Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Rachel Ruggeri: Sure. Thanks, Sara. In terms of the question around Q1 and what drove our business outside of the headwinds in China. So if you took headwinds out, to your point, we would have been above expectations. It’s a combination of things. It’s stronger performance in our U.S. business, which is inclusive of our U.S. license. So our U.S. company operated as well as our U.S. license. It’s also growth across our international markets. So excluding China, we had tremendous growth across our markets, which really speaks to the diversity of the depth and diversity of our portfolio. We also had tremendous growth in our channels business. In addition to that, we saw some favorability in terms of foreign exchange, smaller, but that was also a combination.

So it was all of those factors together, that would have given us a stronger Q1 than what we had originally expected. Now when you think about that as it pertains to the balance of the year, we’re able to reaffirm our guidance because even though we’re seeing headwinds in China, and we continue to believe we’ll have strong momentum across the other businesses. You can imagine there are a lot of other factors at play continuing inflationary pressures, economic challenges. So the combination of all of that gives us confidence that reaffirming our guidance is right given the position we’re in today.

Howard Schultz: Rachel, I wonder if Michael can just give us a little bit more color on how strong the international was across the board.

Michael Conway: Yes. Thank you. To the question, I would say definitely our markets outside of China performed even better than we thought. Just to note a year-ago, most of our markets we would have said is fully recovered. And so what we’re seeing now with this 25% growth is growth over growth and performance over performance. And we were also expecting in some markets to see the economy inflation slow demand and it hasn’t. So as Howard talked about the tailwind, we are seeing a true tailwind and continued recovery coming out of the pandemic in all of these markets. Just for example, Latin America, we’re seeing revenue growth of over 50%; EMEA, over 20%; U.K., which is a company-operated market, is having double-digit comp growth; Asia-Pacific, over 20% revenue growth, and we actually crossed 5,000 stores across that region.

And then Japan, which is our third largest company-operated market is also continuing with significant growth. This is our eighth consecutive quarter of strong revenue growth, driven by not only product but actually digital. Within Japan, we are rolling out the digital flywheel, Mobile Order & Pay is fully penetrated. We’ve doubled our sales of Mobile Order & Pay over the last quarter. And we just introduced multi-tier redemption, which has shown success in the U.S. We’re seeing a significant improvement here as well. So as we think about going forward in these markets, we see more tailwind. The international travel is just starting to come back as they start to go to other markets as well, we’re going to see further tailwind going forward.

Rachel Ruggeri: And just to answer your other question, Sara, last year, we had expected China to be about 25% of the total company operating income, which is generally where it landed, we’ll expect maybe closer to 50% based on what we know today.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from David Palmer with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.