Restaurant analyst at Oppenheimer and excited to have Domino's back at our consumer conference. We upgraded Domino's in January of this year, thankfully. Domino's is the largest pizza company now by system wide sales and it is the best system wide sales growth in the industry, at least that's what the data suggests. And with the company, we have Jeff Lawrence, CFO. He's going to go ahead and give a fifteen minute presentation or so, and then we're going to open it up to Q and A.
So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Jeff. Thanks, Jeff.
Great. Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As Brian said, we're super happy to be here, again at the conference. Always a good chance for us to come and speak to you all. And, we appreciate you making the time to listen to what's been going on in Ann Arbor, Michigan in almost 90 countries around the world.
I'll walk you through this investor presentation again about fifteen minutes or so, and then I'll leave hopefully some time for some Q and A. So if there's a question you've been saving up to ask, the Domino's guys were here today, it'd be a great time to do it. This is just the forward looking statement disclosure. We call it legal stuff. In the event I do that, we'll refer back to this slide and hopefully, I won't get into too much trouble back at the barn.
Domino's is a global quick service restaurant franchisor. We are the largest pizza company in the world, a claim that we've been able to take over the last year or so. And we're a diversified business. We have about 9,000 or more stores in international, again, in more than 85 countries around the world, utilizing a master franchise model. And on the domestic side, more than 5,600 stores run by nearly 800 independent business owners.
And added to that, I we run about 400 corporate stores in The U. S. Only, which is also a very good business. But a big business, a global business and one that's diversified between international and The U. S.
In international, more than half of our restaurants are run by four very large, very successful, very sophisticated public master franchisees. You can see them listed here, on this slide. Each one of them, themselves with a market capitalization of more than $2,000,000,000 a piece. And one of the great things about this arrangement is these guys, again, are very sophisticated. They're innovators.
Sometimes they're teaching us just as much as we're teaching them. But it's a very healthy relationship and one that's been an important part of the growth engine and the growth algorithm for us outside of The United States with these four partners. Our business model is pretty simple. We're primarily a franchisor and primarily our free cash flow comes from franchise royalties, both in The U. S.
And international. In The U. S. With a standard franchise model, we get a contractual rate of about 5.5%. International is around 3% on average.
There are some higher than that, some lower than that, but 3% on average. You'd And expect that to be lower given the fact that we have master franchisees in those countries running the operations directly. Retail sales also generates domestic and international e commerce fees for us. We have about 25 countries outside The U. S.
That are on our e commerce stack with our proprietary point of sale system as well. And in The U. S, of course, 100% of the franchisees are on that. In The U. S, they pay us about $0.25 in order.
Digital helps us to defray some of the significant costs that we do incur to build this technological capability. And in addition to that, we also, again, have a pretty large supply chain division, about $1,700,000,000 in revenues there, operate commissaries in The U. S. And Canada, good ROIC on that business. And I'd mentioned the 400 corporate stores earlier.
What matters most to us, it's about global retail sales. We're very fortunate that as we sit here in 2018 as the global market leader, we've been able to get there by finally really attaining the balance that we were looking for. So a nice balance, certainly U. S. Versus international.
But when you talk about retail sales, we're achieving the balance between comps and unit growth to drive retail sales growth, which is exactly kind of the way you'd want to draw it up if you were to whiteboard it. We're very fortunate they're taking a long time to get there. But we're able to get there because our franchisees enjoy industry leading economics, and that's something that we're very, very, very focused on maintaining for our independent franchisees around the world. We talk a lot about fortressing markets, that we are going to continue to split territories both in The U. S.
And abroad. In international, this strategy has already worked phenomenally well in places like Australia, places like India, places like The UK. And in The U. S, we've even done it in Seattle. We talked about that at our Investor Day, where we go in, we really try to forfeit some market.
And what we've seen in almost all of those experiments is we come out a very strong dominant number one player in those local neighborhoods and marketplace and gives us a lot of confidence that we can replicate that in other countries around the world and also here in The U. S. As we try to get to the 8,000 stores that we think we can build here. As you know, pizza category, both in The U. S.
And abroad is incredibly fragmented. More than 50% of the industry is independents and regionals. The big three or four guys actually have less than half the market share, both in The U. S. And abroad.
That creates an enormous opportunity to us to flex scale kind of the old school way in procurement and advertising, but more importantly, the kind of the new school way in technology has really proven to be a market share changer for us and something that we're very, very keen on making sure that we maintain that technological leadership and innovation by leveraging our scale. This chart here is our global retail sales growth since 2011. In the yellowish color, we have the international store retail sales growth and in the blue is The U. S. Business.
And as you can see, working left to right, we've become more balanced. And we've become more balanced because we're not only getting the comp growth in The U. S. And international businesses, but we're also getting the unit growth first and more materially in the international business, but more recently seeing a nice unit growth, two sixteen net stores in 2017 from The U. S.
Business. And why are we getting that? We're getting that because we have the best unit economics in the business. Our franchisees recognize that and they start to swing hammers and open up new units. This is the international only business for retail sales growth.
And here, what we really want to highlight is the balance between comps, which are in blue and units that impact retail sales growth, again, in the yellow orange color. And what you can see is there's a nice balance here between both units and comp growth, again, exactly kind of what we're striving for and something that we're going to really focus on trying to maintain going forward. This is the same slide for The U. S. Business.
This one is a little different. As you can see, retail sales growth in The U. S. Used to be about comp growth because we really didn't have a lot of unit growth. And the reason why we didn't have a lot of unit growth in The U.
S. Business is because unit economics weren't good enough, quite frankly. Well, we fixed that this decade. Our U. S.
Franchisees are enjoying all time fifty eight year, all time record profitability in dollar growth for EBITDA in the four walls. And as you can see, that started to have an impact on, again, the unit growth. You can start to see that balance now coming in just like an international story starting to come in on The U. S. Business as well.
This is simply a twenty year look at our comps. A lot of brands will not show you a twenty year look at comps, but we will. We do like to do things a little bit different. And what you can see is in The U. S.
Business, between a 3.5% and a 4% comp for an extraordinarily long period of time, twenty year history, 17 out of twenty one years positive. And in international, we are coming up quite soon on 100 consecutive quarters if we can continue to execute 100 consecutive quarters of international comp growth, just an outstanding long term track record of success. One thing I'd to point out, again, we like to do things a little bit differently at Domino's. I want to point you to 2006 to 2008 in The U. S.
Comp on the top. A lot of people think that, that was the recession or it was macros. That was self inflicted. We took our eye off the ball at that point in time. We weren't driving comps the way we needed to.
We weren't providing the consumers with the value proposition that we really needed to resonate. And as a result, we experienced three years of same store sales decline. That led to the reinvention of the brand in many ways. But I think the important lesson for us is, we don't forget when we've made the mistakes in the past, we try to dedicate ourselves not to make those again. And as you can see this decade, we've done a pretty good job so far of avoiding those pitfalls.
You add all that up, unit growth, more than 5,000 stores since 2012. Again, the blue bar, The U. S. Business, it was our number one market of growth in 2017, The U. S.
Business. We wouldn't have been able to even dream that five, ten years ago. But you can see that the business is growing. Franchisees with the unit economics are recognizing that and they're investing capital into the brand at an accelerating rate, which is very exciting for us as the brand owner. U.
S. Business, I mentioned this a little earlier. We have all time high franchise economics. That's what's leading to the store growth that I just showed you. And again, this is consistently since 02/2008, year after year after year, the dollar profitability of the franchisees in The United States continues to go up.
Certainly, it's a challenge to do that for a very long period of time, but we are committed to making sure that our franchisees win economically because we know that's the only way we can also win globally. And this is a metric that we share. Not a lot of brands will show you the unit economics for their franchisees. We're very proud that we do that. And we are committed to making sure that our franchisees win right alongside of us.
Our industry, it's a great industry to be in. It's a healthy global industry. It's growing. But again, it's very fragmented, which creates a lot of share opportunity, I think for the big guys generally, but certainly for Domino's, given our strategies and our level of execution recently. You can see on the left hand side, the independents and regionals have 43% of total pizza in The United States in 2017 I'm sorry, in delivery.
On the right hand side, they have 52% of total pizza. And what that means is that's a long runway, an opportunity doesn't mean that we'll do it, but an opportunity for us to continue to execute at a high level and hopefully continue to take share, not only from some of the big guys, we'd like doing that as well, but hopefully from the independents and regionals in the category. On the international side, a ton of opportunity there, very large and growing international pizza industry. This chart simply shows you the top 15 markets that we have by store count in international at the end of twenty seventeen. And what this is just showing is we have at least 5,000 units to grow just in these 15 markets alone, doesn't include the 70 markets that I'm not showing you on this slide, which includes some pretty big places like Russia, China, etcetera.
But we've got a lot of opportunity for growth. And again, buoyed by the fact that it's a very fragmented industry. You can't talk about Domino's without talking about technology. We pride ourselves on our story of being the last to market of the big pizza players and catapulting past them to be the leader in technology. How do you do that?
Well, you take the long and the hard road, you dedicate yourself to really courageous choices, including ten or fifteen years ago deciding we were going to have one point of sale system that was going to be really important and getting that through The U. S. System as fast as we could. When e commerce comes around, you can then vertically integrate your e commerce capability both in The U. S.
And now abroad. And that just, again, creates a lot of momentum and we innovate faster and more efficiently, we believe than the other guys. So when we do pizza profiles, when we do your easy order, when you want to order on Alexa or through Twitter, we're ready to do that faster and more efficiently than the other guys. And we think the consumers have recognized that and have given us their loyalty buoyed by the fact that we also have a pretty good loyalty program. We've shared some data on this.
We have more than 15,000,000 active loyalty members, which puts us in the top one or two loyalty programs in all of QSR more broadly. And again, just one more thing that we think we're doing that's helping to drive share gain over a longer period of time. We built some shareholder value along the way as you'd expect when you're delighting your consumers around world, giving them great value. You can see we have a 20% plus earnings per share compounded annual growth rate over a very long period of time. While we don't give earnings guidance going out, our goal is to continue to grow this number at a healthy rate so that those top line retail sales really efficiently flow through to the bottom line, both in EBITDA growth and EPS growth, and hopefully, care of our shareholders along the way.
Speaking of taking care of your shareholders, we are very fortunate to have a very strong free cash flow model. We create an enormous amount of organic free cash flow, as you would expect, from a large global successful franchise brand. And we reinvest that in the business. But when we reinvest invested aggressively in the business, we still have a lot left over. We are committed to getting that back into the hands of our shareholders in an efficient manner.
Since 02/2006, we returned more than US4 billion to dollars our shareholders, a combination of share buybacks, accelerated share repurchases, ordinary dividend, special dividends. We've basically done it all. But the point here is we returned that free cash flow back to our shareholders and get about our business. Just quickly, we pioneered higher leverage in the QSR restaurant industry back in 1998 through every economic cycle, every economic model, every financial eventuality. Our model performs extraordinarily well in that three to six turns of EBITDA leverage range.
We just did another recapitalization earlier this year to lock in additional debt at long term fixed interest rates. And again, why are we doing this? We're doing it to lower the cost of capital longer term, really to benefit our equity holders along the way. It's not been easy. A lot of folks think it's simply the app on the phone, the Domino's app on the phone to create all this value over time.
Boy, I wish it was that easy. But this has been a decade long process of really, again, having a lot of courage, taking a lot of hard hills and with our franchisees around the world, building just what we believe to be a better pizza brand. Started, of course, in 2010 with the pizza turnaround. What do you do? You got to fix your product.
Again, I view it as kind of old school product service image, new school technology. You've got to do all of it well and you've got to dedicate yourself to constantly improving product service image and technology or you simply will fall behind in this very competitive category. You can kind of look through the rest of the stuff we've done over the last ten or fifteen years, but each one of these is really an important building block for where we are today. And our commitment is to continue to invest very aggressively to make sure that we can stay ahead and keep the lead that we've earned. I mentioned some of these before, again, ninety seven consecutive quarters of international comp growth, twenty eight consecutive quarters in The U.
S. Business, digital sales in The U. More than 60%. In a decade going from zero to 60 in not three point nine seconds, but in ten years. And again, really focused on driving order counts and traffic ticket in the QSR industry, as most of you know, it's a dangerous game.
Consumers know if you just poke them in the eye and you want to take price from them and they have lots of other options within quick service restaurants to get fed by. We've really dedicated ourselves to a value proposition where we're going to primarily grow our business and have grown our business through orders or traffic growth. It's a share of stomach game is kind of our view of the world here. So we're going continue to take that view. It doesn't mean that we can't take smart ticket over time, but I don't think you'll see us just nonchalantly raising prices just to raise prices.
Consumers do notice in this category. And so if we do any of that kind of stuff, it's always with a data driven approach. Where are we headed? We're always focused we're always aggressive, always focused down the field. We have our reimage campaign globally substantially completed, which gives us what we believe to be one of the best images in quick service restaurants, again, globally.
We're going to continue to really focus on the carryout business. We were really an accidental carryout company for the first fifty years of our fifty eight years of existence. It's really been in the last five years that we've really dedicated ourselves to being a serious, purposeful, intentional player in the carryout space. And I think this is really important. There are a lot of people in our industry that are pivoting into food delivery, which is extraordinarily difficult, but quite frankly, also not as large as the carryout business.
And we like to do things a little bit differently. We're doing exactly the opposite. We're got a really good stranglehold on food delivery, certainly in pizza, but we're actually going and getting really serious about the carryout business where there are many, many more transactions and dollars to be had. And so we're on that journey right now. I think we're doing a pretty nice job over the last four or five years there, but a lot of share opportunity there for us if we can continue to execute.
This is our three to five year outlook that I shared with folks at our Investor Day down in Florida in January. Basically, percent to 6% comps is what we think we can do more often than not over the next three to five years globally. We think we can do global net units of 6% to 8% per year off of the existing base. Again, three to five year outlook more often than not. And when you add that up, and this is really the important one is we think we can do 8% to 12% global retail sales growth.
If we do this and execute well and we do 10% global retail sales growth, a lot of great things I think are going to happen for our franchisees, for our consumers and ultimately the shareholders of our great brand. I'll skip the 2018 outlook. This is the same thing that I gave you in January. And with that, I want to thank you again for your time and attention. We really appreciate the interest in the brand.
And I think we have about fifteen minutes or so to do some Q and A with my friend, Brian Bittner.
Thanks, Jeff. And you guys, so if you have a question, please don't be scared, raise your hand, we'll get you a microphone. Just first of all, at a time when in The United States when a lot of brands are pulling back on growth, even shutting stores down, you're actually accelerating unit growth. And obviously, it's because of the unit economics. But what is it about that strategy that makes sense for Domino's as far as accelerating unit growth and not just relying on same store sales to drive your retail sales growth here in The United States?
Yes. So we're very fortunate to be in a position finally to see a lot of store growth opportunity in The U. S. Last year, we opened up more than 200 restaurants net in The U. S.
Business, was our largest growing market, as I mentioned earlier, in the world. And we're doing that because, as you mentioned, the unit economics are just fantastic for our franchisees in The U. S. But franchisees don't build stores or material amount of stores when you have one or two years of success. What they're really focused on is, do we believe in where the brand is going?
Do we believe in the management team? Do we believe in the market opportunity? That's what's going to get them basically to swing hammers in all of these new opportunities that we've identified. And so the way we look at it is much the way it happened in the 1980s and 1990s, where you have two stores in a town, you probably should have a third. And in our view of the world and our franchisee view of the world is someone is going to split that territory, some brand will build a store in between the two existing stores as an elementary example, and it might as well be us.
We have the best unit economics. We believe we have the best future of a brand amongst our major competitors. And so our franchisees are leaning in. They are building a lot of units. Again, I mentioned over 200 in 2017.
But again, you only see that when you really see a belief by your franchisees at times not only are good today, but they're going to remain good. And we think that kind of psychological mentality is really an important one. And again, we just had our biannual worldwide rally in Las Vegas about a month ago. Our franchisees around the world are super excited about where we're at as a brand, but also where we're going. We talk about technology and we talk about autonomous vehicles and we talk about maybe being 100 digital company, not just through the app, but potentially through phone orders as well.
And that gets them super excited about where the brand is going. They reach into their pocket. They continue to put a lot of capital into the brand. That's what gets us excited as a brand owner.
And you had a goal to be the number one pizza player and you've done that. And now you set a new goal to become the dominant number one pizza player because at the end of the day, I think you still have something like only 15% share as the number one player, which symbolizes the opportunity in pizza given the fragmentation. If you do then achieve your goal of becoming dominant number one, what's going to have driven that five years from now or whatever it may be?
Yes, think it's a couple of things. I think one is continuing to have courageous leadership. Rich Allison coming on board just in a couple of weeks here. He's an insider at the company. Just an amazing talent, has just led enormous amount of growth in our international division.
Just like Patrick, he's a courageous leader. He is not going to shy away, from making aggressive investments and taking some smart risks and some smart bets. I think we want is we need to continue to do that and I think we will continue to do that. Two is, we need to continue to have a relentless focus on our franchisees' well-being. Again, we like to think of ourselves a little differently sometimes.
We share our franchisee economics, not a lot of brands do that. But the reason why we do that is multifaceted. One important one is we want our franchisees to know that we're putting their well-being and joining that with the brand's well-being. We know we can't win unless they're winning. And so being very upfront about that and outward about that, we think creates real trust.
Everyone says they have great franchisee relationships. It's easy to say. How do you know you have great relationships? It's when your franchisees are economically benefiting and they're actually putting capital into the brand, which we're doing, that's how you really know, right? So I think a relentless focus on franchisee economics will continue to be focused and will help us hopefully to get to a dominant number one.
And then the last one is just technology. We've got to continue to be front footed on technology. It's been a long difficult road of building these internal capabilities and point of sale in e commerce, in taking that now global and also the analytics behind it, building the capabilities with statisticians and mathematicians to really tear apart the opportunities and the challenges of the business. We've got to do more of that. So in my role, of the fun parts of my job is to work with the incredible technologists, the marketing people, the operators, the franchisees to figure out what those next big bets are going to be.
And I think we've shown the ability that we're going to continue to invest material amounts of money to make sure that we at least have an opportunity to get to that dominant number one. We think it's there. We think it's not going to be easy. There are a lot of hills to take still, but we like the fact that we are the number one pizza company both in The U. S.
And in the world. And that just gives us a platform to hopefully springboard off of to go get it and continue to compete in every neighborhood.
Is there any questions out there?
Free gift card for any questions, is that how we do this?
Franchise at a company like yours, where it's a franchisor driven company, franchisee alignment is so important. And I don't know if I can find better franchisee alignment with corporate than at Domino's. And maybe you could talk to everybody about how you become a franchisee of Domino's because I think that's lost or underappreciated by the investment community because you can't just fly in and become a Domino's franchisee. Think you have to come from within. So how important is that to building the alignment that you now have with your franchisees?
And who is growing? Is it just existing franchisees opening up more stores? Is that where the unit growth is coming from?
I mean, I'll answer your second part of your question first, which is most of the growth is coming from existing franchisees. We've got a great stable of entrepreneurs, independent entrepreneurs who are just killing it, and continue to invest more in the brand. But you bring up a really good point, which is, again, we do things a little differently. As we've talked about before, it's very easy to sit up on the stage and other people have done it and say, well, we've got great franchisees and they're completely aligned and all that other stuff. It's a different matter to actually go prove that.
And one of the proof points that we look at is of our 800 franchisees in The U. S, more than 90% of those ladies and gentlemen started as a delivery driver or a pizza maker in a Domino's Pizza restaurant. And so what that does, it gives us an enormous competitive advantage because we don't have money guys running our stores, right? It's not guys like me who have some money to invest and say, well, I want to Domino's is doing great and I want open up 10 stores in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I live. It doesn't work that way.
You've got to be an operator an operational excellent leader to be granted a franchise by us. And not a lot of people in our industry does that, certainly not in pizza. That gives us an enormous advantage because what we do is we know that capital will flow to great ideas. It's what everyone in this room does and what we all know. And so when you have an operationally excellent system, guys and gals that started as drivers and pizza makers running your stores.
As you know, Brian, this is a neighborhood battle. You don't become number one in pizza by focusing on the globe. You focus in every neighborhood that you do business in, you've to outcompete the other guy. I just feel eminently comfortable that our guy knows more about pizza than the other guys by and large. So it's a huge advantage for us, one that we probably quite frankly don't talk enough about.
But all these good ideas in headquarters, we're not silly enough to think that we're creating all the value here. It's got to be operationalized, has to be executed in the field. And again, we think our guys are a little bit better than the other guys.
And a unique part of your oh, you got a question? Yes, we have
a question here.
Can you hand him the microphone, please?
Yes, sir.
Good morning. The industry, the pizza industry has had phenomenal growth track record and there were only a few years when the volumes were down. Just help us understand where we are now and why this should continue for you?
As far as The U. S. Pizza industry?
Yes.
Yes. So The U. S. Pizza industry, it's $36,000,000,000 $37,000,000,000 As I mentioned, it's fragmented. Our research shows that it continues to grow low single digits, so it's a healthy and growing marketplace still.
You definitely want to be in delivery and carryout. You don't want to be in dine in, as I'm sure other people have told you. It's fundamentally a dine business there by and large. But we continue to see The U. S.
Industry in pizza continuing to grow. And we think it's going to grow in carryout and we think it's going to grow in delivery is our expectation. So we like that we're focused there. We've been focused on that for fifty eight years, and more recently, really intentionally around carryout in the last five years. But that's where you need to be if you want to win in pizza longer term.
We're glad that we're there. We're glad that we're focused there. And we think that's the way you're going to get hopefully to a dominant number one.
What is the unit volume that the industry is experiencing as we speak?
So the unit volumes amongst all of the industry, you'd to get an industry rag for that. I can tell you that at Domino's, order of magnitude on average in The U. S, they're doing about $1,000,000 in sales per unit. Again, averages lie. You got a lot of guys doing a lot better than that, some guys doing less than that.
But if you can do around that $1,000,000 mark, again, you see the flow through in the $136,000 of four wall EBITDA on average for the franchisees in 2017. And that's a model that just works, right? You don't to sell unit opportunities at that point. Franchisees want to do it.
And outside of The U. S, you've done extremely well in India. Where else are you seeing significant growth outside of U.
S? I mean, we more places than less in international, just a great brand outside The U. S, Phenomenal dominant number one stories in Australia, in India, in The UK. If you're watching the World Cup, Iceland, a country of 330,000 people, we dominate pizza on that island. So we do great in Mexico, we do great in Canada, Netherlands, tons of places up and down the globe, the pizza model works.
And I think it works because, again, we really cultivate partnerships with franchisees that get it done. And listen, we've had some tough discussions in the past ten years and some partners that we've had to exit out of the business and get some new partnership in. Again, it's just another challenge for us. We're not going to lean back and wish things are better. We're going to be very active, make sure we have the right partnership.
And when we do, just grow with them and make sure that we're doing it the right way and in more places than not in international, we're doing that.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
Can you describe how your franchisees manage the delivery in The U. S. And as wage rates go up and the competition for these delivery drivers goes up for other areas, is that cost going to increase for them?
Yes. So a lot of talk about labor in quick service restaurants, but only in the last fifty years of the quick service restaurant. Labor is always going to be something that restaurateurs are worried about and thinking about and our franchisees are no different, right? I think the interesting thing though is, as we think about it a little bit differently. When I think about the P and L, whether it's labor, whether it's commodity inflation, it could be rents, insurance, it could be anything.
I just view them as headwinds that we need to overcome. We are not a brand and we don't have a franchisee base that kind of does the old shucks, labor is going up, poor us. We're really a brand that says, we're going to try to grow our way out of this. And certainly, are things we can do to innovate and be more efficient around labor with our independent franchisees. But we definitely take the kind of the aggressive standpoint of we're going grow our way out of this.
And certainly, that's what we've done with any kind of headwinds over this decade. It doesn't mean that we'll be able to continue to do that, but that's kind of our mentality there. And listen, you guys read the same articles I've been reading, I'm sure. Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago said that there were more job openings in The United States than there were unemployed people in The United States. That means that the labor market is fairly tight.
But I got to tell you something, when there were a lot of unemployed people in The U. S, our franchisees continue to say the drivers were a challenge. It's they're always a challenge, but it's not going to prevent us from getting done what we need to get done. At the end of the day, you pay what it takes to attract, retain, develop great team members in our stores. Our franchisees do that pretty darn well in most of our places.
And you're to to pay what you're to have to pay. We're agnostic about that. We don't get political about that. We're focused on making great pizzas and getting to you safely and quickly. And it doesn't again, it doesn't matter whether it's labor commodities, we're focused on outvoluming the other guys.
Quick follow-up because you mentioned driverless vehicles. When do you think you'll actually be using that? When will you start testing it?
So we're already testing autonomous vehicles with some different partners, including a publicized one that we've done with Ford Motor Company. We are learning a ton. Listen, we're not going to be an autonomous vehicle company. We're not going to build the cars. We're going let smart people do that.
We're just a pizza company. But what we're really learning is around the interaction with the consumer and our technology platforms. What's that going to look like? What's that going to feel like? Our consumer is really going to that last 50 feet is a big issue with an autonomous vehicle, right?
At least where I live, I've got a lawn and some trees and I got a curb and it's 50 feet to my front door with an autonomous vehicle, unless we figure this out, it's not going be on my doorstep. It might be in this how are consumers going to interact with that? Are they going to be comfortable with that? We're learning a lot around the psychology and consumer experience aspect of that, while also trying to figure out how are we going to make sure that our technologies when autonomous vehicles happen, and we believe they will happen, that's our worldview. How do we make sure that our technologies are ready to very seamlessly and quickly and efficiently dovetail in, so that we're the first there, we're the innovators there and we're surprising and delighting the consumers in 2000 and fill in the year.
And we're going to have to leave it there, guys. Jeff Lawrence, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Thank you guys very much. Appreciate it.