AGM 2020

Sep 16, 2020

Is a priority for Couche Tard. We hope that we will be a virtual entity was necessary under these circumstances. We thank you for your flexibility and for being with us today. I now declare the meeting open in accordance with the company's bylaws. As Executive Chairman of the Board, I shall chair this meeting And Madame Valerie Zamenhor, Corporate Secretary, will serve as secretary for the meeting. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Since the assembly is being held virtually through live audio webcast, we believe it is necessary to set a few rules for it to run smooth. The agenda of this meeting includes: 1, the election of directors 2, the appointment of auditors 3, an advisory vote on our executive approach compensation policy as well as voting on 3 proposals from shareholders. Details of these matters are outlined in the management proxy circular. The Chairman will present all the proposals. They will not need to be seconded. Only the holders of record as of July 20, 2020 or their duly appointed proxies who are registered with our transfer agent and having obtained a control number prior to the meeting may participate, ask questions or vote at the meeting. All other persons may attend the meeting as guests. At the appropriate time, the shareholders or their duly appointed proxies will be asked to vote on the virtual meeting platform after all the points on the agenda have been presented. You will have only a limited time to do this. Registered shareholders and duly registered proxies who wish to communicate with members of the executive team or Board or who wish to ask a question? Is represented today by Mr. Bertrand Junier. Confirmation of company that it has sent the document regarding record on the books for 2019. I am the proxy secretary in the company's sector with the FDA. A company confirming that they have been sent to shareholders. I declare this meeting to conduct the business for which it was called. First item on the agenda concerns the receipts of the company's financial statement. I now submit for receipt to consolidated financial statements of Arimantas business. I'm getting a lot of feedback on this interpreter line. Is there something we can do? Financial office and we'll answer your questions at that time. As indicated in the Biographical news on the candidates are included in the management of the future made available to our shareholders. After 8 years service. Our company's success and prosperity. I Board Member since 1988, the Jean Michel Fisch, the new President of Director, Richard Fortin, Co Founder and Board Member since 1980. Ryan Panas, Board Member Member since 2015 Pierre Alsour, Co Founder and Board Member since 1988 Daniel Rabinho, Board Member since 2013. He's 2 Board since 19 and Executive Chairman of the Board. Each candidate has indicated their desire to serve as a Director of the company. I propose that each of these individuals elected as a Director of the company until the close of the next annual shareholders meeting or until a successor is duly elected or appointed? Next item on the agenda. You will be asked to vote on the election of each director and after on all other matters that's loaded upon. Now proceed with next point of the agenda, the appointment of the auditor for the current fiscal year and the authorization provided to the Board of Directors to set their compensation. A firm of interprofessional until the next LOP appointed auditor the Board of Directors be authorized to set auditors' compensation. That you will judge the competitive compensation program based on a performance based approach aligns our shareholders long term interest. Positive vote will not be binding on the Board. However, when examining the approach compensation 6 on the agenda are submitted to the by Medata, the presentation of the Defense sectional represented by Mr. Willie Gagnon. On annual activity of this company. So they report on the important and governance criteria in assessing the performance of executive officers and in setting their compensation. The second assumption is the disclosure of management of circular, while information whether or not a director is independent regulations and the 3rd motion, the adoption by the Board of Directors of a responsible employment policy that is to employ a living wage. The company has and was provided only in French. Appendix B of the management proxy circular also explains the company to deducts argument. Although the company We will now proceed with a vote for the single electronic talent. I the auditor 3, the advisory resolution on the company's executive compensation relative to compensation practices And 4, the shareholder proposal stated to the voting page. And first, press the 4 for abstain button next to the name of the candidate of the Brexit business. Secondly, you will also for or but next is a resolution to appoint Pricewaterhouse as the company is holding onethree of press 4 and expect to be a resolution on practices. And finally, 4th, press before or against the button to each of the 3 shareholders voting page will automatically be presented. You will now have a few moments to fill out the electronic balance and we will resume the meeting once the voting has ended. Need to hang up and dial back in. I'm going to take it while you do that. Yes. You're now. The difference. Okay. I'm taking it. Okay. Members of the company. I'm also pleased to announce that the resolution on the appointment of Prowse WaterhouseCoopers LLP and the advisory resolution on the company's executive compensation practices have been adopted. Finally, the 3 proposals submitted for consideration by shareholders at this meeting have been rejected. Details of the results will be available shortly on the SEDAR website and on the company's website. With the legal formalities now completed, it's time to close the meeting and move on to the corporate presentation. I therefore declare the meeting closed. What a year it has been so far. In 2020, we are celebrating Kushta's 40th anniversary and 2020 is also the dark year of COVID 19. It's a strange year to say the least, But there's nothing we can do. So first, I hope that you all are well and that your loved ones are well. We are in convenience store business. That's what we do. Our customers are also our neighbors. We've experienced the pandemic up close and it looks as though it's not over yet. It's confirmed that it's not over yet. At this time, early in the 2021 fiscal year, I'm feeling a deep sense of pride, pride in this company that I founded in 1980. But above all, pride in our people, the more than 130,000 devoted men and women in our 14,500 stores in 26 countries and territories. Our presence is global, but the recipe that has defined us since the start hasn't changed. Like my close collaborators, Jacques, Real, Richard, who have contributed to building our network, and later, Barayan Hanash, who rounded out the core of our team of builders, and it's now our big family. All those people who have joined us over the years who are enabling us to grow together. Our people are a pillar of the company and have always been a major factor of our success. Together, we've built a solid foundation that enables us to keep investing in our growth. We are always on the lookout for acquisition opportunities that may arise, but we remain disciplined as shown by our experience with Speedway in the United States. As you know, Couche Tard isn't looking for flashy deals. We're investing our shareholders' money and we have to provide them with good return on investment. Up to now, our patience and rigor have served us well. We listen to our investors. We have all who have also asked us to achieve organic growth. Many initiatives in our strategic plan leading in this direction are underway. Customer experience that stands out, products and services that fit the needs of new generations, all of this to make life a little easier each day for our customer. The pandemic affected our revenues, obviously, but not our performance. We're showing record net earnings of $2,400,000,000 all of this in U. S. Dollars. Our debt is down substantially. We also increased our return on capital compared to the 2019 fiscal year and our annual dividend has gone from CAD0.225 to CAD0.265 up 18%. Fiscal 2019, our valuation has risen by nearly 15%, with markets barely recovering from a major decline during the same period. In 2020, we laid the foundations for an even better and stronger company. Like it or not, our 40th birthday will always be associated with COVID-nineteen. It's one of the greatest challenges we've ever faced. Fortunately, our company is on solid footing. Thanks to our discipline, we are in an advantageous fiscal position to weather the storm well at the height of the crisis, lockdown measures caused our sales to plummet. Our decentralized business model and our ability to our agility enabled us to make quick decisions to protect our employees and customers and to make sure we had essential products available in our stores. The measures taken suited to each of our regions. I will leave it to Brian to tell you about our frontline heroes. What I wish to emphasize, however, is the extent to which this crisis has brought out the best in us at every level of the organization. I have seen people work with extraordinary efficiency to identify needs, recognize opportunities and find effective solutions. The entrepreneurial spirit is impressive. It has enabled us to ensure our company's success through periods of volatility over the last 40 years. It has also helped us get through a global pandemic. I wish to thank employees for the initiative and leadership they have shown. COVID-nineteen had also provided an opportunity to expedite innovative products from home delivery to contactless payments. These initiatives will continue to enhance customer experience. Our success lies in never thinking the peak has been reached. It's always believing we can do better. And doing better today means acting with a deep sense of social responsibility to be certain sustainability report. I invite you to take a look at it on our website. This year, we'll be turning sustainable development into a priority criteria that will apply to all our business decisions to all our strategic projects. We have outlined our ambitions and set high goals for ourselves. Brian can tell you more about this. We have also appointed executive with our communities. This is fundamental for Couche Tard. During the pandemic, our teams have worked relentlessly to keep our stores open and provide an essential service to our community. I thank them sincerely. An important phenomenon occurred this year with respect to social relationships around the world and it concerns all of us. I'm and it concerns all of us. I'm referring here to the protests that broke out followed the senseless death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and to the Black Lives Matter that has spread far beyond the United States. We are a company that runs neighborhood stores. The notion of inclusion is a key value for us. At the local level, our stores clearly reflect the diversity of the communities where we work and ensuring that inclusion and diversity become values upheld and promoted at every level of our company. I am encouraged by the initiatives taken in the last few months by Brian and the Executive We are firmly committed to continuing along this path in ensuring every community is valued and flourishing at seeking better products, better approaches and better more efficient processes. Our vision is to become the world's preferred destination for convenience and security around the world. Customer experience is the cornerstone of this initiative. To attract new generations, we're using new technologies that enable home different markets. We are adding more gamification to our marketing campaigns. This is a constant effort of innovation and adaptation. The size and scope of our company are assets. We can test and evaluate before introducing something new on a large scale. The fresh food fast program, always fresh, always ready is a good example of this. After pilots that worked well in many markets, we are aiming to introduce it to 1500 stores by the end of 2020. The pandemic is not over. This first virtual meeting in our history offers proof of this. Plenty of uncertainties remain in health, economic and social matters. The best we can do is to stay the course, keep advancing towards our goals, continue meaning something to our customers and creating value for everyone. I'm confident that we will be able to adapt to new normal. Thank you for your support and trust. Speaking for myself and on behalf of the Board and the shareholders, I express my deepest gratitude to all our people in our stores and support offices as well as the management teams. I now hand the microphone over to Brian, President and CEO, who will present a review of the past year. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This year clearly was one we always remember. It was a year that even during the most troubling of times, we became a better, stronger company. And it was a year that I've never been prouder to be CEO of Couche Tard. This year, we had record earnings and made significant progress on our strategic vision and we improved our customer experience both inside the store and at the forecourt. We also relied on our customary financial discipline as well as the advancements we've made in operational excellence to help us face the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-nineteen crisis. I have no doubt even with the challenges ahead with the global economy and the persistence of the virus that we will become an even better and stronger company in the year ahead. Before I continue, I want to extend my gratitude to all of you, our shareholders, our partners, our suppliers, our customers, and our employees for the trust and commitment you've shown us during this unforgettable year. I also want to pause and wish our team members and customers well as they face Hurricane Sally, which made landfall this morning in one of our core markets in Louisiana. This year when COVID-nineteen first emerged, Couche Tard had powerful tools to face it, an experienced team that's faced many natural disasters and business threats in the past, an agile decentralized model that allowed us to react quickly to local conditions, as well as a healthy balance sheet and most importantly a long term mindset to weather the economic turbulence of the pandemic. Starting in February as the virus started spreading from Asia to Europe, we mobilized the network to ensure the health and safety of our employees and our customers. Travel was quickly restricted and remote work procedures were created. At our stores, preventive measures were established very early in the pandemic, including extensive sanitation procedures, the installation of plexiglass dividers at our checkouts, floor markings to ensure proper distancing, and the supply of masks for our team members and customers where permitted or required. We also took critical steps around food safety, enforcing the strict cleaning and food preparation areas and suspending the use of refillable mugs and cups. Within weeks, our store members became frontline heroes in the pandemic, which is really a period of tremendous uncertainty at the beginning. They courageously took care of each other, our customers and our business, and we quickly implemented additional measures to support them and ensure their well-being, especially in North America with our hourly employees who do not have the same government safety nets as in other regions where the company operates. These included an emergency appreciation pay premium as well as emergency sick care plans for anyone who had either been diagnosed with COVID-nineteen or placed under mandatory quarantine. We focus on remaining open and operating and committing ourselves to being part of the solution in the communities and where we work and live. We're among the 1st retailers to offer free dispense beverages for all healthcare workers across the globe, giving way over 3,000,000 drinks in the 1st months of the pandemic. We donated over 40,000,000 meals to Feeding America through local food banks and pledged 5,000,000 more meals in Canada. Our meaningful initiatives took place across the network including little thank yous, digital gift coupons and home delivery to the elderly and the frail in many markets. I'm proud to say that during the pandemic, even as we prioritized health and safety, we stayed the course with our strategic goals. At every level of the company, we remain focused on transforming and improving our customer experience through our work on operational excellence, branding, pricing, promotions, loyalty and innovation. 1st in growing our Global Circle K brand, we completed the conversion of our entire European network and pushed forward in North America. We now have close to 90% of our stores across the network with a new global brand. Over the course of the year, we also continue to expand the Circle K fuel across North America with now more than 2,300 Circle K branded fuel sites. In every way, our actions are bearing fruit as brand awareness has never been higher with our brand trackers in both Europe and North America outperforming the industry in terms of growth and awareness. Throughout the global network, our customers can easily identify our Circle K and we're seeing increased loyalty to that brand. Importantly, our rebranding allows us to speak with a clear voice and a unified message, which has been especially meaningful as we've navigated the COVID-nineteen pandemic and provided support for our employees, our customers and our communities. To build on that brand loyalty, we pressed the accelerator on several basket and traffic building loyalty initiatives. Lyft, our digital point of sale platform, is now deployed across our North American network and we're preparing to bring it to Europe. This digital platform gives us the ability to understand our customers' purchase histories and offer them very personalized discounts based on the composition of the basket. We've also expanded several other loyalty and promotional programs, which create savings, award point for fuel, food and beverages and give everyday fuel discounts to our most loyal customers. This year, we also made great strides in a state of the art data driven pricing approach that customizes our merchandise prices to meet the leads of our local markets. As we start to roll out this initiative, it's clear that being more responsive to local needs is a beneficial solution to our neighborhood customers and our business. As Elaine mentioned, innovation is one of the characteristic strengths of the company and this year we doubled down to get to better respond to the changing needs of our customers. We've expanded our home delivery to almost 1,000 locations across the network and developed new frictionless and touchless solutions such as click and collect, which we also have in about 1,000 stores in the U. S. And Europe. We're leveraging our CircleK app to provide ordering and payment capabilities as well as license plate recognition for fuel payment in Norway. We also just announced a partnership to pilot autonomous checkout solutions. This is an exciting development as the emerging technology aims to make our checkout experience as easy as just walking in and walking out. It's also uniquely designed to work with our existing store layouts. Throughout the year, we built a strong success with our gamification initiatives in Europe and rolled out several mobile centric games and promotions to our customers in the U. S. And Canada with great success. As we look to constantly improving our offering, we use our scale, our agility to share best practices and learnings across our global network. This year, one of our key priorities has been expanding our fresh food program from network across the U. S. We launched fresh food fast early this year testing a variety of formats to identify what worked best. While training and food sampling was put on hold during the pandemic, we continue to with the structural rollout now have the program deployed in over 1,000 U. S. Sites. We're opening dozens of stores a week with the goal of hitting 1500 locations by the end of the calendar year and we feel very confident in achieving that. I'm happy to report that we're seeing positive results and customer enthusiasm, especially for our breakfast sandwich assortment, our hot and ready pizza, and our fresh baked in store cookies. This initiative is already boosting traffic and baskets across our locations and we're excited by its simple preparation, speed of service, as well as the ability to adapt it to local taste. Turning to coffee, we deployed our coffee in demand program in 95% of the U. S. Network with approximately 13,500 being the cup machines. Customer reaction remains very positive to on demand brewing, which delivers the freshest coffee possible while also reducing waste and maintenance costs. In Europe, we introduced Circle Case certified blends with new equipment that delivers a breeze to quality beverage in less than 90 seconds. And in Quebec, we rolled out a new coffee blend focused on driven from our customer focus groups. In cold dispense, we expanded the Polar Pop! Program to our northern tier sites and an additional 130 stores in Canada, launching exclusive and first to flavor markets to help us drive engagement and sales. In Ireland and the Baltics, Froster, our frozen beverage, is now not only a big hit, it's a social media phenomenon and we'll roll it out to more sites in Europe in the coming year. On age restricted products, which continue to represent an important portion of our sales. As an experienced and responsible retailer, we continue to rigorously comply with laws and regulations in each of our markets. In the U. S. Where we've seen increased tightening of legislation and restrictions, we benefited from the growing demand for smokeless tobacco and other alternative tobacco products, particularly white modern white nicotine. In Canada, we've had strong traction from premier vaping products and we also continue to explore the cannabis opportunity with our strategic agreements and investments in Canopy Growth and Fire and Flower, allowing us to learn more about this space and its future potential. Fuel remains one of the prime movers of our business and this year I mentioned earlier we expanded our Circle K Fuel brand through increased presence on our forecourts and dedicated promotional and loyalty tactics to drive higher traffic and volumes. We also introduced dynamic pricing to this category and we've been testing it at 2,400 sites with encouraging results. Our Norway market remains the clear leader and pioneer in electric vehicle adoption and we currently have installed more than 4 50 chargers at 81 sites across the country. We've also developed a Circle K branded home charging solution and installed thousands of chargers in partnership with residential complexes and office buildings. Our store managers face some of the greatest challenges in our business, which is why we've listened carefully to their feedback and have made significant strides this year in improving our operational excellence tools, making it easier for our store employees to better serve our customers by reducing administration and labor challenges. In North America, we rolled out a best in class labor model that adapts to individual store needs and determines our needs based on key metrics. With that, a new scheduling tool automates the creation of schedules and permits easy shift swapping. In this past year alone, over 5,000 stores underwent a refresh of backrooms, offices, cash register stores and cooler areas as part of our easy visit to create a more positive work environment for our team members. In Europe, administrative oriented hours in the stores have been cut 20% since the beginning of our 5 year strategy. Coming to fiscal 2020, we accelerated the pace of new store construction after a significant effort to grow our project pipeline. We had good momentum with the builds until the pandemic caused a necessary pause. We've also introduced a new design for our North American sites that mirrors in many ways the holiday store format that improves the customer flow through the site. We continue the rollout of our new store concepts to all 9 of our countries in Europe with enhanced food and merchandising, fuel charging, Wi Fi washrooms and parking. We now have hundreds of these truly attractive stores which have led to improved profitability and sales in our European market. As Helane said, we continue to watch carefully for M and A opportunities in the U. S. In particular, a market we know well and where we can achieve significant synergies due to our scale. We also remain interested in expanding to the Asia Pacific markets where we see attractive demographic trends and solid economic growth potential. Our solid financial foundation, healthy balance sheet, as well as our historically disciplined approach puts us in a great position to move on opportunities when they represent strong value for our shareholders. By far, our greatest strength in this company is our people and we made progress this year in solutions that improve communications, facilitate recruitment and training, strengthen employee engagement. Digitization has been key to these efforts and we now fully implemented our digital HR resources platform to all North American employees and are preparing to start it in Europe. We also launched Gamify Training in all of our European divisions, which focuses on sales techniques and food and that have achieved a 90% completion rate and led to an increase in basket size where we deployed it. This is now being successfully piloted in designated U. S. Business mark business units. I'm very excited by the potential of this training. It's engaging and lets people train where they want, when they want on their mobile devices. In terms of diversity and inclusion, this year I proudly signed the CEO Action Pledge, making us the 1st convenience store retailer to join the largest CEO driven business commitment to advancing diversity inclusion within the workplace. This effort was championed by our Women's Council, which celebrated its 1st year formation with many milestones, including a training initiative to increase both awareness of unconscious bias and inclusivity across the company. In the summer, following increased passion in the U. S. Against systemic racism, we began encouraging conversations, courageous conversations across the organization and pledged to listen, learn and work toward meaningful changes so that our company better reflects the diversity of our customers and our store employees. Sustainability, as Elaine discussed, has been integral to our business and we've committed ourselves to creating a more responsible future. We started to carve out our sustainability goals in our first global report last year in 2019. This year in our second report launched in July, we set our sights even higher with ambitious targets focused on 4 key areas where we believe we can really make a difference: fuel, energy consumption, food packaging and waste and then finally workplace safety. While we have far to go, I'm truly proud of the promise and progress we're making for our customers, our employees and our stakeholders as we work toward a better and safer world. As we enter this new fiscal year and a future where the continued threat of the virus and the global economy is uncertain, we've taken the learnings from the pandemic to position our people and business to thrive and grow in the long term. We will maintain the extensive sanitation measures at our stores and offices and expect our customers to choose the ease and safety of our locations more than ever over the big box sites. We will continue to supply products which became important from masks, emergency goods, alcohol and tobacco to fresh food items and more. We will continue to innovate and plan for more frictionless future that meets our customers rapidly changing needs. All the while, we will push toward the strategic growth potential of our business as we make our customers' lives a little bit easier every day. In closing, I want to once again thank all of you as well as our team members, our partners and our customers for your support during this memorable year. Throughout, we have shown ourselves to be one team. We're in this together and truly proud that in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis, we maintained our characteristic financial discipline. We stayed the course on our Double Again strategy. We remain committed to improving our customer journey. Putting all that together, I truly believe we're a better, stronger company. So with that, I'll turn it over to our CFO, Claude Tessier to provide further financial details. Thank you. So in the past 10 years, how could we go ahead in doing year after year? As you just noticed, our EBIT has increased by more than 15% and more than 6% in the past year and 9.7% demand increase. We could see all of the challenges that went through with the 2011, our EBITDA have increased by 22% for more than 4 $1,000,000,000 increasing our operational. Then what shows the creation of value actually increased by 20 percent 30% in the past year in order to reach almost $50,000,000,000 There was another good stock exchange performance since 2019. Category B shares actually increased by 13% and this corresponds to the benchmark reference. As well in the last few years, the value of Anantasoku's task class exceeding greatly the main benchmark today in North America. Finally, as we underline our 40th anniversary, I believe it is worth mentioning based in Nariman Couche Tard. And the time has come to thank all of our shareholders who 34 years ago actually invested more than $1,000 each within the company and now they can see the return of $950,000 without counting the dividends that were received. As we have discussed recently with the investors in the past year, we have the 5 year plan that foresees a balance. With 2 years into it, we realized more than one and it is certainly not a position that is considered as being a negative one. So multiple initiatives that were attached to hit an excellent work by our teams. Since we have not gone beyond what was accomplished with Holiday in 2019, we will always remain on the look for new opportunities. According to service and merchandise actually all of the betterment brought into our offer as the consequence of Trafigena's toys, for example, it has increased by 0.1% to 0.5 percent excluding the PAPL activities, which we sold during the fiscal year and excluding the negative impact from currency variation, the increases would have been approximately 2.2% to 1 0.5% respectively. As for same store sales, they grew 2.1% in the U. S. And 0.1 percent in Europe and 2.8% in Canada. These results are even more impressive when you consider that we cycled very strong comparable sales in 2019 and given the impact from the pandemic at the end of the year. On that last point, at the end of the Q3 prior to the impact from COVID-nineteen, same store sales growth was 2.9% in the U. S, 2.1% in Europe, 2.3% in Canada. Now in our road transportation fuel category, we saw a volume that decline of 4.5% in 2020. That said, due to the strong fuel margin, our gross profit margin for fuel growth 13.5% during the year. The decrease in fuel volumes was due to the part of the divestiture of portions of our wholesale network as well as the sale of CABL excluding these 2 factor fuel volumes would have declined 3.9%. This notably includes the negative impact of confinement measures that were enacted in the month of March April. In the U. S, our fuel market for the year was €0.312 per gallon, very solid performance as the 3rd consecutive year of improvement in Europe and Canada, while margins were slightly lower year over year, they remain healthy nonetheless. The changes we have been bringing to our business model in Canada combined with wage increase in a number of region across North America has a meaningful impact on our operating expenses in fiscal 2020 as well in order to support the launch of our new 5 year strategy plan and to accompany our numerous growth activity we invested towards the promotional activities and Omega D plan throughout most of the year. This investment were planned in advance and have worked hard as we always do to mitigate their impact. We also dealt with the pandemic related cost increase in all regions we operate our network. While operating expenses grew by 2.8% last year, we are seeing many benefits stemming from a strategy to optimize costs and have doubled our efforts to adjust expenses in the 4th quarter in order to align our business with a decrease in traffic induced by the pandemic. We remain determined to maintain long term OpEx growth below the inflation rate and are already seeing some meaningful progress on that front as seen in our Q1 results published on September 1, which showed a decline in cost year over year. We once again saw last year the strength of our business. The overall performance allowed us to conclude this year by $2,200,000,000 an increase of 18.5% over the prior year. We once again saw last year the strength of our business model as the company generated significant cash flow. Our EBITDA increased 26% compared to the previous year reaching $4,500,000,000 In the same period, we generated cash flow of more than $2,000,000,000 up approximately 11%. In order to maintain our leadership position in the global convenience industry, we aim to reinvest 35% and 40% of our EBITDA towards capital expenditures with about 20% of that amount allocated towards the maintenance of the stores and the remain their earn mark for growth initiative such as new stores as rollout of our commercial programs. Finally, we took advantage of the exceptional results for promising future to raise the quarterly dividend by 12% in the 3rd quarter for EUR0.0621 per share to EUR0.07 And notably, we have now our dividend by 14 consecutive years since instituting our 1st dividend payment of November 15, 2005. This demonstrates our commitment to rewarding our shareholders. Additionally, we continue to execute on our share repurchase program, which was announced at the end of the fiscal 2019 and represented 4% of our Class B sub voting share flow during fiscal 20 20, we spent more than BRL470,000,000 to buy back 16,400,000 shares. In total, we returned more than $685,000,000 to our shareholders last year after having invested fully in our growth initiative and in the maintenance of our operations. As we have historically done, we continue to pay down our mortgage with some amounts having come due during the fiscal year by keeping ear to ground in regards to movement, the debt to market, we have been able to benefit favorable environment and raise to $1,500,000,000 to further strengthen the balance sheet. That said, due to our strong organic growth, we saw a leverage rate to 1.6, a level that is well below our target 2.25. Fiscal year 2020 has allowed us to improve our return on capital employment, a metric that is practically important to us in evaluating our operational efficiency. As demonstrated over time, as we integrate acquisitions and drive organic growth, we are able to get more out of our assets. So we have repeatedly proven our ability to increase the returns following the integration of large acquisition and fiscal 2020 was not an exception. A strong operating performance combined with efficient capital allocation strategies have allowed us to drive a return on capital employment of 15% in the past year. Now the highlights, we now show our most recent trends as reported in Q1 results on September 1. Merchandise same store sales growth was positive across our 3 geographies as many markets took steps towards gradually relaunching their economies in May June following widespread confinement. Importantly, this performance demonstrated resilience of our business model and the key role that we play in our communities. As for fuel volumes, they decreased across our network as restrictive social measures and work from home had a negative impact on mile driven. That said, we saw stabilization of the volumes during the quarter and a gradual increase since having touched bottom of the spring. As mentioned, we are pleased our efforts continue and reduced costs as operating expenses declined by 0.3%, thanks in large part to the hard work and discipline of our teams towards that goal. This cost optimization is especially impressive and we could see that the performance allowed us to generate adjusted net earnings of $777,100,000 increase of 44.2 percent over the prior year and an increase of 47.9% on an adjusted diluted earnings per share basis. From an acquisition standpoint, our balance Our balance sheet is a great position with more than $6,000,000,000 in total liquidity at the end of the first quarter. And balance sheet capacity is less than $1,26,000,000 of the balance sheet capacity to invest more than $9,000,000,000 should a worthwhile opportunity present itself. Lastly, our shareholders can rest assured that we will continue to adhere to our strict financial discipline in the execution of our strategy, whether in our investments to drive getting growth and while evaluating acquisition opportunities. With that, the floor is yours, Alain. Thank you, Claude. We will now move on to the question period. Only registered shareholders and duly appointed proxies may ask questions. You may that is offered on the virtual meeting platform. Indicate which member of Board of Directors you would like to ask your question. Retunded questions will not be answered. Are there any questions? Did we wait or there are no other questions Jean Marc? No. We had time to compile questions and nothing came in. So that ends the question period. On behalf of the members of the Board of Directors and on my own name, I wish to congratulate quite the job they did during this pandemic. So thank you all for your presence today.