Darden Restaurants, Inc. (NYSE:DRI) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jeffrey Bernstein: Great. Thank you. First one was just on cash usage in the share repurchase as part of your long-term algorithm. I guess the midpoint going up by like $200 million. And you bumped the dividend by close to 10% and the CapEx is going up a little bit more than perhaps what you previously thought. I just wondering what’s going in the other direction. And I think about in the context of M&A. I mean, I know you have returned to the market with the Ruth’s acquisition. I’m wondering whether you’re seeing potential for more, maybe the valuation challenges that you’ve previously noted have been easing. Any thoughts there would be great. And then I have one follow-up.

Raj Vennam: Yeah. Let me talk about the cash and then I’ll turn it over to Rick for the M&A commentary. So as far as cash usage, if you look at our business, we generate somewhere around $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion, our guidance would imply in terms of cash — operating cash flow. So between the dividend and the CapEx and with the share repurchase, we still would be building cash maybe at an — if you take all the midpoints of all of those ranges we would still build a cash balance of call it may be close to $100 million. So we’re really not tapping into any borrowings sort of that to meet these commitments we have embedded in here. As far as the long term framework share repurchase range, that is really to reflect the change in our share price from five years ago because we haven’t updated the framework for five years.

So all that change as much as it feels like it’s double, that’s basically reflecting that our share price has doubled during that timeframe. And so now, with that, I’ll just turn it to Rick.

Rick Cardenas: I’ll just add something to that. If you look at — think about the cash flow or EBITDA, pre-COVID, our EBITDA was about $1.2 billion and today with based on Raj is saying it’s $1.7 billion, $1.8 billion. So that gives us a lot more cash to do those things and increase our share buyback and M&A. And so if you think — but we’ve talked about M&A often. M&A adds to our scale which is our biggest advantage. And we continue to talk to our Board, management continues to talk to the Board about our best uses of capital and M&A is one of those. And so but we just got done with the Ruth’s deal. So let us do a little bit there. It doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t be back in the market down the road. But we’ve got plenty of cash, we’ve got plenty of debt capacity. Raj said, we’re at basically two times adjusted debt-to-adjusted EBITDAR and that’s at the low end of our range. So we have plenty of capacity to do more things.

Jeffrey Bernstein: Yeah. And then just a clarification, just wondering if you’re going to provide pro-forma restated maybe Darden results for the quarters of fiscal ’23 as if you owned Ruth’s the entire year. I know it’s tough for us to model with a different quarter and year-ends and with Ruth’s operating a 50-50 company franchise model, just trying to get some color as to whether or not you’ll provide any help from a modeling perspective or any pro-forma type results to give us better insight into the growth rate going forward. Thank you.

Raj Vennam: Really the fiscal calendars when you look at the quarters, we’re only a month half. We don’t plan on restating the history. I think — and I also want to think about how material it is to the overall Darden P&L.

Operator: Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Sara Senatore with Bank of America. Please proceed with your questions.

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