Good morning. My name is Colin, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the AutoCanada First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. Listeners are reminded that certain matters discussed in today's conference call are answers that may be given to questions and asked and could constitute forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties related to AutoCanada's future financial or business performance. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated of the forward-looking statements. The risk factors that may affect results are detailed in AutoCanada's information form and other periodic filings and registration statements. You can access these documents at SEDAR database at sedar.com. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, May 4, 2023. I'd like to introduce Mr. Paul Antony, Executive Chairman of AutoCanada Inc. Please go ahead, Mr. Antony. Thanks for that. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining on today's call. On the call today, we have Azim Lalani, our new Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to begin by welcoming Azim, who joined us March 27th following Mike Borys's retirement. Azim is a seasoned executive. We're very pleased to have him as part of our management team. We released our 2023 first quarter results last night after market close. You can access the news release as well as our complete financial statements and Management Discussion and Analysis on our website at autocanada.com. Our news release, financial statements, MD&A have also been filed on SEDAR. Today's call, we're going to discuss results for the period ended for March 31st, 2023, provide a general business update, then we'll open up the call for questions. Throughout the first quarter, demand for AutoCanada's products and services remained strong, with our company achieving another revenue record and strong same-store sales growth. At the same time, new vehicle supplies remain constrained for most brands and consumers' preferences have shifted to lower price point vehicles, which caused both new and used gross profit margins to decline relative to historically record levels in the first quarter of last year. With despite these headwinds, we saw significant used car volumes continue. We've been building out our subprime and near-prime muscle for the last five years, and as consumers trade down, we're flexing this muscle, which helps us to grow our used car sales despite shifting consumer behavior. Additionally, demand for F&I parts and service and collision repair was strong, with these divisions benefiting from higher used car sales. During the first quarter, we recorded sales of CAD 1.5 billion. That's a Q1 historical record. Adjusted EBITDA of CAD 45 million and net earnings of CAD 8.4 million. Sales grew 15% when compared to the same period of 2022, including a CAD 226 million contribution from 27 acquisitions completed over the past two years. Our same-store sales, which does not include acquired revenue and excludes foreign currency exchange, increased by 11.7% in the first quarter. Notably, Canadian same-store new vehicle unit sales growth was 4.3% during Q1. That's the first meaningfully positive growth in a quarter in almost two years. This is again a positive confirmation that new vehicle supply continues to come online. Our Canadian same-store used vehicle units sold increased by 3% in the quarter, with the ratio of Canadian used to new retail units sold increasing to 1.72 from 1.5 to one last year. During the last 12 months, AutoCanada sold 31,171 new retail vehicles and 53,809 used retail vehicles in Canada. That's a ratio of 1.73 to one. As you'll recall, when this management team came on board in 2018, this metric was 0.62 to one on an annual basis in Canada. We're pleased with the trajectory of this ratio over the five years as this is a key focus metric for us, given the used market's unconstrained nature, which gives us a wide-open runway to continue to grow our share of the used vehicle market in the future. Increasing used retail volumes also gives us more opportunities to generate higher margin parts and service growth through vehicle reconditioning and to utilize our best-in-class F&I department, all of which saw continued strength in the quarter. The U.S. division retailed 1,168 new units during the quarter. New gross margins declined 53.5% versus the first quarter of 2022. Recall that last year, the shortage of new vehicles resulted in U.S. dealers selling new vehicles for prices above suggested retail price, a practice that is not allowed in Canada, created outsized profitability in the U.S. new vehicle sales across the industry. This year, we have had a more typical start to the year for Chicago dealerships, with sales expected to pick up in Q2. Used to new ratio increased slightly to 1.87 from 1.83. Parts, service, and collision repair experienced good demand with same-store sales growth of 3.1%. This translated into healthy profitability in the segment as customers hold onto their vehicles longer, requiring more service needs. Parts, service, and collision repair gross profit increased by 7% and gross profit percentage increased to 54%. F&I also had a very strong quarter against a backdrop of Q1 2022, being one of the best quarters ever in the industry of the car business. Same-store F&I revenues increased by 5%, gross profit increased by 4.8%, and gross profit percentage increasing to 93.7%. These results reflected are selling more product per deal. Consolidated gross profit percentage was 16.6%, down from 18.4% in the first quarter of 2022. The decline in gross margin was a result of a shift in consumer preference to lower price point vehicles compared to our inventory mix, which was leaning towards higher priced vehicles. The decline in gross profit margin due to this dynamic was partially offset by healthy profitability in both parts, service and collision, and repair and F&I divisions. Operating expenses before depreciation for the first quarter were CAD 212 million, or 77.6% of gross profit, compared to CAD 194 million of 73.4% of gross profit in 2022. The increase as a percentage of gross profit resulted from lower gross margins, as discussed, as well as an increase of CAD 12.4 million in floorplan financing costs due to higher interest rates on these facilities and the inclusion of recently acquired businesses to our platform, which will be optimized in the coming quarters. Adjusted EBITDA was CAD 45 million, a decrease of 27.6% over the same period in 2022. However, adjusted EBITDA per diluted share decreased by only 14.5% to CAD 1.83 from CAD 2.14, reflecting the CAD 4.7 million shares repurchased during 2022, which has benefited our per-share performance in this more challenging environment. I'm now gonna turn the call over to Azim to discuss our financial position. Azim? Thank you, Paul. Good morning, everyone. As of March 31, 2023, we had CAD 185 million outstanding on our CAD 375 million revolving credit facility. Other debt also consisted of CAD 350 million in seven-year senior notes and CAD 32 million in non-recourse mortgages on three dealership properties, as well as CAD 1 billion in floorplan, which supports our inventory. We also have unrestricted cash on hand of approximately CAD 115 million. Excluding our floorplan facilities and our lease liabilities, our total net funded debt as of the end of Q1 was CAD 465 million compared to CAD 460 million at December 31. Our total net funded debt to EBITDA covenant ratio of approximately 2.25 is below our 4.0 covenant limit. This compares to our total net funded debt ratio of 2.0 at December 31, 2022. During the trailing 12 months ended March 31, 2023, we generated CAD 181 million in free cash flow compared to CAD 94 million for the same period in 2022. During the quarter, our B+ credit rating was affirmed by our rating agency, S&P. We continue to have access to over CAD 300 million of liquidity under our revolving facilities in cash on hand as at the end of March. As we move through the coming quarters and continue to allocate capital, we expect the leverage ratio to remain consistent. Our effective fixed rate portion of total debt including swaps, is approximately 40%. We'll be focusing on opportunities to materially increase that portion from current levels over the coming quarters to add greater stability to the business given the current rate environment. Our basic weighted average shares outstanding were 23.5 million shares as of March 31, 2023, which is a 13% decline compared to 27.1 million shares as of the end of the first quarter last year. For the trailing twelve-month period ending March 31, 2023, AutoCanada purchased and canceled approximately 3.8 million shares for total cash consideration of CAD 108 million under its NCIB and SIB at an average price of approximately CAD 28 per share. We will continue to use share buybacks strategically when appropriate while maintaining a solid balance sheet and prioritizing high-value growth objectives. I will now turn the line back over to Paul to discuss the outlook. Thanks, Azim. Consumer preference for lower price point vehicles has so far persisted during the quarter. For context, during Q1, our Canadian GPU for used was CAD 1,151 versus CAD 2,596 in the prior year, representing a significant decrease of first quarter variable gross profit in the Canadian operation. During Q1, we made a conscious decision to reconfigure inventory, and what we are now seeing is that GPU has started to recover into Q2. Our focus over the past five years has been to establish industry-leading new, used, subprime, F&I, parts, service, and collision repair businesses, plus a significant real estate portfolio that support our operation. We now have multiple levers of sustainability built into our business models. As a result, we've meaningfully insulated ourselves from market volatility so we can continue to focus on our long-term growth objectives across all of our divisions. Conservative balance sheet management and disciplined capital allocation decisions with a continued focus on best-in-class performance across all segments remain our priority. Subsequent to the end of the first quarter, we announced the acquisition of Premier Chev Cadillac Buick GMC, both the dealership and collision center in Windsor, which is a top-performing Canadian Cadillac store and brings our store count to 83 franchise dealership locations across 28 brands, three used vehicle dealerships, one used vehicle auction business supporting the used digital division, and 12 RightRide locations and 11 standalone collision centers within our group of 27 collision centers. On May first, we also acquired London Auto Collision. After acquiring Burwell Collision in London, Ontario in July of 2022, there's been a significant increase in volume at the shop such that it's now operating at full capacity. We acquired London Auto Collision on May first to handle the work overflow and continue scaling our collision operation in that market. Our M&A pipeline is healthy and the pace of inbound inquiries from potential sellers remain really robust. We are beginning to see multiple compression in the private market due to normalizing operations and operating conditions following 2022, which was without a doubt the best year that the automotive retail industry has ever experienced. We intend to be very prudent in our capital allocation decisions. Subsequent to the quarter, we announced our expanded partnership with Kijiji, which furthers our online retail strategy. Kijiji has 11.8 million unique visitors per month, with 1.4 million for sale by owner cars listed for sale every year on their marketplace and a co-consumer base that is presently unserved by finance and insurance products. It's too soon to provide guidance on the potential financial contribution from this initiative. However, we believe that it is a unique, untapped opportunity that is now exclusive to AutoCanada. That concludes our prepared remarks. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to the operator to open up the call for questions and answers. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll now conduct the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. If you're using a speakerphone, please press the handset before pressing any keys. One moment for your first question. Your first question comes from David Ocampo from Cormark Securities. David, please go ahead. Thanks. Thanks for taking my questions, everyone. Paul, maybe we could start on the U.S. side of the business. In the MD&A, you guys called out focusing on quality over volume in the U.S. Just curious why the shift, and can we expect that shift to happen in Canada as well? With the U.S., we've learned a lot. You know, last year that business created roughly over $20 million of earnings. Last year, what I would tell you it was in an anomaly. If you go back to normal times, I don't wanna say normal like when we bought it, that business was losing a lot of money in Q1. What we've come to realize is that normally in the U.S., in Chicago, January and February are usually months that those businesses lose money. March usually make up pretty close to January and February, then by April, you're kind of getting to escape velocity and getting profitable. That's precisely what's happening. What I would say is things are turning into a more normal business in the United States versus what we had previously. Got it. If I take a look at the used margins down south, they're quite a bit stronger than Canada. Just curious what's driving that, and is it simply just a difference in inventory or market? And I'll talk more about this in Canada as well. Maybe just to kind of, because I'm sure we're gonna get this question from a lot of people about margin. Depending on the mix of inventory, because of the rising interest rate environment that we operate in, people that might have been funded on a vehicle for $50,000 now qualify only to be able to buy a vehicle for $40,000. Our, our dilemma internally is, do we compress margin and just roll the car and reconfigure our inventory to kind of match it with market demand? Or do we just hold on to inventory and try and sell it at, you know, at the same premium we were before? We made a conscious decision in Canada to go ahead and lower the price of the vehicles to make sure that people finance and actually move more cars. You'll see that with our number. We had a historical March. I think we beat our July last year as far as volume goes by a significant number, and we also had a record first quarter for used car sales. What I'll point out is we actually sold more cars in the quarter in Canada with roughly 3,300 less cars in stock. I'll come back to that in a second. In the United States, the configuration was a little bit different. So we had more of a cleansed inventory. We were able to probably hold margin more than in Canada. Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Maybe my last one here is on the OpEx as a% of gross profit. Obviously, that increased in the quarter. How should we be thinking about your cost structure on a go-forward basis? Do you think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there that you could trim the cost to get your that profile closer to U.S. peers? What I would tell you is there's a lot of fruit. I don't wanna say that it's low hanging. It's. This is the hard stuff, and this will happen over the course of the next 1-2 years as we start this journey. There's a lot of opportunity for us. What we decided, again, internally was to move volume. We're really focused on moving volume because we can attach more F&I to those cars. We can generate more parts and service repairs and actually just get more customers through our doors. That's, that's of the highest priority for us. We did that last, as I said, last quarter. You know, part of the job also, we're very conscious to our expense structure. We know what needs to be done, but as I said, it's a journey and it'll take time. You'll see that kind of bearing fruit over the next year to two years to even three years because it's going to be a longer process. Okay, that's perfect. Thanks a lot, Paul. I'll hop back in the queue. Yeah. Your next question comes from Chris Murray from ATB Capital Markets. Chris, please go ahead. Yes. Thanks, guys. Good morning. You know, Paul, maybe, you know, going back to the margin question, I think you made the comment that your GPU was a lot significantly lower. I guess a couple of parts to this question. I mean, one, are you able to get supply of, call it, lower value vehicles with the OEM? Because the OEMs for a long time were, have sort of been focusing on the best margin vehicles, which also had a tendency to have a higher ticket price. Just wondering about your incoming supply if you have to rotate maybe to smaller vehicles or less expensive vehicles. Two, is there anything in... that you have available to you other than, you know, the F&I, to bring that GPU up, over the next couple of quarters? Yeah. It's actually pretty simple. When the impact of the interest rate, and I don't wanna blame things on the interest rate, but the impact of the interest rate is over CAD 240 of increased interest cost per month for a consumer on average year-over-year. That money's got to come from somewhere, and that came in compression on the GPU on our vehicles that we had in stock. It's up to us, as I said, you know, earlier to David, it's up to us to reconfigure our inventory. It's not that we were overpriced on our inventory anymore. It's actually having inventory that's less in demand than lower priced cars. For us, it's all about reconfiguring our inventory mix, buying lower priced cars that I don't know if you've heard the term before, but booking out. When we refer to booking out, like what a car books out at, you're basically talking about how much will the bank loan against that car, given the current interest rate environment and the credit profile of that customer. With more expensive cars, they don't book out as attractively because they're priced out of the market with a higher interest rate environment. That actually gets us. Hopefully that answers part two of your question. The question is, where are we gonna buy the cars from, in order to sell more cars in order to keep up that volume? I don't wanna get into this in a meaningful way on this call, but we did sign a deal with Kijiji. They have 1.4 million active sellers that are selling cars in market in Canada to active buyers, and there's an opportunity for those cars to be purchased. Those are kind of right in our wheelhouse. Okay. I'll leave it at that. Sorry. On new supply, are you able to get or the OEMs producing enough of those lower cost cars for you? I think that, you know, the OEMs are producing whatever they can as they can produce it. You know, we're starting to see volumes come back online. They're still not where they need to be. You know, a lot of the import brands are not necessarily there yet. On the new car side, you know, I think we take, we get, and we sell it as it comes. I don't think that's the issue. That's my opinion. I think, you know, the key for us is make sure we have a pipeline of strong, solid used vehicles to sell into this market. That's fair enough. Then the other question is just around, you know, overall inventories, and how you're feeling with those. I know we've been struggling a little bit, and certainly, I guess there's a bit of a rotation going on with inventories now. How are you feeling going into the spring selling season? You know, we saw the April numbers, which were a little bit soft. I think they were 5% across the industry. How are you folks feeling about your inventory position as we kinda start to pick up this year? I'll talk about both new and used. If you'll recall on our last earnings call, we talked about one of our issues which was getting vehicles reconditioned in a timely fashion. I think we said that the inventory or the industry standard is like, you know, 10 to 14 days, we were at 41 days originally when the guys got here, this latest management team got here and took over the helm, we're at, like, 48 days. We sold more used cars this quarter, I keep on coming back to this. We sold more used cars this quarter with 3,300 less vehicles than we had a year ago, which helps our floor plan, we're also now able to get these cars reconditioned to the front line in 27 to 28 days. That's like a 13-day increase over last quarter. As that number gets better, we're able to turn cars faster. In other words, doing more with less. On the used car side, we feel really good about it. On the new car side, again, we're kind of beholden to the OEMs and whatever they produce. You know, I think we're doing a really good job of moving the inventory, keeping it profitable with what we have. How do I feel about it? I feel like it kind of is what it is, and we did well last year, and we'll continue to do well this year. I'd say the U.S. is still struggling to find inventory, and so we're really focused on used cars there. All right. Thanks. I'll leave it there, folks. Thanks. Your next question comes from Michael Doumet from Scotiabank. Michael, please go ahead. Hey, good morning, guys. Azim, welcome. Hey, Michael. Hey. Look, I mean, I think, you know, if I look at the quarter, the trends were, you know, I think at least to me, largely expected or as expected except for two items, you know, operating costs, and the U.S. EBITDA. I think Dave did a pretty good job at asking some of the questions there. I'd like to get maybe a little bit more specific on those two items. On operating costs, you know, that was, if I look at Q2 last year versus Q1 last year, about $20 million quarter on quarter. I'm just wondering if we should expect similar seasonality this year or if there's anything maybe that would make that a little bit different. And then, you know, on the US side, you know, you spoke about that pretty well. Should we expect, you know, profit normalization into Q2, but given maybe the better seasonality, not the same extent, you know, in terms of the dollar decline EBITDA-wise year-on-year? Let me start with the last question first because that's the only one that I can remember right now. The U.S., I think this is all unchartered waters for us, and I don't, I don't know, like, not that I'm trying to cleanse myself of everything I've said every earnings call, but I am trying to cleanse myself of everything I've said in every earnings call. What I would say, if you recall, we keep on saying these are unnormal times. They're, you know, it's COVID. We, we don't know where the market's gonna be, and we're just doing our best. Hi, this is the operator. Paul, are you still there? Hi. Hello, Paul? I think there might have been an audio issue. I'm just checking in to see if you're still there. Hopefully you can hear us now. We're back on, hopefully. Operator, are you there? Hi. Yes, I am. Yeah, you're back. I can hear you loud and clear. That's our answer, Michael. Stupid question. Sorry about that. Where did we leave you? Pretty much right at the beginning. Okay. Sorry to make you go all over again. In the U.S., I would say, and I don't, I don't know where everybody heard too, in the U.S. the issue was. I guess let me actually. You asked the question, what is normal in the U.S? I think that's what you're trying to drive at, right? The dollar drop on EBITDA in Q1, just thinking whether or not, you know, we should expect something similar or not, given there's a little bit better seasonality in Q2 and Q3. Right. Yeah. I would just tell you our experience and everything we're hearing and understanding operating five years in that environment in the States is that Chicago, and Illinois in particular, is very difficult in January, February and the winter months. We saw losses in those months in our stores. You know, we raised alarm bells internally, said to our operators, like, "What's going on there?" They said, "Don't worry, March, this is more normal. March, things will pick up." They did. They offset the losses in January and February. We were told by April we should start, you know, we should start seeing more profitable months, and I'm here to assure you that that's what we're seeing. What we're seeing is more normal against the backdrop of what was very abnormal last year and even a bit of the year before. You know, we made over $20 million U.S. last year. That's more of an abnormal year. Our expectation is we're gonna see more of a normal year, which is still gonna be a very profitable business in the U.S. That's what I would say, that's our expectation. Does that make sense on your question? Okay, 100%. Maybe, you know, the first part of the question. OpEx? Ten minutes ago. Yeah. OpEx. You know, look, the OpEx is the part of the business you can control, right? Yeah. Whereas maybe everything else, a little bit more challenging. I'm just thinking, you know, if I look at Q1, Q2 last year, you know, whether or not we should expect, you know, similarities within, you know, that quarter-on-quarter jump in terms of OpEx. What I told David, I'm going to say it again just for consistency purposes, is that the next leg of the journey is going to be attacking OpEx, and it's the harder stuff, and it's going to take time. You will see that over the next one or two years, because there's a lot of things that we're actually now privy to that we didn't know before, where we say, you know, if you look at our U.S. peers, they just have expenses far more in control. When you look at productivity and where we should be putting our resources, I would just say that we need to actually match the resources with to produce the highest productivity. I'll kind of leave it at that. It's the harder part of the journey, and we're just embarking on it now. Okay. It feels like I'm going a little bit long here, this would be my second question. One of the, I guess, one of the benefits to selling a lot of used is, you know, the incremental parts and service that you would capture, especially with the extended warranty. You know, look, we've seen obviously gross profit from parts and service move up quite substantially. Can you speak to maybe the capacity utilization of that business or maybe even the penetration rate of the car park, just to give us a sense of where that business could continue to go? The, like, the volume of used? The product support, the parts and service, collision repair business, the gross profit continues to make new highs. Just wondering if this continued ability to grow that business on the back of used sales? Well, I think it's, I think there's, you know, it's very labor dependent on the collision repair and parts and service, right? That's something that we can actually scale up as we grow. We still have service bay occupancy, so we still have resources to actually handle more throughput. Our goal is just like a hotel or a rental car company to make sure that we get to 100% utilization. There's definitely a lot of opportunity as we grow that business. For that reason, we're actually growing our used car business in a significant, you know, way. We wanna become untethered to the constraints that we have of the new car business and selling just new cars. There's a lot of knock on effects of us selling used cars. There's a lot from customers for life to increasing product per deal, to selling more, you know, finance, selling more insurance, selling more service. There's an opportunity for us to warranty vehicles and have customers that we didn't even sell the car to start coming back to our stores if we, you know, bring deductibles down to make it more advantageous for them to get their car serviced in our facility. There's just a lot of opportunity that's untapped. Perfect. Thanks for that, Paul. Appreciate the time. Thanks. Take care, Michael. Your next question comes from Tamy Chen from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Okay, thank you. Good morning. First question I had is, Paul, last earnings call, you alluded to, potential strategic assets. There was some discussion about it. Obviously, you couldn't say much. I'm just curious if you're able to the extent that you can, give any update to that. Like, was that in reference to, the Kijiji announcement? Yes. Okay, got it. My second question is, like my understanding, you elaborate a bit more on this in this call, but the Kijiji announcement, like I thought the opportunity was more so in facilitating F&I for the transactions that would happen on that platform. Now it sounds like from what you've said, that that is an opportunity, but the other much more meaningful, it sounds like opportunity is that you would essentially look to purchase source from your used vehicles from the listings that are on the website. Do I have that understood? Like, are those the two primary, I guess, opportunities for AutoCanada through this announcement? Yeah, those are definitely two of the primary opportunities. I actually I don't want to weight one over the other, but I would say given that we're kind of operating a best in class F&I business in the country, even North America, we see this as being a completely untapped market. If we look at our penetration rate or our attachment rate that we're able to sell to, we think that it's just a wonderful opportunity and one that nobody has actually gone after. We're actually quite excited by it. You mentioned exclusive. You are the exclusive, I guess, in terms of if you wanted to source the vehicles from the listings on Kijiji, like that's an exclusive funnel for you then, is that correct? I would say the way we're going about it is of an exclusive nature. Got it. I was curious with respect to the dynamic between new vehicles and used vehicles. I know historically, there's nuanced differences between the dynamics in both of these two channels. As new supply will gradually come on, perhaps more so later this year, can you just talk a bit about how you're thinking of demand for used vehicles? I know it's still a key initiative to continue improving that used to new ratio. Just right now, what are you seeing or expecting with respect to used demand as we go through the rest of this year? Tamy, I think that used is gonna be off the charts for the next three to four years. I'll tell you why I think this, and we've been saying this over and over again. Hopefully. I actually hear other people starting to adopt it, so maybe I stole it from somebody and somebody will steal it from me. Look, we're short roughly nine to 10 million cars that weren't built for North America in the last three to four years, which means that we're short nine to 10 million used cars that haven't been built in the next, in the last three to four years. Which means that there's not only a shortage in pent-up demand that needs to be made up on the new car side, but there's also limited used cars out there. That would be data point number one. There's just a shortage of used cars. In Canada specifically, a lot of our used cars get, end up getting exported to the United States. There's even more of a shortage because of the exchange rate arbitrage. If you, if you kind of use that as your backdrop, then point two is the interest rate going up is having people kind of tilt more towards buying cheaper, more affordable vehicles. It's tough with new cars. The price of the average new car in the States, I think, is at $48,000. In Canada, I'm not, I'm not sure exactly as I... We just finished our board meeting. That was a number that stuck out to me. That's a lot of money for the average consumer. Given the fact they're gonna pay an extra $250 per month, just in interest rate charges, finding affordable vehicles that will suit the consumer is of high importance. I don't know how quickly we're getting out of this higher interest rate environment. It could be the new norm for at least the next three four years or two or three years. We're positioning ourselves to sell volume and to sell used vehicles in order to drive business through our shops and our dealerships that we think is more s ustainable. Eventually that used car customer, if we treat them right and service them well, they end up becoming a new car customer. It's actually just a whole cycle of the life cycle of the customer. Is that helpful, Tamy? That is. I appreciate it. One very small last housekeeping question is just on the OpEx, there is seasonality through the quarters, correct? I'm just thinking, I think following on some of the other previous questions, like through this year, I think historically, like you've had some ebbs and flows through the quarters, I should say. Can you just confirm that there should be some seasonality? I think historically, is it Q4 might be one of the higher periods? That is correct. Yes. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Thanks, Tamy. Your next question comes from Kristen or Krista, sorry, Krista Friesen from CIBC. Krista, please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I was just wondering if you could give some color as to how you think about your free cash flow priorities, choosing between continuing to be active on the acquisition front versus, being active on your share buyback. Yeah. I would say that's a great question. From our perspective, we have alignment with our board, you know, when our multiple is trading higher and it makes sense to go and buy dealerships, both strategically and financially, the decision to actually buy dealerships is quite easy. When our share price becomes gets to such a level as we see a way higher return buying our shares back versus buying dealerships, we actually shift the focus from M&A to being just all about capital allocation, right? I would just say that we are going to buy our shares back in a meaningful way when our share price is cheap, and when our share price is ahead of what we think it ought to be, we'll be looking to do more M&A. At this point in time, I would tell you that we're not going to be advancing on M&A for a couple reasons. Number one, it just doesn't financially make sense. Number two, our results are not just indicative of what we're doing in the market, they're indicative of everybody in the market. Frankly, I think there's a lot of dealers that have to recalibrate what they think is the new normal, and that's gonna take some time. Until that time, we see this as being a tremendous opportunity for us to look at our own company to invest in. Great. Thank you. I think everyone else has taken my other questions, so I'll jump back in the queue. Thank you. Your next question comes from Luke Hannan from Canaccord Genuity. Luke, please go ahead. Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Paul, I wanted to get your view. I know you said you didn't wanna talk too much about it, but I just wanted to get your view or your opinion on why it is that there was no F&I partnership before that was in place with Kijiji, whether it was with regards to AutoCanada or some other more national F&I player before. It seems obvious what the benefits would be, so I'm just curious what your thoughts are on why that wasn't in place previously. You know, I think we kinda, like, I wish I would say that we were smart enough and we looked at this and we figured it out. I think we kinda stumbled on it as a team, and we all kinda thought about it together and thought about the opportunity. You know, like, you know, 20 years ago, there was no Carproof, and everybody said that they had thought about that and wanted to do it. You know, everybody told us it was their idea and they were gonna do it. Hopefully we have the same outcome with this, and everybody says we were gonna do this and nobody thought about it. Everybody's got to think of something once, and it's better to be lucky than good. Hopefully we thought about it before everybody else. Right. I hope. Yeah. Right. Switching gears a little bit here. With car prices sort of pulling back a little bit here, I would imagine, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine that the amount of disequity that you are seeing out there is probably increased a bit. Can you remind us, I mean, well, one, is that the case? Two, if it is, what are the best vehicles or best inventory that you have to be able to absorb that disequity? Are you well represented with that inventory on your lots today? Well, I would just say, The compression that you saw in the GPU in Q1 is a result of us shedding the mix of cars that didn't book out well. Recall what I was saying about booking out. reconfiguring our inventory to cars that do book out well. Are we well-positioned? I would say we are better positioned. I would say over the course of the next quarter or two, we should be in prime position. Because before, like I said, we were not selling cars. Everybody in the business was just taking orders. Like I don't wanna take away from our salespeople and our people that did a ton of work over the last two, three years during COVID because, you know, they've climbed an unbelievable hill. That said, it was the art of selling a vehicle and the whole way you actually go about selling a vehicle is going to change over the course of the next year, two years and three years. Instead of people just coming in and basically being, you know, jumping out of airplanes into your dealership and wanting to buy cars, and us just filling orders, we're actually going to have to get back in the business of selling vehicles. That's what we're positioning ourselves to do. Okay. Thank you. If you like. Thanks. Your next... Oh, I apologize. We have one more question that's coming from Maxim Sytchev from National Bank Financial. Maxim, please go ahead. Paul, I was wondering if you don't mind providing a bit of color in terms of how you think about the interplay between, I guess, overall revenue growth versus profitability. When we look at, you know, some of the cohorts of U.S. players, you know, definitely less revenue growth, but, you know, holding it a little bit better in terms of the gross margins. I'm wondering, is this the question of geography or OpEx? Just what are your thoughts there? Again, like how do you achieve maybe a better balance from that perspective? Thanks. Sorry, is it to do with geography or which? Or OpEx. Yeah. Listen, I think a lot of it has to do with OpEx. What we've learned with some of the executives that we brought on board was that our OpEx was too high and we've got to cut OpEx. You know, you could say, "You guys suck," or you could say, "Wow, you guys have a great opportunity." We're choosing to think that we have a great opportunity. Where the guys in the States actually don't have that same opportunity because they've already, they've already walked this path. For us, it's exciting times. What I said stands, I think, to David, I'll say it again. We have fruit. It's not low hanging. It's work. This is gonna be the tough stuff. The good news is the operators that we have in the chair now have just been through this. For them, there's some muscle memory where they're gonna just do what they did in their groups they were in and kind of help us achieve what they achieved, which is what you're comparing us to. That's one thing. The other thing I will say, and I ask this question of our management team all the time, "What's different between Canada and the U.S?" Like, I probably say it so much, they think I have, you know, like dementia. I'm asking because I'm keep on trying to understand the difference between Canada and the US. The day supply of used vehicles is massively different in Canada versus the U.S. The way we deliver cars in Canada versus the U.S. is also markedly different. Like in the U.S., you can actually spot deliver a car. You buy a car, and we just talked about this in our board meeting yesterday, and Jeff suggested you buy a car in the States, you're driving out with that car. In Canada, you have to license it, safety check it. There's a lot of things that you have to do. So there are nuanced differences between Canada and the United States. So we don't expect to be exactly the same as the U.S. to be compared against. There are a lot of learnings that we're getting now, you know, as a team where when we took over this company five years ago, I think we were like $72 million of earnings that year. I think last year we're over $200 million. We've done a lot of work in five years, and we basically took the low-hanging fruit. That's why I say there's fruit there, but it's not gonna be low hanging and it's gonna be the tough stuff, but we're all signed up for it. Great. A quick question in terms of floor plan financing. Some of the commentary out of the U.S. is that because regional banks are sort of curtailing right now the credit availability, that could potentially lead to, you know, sort of higher rates on that part of the capital structure. Just wondering if you can maybe comment in terms of what you're seeing on the ground right now. Yeah, we're not seeing that issue at all. We've talked to our banks and everything seems to be, you know, status quo. I know I've heard the same, but it's not, it's not turning out to be reality for us. Okay. Good to hear. Lastly, just in terms of can we have an update on CapEx, plans for 2023? I think at that point, I think that's more of an Azim question, and Azim has been in the chair for one month. I think, I'm happy to probably answer that more on the next call. Not that I'm trying to play hide the peanut, I just don't have an answer, and I don't know that Azim has it at his fingertips. Okay. Fair enough. That's it for me. Thanks a lot. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn it back to you. I said it and I, you know, I noticed that it wasn't in my script and I wanna say this again. I wanna thank all of our OEM partners and everybody at AutoCanada for pulling together. You know, these are it's a changing environment, and we're very fortunate to have the team that we have. You know, from everybody in the dealerships to everybody at head office to our OEM partners, we're very fortunate. We are building something special, and I hope we look back at these times, you know, in the next couple of years and we go, "Wow, was that ever a ride." Really appreciate everybody joining us, and thanks again. We'll talk to you next quarter. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.