The Wendy’s Company (NASDAQ:WEN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Todd Penegor: Great question, Jeff. As we sit around the table operating as a senior leadership team, the last couple of years, I had two business unit presidents that had a lot of autonomy that were driving their business. And it served us well. I mean we’ve got a lot of success in the U.S., a lot of success in international. But we do need to have that global mindset, and it will put me a lot closer to the business. And as we sit around the table as a senior leadership team, having a global marketing mindset, talking about operations with a focus on the U.S. and international, it will help speed to decision-making. We’ll make sure that we got one message to the entire organization, both U.S. and international. And I do think it will make us a lot more effective, so we can go faster to continue to drive and accelerate the results that we’ve seen behind our key strategic growth pillars that we’ve been very focused on the last couple of years.

So I see a lot of benefit from all of that.

Operator: Next question comes from the line of Danilo Gargiulo with Bernstein. Danilo, your line is now open.

Danilo Gargiulo: Hi, good morning. I was just wondering if you can comment on the timing of the announcement. Essentially, your comps are still continuing to see outperformance. The G&A seemed to be relatively more relevant compared to last quarter. But I’m wondering what was propelling your decision to announce the organization redesign today when you’re seeing kind of sales continue to be elevated.

Todd Penegor: I think just a function of how we’re looking at managing our business moving forward. As we start the year fresh here in 2023, but I personally thought it would be good to have a fresh look on how we operate as a leadership team. And as we embark on some of the work to make sure that we can hold our G&A relatively flat in 2023 and 2024, as GP just alluded to, having the senior leadership design in place certainly helps enable that work. So as we work through what that next layers look like, how does the org design flow out, what does our G&A actually come out to look like, we’ll have all of that work done to be able to share with you as part of our 2023 guidance and our longer-term outlook when we reestablish that on March 1.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Chris O’Cull with Stifel. Chris, your line is now open.

Chris O’Cull: Thanks. My question is regarding the capital allocation. The companies use more capital to repurchase stock and pay dividends on average, I guess, over the past several years that looks like it’s going to change going forward. Could you talk a little bit about how the company came to this decision? And then I had a follow-up.

Todd Penegor: Good morning, Chris. Yes, it’s obviously an active dialogue with our Board of Directors. There’s different point of use that we discussed in terms of what options do we have to return the excess cash that we currently are sitting on to shareholders. And at the end of the day, what I think we decided is in line with the capital allocation policy. Number two is an attractive dividend. Now obviously, at the stance we are taking on dividend is very, very attractive. And we want to signal to the financial markets that we have high confidence in growth, high confidence in high cash flow generation, and that’s basically a little bit the adjustment that we made on the dividend side of things. Again, all combined, if you do the calculation, you’re getting to capital returns over the next several years of more than $1 billion. So we are signaling that our cash flow generation is going to stay very strong.

Operator: The next question comes from the line of John Ivankoe with JPMorgan. John, your line is now open.