able to get learnings across brands and across geographies. Progressively, we are getting into understanding which are the customers that have not bought us in the last 90 days, have not bought us in the last 180 days, which are the customers that we are losing and why we are losing those.
By learning from that, we can evolve on becoming more targeted and smarter. We are going to evolve on the second pillar on what we call personalized marketing. It's also not only important what the customer bought, but what the customer has not bought and what they do not know about the brands. That's where we need to pick up their preferences on their day-to-day routine, but also to highlight the value of the brands on our new offer. The final piece, it's about customer satisfaction and how we relate the customer satisfaction in every point of transaction to build up the relationship with them. A positive feedback, what do we do about it? A negative feedback, what do we do about it? Is part of the overall CRM strategy.
Getting from the general strategy into the more specifics, and there are important changes that we are going to drive moving forward on this chapter. As we shared, we are going to get back-to-back with our global partners and truly to accelerate the agenda to become the best-in-class. Within that agenda, the first chapter in Starbucks on our loyalty strategy is going to be fully focused and solely focused on Starbucks Rewards. We are going to expand, and I'm going to expand in the coming slides what that means, which is the potential, and for us, which is the potential to grow. Armando mentioned SDS, and we are going to share that in further detail. The second piece is Domino's.
We know that Domino's has a Piece of the Pie Rewards, it can have different formats, it can have different rules adapted to different market realities. Yes, same Piece of the Pie exists in U.S., exists in multiple countries in Europe. Not necessarily exactly the same rules, those being adapted to the reality of each market. Important is to have the common platform and to drive the learnings through that common platform. The third piece is we do acknowledge that in the restaurant segment, we have been investing a lot in the WOW platform in Mexico. We do acknowledge that our evolution in the restaurant segment around CRM and loyalty has been very important in Europe, we are looking to converge those on a common CRM and loyalty platform on the restaurant segments for the entire year.
The final chapter we can see in Burger King, MyBK examples on MyBK penetration. Just launched it RBI on a year and a half in Brazil. Within a year and a half, they've got more than 25% sales penetration. When we back it up, you can see our current penetration below. This is our reality. This is the balance between our reality and our opportunity. Today in Starbucks, we are around total. We are 14% penetration in the loyalty, and we are going to see that if we benchmark that with U.S., 50% penetration in U.S. as a benchmark, and we are going to tell that history. Similar situation in Domino's, 50%-60% penetration because the loyalty program is fully embedded on the e-commerce and fully embedded on the delivery platform.
Imagine the opportunity and imagine if each of those customers actually spends the double with us than being non-non-digital customer and not having the data of that customer. That's basically on the CRM and the opportunity. Now the second pillars. I mentioned that loyalty is one of the pillars of digital. The other key pillar is delivery. When we open delivery, we're talking about this in a balanced way. There is a usual contrast on shall we go fully with the aggregators, shall we go fully with our own delivery? It's not about, in reality, one or the other, but how we build an overall delivery strategy, understanding the role of both aggregators and our own delivery.
Understanding that the aggregators is a channel that is growing, that the consumer is selecting, that in general is here to stay. We need to make sure that we capture our fair share, and we capture customers which are not necessarily loyal to a brand. Usually, customers that are highly loyal to a brand get on the brand-owned e-commerce and in the brand-owned application, such as the example of Domino's. The balanced role of our own e-commerce and delivery is how whilst we are getting non-loyal customers from the aggregators and our fair share, we make sure that we deliver the best high value through our own e-commerce and delivery platforms. When we talk about loyalty program, it's going to be on our platforms, and that is going to get the right balance on capturing the full delivery moment consumption opportunity.
When we look into the specific numbers, you can see on the upper left, on around 42% Domino's. Down below, you can see the distribution between our own delivery, aggregators delivery, and a bit on the opportunity. Just to highlight, that's only the opportunity on aggregators, okay? It's looking to the representation that we need to capture in the relative short to mid-term on our fair share. In Domino's, obviously, mostly concentrated on the strengths on our own delivery, but opportunity to almost double our representation on aggregators. When we look into Starbucks, similar situation, and you can see that across the different sales penetration and across the different mix of brands.
That's a bit on the mix the key messages on the overall delivery strategy and again, the role and the clear strategy and the highest value that we need to deliver through our e-commerce as a mid to long-term bet. Now from the general key aspects, getting into couple of specific cases on our largest brands that we wanted to share. We picked Starbucks Mexico. Couple of specific KPIs. On Starbucks Mexico, you can see down below the real evolution on sales penetration, digital sales penetration between 2019 and 2022. 2019, we were at 25%, 2022, we are 35% penetration in Mexico. When we look into Starbucks Rewards in Mexico, last year we have grown 50%, whilst the overall business grown 36%.
When we talked about the number of customers that we've got in Starbucks Mexico, we are talking about a bit more than 700,000 customers that are accounting for that 35% of the total sales. The opportunity is huge, not only in the size of customers to capture, but also when we look into the spread of those 700,000 customers, we also got opportunities. There are customers that actually bought us once or twice in the last 90 days. There is an opportunity to also increase their frequency. When we look into their average frequency, again, what happens is they, on average, they've got the double the frequency, and they spend on average the double the value versus a non-registered and a non-digital customer.
When we look into the opportunity and in the outlook, well, U.S. got 56% digital penetration, okay? With the overall acceleration that we are driving with the Starbucks Digital Solutions global platform that I'm going to show you in the coming slides, we do clearly see the opportunity to, in the coming five years, to get to that benchmark level, not only in Mexico, but actually driving that forward across Starbucks and across other markets. When we talk about Starbucks Digital Solutions, what do we mean? Again, in simple terms. Well, it's a technology and digital solution that is comprehensive and is looking to connect in a better way with customers and team members, what we call partners in Starbucks.
When we talk about partners or retail or a store, it is as important to improve our relationship with our customers, but it's also evenly important to make sure that our team members got the best operational technology, so they're able to focus more time with our customers to deliver the best experience, that they have the best systems to manage the store, to focus on the relationship with the customer, and even to manage inventory. The second big chapter is what we call the app, which is the customer-facing app to have improved our loyalty CRM and personalized marketing. The third big chapter is about analytics and insights. Where we are today, in this. We're reviewing with Rafa and Armando, just as a complimentary reference.
We are in the process of developing the rollout for this in Latin America. In Latin America will mean around an investment of MXN 340 million, only for Latin America. It's going to be a progressive implementation between the different countries, so we are going to start Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia. Down the line in the coming 12- 18 months, all the LatAm markets are going to be rolled out. It's going to be a progressive rollout per market, but it's also going to be a progressive rollout by main component: the core, the app, and insights analytics.
On a balance side, also in Europe, we have implemented what we call the bundle one or the retail and the core solution, and also evolving throughout this year on the Starbucks app and analytics and insights and better CRM capabilities. Now the other chapter about Domino's, our other big global brand. Again, picking up Mexico, I think that it is actually great news that in our largest market that we do operate with Domino's, in the second-largest market in volume in terms of pizza globally, we actually progressively are accelerating our market share growth. You can see on the upper side, we're gaining share on 1.5% on last year versus 2021, knowing that there is high intensity of competition, knowing that there has been known challenges on the overall inflation cost.
Couple of KPIs in the same trend. Our sales penetration, digital sales penetration in Mexico is, in corporate stores, around 45%. We have grown our sales in Mexico in digital channels 26% year-over-year. On our overall business, the growth has been 13%, that's a clear signal of acceleration. In terms of only Mexico, we are having 2.9 million active customers. Again, when we measure about frequency, compare that frequency to the overall average of the frequency of the brand, it is 3x the frequency and 3x the value because the average ticket actually is relatively the same. Again, when we look down below, the evolution between 2019 and today, 2019, we're having 26% sales digital penetration. 2022, we ended up with around 45%.
We look in U.S. as being the best benchmark, we are going to talk about how do we get again back to accelerate becoming the best in class, the horizon of U.S. is around 70% of the sales are digital. That's our horizon, the whole key point is: how do we accelerate towards that horizon from where we are today? Similar to SDS, similar to the concept on becoming global, becoming the best in class, having common platforms, actually driving acceleration through simplicity and conversions, the chapter in Domino's is called Domino's Cloud. It's one e-commerce for the entire Alsea, and one e-commerce platform. The second big concept is it is literally the same source code and the same system than Domino's U.S., literally.
Knowing that it's the best in class, and there is a lot of people developing and investing the best in class technology within Domino's U.S. Clearly, we are want to ensure the best experience and making sure that it's not only about one-shot investments, but every time that being in the last source code is, let's say that U.S. has the latest innovation, rather than being three to five years delayed, we are going to be three to six months delayed. That's the whole difference. It's about continuous innovation and continuous improvement and how do we drive that forward.
Similar to Starbucks solution, the key pillars of Domino's Cloud is there are two chapters on the left side, Flex and inventory app, which is, it's all about how we further facilitate our operations at the store, and we make them more efficient, and we make those easier for our store managers, like Cory was mentioning. The second chapter, which is Digital Shoulder Surfing, Digital Shoulder Surfing is in simple terms, a way to predict what the customer is going to order, okay, in digital platforms. Piece of the Pie is a loyalty platform. When we talk about GPS, we do acknowledge that's an opportunity on us, and we need to catch up. As part of this deployment, we are catching up very quickly.
Talking about advanced make line, mostly of our pizza business is about the rush hours and the peak hours. Getting connected with advanced make line is how this Domino's Cloud platform is going to help us to actually predict what do we need to further prepare in those peak times to actually make the stores even more efficient and make our service even faster than what we are doing today. Before getting to another video, let's get into the concrete reality, not only the PowerPoint. It's where we are today with Domino's Cloud. We've got mainly three key markets. Now, we expanded one store in Uruguay, but it's Mexico, Colombia and Spain. We already implemented the web version in Mexico and Colombia, so that is live.
We are going with the app versions live in Mexico and Colombia between April and May, and rolling out the rest of the technology in Mexico and Colombia by the end of Q2. Start the development and ending up the full rollout for the entire Alsea by the end of 2023 on this overall solution that we are presenting. We've got another video about Domino's Cloud and what it's about.
This is our story. Innovation and happy customers have always been the driving force behind our ideas. Back in 2014, we launched our first e-commerce platform, and have since evolved to become the largest single restaurant online platform. We've created new digital channels and partnered with delivery platforms to increase sales and place our brand at the top. In 2022, we sold MXN 6.5 billion digitally. We have over 5.5 million active customers, and we're proud to say that we get more than 590,000 digital orders per week. Yep, that's a lot of pizza. Now, we want the best technology to take us even further, to continue being number one, to be there for our customers before anybody else, and to deliver the best pizza.
It's not just about pizza, it's the love for our customers, and a bunch of experts figuring out what it is that our customers want and delivering it better than anyone else, like personalized marketing and rewards with every order. We're a team that dreams big and innovates with tech features like Flex to enable all of the new Domino's Digital Solutions. Digital Shoulder Surfing enables order prediction, and GPS tech with live order tracking from the oven to the customer's address. With the latest tech in the world, we will remain at the top, delivering the best pizza experience one slice at a time into the future.
That was basically it on my side. Thank you so much for listening and thanks for the time. Okay.
I have been part of Alsea for the last 10 years. I started in Chile, leading first Starbucks, then the whole portfolio in Chile. I moved to Mexico. Since last year, August last year, I am back in Europe, back in my hometown in Madrid, in Spain, leading our portfolio there in Spain and the other countries in Europe. Of course, all the strategies and ideas that have been explained by my colleagues, by Corey, people, purchasing and logistics and for sure digital and technology, all of them apply to Europe as well. Yes, we are a truly global company, and we have.
We are in close contact, we have the same strategies. What I have seen when coming back to my city and to my country is a huge opportunity in Europe for Alsea with our portfolio. Besides the opportunity in technology and digital that Pablo explained, I wanted to focus on the opportunity in terms of store counting. Number of stores. Yes? There are possibilities for our brands to grow in Spain and in Europe. Today, our portfolio is composed of seven brands in Spain and mainly just one that is Starbucks in the other countries in Europe, in France, in Portugal and Netherlands and Belgium.
We are opening the first Starbucks stores this year. The opportunity, I would say is in all brands, but mainly in three of them. The biggest opportunity is with Starbucks. Starbucks is doing very well in all our geographies and in Europe for sure. The opportunity is bigger in France because the market is much bigger there and our penetration is still low. But there are opportunities in Spain, in Portugal, Netherlands, and for sure in Belgium. We'll talk a little bit later about France. The other opportunity that we have is with Domino's Pizza, with we are close to 400 stores at this moment, but we are still the number two, the second in the line in the pizza market in Spain.
For sure we want to be the number one. We will do that in the coming years. There are opportunities to penetrate in smaller cities and to organize new openings in the big cities as well. Domino's is doing very well in Spain. The third opportunity is big opportunities with a local Spanish brand that is called Vips. We have Vips in Mexico as well. This is a very interesting phenomena in Spain because it's a local brand. It was born in Madrid, in the center of Spain. We have 150 stores. We define Vips as an eatery. It's a place, it's a fantastic magic place where you can go.
We open early in the morning, 8:00, and we close late in the night, 12 or 1:00 A.M. You will find people there all the time, having breakfast, having lunch, dinner, after lunch, whatever. Yes? There is a very nice atmosphere in this brand. It started, as I said, in Madrid, in the center of Madrid, very successful there. In the last year, we have been opening more stores, more Vips stores in the surroundings of Madrid with a very good success and in other cities in Spain. One thing that surprised me about Spain, now that I'm back there, is that Spain used to be more about Madrid and then Barcelona. Then the rest.
Today there are several prominent cities growing very, very fast in Spain, like Valencia in the east. The whole east coast of Spain is doing very, very well. The south, Malaga, Sevilla, and the north, Bilbao. So there are opportunities to go to. We are present in some of those cities, but there are big opportunities to grow there. We are going to be for sure busy in this and coming years in terms of opening new stores. When we talk about France, we were acquiring the French market from Starbucks at the end of year 18, yes, at the end of 18.
As I said, probably here is our biggest opportunity. It's a huge market. We don't have clear, direct competitors. Of course, you can find cafeterias and bakeries there, but Starbucks is doing very well. Our team there is performing fantastically. They started applying the rules that have made us successful in other countries, trying to of course, to boost sales but having cost into control. We found opportunities in terms of maintenance, for example, or other opportunities in terms of the management of the real estate portfolio.
We found there many flagships or stores in, let's say, in expensive places where we want to be for sure, but there are opportunities with Starbucks to be with different formats of stores in different places. Almost everywhere, yes? We have been diversifying this portfolio. We are beyond the main street or the high streets and the commercial centers. We are opening new formats, as I said, kiosks or for example, by the end of this year, beginning of next year, we will be opening the first drive-throughs in France and in other countries in Europe.
It's interesting to see that in the Americas and particularly in Mexico and other countries, these kind of stores, those drive-throughs are very powerful, and they are doing very good business. In Europe, we have still to start with that. We are today maybe a couple of steps behind in Europe, which is let's say a very good, very good news. I see it positive because once we implement in Europe what we have been doing in the other countries, and this is coming right now, this is gonna make us very, very successful. What Pablo mentioned about delivery, about Starbucks Rewards, etc , applies for sure to Europe.
In France, we have been running the program, Starbucks Rewards for two, three years. It was not on the top level of Starbucks Rewards. We reached that by the end of last year. We are seeing in a couple of months that the percentage of sales that are coming from Starbucks Rewards doubled from 8%- 16% suddenly, yes? We see a good, very good trend for this program. About the other countries in Europe, Spain, Portugal, the program is right coming. We didn't have it. It's coming this May. Again, we see a lot of growth coming from those digital tools. Delivery is another opportunity.
Imagine that, while in Mexico, for example, in Starbucks, our delivery accounts for almost 10% of our sales. In Europe is less than half of that, yes? Maybe we have been, in the past, a little bit conservative in terms of delivery. We are not anymore. There is huge potential for delivery in Europe, and not only for Starbucks, for all our brands, yes? Finally, I wanted to share with you the two main headwinds that we have been navigating the last year, that were the cost of energy, first of all, and then the high cost of product, yes?
In terms of energy, we had a very good situation last year till June. We had a nice and very, very convenient, very competitive agreement in terms of electricity purchasing. Unfortunately, this finished by 30 of June last year, and we had to start buying e-energy in the open market. That meant that we were buying for EUR 40 the kilowatt, and we started suddenly growing in the open buying in the open market for more than EUR 200, EUR 250, even EUR 280 euros per kilowatt. There was a crazy situation in Spain and in Europe the last year. We were navigating that. We were trying to find, exploring possibilities.
By the third quarter of last year, we already have some opportunities. Still, we see and we feel and we have been advised by experts in the market that is not the best moment. It was not and it's not yet the best moment to engage with covering the cost of energy. It's still better to buy in the open market. Compared with EUR 280 per kilowatt, we are today, as we speak, buying the kilowatt for EUR 100, some days below EUR 100 the kilowatt. Still, of course, higher than those EUR 40 that we have in the past, but much better than last year.
What we are seeing is that the cure for, the future scope of the price of the energy should go to levels close to the ones that we had before the crisis. We are watching the market. We are seeing what is going on. We believe that in a matter of one, two years, we will be having much better and more competitive prices than we had in the past. About the increase of costs, which was something that happened globally, well, the strategy was to try to, I mean, of course, to compensate and to trespass part of this impact to our customers.
We're very, very carefully trying to keep for us the most important thing is to keep our customers coming to our stores. We were suffering on the average, an increase of our cost in the level of almost 16%. 15%. 15.5%. We managed to trespass to our customers 8.5%-9%. Depending on the brand, was more or less. This was more or less on the similar level than our competitors. Yes? This year, still there is a problem of inflation in Europe. The situation looks better than, fortunately, than year ago.
We, as Pablo explained, we are trying to be more sophisticated in how to deal with prices, trying to find better strategies, more clusters, more differentiated clusters in our geographies. Notice that I mean, Spain and France as well, our main two countries in Europe, those are favorite touristic destinations, yes, for people. Depending on the area of the country, depending on the season as well, we can do things with the prices that will not be at the expense of the number of transactions. We are very focused, we have always been, in terms of innovation, product innovation, yes?
Innovation is key in the European market because it's very competitive and very mature market, so you have to offer, to give to your customers new reasons to come to you and try new products. At the same time, this same innovation give us the possibility to trespass part of the cost without having our customers suffering. Just because our customers are accepting and buying very well new proposals with a good quality, even if sometimes they are more expensive than the one they had before. Although we...
I mean, this inflationary situation was eroding last year our margin, we expect that between this and next year, we will come back to the level of margins that we had before the crisis. Yes. Thank you. I give back to Armando.
Well, maybe a bit more. I just wanna here highlight it a little bit, what is that we're market holding capacity in the whole markets, in the whole region. I mean, we have a white space still of about 2,500 stores. There you see 880 in Mexico. What about Europe and South America, this was a study that we just did in Euromonitor last October. At the end, we can, I mean, we can. Out of a Starbucks, if we reach that market holding capacity, Starbucks, we would be at 38% in the weight of stores in our company. Domino's 32%, the casual and family dining division 21%.
I broke it down a little bit to see if we reach that market holding capacity, what will happen in Starbucks. Starbucks, Mexico would be 45% of the pie, 35% in Europe and 21% in South America. I will give you a little bit more in the next slides how this will look for the openings to 2027. Starbucks, this is a little bit the plan. I'm not gonna dip in completely in the key strategies for every brand, but I just wanna take a look of the units that we have. Just last December, we closed the year with 1,661 units.
Our plans for 2027, it will be open around 140, 138 stores per year in this brand. That will be 86% will be corporate. As you know, in France, we have some license and franchisees, that is the only country that we have that formula. That represent about 14% of the portfolio. It will put us again in the 43% stores that it will be placed in Europe, 36% in Mexico, and 21% in South America. If we go to the Domino's Pizza, what will happen, and we are planning to open around 127 stores per year. That is around 633 in the next four years.
We do have in all the three countries that we operate, we have franchisees. That will be 46% will be corporate, 54% franchisees. This is how it will look, the pie. In Europe 17%, Mexico 68%, South America with 14%. Last and not least, this is gonna be the casual and family dining business, with of course, less growth, but we're still gonna open 15%- 17% restaurants per year. 17% are corporate, 25% franchisees. That will be the total of portfolio, how much is Europe, in Mexico, and South America. Only those, mainly these stores that are open for a year are in Vips Spain.
That's the most the brand that we are seeing a better opportunity, very average weekly unit sales, better margins. We're gonna strive in that concept. Rafa, why don't you show us a little bit an update we'll come back to give you an update of how we're doing in the year now.
Okay.
Week 12.
Thank you, Armando, and thank you for joining. The debt profile as of December 2023. As you know, we show a U.S. bond at the end of 2021, $5 million U.S. dollar U.S. bond, and we hedge to Mexican pesos. On January last year, we show a Euro bond of EUR 300 million to refinance all the bank debt that we had. Almost all the bank debt. On that credit that's still alive in Europe, we have some restrictions. Restrictions in terms of CapEx and restrictions in terms of liquidity. Last December, we took out those restrictions, and now we have the normal covenants for this kind of bank credits, only gross debt to EBITDA and interest coverage.
Last year, we paid MXN 2.1 billion for the amortizations of credit that we had for 2022. For 2023, we have amortizations of MXN 1.3 billion. MXN 1 billion it's in Europe and MXN 300 million pesos, it's in Mexico City. We're gonna pay the 300 peso that we have in Mexico, and we are working to refinance all the bank credit that we have in Europe, trying to back-end the amortizations that we have in Europe, not just the MXN 1 billion, but all the bank credit that we have in Europe, trying to amortize more in 2025 than the amortization that we have in the next years.
At the end of 2023, the debt will be around MXN 27.4 billion. In Mexico, MXN 18.4, in Europe, MXN 8.9. If we don't refinance, the debt will be MXN 9.9 billion in Europe, and in Chilean pesos it's only CLP 12 million. The cost of the credit is 9.8% with 70% of our credits it's fixed interest, and 30% it's variable interest. One of the main strategies of the company is to deleverage the company as fast as we can.
You can see that the leverage of this company because of the incremental EBITDA that we generate every year and also the amortizations of credits, we leverage the company pretty fast, no? In our projections, we're gonna be in 2x net debt EBITDA in two years. You see that we have in our team pretty clear the main strategies to achieve this guidance. We have to have this operational excellence with our store managers. We have to achieve the best cost for our products. We have to implement all the digital and loyalty platforms to achieve this guidance.
In terms of openings, for 2023 will be around 180-200 corporate stores, mainly in the most profitable brands. Those are Starbucks and Domino's. So around 50% of that number will be Starbucks, and 20% will be Domino's Pizza. subfranquicias, around 70-90 new subfranquicias units, also mainly in Starbucks and Domino's Pizza. In terms of CapEx, the CapEx will be around MXN 5.5 billion. I'm gonna break down the CapEx in the next slide. Same-store sales growing 14%-17%. This is in local currency. And total growth in terms of revenues, around 13%.
In terms of EBITDA margin and EBITDA growth, EBITDA growth pre-IFRS 16 will be around 15% with an EBITDA margin of 13%. With these numbers, revenue 13% increase and 15% increase in terms of EBITDA. The amount of EBITDA that we are gonna achieve is gonna be around MXN 10 billion for the whole year. With this, gross debt to EBITDA will be around 2.8x, and with a return on equity close to 19%. Numbers post IFRS 16, EBITDA growth of 10% with an EBITDA margin of 20%. Gross debt to EBITDA 3.3x and a return on equity close to 23%. The breakdown of CapEx, as I mentioned, openings, corporate openings between 180-200.
The percentage of the CapEx for these new openings will be 37%. In terms of remodeling and modernization of our units will be 17.5%. This gave us an increase of sales because every time that we remodel or modernize the units, give us an increase in terms of sales of around 15%. We have maintenance, 28.4%. We are putting a lot of focus to have in a pretty good shape our units. We are investing 28.4% of this CapEx in maintenance. Technology and others, we mentioned, no, we are going to invest in a Starbucks Digital Solutions for this year, around MXN 200 million.
The total amount is around MXN 340. The other part is going to be for the next year. We are putting some things in terms of digital and technology. We are going to put all the Burger King kiosks, digital kiosks in Mexico and South America. That also give us an incremental ticket of around 20%. We are going to implement the Olo, Olo clouds and the SDGs. In terms of capital allocation, after this investment in terms of CapEx, also the excess in cash that we have, we are buying back some shares. Last year we bought back around 18 million shares, that is around 2.2% of the total shares that we have.
We are, also looking, to buy back, this year around MXN 500 million pesos in terms of, buyback of shares. We cancel the shares that we bought last year. We are in the process of this, cancel of the shares that are gonna be for sure in April. I think, that's it. Alberto, please share.
I just wanna finalize, and then Alberto will finish, and then I pull that back. Just to tell a little bit how we're doing. You asked me a little bit how things are doing. We are just finalizing the quarter in a week. Things look better than the numbers that Rafael said, but I have to tell you that because it's not shown his way, but we are facing a same-store sales around 24%, let's say, from last week. Here it says 7.18%, the final number there is gonna be 17%. There is good, there is Starbucks in Mexico is facing up to date a 32% increase in sales in same-store sales.
Very glad to see that Vips is growing faster now than any other restaurant brand in Mexico with 15% in our, against our, of course, brands that we have in the restaurant business. Europe is also up 17% same-store sales. Just framing that Spain and France are in the 29% and 27%. Things look a lot better in for our folks. That one is mostly driven by traffic. 60% of that amount is driven by traffic. We don't see from some of you that I saw yesterday when I come in a quick chat, we were asking what about inflation? What are you looking? I mean, we are not seeing any prices or any emergency calls that we saw last year about pricing.
We have it very steady, as Miguel said. We have the most important raw materials really closed or negotiated already to the end of the year. Labor, we already know what was the rate increase in Spain, the rate increase there. I think we are very ready for what come. I think I have the main thing drivers very clear. No, that is our operational excellence, focusing the people. That is what make us the difference in Alsea. Of course, a profitability company and focus in the CapEx allocation, very clear where the CapEx allocation has to be in geographies, in brands. Same-store sales and organic growth, we have that ahead of us.
We have the talent, we have the brands, and we have the space to grow. I think that is... Of course, what Rafael said, earnings per share. I have it very clear for my Board what I, what has to be reduction of debt. We have it very clear, too. Of course, return capital to shareholders. Those three topics I have it very clear, and that's gonna be my focus in the next year to come. Okay? Thank you, and I pass the word to Alberto.
Gracias, Armando. Well, thank you. I know most of you. We've been here many, many years together. What I want to tell you is that we've been working 32 years in this company all together since day one. As you can see, we're trying to build a better company every day and everywhere and with every decision we take. We've been hearing you very well about the corporate governance that we should have in a company. Just remember that this is a family company that was created 32 years ago. The family still owns about 40% of the company. Sometimes it's very complicated to follow the rules of corporate governance in terms of tenure of the members of the board.
What we have done in the last years, we have reinforced, and now in my new job.
Only being the chairman of the board, we have reinforced our corporate governance in the company. As you probably heard, we just invited two new women to our company. Our board is integrated by 12 members, seven of them are independent, and three of them are women. We are meeting most of the ESG corporate governance recommendations. We are also focused on the ESG in our board. We have very clear that ESG and our goals for 2030 have to be met. We just share it with the public and I think we're gonna make it happen. We're also clear about succession.
I know this is a concern for most of the investors of the company, so we're focusing on making sure that the next CEO of the company will be an internal that comes from the company and is very well prepared. We are also focusing on making sure that everything that has to do with the future, in terms of, and you just heard, people, everything that has to do with people, everything that has to do with supply chain, everything that has to do with technology, everything that has to do with operations, everything that has to do with our finance is very clear for our directors. I think it was a great idea from Armando and the team to come all of them here and be in front of you guys to answer any kind of questions that you have.
I think it's the first time we have so many directors in the company. I think it shows you the intention that Alsea has, as always, to be open, to be clear, and to be in front of our shareholders, always trying to generate value. The only thing I wanna say, thank you. I'm gonna leave this for question and answers. In my new role as chairman of the board, you may be, or you can be sure that all our job in the board is to generate value for the shareholders, to take care of the company and our team members, and obviously to meet all the regulations in terms of corporate governance and ESG. Thank you very much, and I open for questions.
Two questions. First on HR, right? All these plans to reduce turnover and increase benefits and compensation and so on and so forth. How should we think about that together with all the payroll pressures we're seeing, especially in Mexico, minimum wage increase and increase of contribution to pension funds? How should we think about that from a margin perspective, and how can you offset that from a gross margin perspective? The second one is for Rafa. Rafa, just on your guidance, what kind of MXN average effects are you thinking for 2023?
Well, for 2023, I don't put for net net profit an FX effect. In these projections, I'm putting 20.6 for. It's an average for the whole year. MXN 20.60.
Yeah.
Yes. Regarding your first question, it's through productivity. We are continuously reviewing the labor models that we have in the stores, and it's always a challenge making sure that we have the people where we have the peak hours, but not when we don't need them most. It's always thinking about that. We always say that we should have less people, but better paid. In order to make sure that labor versus sales is in a healthy position. We are acknowledging, not only in Mexico, but in Latin America as well, all of these labor reforms. I will tell you, we're not worried about that because I think that our business is going to be better sustained for the midterm and long term if we really have that compensation in a better place.
I mean, you cannot sustain business with low wages or bad wages. We are working in order at the same time to be very productive. Yes.
Joaquin, just to tell you, in that labor issue, all the technology that it comes with BK, with Starbucks, with Domino's, one of the main inbound technology that is gonna have is the scheduling for all our partners, no? The efficiency in the scheduling that we will have, and we are working with Kronos and Workday, with 2 other vendors in the U.S. that we already have it in the Burger King, in Starbucks since two years ago. That has given us a precision of how we need and the hours we need to pay. I think that is the efficiency that we'll see. Now, the point is that sales are going that high that we need to help to get that demand, no?two We need to be careful of, where to put the, la llave, no? Close the key because sales are just, still, in a good horizon up.
Mm-hmm.
Be careful of that.
Yeah.
I would say, if I may, that another thing that is going to help us in terms of productivity is the new selling channels. Yes? When we talk about the delivery, for example, for our restaurants, where we are delivering the food, we don't need the waiters there, using the time with the customer. For example, MOP, the solution that Starbucks is bringing to order in advance, yes, and then to go and pick up. For example, when I think about Burger King is very fashionable in Europe, and I think that in Americas as well, the idea of not interacting. I mean, the people self-attending themselves in the, those-
Kiosks.
Digital kiosks. There are coming several channels that are softening the cost of labor to our stores.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi. Alvaro Garcia from BTG Pactual. Two questions. The first one for Pablo. To what degree are you working with the brands themselves on data management? I'd love to hear some examples maybe of how you're working with brands on data. Two, on capital allocation. Rafa, you mentioned, the plan is to delever as fast as you can. You mentioned the 2x target in two years, which is great to hear. I was wondering maybe how the sort of strategic committee was thinking about M&A going forward. It's been a focal point for you guys over the last 15 years. I was wondering if there's less of that in conversations these days. Thank you.
The first question, thanks, Alvaro, for asking. If I understood well, is to which extent are we working.
Data.
Brands and data, right?
With the Domino's and the Starbucks of the world.
Data. Yeah. Let me pick the two main chapters that I explained the presentation and expand on those and we take it up from there. Within Starbucks, as I shared today, Mexico got 35% sales penetration, lower percent on the total Alsea-Starbucks. The whole ambition is how do we get to the Starbucks Digital Solutions on this rollout that we are working back-to-back globally with Starbucks International on this rollout between LAC and Europe to get us from our current sales penetration to the aspiration of the 50% penetration in the coming years. More specifically, what that means in terms of data itself.
When I talked about data, nailing that down on an example is now we are bringing all the Starbucks Rewards on our customer lifetime value segmentation, which was the main pillar, the initial pillar, and getting that similar segmentation value approach across all the geographies. By doing that, with the second pillar, is we are start to be much more active on engaging those customers with personalized communication based on their value and their preferences. Clearly, the combination on enabling technology, but also evolving the way we do marketing, using data in the way we explain, is going to accelerate us towards the horizon of the 50%, driving increased customer frequency through that engagement on the Starbucks chapter. I would say in Domino's, similar situation, on, again, being consistent on the customer lifetime value.
We shared in the video that in Domino's between Mexico, Spain and Colombia, we've got around 5.5 million customers. There's still room to go and to grow. 42% digital sales penetration account. The horizon is around 60%, even when we look into U.S., 70%. Similar chapter, we've got the customer data. We know where they do transact, what they do to ask, but it is as important what they do not ask for. If someone likes on the Domino's, usually a pepperoni, but it's important for them to know the rest of the specialty or if there is additional offers or if there is a product innovation or if they prefer a different type of pizza or size of pizza on the weekends or the weekdays and different moments of the days.
That is the combined factor between using the data and personalization, in a similar approach.
Okay.
All those questions you are thinking of on your own as Alsea or are you working alongside Domino's on that question?
The data in terms and the way we are working, we are working back-to-back with Starbucks International and globally in Seattle, and with Domino's International and globally based in Ann Arbor, okay? The whole approach is, we are truly looking to become the best in class with them, working back-to-back with them to make sure that we truly accelerate the best practices, learning and copycat very quickly with them. Once we get there, then we look to further, to have further incremental value. Again, we need to reduce the gap that I mentioned between being, what, three years delayed to become three months delayed, okay?
Okay.
Regarding M&A, it's, as I said, we're very clear about the goals of the company. Armando and the team just presented the market holding capacity that we have, and as you can see, it's huge. The board decided that the strategy is to focus on organic growth and saturate our market holding capacity in those markets and focus in the brands that are generating more return for us. The company is not distracted at all in anything that has to do with M&A today.
Um-
Hi, good morning. Thanks for the presentation. Antonio Hernandez from Barclays. My question regarding... Well, for this year and so far it looks like you're doing a great job and everything, you know, consumer-wise, looks like there's a solid trend and you provided some guidance. In terms of pricing versus sales mix, how much do you think it will help, you know, pricing versus sales mix this year? Where might you see, for example, more pushback from consumers in terms of passing through cost increases via prices?
I mean, with the story that we're doing, and it's already finalized in Europe with a third party.
That is helping us high in the price management evolution. It's done already in Burger King, the whole country for Mexico. Our RBI did it with Simon- Kucher. We are knowing which, where is the elasticity, where we have more room and space to grow, no? We already saw that delivery pizza has a more complex elasticity, there we have already in the top. We are working well with a big promotion in carryout, for example, for that pizza. We know what is the price target, depends on the geography regarding price. To tell you, the best thing is the traffic it's on. We are, I think 70% or 65% of the increase that I told you right now that we're running the first 12 weeks are by traffic.
That is the good news. I mean, probably we are doing a comparison. You know, in Europe there was Omicron in the first eight weeks. In Mexico probably, we were running the first five weeks with 70% of capacity in some cases. Now that we are open, it's just a matter of now traffic. With this, we just launched a Frappuccino promotion just four weeks ago, three weeks ago in Starbucks. We had a record week in Starbucks, crazy numbers in the week number nine, I think. It's just, it's been traffic. Thanks to that, it's been traffic. In same as Vips.
Just to add on top of Armando, whenever we talk about pricing and revenue management, we are looking to maximize the value. It's not only about increasing prices, it's to have the right price to maximize the sales and profit. It might be the case on that journey that we are finding actual opportunities on reducing some prices in some locations, but to maximize sales and profit and to get the better balance between orders and traffic, like Armando was saying, on overall sales. What is starting in Spain is something that, like we described, we are looking to progressively roll out in the rest of Alsea markets. Okay.
Perfect. Thanks.
Mm-hmm. Thank you. Is the nearshoring, has it been relevant for the company? I mean, 'cause you get, the raw materials now from other regions. Have you had any, like, supply chain problems that have been solved, and would it have, like, any benefit on the costs?
Miguel, you get it.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
I think the raw supply chain constraints around our countries have been fixed around 12 months ago. All the navy carriers costs have been dropping down dramatically. What we're seeing, the cost of fuel have goes up, and that's impacting us. The availability of the products have been very good. Today we cannot say that we have an impact in constraints about outs or not getting the amount of volume that we need for our brands.
What we're seeing is in the north part of Mexico, the increasing sales are better than I told you in average.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know. I mean, it's, there's some money going on to the north region of the country. There are four or five states that we've seen the volumes, and also a little bit more complicated to get some labor there. It's been the economy there has, it's looking.
Strong
... strong and bigger than we thought. Right now, if you tell where we open stores, if I tell you the 50 or 60 stores that we already have automatically pipeline now, most of it is 60% on that region. 60% or 80% are Starbucks drive-throughs. We are finding those volumes are just probably 30% higher than the one that we used in Mexico City. The type of sites and land that we're getting there, a lot cheaper than any other places in Mexico, Guadalajara or Monterrey. I think that's good news for us.
As it has been, as it does make sense now to hedge the energy costs in Europe, in other raw materials, have you been able to increase the months of hedges for other raw materials as they have been more stabilized, or are they still very volatile, so they, you have to have, like, short months of hedges?
It depends on the raw materials. For example, cheese, we got a special deal with Latino that it will allow us to buy in the springtime, where the low cost, we have an excess of milk in United States, and they have an excess of production in cheese. Every raw material is a little bit different. We have hedgings for around 24%-25% of the total spent for the year. We see in the third and fourth quarter better numbers in coffee and wet, in oil.
In flour.
Flour. Everything it's, we On a vary Chicago Mercantile Exchange. We follow those index. We see that the trend is going down. Hopefully it will come.
I would like to get back to the question because I think it's important. In the past year, you've seen Alsea doing a lot of M&A and there were some comments about Alsea buying growth and not necessarily getting the returns or the margins that we should. We heard, and obviously after that COVID, we have analyzed our opportunities and the board has decided, and in our plan, you will see a less complicated company in terms of number of brands. We might. You might see rather than buying new businesses, we will be selling some of the brands that will not get the critical mass. When. For us, our critical mass is 1,000 stores.
Mm-hmm.
Because if we're gonna build 200 stores per year, 250 stores per year, any brand that will not reach 100 stores, it might be small for us. What you will see in Alsea is focusing on the big brands. As they presented the brand, you saw it today. I mean, we are focusing on the big brands. We are focusing on growing those big brands. Why pay multiples of four, five, eight, nine if we can open stores at CapEx? We have so many opportunities to do that with great returns, and that was part of the strategy of buying Europe. We had a lot more market capacity, especially with the brands that are giving us better returns.
Really you will see the company focusing on what you saw here, and the company will not be distracted in any acquisition that will not be the brands that we have today. Even that we are not looking today. I think we have to analyze our CapEx allocation better. We are spending about half of our EBITDA in CapEx every year or more than that, and we believe that at least half of that should be in organic growth, not necessarily so many maintenance. Obviously dividends is an issue that we wanna take care. Debt is an issue that we wanna take care also. I think the company has a very good cash flow to attend all of those at the same time. I think that's what you guys are gonna see.
Also, the board has asked the administration that we want better margins. The company can generate better margins, and that's what we're aiming for. You know? I think you're gonna see a change in the way the company will be operated from now on.
Hi, thank you very much for the time. Hector Maya from Scotiabank. I just want to better understand your mindset change, because as we have discussed that throughout the years, Alsea's, one of the main drivers for the company has been M&A. I remember that when we were in the middle of the pandemic, there were several discussions with you about probably selling a brand, selling assets across geographies. I remember that you were very friendly believing in your path, in your growth, and in how you operated restaurants. You said, "Hey, we are not going to do this. We know the market holding capacity.
We know that there are many opportunities now with the pandemic to continue expanding because competitors are closing." I just want to understand what was like the breaking point for you to say, "All right, we're gonna hear what you're saying. We're going to stop going for M&A, probably focusing more on margins." Also understand, I mean, if you are hearing the market in that way, what is stopping Alsea in hearing the market in terms of corporate stores versus franchisees? Because that is also another way in which you could increase your margin. Want to understand that, and then I have another question. Thank you.
I don't think we have changed. If you remember in the last three years, we have sold several brands. We sold CPK, we sold the operations of P.F. Chang's, and we closed some of those in Brazil. We closed.
Argentina.
We sold the one in Argentina.
Colombia.
We have been clear with the strategy in terms of taking all the small brands out of our portfolio. When we, for example, when we bought Vips, late in 2018, we closed Mama or Mama immediately. We sold also a Spanish brand that we have, Tapas y Cañas.
La Vaca.
La Vaca. I don't think our strategy has changed. I do believe what has changed is that we found out, and as you saw today, that in markets like France, the opportunity is so big still. In brands like Domino's and even in Burger King, the opportunity is so big that it's more profitable to focus on those brands rather to get distracted in another one, in other brands. It's also true that we, through the pandemic, we saw that the global brands were a lot more resilient than the brands that we were operating locally. We still have very good locally brands like Vips or Foster's or Ginos in Spain that are performing incredibly well. If you see all of...
You see 2021 and 2022, our best performance brands across all our geographies was Domino's and Starbucks. I think this has reaffirmed our strategy rather than change our strategy. Also, in terms of franchising, the model is there. You saw how many stores of franchisee we're gonna open. Remember, we don't have the rights to license or franchise the Starbucks brand in Latin America. We only have that in Europe, and not necessarily in Spain either. Only-
The Netherlands.
in what we call Clover, which is,
The Netherlands.
France and Benelux, because it's the model we bought it with. Even with that, we will be buying some of those stores, and we're trying to have less franchisees in the France market. We're giving them territories, so we can grow to them. We understand, and I agree with you 100% that so franchising, it's a very good business and we're trying to do that every time more for the company. Both at the same time, corporate stores and franchising. It's not changed.
Got it. Thank you. Also in terms of the opportunities that you're describing around geographies and best practices, I mean, I want to understand if those opportunities have increased throughout the years or what is enabling you right now to be able to go for those opportunities, particularly in Europe as you were describing them. Thank you.
I think the opportunity is more how we do it vertically. I'm not talking about opportunities of other brands. I'm talking how can we leverage what he's doing, for example, in Starbucks in the pricing, the development issue. We do it vertically in the 11 or 12 countries that we operate. SDS, we do vertically completely. All the strategics, commercial, human resources, supply chain, growth in stores, we are very aligned by brand. We didn't talk each other as much. The whole, you know, we work together with José Luis. I do the same with Santiago in Cono Sur and with Francisco there. We manage the whole Starbucks brand like one now. That is gonna. In data, for example, we're gonna do the same. In inside analytics, we're gonna same.
The same we're doing in Domino's. That's giving us a lot of leverage now how to work, you know. That is what I call the best practices, how can we manage it around the world.
Also taking care of the scale we have today, we closed the negotiation with Coca-Cola and Pepsi all together.
All together.
In the same time.
If I can add something. You say, okay, opportunities. We have always got opportunities. There are some opportunities that are, I would say, bigger today. One of them is everything connected with the delivery technology, digital, CRM, loyalty. Those were opportunities several years ago. Today, those are big opportunities, and in some markets, huge opportunities because we are a little bit behind. Other opportunities I would say are the same. For example, in terms of innovation, product, etc. This is something that was very important in Europe before and is very important today. From my point of view, the idea that was here explained that we want to focus in...
All brands are important, but some of them are more important, more profitable, and they have more space to grow than others. To focus on those, on those bigger opportunities in terms of growth, of number of stores. This is something that is helping us today more than before.
Sorry to jump in. You have to remember that Alsea was buying market share. I mean, it's the market holding capacities. When we bought at the end of 2018 and early 2019, when we bought Europe, remember that we bought a group of Vips which had Starbucks in Spain and Portugal, but we also bought Starbucks in France and Benelux. If you saw the growth, we have more than 1,000 stores to be built in those markets. Unfortunately, 2020 and 2021 happened what it happened, we have not been able to really capitalize that opportunity. That's exactly what we're doing today. You know?
The last one, I promise. There is this aggressiveness now with other players in Mexico going for loyalty. I'm talking about FEMSA with OXXO. Is there a way for you to partner with them to try to explore alternatives? I mean, you also have the footprint, relevant footprint in Europe. They also now have a footprint in Europe. Is there a way for us to think about a partnership there in loyalty?
No, no, they already went. We already are in talks with them. As you know, they are doing a small pilot test there in Monterrey of coffee. Completely different what we are in their own brand. That's not our consumer, for sure. The Starbucks consumer is completely. We partner with the partners that it really create value to our group, no? No, I don't see that we partner with anybody in the Starbucks segment or in the Domino's. We can have somebody here in the States, you know, Delta is with Starbucks, no? There's two other partners with Starbucks. We don't see it to be doing something with FEMSA or something like that.
Yeah. Having said that, strategic alliances is a key pillar on our overall CRM strategy, like Armando was saying, is... With the right partners to bring the right complementary value to our businesses. Clearly, the specific case that you ask the question, it is not necessarily that case that we are going on all further down, but there are many other cases that, like Armando was saying, Delta, how that translates on Aeroméxico potentially and to bring value for Starbucks Rewards are some other key strategic partnerships that we are exploring to bring more value to our customers. It needs to be incremental, complementary value to our customers and brands as part of our CRM and loyalty strategy.
'Cause I was thinking about, I don't know, Burger King, Domino's Pizza. They already have 25 million users with Spin Premia, so probably, I don't know if there's a subsegment there for Domino's or Burger King.
I mean, that is specific example that you give, it's right now start working.
Yeah.
They are not, there's no place yet, I mean, giving results now. We will... I mean, with Coke or Pepsi, whatever, we are a good, a good...
Partners.
partner with them. We will look at it, if that makes sense.
Yeah. If, if that makes sense, we'll capture those opportunities. Again, They approach us. We had initial conversations. We have.
A open dialogue, I would say. It's not only that opportunity. There are many other opportunities on generating a broader coalition value. We need to make sure that we also keep the right priorities with the right focus. Okay? There are many opportunities. It's all about how we prioritize them and what we capture behind our core strategy. Again, we are in continued open dialogue with them. There are some other opportunities that we are also looking, but just whilst keeping the focus on what we need to build, in the, in the short to the midterm, to actually drive us into the next level. Thank you.
Thank you.
Sergio Matsumoto from Citi. For the logistics part of the business, what parts of those can you outsource to third parties? You know, conversely, what parts would you wanna keep in-house, when you look into the future and, you know, you see Alsea with more scale and, perhaps more complexity, and customers demanding higher service?
I will tell you, just in the... Thank you. The logistics in just the only piece that we have logistics, the warehouse, the own logistics manufacturer, like 5PL is in Mexico. The rest of the countries, as we know, two years ago before in Colombia, we did a 5PL. We sold our distribution centers to Axionlog. Now they are distributors. They do the logistics. In the Domino's side, where we have Domino's, we do the manufacturing of the dough. You know? We do produce the dough. Starting producing dough and doing it for 30 years, that was starting. What about the sandwiches? We do build the sandwiches. Like I said, that's a super great advantage with big margins.
With the sandwiches that we do in Spain, they get sold in Benelux, in Belgium, in other store in France with great quality, great innovation, R&D. For us doing right now, we would say that the big key that we didn't have it before, it's the manufacturing, no? The manufacture of cakes, salado, dulce. It's just great advantage to have that arm in Alsea now. I mean, I won't see it if I don't have it. I mean, it's just amazing. In Mexico, the distribution, you know, the lack of distributors there. We don't do the distribution for Burger King, or example. It's done by a third party. There's only two or three players that does distribution. I think, being doing it by ourselves, that makes us a great advantage.
With Miguel and the team having that productivity, I share some numbers of DPI U.S. regarding the cost for them to distribute in the U.S. versus the cost of all distributor in Mexico. We are at way better numbers than them, no? I think as soon as we see it, but I think we are in the right model as to do it, no?
I think also to add to what Armando says, in Europe, we have a very good operator, Hong Wei, no. He is the best in class in Europe. We took a lot of best practices three, four years ago with the benchmark. Now we're beating them. Today we'll do benchmark locally with our two, three food service logistics operators. We can say that we are 35% less cost effective than them. We have comparable numbers. Definitely Mexico, we are competitive advantage. Even though we went to a third party, we're gonna lose those margins.
Yeah, regarding Sergio, regarding manufacturing, we do believe it's a competitive advantage. We definitely believe that in our biggest brand, which is Starbucks, we have today the best croissant available. We're importing croissants from Europe, in Mexico, bake in stores. I was in a store here yesterday in Washington watching the croissants. Believe me, our croissants are a lot better than the one that at least they are using now in the U.S. because we do bake in store. We really believe that this strategy alliance that we have done with Europastry, we put our food program in Mexico in the next level without having to import it from Europe, which is what we are doing today. I do believe that the capabilities for manufacturing...
That was some big changes that we did in France. As Armando said, today in France, the sandwiches are made in our factory in Spain that came when we bought Vips. I just visit the factory and the capabilities that we have in terms of manufacturing food for our food case, particularly in Starbucks, are a big competitive advantage to have consistency, quality, and price in so many stores, and give us capabilities also to grow at the pace that we are growing, specifically in that brand. I think we should. I mean, we are restaurant operators, but if we need to be in the other part of the service and supply chain, I think we should be only when it makes sense. You know?
Yeah.
Bob Ford, BofA Merrill. Cory, in one of your slides, you refer to a fair income gap of 77% in Mexico, and I was just wondering if you could explain that, please. Then Pablo, you know, how did the economics of the Starbucks and Domino's digital solutions compare with what you have in-house? What are the performance differentials of the Starbucks and Domino's platforms relative to Wow+?
Excuse me, Bob, can you repeat the question, please?
One of your slides, Cory, it had a fair income gap of 77% in Mexico, and I didn't understand what that meant.
I-
I don't think we touched on it.
Yes.
In the conversation.
With the fair income. Yes.
Please.
What we do in Mexico is, we take information from CONEVAL regarding what's the welfare line, the línea de bienestar. That is an amount of money that is required for a family of two people that are actively working in order to support two more. That figure right now is around MXN 8,600. The income of our people doesn't necessarily meet that amount. 77% of Alsea workers in Mexico earn that, but we need to increase. The goal that we have for this year is 83%, which we're talking about 1,600 more people, mainly from Domino's and Burger King, that we can take them to that level of income. It's, for us, it's a very important thing, as you can see.
Basically the main challenge is located in Mexico. We are reviewing with our partners. Europe, the minimum wage meets that. In Mexico, the minimum wage does not meet that. That's why we have to continue designing the compensation scheme of the people in the operation with additional income, bonus or special gratifications, et cetera, so that we can get to that line. Yeah. The goal, of course, is having everybody on the fair income line. Yeah.
Of course.
Okay. Thank you. I take the second part of your question. There are, like, two chapters. You make that a broader question and then a chapter is... first chapter related to Starbucks, second chapter related to Domino's. Getting back to Starbucks, which are the key differentiator against our current situation, okay, in terms of and how those economic works. First, we don't have the last, let's say, the last high-end version, best-in-class integrated digital and technology solution for Starbucks today in Alsea. We don't have that. Examples of that is today Mexico got around 35% sales penetration.
José Luis was expecting and was referencing that into France that we had around 8% a few months ago after implementing one of the bundles or models or Stars for Everyone, where people do not need to get money into their cards, but tie it up to their credit cards, and that's more flexible and open. That jumped from 8%- 16% in just couple of months. The whole point is having the common platform for all the markets and with the latest technology, get us on a common next level versus our current situation. Again, I reference Mexico, which is local solution. France, that is getting the first bundle of the global solution.
When you get down into Argentina and Chile, again, a set of local solutions that we need to get into the, into the global level. The second big difference is in the way we are approaching. We are engaging. Alvaro made a question. We are engaging back-to-back with our global partners to truly become the best in class and not reinvent the wheel and build on top of their best practices. That's a huge difference versus where we are today. To close the chapter on Starbucks, to be even more specific, I presented on the slide, like, see three different main building blocks on the Starbucks, like the operational at the point of sale at the store.
Our point of sale is not Simphony today, it's not Oracle today, it's not the best performance for many of the partners. We are having opportunities to improve that and to improve the timing and performance and to make sure that our partners truly dedicate their focus in front of our customers by having the best technology at the point of sale. Similar thing applies on what I mentioned on the app and the analytics and insights and how that relates to the overall CRM strategy. The economics, and that will apply also between Starbucks and Domino's.
What I can say, and we did, it's been long time, long negotiations to make sure that we do not only become the best in class, as I mentioned, on the scope that we are chasing with our partners, but it's been long negotiations with them to make sure that the economics are also competitive against other benchmarks that we've done. Even comparing if we have done that ourselves or with other alternatives. And that has taken us, I would say, quite a long time to make sure that we tackle the details. Similar case happens with Domino's, I would say. Today in Domino's, I presented the 45% corporate digital penetration in Mexico, 42% globally.
We don't have the same e-commerce platform in Mexico today than in Spain and different in Colombia. Three different e-commerce, three different platforms, to some extent, different customer experience, and not even being back-to-back to the global best-in-class practice. By moving to the U.S. source code, we get into the latest best practice in terms of the user experience, and that is only the core. Then today, we don't have GPS, we don't have digital shoulder surfing, we don't have the best-in-class inventory management platform, which is world-class coming from U.S. Not even talk about.
Potential innovations that I mentioned and signaled as advanced make line, and to predict the rush hours, being a critical component on our service and our customer satisfaction, and truly delivering in better times. In both cases, once we are there, the road is only going to accelerate because, again, instead of being like three months, three years delayed, we're getting back three months delayed. The final piece I would say on economics is, again, we tend to think on economics, at least personally, I responded on cost. It's also important to highlight that also in the economics is every customer that we've got the data. In the way we have been performing and looking to improve that better is 2x or 3x the frequency on a digital customer versus a non-digital customer.
When we look into improved value on our customers on a per customer basis, the opportunity is huge, and that is going to connect with organic growth and same-store sales. Okay. You're welcome.
Thank you for the time. Alejandro Fuchs from Itaú. Two quick questions from my side. The first one is on the SAT. Wanted to know if there's any updates, or where we are in the process with them. The second one is on competitive dynamics in Mexico. It looks like the start of the year is very good, very solid. Could we say that the risk of trade down, maybe from QSR to more informal part of the street food, maybe market, is that past us, or do you still see that as a risk going forward? Thank you.
Now, in terms of the SAT, with the acquisition of Vips in Mexico, there's nothing new. No. In May last year, we start with the litigation, and right now we are in the process. The, the attorneys told us that it's gonna be or it's gonna take us around two more years to end this now. We are confident that we are gonna have a positive, resolution for us. Yeah. As I said, I don't see it as... I mean, we see that trends is very complicated, that we will see a slowdown, no? Especially that when it comes right now.
And we measure sales, and we are putting the promotions and we're doing the commercial things right in order not to find there is gonna be a decline, you know, in the sales, no. I think, with the things that we have exactly, the new app that is coming the next four weeks for Domino's, and we're gonna launch it in a big way to increase digital sales. That has to be in the getting a better momentum, no. In Vips, we are looking the opposite way, you know. The trends are higher than we expect, no.
I think in the budget that we have for second quarter, we're gonna achieve it and in better results because the first quarter budget that we have, we are up a good number now, no? I don't see any things that can be complicated for achieving the first semester at all. I mean, in terms of demand, no, este. There's no. We are ready for it, and I don't think it's gonna be different, right.
Jian Tao from Lazard. You lay out the opening, store opening plan till 2027 for Domino's Pizza and the Starbucks, Alejandro. Can you share the forecast framework and the key assumption behind it? How you drive this, get this conclusion for store opening?
To where to open, you mean?
No. How you get this number? What's the key assumption behind?
Okay. At the end, we do, I mean, a market holding capacity by region. Okay. We already know where are the white spots that we can open stores. In the Domino's side, it's easier because here at the end, we have a delivery and geographies. At the end, where can we There's white spots for making a delivery unit. That's a lot easier. On the other end, we have track or map with the whole regions in Starbucks, for example, where can we held as the Starbucks store doing some economics in income, population, traffic. No. We map all the shopping centers. We map all the airports in that's the case. Where can we can map, and we already see where is gonna be the capacity in the next three years.
At the end, like I told you yesterday a little bit, everything has a return of investment target. If we don't see, no matter what brand we open, the less is 25% EBITDA against investment. We are targeting the two to three years now in Europe of a return of investment in France, and probably three or four in Starbucks, in Domino's. I think, we have mapped the whole region and the whole countries, where can we build more stores and how. We put a tier, no? Which one's first, no? The drive-throughs now, for example. I would said, where are we? We are not aiming to open stores in businesses, in corporate office, for example. We are not.
We rather open in the drive-through segment that is getting quite double the sales than it used to be. That's how we track it a little bit.
Just to follow up. When you look at the white space, are you considering the competition landscape as well?
Yes. Yes.
I mean, the penetration rate of the competitors, whether that's.
At the end, we are here with the people of Starbucks this week, my people of development, seeing the model that these guys use. We have another model that is taking care in Asia, and we have a model in Mexico. In Mexico, and the information that we have is a lower. It's, we don't have as much information, real information. We've been in that 20 years that we've been here with Starbucks, we've been really putting in place formulas and information with Euromonitor and with competition. A lot of things that we put in the mix in order to predict sales. I mean, that's the hardest or the only thing that we don't know here is the prediction of a sales unit that we will open.
The rest, you know the rent, you know the cost, you know the fixed cost, you know everything, but just a prediction. Well, in the market volume, with the hitting rate that I call, we are very aligned and doing well there.
Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I think we have a couple of questions online.
Okay.
We will now start the Q&A session. If you have a question, please press the Question button in the browser. Please make sure that you are not in full screen mode to see the button. The first question is from Mr. Rodrigo Alcántara from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon, team. Thanks for taking my question. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah. Thanks. The first one would be, I mean, on Starbucks and Domino's Pizza, you have done an amazing job. Congrats on that. Just curious to pick your brain on the latest thoughts on Vips Mexico. You know, over the last few years, we have seen you guys implemented initiatives to try to revamp the brand. At some point, we were in talks of the remodelings, then we got the pandemic. Now, just got a bit lost on where do we stand for that brand. It's not part of the growth equation right now, but still like kind of 15% of your sales, if I'm not mistaken. Just curious about your thoughts on Vips.
Also for Rafa, just to complete the cash puzzle here, for cash balance puzzle for 2023, just curious if you, besides the CapEx and all the other expenses, you foresee any other meaningful outflow in terms of cash, perhaps on the working capital level. You know, suppliers in 2022, you receive an inflow of MXN 2.3 billion. If perhaps we may see a reversal in 2023 on that line. Just also curious here on the working capital, if you foresee any pressure here, Rafa? Those would be my questions. Thank you.
In terms of the free cash flow that we are projecting for the full year 2023, as I mentioned, the EBITDA can be around MXN 10 billion pesos. We have the cost of all the bank credits and the cost of the commissions of the credit cards that are close to MXN 3.4 billion pesos. We have the taxes of around MXN 1.3 billion pesos. Working capital positive, around MXN 400 million pesos. With all of this, we are gonna be positive in terms of free cash flow, operational free cash flow of MXN 200 million pesos.
After that, as I mentioned in terms of the capital allocation, we can buy back shares of around MXN 500 and prepay or pay the amortizations in Mexico, MXN 300. If we can refinance the European bank credits, that will be only MXN 300 million pesos that we're gonna amortize in terms of the bank credits. This will be the free cash flow for the year. At the end of last December, we end with MXN 6 billion pesos in terms of cash. After this amortization of the credits and the buybacks, we're gonna be a negative free cash flow for around MXN 700.
Okay. That's clear. Thank you.
Depending the refinance of the European credits. Rodrigo, regarding this, as I mentioned, the recovery because mobilization, of course, that brand was very affected of mobilization. Especially we have a lot of restaurants based in community in areas with businesses. It's like, it's aggressive, especially downtowns in cities. I would like I said, in traffic, just in the first 12 weeks, we are 80% of last year. It's only 20% that comes for ticket average. We did some come back to some promotions or some campaign in Mexico that is still on, that with some good price entries. That is called Los Clásicos.
Los Clásicos.
That is working very well. I mean, we see. I mean, traffic right now would say is, like I said, 10% up. The whole, actually the first three weeks of the year, we had better sales than any other weeks before of last year. We are on track. We are on track with in costs. We are on track in the labor management too. I think the Vips segment in Mexico, it will be back on track with where it's. What it was before in 2019. Remodeling, yes. We are only 60% of our restaurants, of our portfolio is in remodelations. We are doing around 30 remodelings or reimage this year in that brand.
As soon as we do a reimage, the sales go 15%-20% up. They have a payback of 25%, more or less. We are putting around $300,000, MXN 5 million-MXN 6 million in each store that we do a reimage or remodel.
Yeah. Just a little on what Armando responded, and part of your question was related to which extent this is a priority for us. Again, to reemphasize, Vips is our brand and it's clearly on the top priorities of our agenda. And clearly there are clear symptoms that on very positive results. We will keep on working on evolving the brand value proposition forward to make sure that we don't only get the recovery results that we are having, but those are consistent from the short term to the midterm. There are some learnings that we are getting from... José Luis was sharing the great results from Vips Spain, okay?
Vips Spain, three to four years ago, was in a similar, not the same, but similar situation on Vips Mexico a bit today. We are making sure as a company that we capture those learnings across. We are making sure as a company that that strategy is reinforcing our Vips strategy on the recovery to put Vips where it deserves. It's clearly on our top priority agenda. Okay?
That's clear. Thank you very much, Armando, Rafael. Thanks.
Thank you.
Yep. Thanks.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Mauricio Santos from GBM Asset Management. Please go ahead.
Hi, all. Thanks for the presentation. I was just wondering, what makes more sense, what's more profitable between investing in stores or investing in digital? How much room of maneuver do you have considering that you have to honor your franchisee agreements? Thank you.
Investing in stores.
Investing in digital.
Easy.
It's not one or the other. It is to understand which is the role that one and the other plays. Like the team and Armando was describing and Alberto was sharing, we are looking to. The main origin of our growth is going to be same-store sales and organic growth and how we are evolving and are concentrated on our current store performance. Digital plays a key role on that space, making sure that we capture more customers, that current customers become digital and become more frequent, and we increase the value of the sales on an omnichannel strategy that we presented.
Obviously, there is a complementary role on the remaining 20%-25% on the growth rate related to opening white spaces on further consolidate our brands where we do operate to make sure that that also makes the growth of the brand presence on existing geographies. With the right balance. Again, that connects with the multiple opportunities that we presented, again, picking up on José Luis as an example in France. Yes, we've got opportunity to become more digital, but if we don't capture the opportunity on the white space on the stores in France, we are not going to get the brand into the next level as a brand overall presence consolidation. That's what I would say.
If I can add, saying the same, is both, Mauricio. I mean, having more stores, filling those white spaces and having at the same time the best technology. This is part of the same white space virtual cycle that help us grow in a more profitable way. We need both of them.
It stands. The value proposition is like that. This is the value proposition of this brand. Either you want to go to the store, that's fine. You wanna make a line, that's fine. The barista wants to put your name, that's fine. If you wanna go digital by MOP and just take it or go to delivery, I need to give you all the ways or the channels. You can do delivery. I mean, that's up to the customer that wants to buy, the type of customer, the time of the day. You know, it depends what you like and when you want it. For us, we're gonna make it easier, and we have to be in the...
Our value proposition is where the client is, how he want it, and where he want it.
Mm-hmm.
You have made the exercise. Let's say the numbers you released were impressive, no? At least for both Domino's and... Each customer you manage to engage through the digital platform or generated multiple times more revenue, you know, compared to-.
Yeah.
It would seem to me that okay, you need to continue growing now that the white space as you mentioned, all this capacity to growth. Isn't it more profitable to grow through the digital platform, lever up?
No, no.
Additional capacity you already have?
At the end, we need to have the stores in order to supply the demands, you know? Then in the stores, I went this morning to this Starbucks that it has here to show that demand, that peak demand in 30 minutes was pretty heavy, you know, pretty heavy. If they didn't do that band thing with MOP, the line will be up to the street. That is a little bit the way of doing it now. You do MOP, the store is there, your product is ready, and you just pass by and we have time to put it in the order in the way that it arrives.
I think the digital is just part of the equation of an efficiency that we need to have and capture more and capture better and more customers all the time. Yeah, but the proof of the focus of digital. You're right. The majority of the growth is going to come from same-store sales. To realize that, we need to become more digital and need to become more omnichannel. That's a balance and that's a fact that is consistent with our strategy. That's what I would say. Yeah.
Although it's not reflected on the capital budgeting, at least for this year, you're spending much more on stores compared to technology.
Oh, yeah. For sure.
Okay. For sure.
Yeah. For around 37% is gonna be for the new openings. In terms of IT projects and other projects that are not only digital, it's around 16%. Yeah. Again, it's not only the absolute or the proportional numbers, but how one reinforce the other. Every new store that opens with a new technology will have a better return on investment because we are realizing the full potential on a new level on same-store sales. What we are putting on investment on technology, just to be very clear, is what we fully need to realize the full potential on all of our footprint for all of our stores, for all the functionality that we presented to look for the full potential opportunity.
We are also generating economies of scale behind that on this global approach.
It's more like, it increases return on investment. That's sort of how you... Okay.
Yeah.
How you blend it. Okay.
Exactly. We increase same-store sales on a per store basis. Obviously, the investment in technology compared to the CapEx in the stores, the right way to look at that is, if we are making sure that we are covering the full potentially on the entire plans that we presented, the answer is yes, and those leverage on our investments, okay?
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your question. Our next question is from Mr. Jeronimo de Guzman from Inca Investments. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. I just had a few just follow-up questions on some of the stuff you mentioned on the holding capacity and the opportunity for growth. Just wanted to understand what drives that higher estimate that you have for holding capacity when you look at Starbucks and Domino's versus what you see for Burger King. Then also when you talked about your unit growth plans, I was just curious about what drives kinda that decision of company operated versus sub-franchisee, and why that percentage is higher for or, yeah, is pretty high for Domino's in terms of how many you wanna sub-franchise versus operate yourself.
Jeronimo, thank you for the question. It's just regarding how are the contracts of the rights that we have, you know? In Burger King, for example, in Mexico, we don't own the master franchiser for a franchise. We are a sublicense that owns territory that is more in the region of Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara, some of the Bajio. That is a little bit what are we explaining. There's a market holding. We own Chile and Argentina, the whole region owned by us in a master license. In Spain that we only have 55 restaurants of Burger King, and as you know, we don't have the rights. RBI Spain is the one that have the rights. That's a limitation of growing regarding that brand.
It's especially in Mexico and Spain, you know? Regarding, of course, the Domino's Pizza, we have it by region, and we already have a concentrate. In Mexico, for example, we know very well we have 45% of the portfolio's franchise. They do have regions, and we already set with franchisees to see where are they gonna build stores in the next five years that are really part of the trade area where they are, you know, in states or city. That's how we come with this number, you know, talking to them about how is gonna be their plans for growing, you know? That's how I came with that number.
Is there kind of a, like, a decision in terms of, like, where does it make more sense for you and economics-wise to sub-franchise these stores versus operating them yourself?
Yeah. I think that first one I will tell you is it makes sense with two things. First of all, the reason that we know our area, that a store. We are not opening in single cities one store. It doesn't make a critical mass for all. When go to a city that we can open four or five stores, we don't go there. We let that city it's being owned by a franchise. It also we see the economics. If that store doesn't make EUR 20,000, for example, EUR 20,000 a week or more, we don't operate that store. We'd rather put it as a franchise unit, no? It's the. That is a little bit.
That model, that we are working first in an operational sense, that it makes sense for us to go to that store. Single stores in one city for us are, we are not good at open those kind of units or a low volume store. We are not the right partner to open that one, no?
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Yeah. I think Jeronimo, in terms of Europe, Domino's is the same story. I mean, the smallest cities and towns usually are good places for the franchisees. They are usually from there. They know the place, they know the people around. They are very successful in places where we would need more time to go. Or for example, another example that Alberto was mentioning is France. Yes, the opportunity is huge. We have sub-franchisees there in France with Starbucks, because Starbucks allows us to do that in France. What we do there, the strategy is to give them some territories and to push them to open stores there, open Starbucks stores there while we are concentrating in other territories.
We together, we build faster and better growth.
Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess the other question I had was within kind of these plans, you mentioned that there's. Yeah, you want to focus on the larger brands that have, can reach this critical mass like Starbucks and Domino's. I just wanted to ask in a broader sense, kind of where does that leave a lot of these casual dining brands? You still have a very big portfolio of casual dining brands that don't have that critical mass. Kind of where do you stand on those, and what are your plans for those?
Fortunately, I will tell you that fortunately, those brands are accretive to the portfolio. I mean, they have better margins than the QSR business for us. If you saw the report that we did from last year, all the brands that we have in next... The four brands of casual dinings, they are EBITDA store level with 21%-25%. That's a pretty amazing number, a good number. That could... That barriers for entry in that category is a little bit harder. We are, like I said, the... We are building 70 or, like, 20 stores, restaurants in the next year, but that's not gonna be our focus. We will see if we can leverage that from the portfolio. That will be an option. Yes, that will be an option.
We will see if that can be possible the next year or so.
Sorry, what do you mean by that last comment, that you could consider kind of selling these or?
I mean, in the near future, if there's someone that really wants to take that decision, we will look at it. I think right now they are accretive to the portfolio. If we build a store of our restaurant, we ask them the same or more is the return of investment targeted, that is 25%-30%. We fortunately do not have any of those brands, any contracts that we will lose the rights if we don't open X amount of stores. We are already in a good position of the stores that we have. We, you know, all those contracts are well signed in development situations, I mean.
We are very, obviously, open of talking with somebody if there is gonna need. We are in. To be honest, in Chile, we have two P.F. Chang's, and we have three Chili's that are in the market. People already know that we are exiting. Our franchise stores already know that we're exiting those markets. It's very open, eh? We'll consider any options in the near future.
Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I guess no rush there. Very profitable as well. In terms of margins, my last question was just in terms of that guidance that implies basically 2023 versus 2022, maybe some slight expansion in margins. I wanted to see if there were any more details you could provide on that in terms of kinda how does this look by regions, 'cause my understanding is maybe Europe is still facing some of these pressures, and maybe other markets are offsetting. Kinda how does that look when you look at the regions?
You compare margins by region. You will see that this first semester in Europe, because of the energy and part of the cost, the food cost, it's gonna be less margin that the one that we had last year. LatAm will be positive in terms of margin. Mexico, it's gonna be almost flat. You will see a better performance quarter by quarter, no? Because of the compression that we'll have with the margins that we have in Europe. 'Cause third quarter was pretty bad because of the cost of energy. The fourth quarter also, the energy it's it was higher than the cost of energy that we are projecting for this year.
We're gonna be almost flat, no? A little bit higher than the EBITDA margin that we had last year for the full year.
Sounds good. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your question. That was the last question. I will now hand over to Mr. Armando Torrado for final comments.
Okay. Thank you very much for... I hope you get a little bit more detail. We were probably more detailed than we should be, but having that group here, I think it's important, no? It's important. The last 2x or 3x that we were here, we were talking more about external situations that was engaging our problems, no? The pandemic and everything else, how to come back. I think today we're talking just about the business, about how things look in the future, the opportunity that we have, the team that is leading this company, and where are we gonna focus the best and how we're gonna make it happen for you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for investing in Alsea.
I just wanna say thanks also to Salvador because I think it's his last R&A. He's taking another opportunity. Salvador, thanks for all these times. Thank you for all this year. Gracias. He hope to see you. This is your house like always.
Alsea would like to thank you for participating in Alsea Day 2023. You may now disconnect.