Welcome to our strategic update for 2026. Today we are proud to celebrate our journey and introduce our strategy for the next five years. From our first store in Laval 45 years ago to nearly 17,300 locations worldwide, we've grown into a family of 150,000 team members and one of the world's leading destinations for convenience and mobility. This year, we're on track to open more than 100 new stores across North AmEricka, with many other sites already under construction and over 1,000 new locations in our pipeline for future development. At GetGo, we've become part of the family, bringing 270 stores and bringing best-in-class food and loyalty programs to accelerate our journey. Every day we serve 8.5 million customers, keeping them cool with a Polar Pop, energized with a warm cup of coffee, and satisfied with everyday food options. Our Fresh Food Fast program continues to gain momentum, with more than 6,000 stores globally and meal deals that are a big hit in North AmEricka, delivering quick, great value options customers can count on. Fueling our customers' journey is what we do best. Last year we sold 15.4 billion gallons across our network. Our loyalty programs are transforming the customer experience. Inner Circle has surpassed 12.5 million members in the U.S. While Extra 2.0 is rolling out across Europe, rewarding every visit, whether it's fueling, charging, or even enjoying a cold beverage or a tasty meal. We are leading the EV transition in Europe. We have close to 4,000 fast chargers and nearly 2 million charging transactions last quarter, up 55% year-over-year. Behind the scenes, we're strengthening our supply chain with three new U.S. distribution centers, supporting 1,600 stores and enabling faster, more reliable deliveries. Our RELEX inventory platform is driving accuracy while reducing spoilage and improving margins in Europe, and we'll be rolling it out in North AmEricka soon. We can't do it without our people. For the fourth year, Gallup named us an exceptional workplace, proof that our one-team culture is driving engagement and a focus on winning the customer. As we look ahead, our focus is clear: providing our compelling value with fast and friendly service, ready with the products and services they're looking for, growing sustainably and responsibly, making our customers' lives a little easier every day, and always striving to be the world's favorite stop for people on the go. Good morning, everyone. [Foreign Language]. On behalf of Alimentation Couche-Tard, welcome to our 2026 Business Strategy Update. Thank you for those joining us in person here in Toronto and to everyone connected via webcast. I'm Mariusz Chojnacki, Director of Investor Relations. Today, our leadership team will share how we're positioning Couche-Tard for the next phase of profitable growth and long-term value creation. We will begin the event with a fireside chat featuring our President and CEO, Alex Miller, and Mathieu Brunet, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury. This will be followed by presentations and a Q&A session. We'll wrap up before noon with some closing remarks, and for those attending in person, we will be providing a light lunch. Before we begin, a few housekeeping items. Today's remarks will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risk and uncertainties. We refer to the following forward-looking statements accompanying this presentation, as well as the risk and uncertainties outlined in our financial reporting. Therefore, our future results could differ from the information discussed today. Full details are available in our public filings, and a recording of today's event will be available in the investor relations section of our website, along with presentation materials to follow. With that, Mathieu, over to you. Hi, good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to kick things off today, and I have the privilege to interview Alex Miller as we look back at the last 18 months since he was appointed CEO of Couche-Tard. So, Alex, when you took over as CEO, I remember you came to me and you said you needed to know a lot more about that investor relations stuff and what that actually meant for you. Since then, we've actually spent a lot of time together, you know, working on quarter ends and different projects. So it's been great to know you since then. Thanks. But now I'm sure that many investors will also like to know more about you since you've been with the company for many more years. So why don't you start things off by telling us more about yourself and your career path? Yeah, thank you, Mathieu. Thank all of you for being here. Excited you're here today. I grew up in central Illinois, in a small rural town. I met my wife, Vicky, in college. We've been together for over 30 years. I have three children, three wonderful children, at least most of the time. One's in college now. Two are in high school. I like to be outdoors. I like to try and stay active. I like to golf. I like to ski. I like to ride my mountain bike. I like to read. From a work perspective, I started after school, after I graduated college, working for Amoco oil company in St. Louis, Missouri. My first job was running three convenience stores. I spent my first eight and a half years with Amoco. After about three years, they got bought by BP in retail. Different jobs in retail, category management, pricing, fuel pricing. I wrote a new labor model, I remember. Moved kind of all over the United States or several times in the United States. Then I moved to London to BP's headquarters to work in finance planning, worked on M&A. I then moved into what we called alternative energy. I worked in solar, wind, natural gas, liquids, combined cycle gas turbines. Then I moved back to Chicago for my final four years working in BP's fuel value chain and their supply and trading teams. Brian Hannasch, our former CEO, I met in my second job in Amoco. I've known Brian for more than 30 years, and I worked for him twice in BP and Amoco. We obviously kept up through the years, and Brian brought me over to Couche-Tard to he had the idea that we had gotten large enough at that time to kind of consolidate our supply and logistics, fuel trading in North American. So I started doing that for Couche-Tard. We decided to then do that globally. I then took on a senior operating role. I ran real estate for a while, and then I became COO. And here I am. That's quite the experience in retail, actually. It started about five years ago for me, you know, working for Couche-Tard, and it's been quite impressive to see how retail is fascinating, actually. So if we're reflecting now, you know, just on the last 18 months, you know, in your career and your new role, can you give me the top three most important things that you have learned since becoming the CEO? Yeah, Mathieu. I think, you know, first of all, just the scale and resiliency of our global platform. I visit all of our business units every year, and I'm just, you know, amazed by the quality of our assets, the quality of our teams, the diversification of our teams, how local our teams are. It is just a pretty profound network and platform that we've built. The free cash flow that comes off of that platform is impressive. We're very blessed by that. I think, secondly, just the power of being in stores and being with our people. I think, you know, it's pretty easy to get chained to a desk, chained to PowerPoint slides. Really resist that. Our business is alive in our stores. I learn more being in our stores than I do sitting in front of my computer or looking at a PowerPoint deck. I learn from talking to our people, hearing what's really happening, what's working, what's not working, what projects we didn't get quite right, and where our focus needs to be. And then I think the third thing I would say is just the pace of change with consumers. I've never seen, you know, just the rampant change in what's happening across retail, how consumers are behaving. So it's just imperative to stay close to the customer right now, really stay on top of that, of what's happening, and adapt, and adapt quickly. Yeah. You're totally right. It's been such a changing environment, you know, whether it was, you know, customer-driven, the outside environment, the interest rates, inflation. It's been a wild couple of years, actually, for us as a company. Now, I'm sure there's a question that is on everyone's mind today, but what has not gone to plan that impacted the execution of the 10 For The Win strategy that we presented 2.5 years ago? Yeah, I think I'll touch on three things. I think, first, we didn't anticipate the consumer softness, the environment. You know, obviously, COVID we'd never been through COVID, coming out of COVID, the inflation. We hadn't experienced inflation like that in decades. Many of our people, many of us had never experienced inflation like that, and just the pressure that it put on consumers, their consolidation of trips, their pursuit of value. We didn't anticipate that in what we built in 10 for the Win. I think, secondly, just, you know, category headwinds or category changes. I guess it kind of gets to the changing consumer. I've been in this business for a long time, and usually, you know, categories would move 1% or 2% year-on-year, up or down. You know, seeing categories move up or down 10%, see it happening very quickly, that continues today. Again, I don't think we anticipated that. I don't think we necessarily changed quick enough. I think we've learned from that. I guess, third, I would say just our food execution. I think as we reflect, when we first rolled out our food program, it was too complex. It had too many SKUs. The processes weren't tight enough. You know, we need thousands of people to execute anything we give them. It has to be tight, kind of has to be bulletproof. It was too complex when we initially rolled it out. I mean, those are quite good learnings, you know, I think, from what we've seen over the last 2.5 years. But if we let's continue to expand on the same topic for a moment. There's also been a few successes as well, you know, as part of 10 for the Win. So why don't you tell us what you're the most proud of from the strategy that came out? I think there's a lot of successes, and there's a lot of things I'm proud of, Mathieu. I think let me first just start with our people and our operating metrics. We're a retailer. We focus on execution. Coming out of COVID, it was very difficult during that time. We have just improved our core people metrics and our core operating metrics just quarter-over-quarter, really ratably. And we're back to being Couche-Tard, and our people metrics are better than they've ever been. I think, secondly, just our network growth and discipline. You saw in the video there, 100 new stores. We have a machine, a real estate and development team that is a machine. We are building sites. We are doing it with our normal discipline. And just, you know, Total. It's a big transaction for us, complex transaction, and we're integrating it. We're ahead of our model plan that we put on the business when we acquired them. I'm really proud of the progress we've made there. Thirdly would be digital transformation. Candidly, 18 months ago, we were waffling a bit. I think we were behind. In 18 months, I think we've leapfrogged and we're ahead. And you're going to hear Ericka and Ed talk about that later today. I guess fourth would be a food reset. We have learned from our mistakes. We've gone back. We've reduced SKUs. We've tightened our process, and we're in action now. And Louise and Hans-Olav will talk about that later today. Fifth, our cost discipline and reinvesting. We delivered on our agenda. We've saved hundreds of millions of dollars. We've performed pretty consistently at CPI, absorbed this inflation while investing materially in systems and platforms. Just last is, you know, culture as a performance engine for us. Our culture is so important to who we are as a company. I think our culture is as strong as ever right now. Yeah. I think those achievements really make my life easier in investor relations, that's for sure. You know, it's certainly been great the last couple of quarters to be able to showcase, you know, the successes that we've had and also the momentum that we've been building. So you kind of finished on culture. So I want you to kind of keep that thought and talk to us about, you know, the culture. I know you've told me a few times one of the reasons you were appointed CEO was because you were the one that was going to protect that culture. So talk to me about what makes the culture of this company so special and unique. I think first is humility, being humble. We are a team of 150,000 people. We are all together. We are out in stores. We are talking to each other. Humility in everything we do. I think second is our values. I'll talk about those a little bit later. But we live by those values every day, and we all share them. I guess, you know, third bit of our culture is just absolutely being customer-obsessed, focusing on the customer in everything we do, listening to them, adapting to them. That's our culture, Mathieu. I'd say a second thing is, you know, our decentralized operating model as a structural moat. That model our founders put in place has served us so well. We have 30 business units around the world. They are local. The people that work in those businesses come from those geographies, grew up in those geographies. They are close to the business. They own the business. I recall, you know, maybe six months after Felipe joined, and he and I were just sitting around talking, and he said he goes, "The thing that just amazes me about this company is the ownership of their P&L and the ownership of their business." That is our decentralized model. That's pretty unique. Yeah. I would definitely echo everything that you said. I think a personal example for me is how everyone came together as one team as we were, you know, preparing for this investor day, right? I mean, everyone was very happy to chip in, so. And that was great. But other than preserving the culture, are there any other points of emphasis that you have focused on? Yeah. I think a few things, Mathieu. I guess first, you know, I'm sure the team is pretty sick of me saying now, "Less is more. Less is more. Less is more." Something I've lived by, I've managed by, I fundamentally believe in. What does that mean? It means focus. I think with a company of our size and our scale and the complexity that's happening around us, it's even more important. Less is more. Focus on what is priorities and get after it. We know when we focus this organization, they can deliver amazing things. I think secondly would be customer-ready operations. Just we are an operating company. We have to be ready for those customers. It is the most differentiating thing we do. I'll talk on that a little bit later. You know, digital and supply chain enablement, that is our scale. That is deploying our scale. That is things smaller, single-site operators. They can't do that. Those are advantages for us. Those are how we utilize this scale, and we are working on that. I guess last, you know, just retention and engagement, back to our people, Mathieu. Our people are who get it done. When we're turning over people, we have to retrain people, and that customer-ready suffers. Really getting after and continuing to improve on retention and engagement is always going to be a priority for me. Great. Thank you, Alex, for the amazing opportunity to have this interview with you and for providing us with a better understanding of your achievements at Couche-Tard and also what your priorities have been as the CEO of this great company. Now, I know that investors and analysts are eager to learn more about where you're taking Couche-Tard into the future. So before we start the presentation, why don't we just take a quick moment and you tell us why it was important to bring everyone here today and present the company's outlook and the strategy for the future? Yeah. I think I'm just incredibly proud of what's been built and what we're continuing to build. We are going to grow this business. We have great people that are highly motivated. I tell Alain all the time, he asks me about people all the time. And I always tell him, I said, "We need more great people." But I fundamentally believe we have stronger people than we've ever had. We have phenomenal leaders up and down this company. And I'm excited for the future. I'm excited for you to get to be with some of our leaders and to hear about where our focus is. Great, Alex. Thank you so much. The mic is all yours. Thank you, Mathieu. I'm excited. I hope you can sense to share with you our strategic update. I'm going to take you through just a bit of our history because our history is important to us. I'm then going to pivot to kind of our vision of the future and the things we're paying attention to. And then we'll bring it back to the strategy. I'll introduce the strategy, and then several of our leadership team will go into greater detail around that strategy. This is a condensed timeline of our history. As the video said, our founders started this company with one store in Laval in 1980. They grew in Quebec. They grew into Ontario, and they continued to grow west into Canada. Our founders would tell you a lot of people told them not to go into the United States. A lot of foreign companies failed. A lot of Canadian companies failed going into the United States. If you know our founders, they believed in their model. They believed in themselves, and they entered the United States in 2001 when they bought Bigfoot Oil. They doubled down on that bet when they bought Circle K. It was a huge transaction for us at that time, a couple of years later. Then they entered Europe. I remember they had been talking about entering Europe, and they found the right opportunity. They bought Statoil in 2012. I think maybe it'll help if I tell you a little story to try and underpin who our founders are and what really is our culture. I joined Couche-Tard in January of 2012. Brian hired me to do the fuel role. I lived in Chicago, Illinois at the time. My kids were in school. I was supposed to move to Phoenix to do my fuel job, but I couldn't move until the summer because my kids were in school. So Brian said, "I want you to go work in one of our stores before you move to Phoenix." So I went to work at a store in Oak Lawn. That's in South Chicago. Brian told me, he said, "You know, get in there. Learn what we do." He goes, "If something comes up that is relevant of why I hired you," he goes, "I might reach out and ask you to do something." I don't think it'd been two weeks, and he sent me an NDA. He called me. He said, "I'm going to send you an NDA." He goes, "Sign it, and I'll call you." So he sent me the NDA. I signed it. It was Statoil. They were working on acquiring Statoil. So I spent months working in our store in South Chicago. And at night, I was in the data room reviewing fuel contracts, working on a model. I ultimately wrote a paper for our board suggesting that the fuel margins were sustainable in Scandinavia. Turned out I was mostly right, luckily. I then went, in early summer, Brian invited me to go with Alain himself and Raymond Paré, who at the time was our CFO, to go ride sites in Benelux on another file. And that was really cool for me because I got to know Alain then and Brian a little more. And while we were riding the sites, you know, they were pleased with the assets we were buying. They were holding on price and pleased with what we were paying on price. But what they talked about the most of why they were doing this transaction was the leadership team they were acquiring. They fundamentally held that for them to enter Europe, they had to get a great leadership team because they knew we weren't going to bring Canadians or Americans over to run our European business. I sit here 13.5 years later, and Hans-Olav, sitting right there, he is one of our senior leaders. Ina Strand, who is our Chief People Officer, came in that transaction. Jørn Madsen, who's another one of our senior leaders over in Europe, they all three came in that transaction. And 13.5 years later, they are still here with us. I think they like our culture. You can ask Hans-Olav later. That's our culture. That is our culture. I think, you know, we entered Asia in 2020 when we brought out our franchisee in Hong Kong. But we've kept adding with additional transactions, Esso in Canada, multiple transactions in the United States, Topaz in Europe, then Total in Europe. So we just keep building on those platforms that our founders have built. Now, this is our network. This is what we've built: 29 countries, 30 business units, 17,000 sites, as you heard in the video. We don't chase site count. We don't have an aspiration to have 20,000 sites or 30,000 sites. That's not who we are. We take a very focused view on our network, and we're actually very active with our network. And it is incredibly differentiated in our channel and in retail in general and provides the foundation for our strength and our ability to grow and to grow earnings. Aaron, who runs our network, will talk about that in quite a bit more detail later today. We pursue M&A for four reasons. We want attractive, long-term assets. We want robust return on capital. We have to believe that we can deliver meaningful synergies. We better have a plan, and we follow that plan to do it. Alain just challenged us this week on something we were talking about, Felipe, right? What's your plan? You need a better plan. We follow that plan. We develop those plans. We execute those. Everything we do, we have a model. That's what goes into our budgets. We know with every transaction we've done, whether we've achieved those models. I can tell you with a couple of exceptions, we have. The final reason is, can we acquire distinct capabilities or platforms, programs, or people, as I mentioned, with Statoil? This is our operating model or the flywheel that our founders developed, they gave us, and that we follow today. We invest in the business, strategic growth. We invest in our business. We ratably invest in our business. We do that with financial discipline. We invest in our existing assets. How does that show up? That shows up through ideas, then the piloting of those ideas, proving those ideas, and then scaling those ideas. We do that over and over again, and we ratably invest in our business. I mentioned our decentralized business unit operating model, global, local. We will not change that. It is unique. It is differentiated. We fundamentally believe it's one of the things that makes us so strong and has delivered the returns that we have over many decades. We only add regional, enterprise, or global headcount where we feel we can deliver scale and unique capabilities. We're pretty aggressive about restricting, monitoring, where are we doing, and how are those interfaces working with our business units. And then finally, you know, it's a cliché, right? Retail is detail. It is a cliché, but it's right. Retail is detail. We focus on operational excellence. We monitor a lot of KPIs. We talk to our business units every period about their performance, the things that are working, the things that aren't working. And we are focused on our stores and our operational execution. 25 years of EBITDA, EPS, and net earnings, and some of the many transactions, sizable transactions on the bottom of this slide. I think it's a pretty good performance under any lens. If you've owned Couche-Tard for these 25 years, you've done pretty well. It's quite an amazing story. It's won all of us. I've been CEO for 18 months. It's a responsibility to take over for Alain and Brian in this trend and what's been built. I take that extremely seriously, as does this team. I know what's on your mind. Hey, it's a great chart, Alex. But what about those last two years? What about that orange bar and that pink or that orange line and the pink line? Those went down the last two years. I could sit here, and I could talk to you about COVID and margin, you know, pretty extreme margin expansion. I could talk to you about the Ukraine-Russia war and the dislocations that drove in oil, gasoline, and diesel markets and increased margins and our capability to capture a pretty substantial share of that. But those are excuses. I know what you want to know: are those bars going to be going back up in this trajectory? I can tell you the answer is yes. We're going to talk to you about our vision of how that happens. I'm pleased with the last two quarters we've talked with you about. We've gotten some momentum. That momentum has continued in this latest quarter. And as we talk with you about our strategy today, the answer is yes. So that's a little bit about our history. It's hard to talk 45 years' worth of history in three or four slides, but it means a lot to us. It is where we come from. It is kind of what grounds us as leaders of this company. I now want to pivot to our vision. Our vision has changed. This is a new vision for us as part of this strategy refresh: To become the world's favorite stop for people on the go. Why did we decide to change it? Again, I mentioned earlier that the environment's changing, right? It's changing rapidly. Consumers are changing. I referenced I have three children. They're a lot different than I am. They live differently. They interact. They consume differently. The world is changing. We need to adapt. What does that mean for Couche-Tard? It means channel blurring. It means digital. It means where, you know, we need to beat the C-store industry, right? And we are by increasingly widening gaps, candidly. But we need to win in retail because channels are blurring. Consumers are making choices. Consumers have more choice, more visibility through these digital channels than they've ever had. Consumers are starved for time. They're looking for efficiency. They're looking to be talked to where they live and where it's relevant for them. They are on the go. We love on the go. In bricks-and-mortar retail, there is no other space I would rather be than where we're at. We have incredibly great assets. We are incredibly convenient. People get into our stores, and they get out of our stores very quickly. Most of the things that are purchased from us are consumed immediately or within 90 minutes. We believe there's broader things we can sell in those stores that fit these criteria. You guys are very intelligent people, and you read like I do. Blue-collar jobs are growing. Trade schools are growing. These are our customers. They're on the go. We can serve them. People on the go is our sweet spot. It's not just in the C-store channel. It's in retail as a whole. Our mission hasn't changed. You heard it in the video: to make people's lives a little easier every day. Sounds kind of simple. Maybe you think it doesn't matter. We think it does. I'll just tell you a story, right? You hear us, you hear me say I'm in our stores all the time, and I visit all of our stores. I think one of the things that just amazes me when I'm on those rides and I'm with these guys and people kind of see us standing around, we're usually wearing protective orange or yellow jackets because we're out on our parking lots. And they're kind of like, "Who are you guys? Are you the big wigs?" You know? But the number of times that people come up to us and thank us and want to recognize one of our employees, you wouldn't believe how many times that happens. It happens all the time. It tells us a story about somebody and how great they are, what they do for them, how they've come through for them. That's real. I think that, you know, we're all consumers. We're all time-pressured. And, you know, I'm 53, but for me, the experience is getting worse. I get disappointed a lot, you know? I wait in line. People don't have something. People are rude to me. People don't seem to care that I'm there to transact with them. This matters, right? This really matters. So making people's lives a little easier is what we do. This is our customer promise. Again, it's a pretty simple slide. One of the things when I took over as CEO, I thought we had the opportunity to we hadn't lost focus on the customer, but I thought we had the opportunity to focus even harder. So we did a ton of consumer research to go out, ask our customers what they wanted from us, what were the most important things they said they wanted. This is it by a long ways, not even close, right? They seem like simple things, right? They come to us for convenience, for speed, for efficiency. They want it to be fast. That's why we invest in Smart Checkout. That's why we use our cameras in our stores to monitor wait time. And I can tell you our wait times in almost every business unit are getting faster. They want us to be fast. They want us to be friendly, as per my story previously. They want to have a positive experience. They want employees that are engaged and happy to be there. Customer-ready, what does that mean? It means that they want our stores to be clean, and they want us to have the products that we are supposed to have that they came to purchase. They want us ready for that. We are investing in platforms and technology that you'll hear about later today that is going to be a game-changer. It's in Europe for us today. It is going to be a game-changer for us to improve on our customer readiness. And I think the thing we added, so those three have been in focus for us for quite a while. We added a fourth. It's called compelling value. That is the change in the consumer. It's not like value wasn't there. Clearly, you've had the Walmarts of the world for a long time with low price. But value with these constrained consumers is even more important. You might be sitting there saying, "Alex, you guys run a convenience store. You're not really known for value." So let me be clear. We're not planning on competing with Walmart for everyday low price. But the places we participate in our core and the things we're developing, we absolutely can compete in value. We have tremendous scale. We have tremendous vendor partnerships. And we can run real compelling deals. So we are running fewer promotions but more compelling promotions. And when we get this right, our consumers respond. And this is something we're going to double down on as we look to the future. I talked about our values a little earlier. One of the questions I get. I saw it was on the IR group. Always gives me a tough Q&A. But I get asked this all the time. One of the questions on the tough Q&A was, "You know, Alex, is it hard to lead and manage in this polarized political environment?" The answer I always give is, "No, it is not." And the reason it is not is because this is how we lead this company. These aren't values we created this year or last year or 10 years ago. These have been our values for the 14 years I've been here. And if our founders and Brian were here, they would tell you these were our values before then. Let me give you a little color about so what is one team? You heard it on the video. I was glad to hear it. One team is we don't do politics. We don't do silos. We don't do scapegoating. We are all in this together. We are all attacking the customer, servicing the customer. This is what we do. We do it every day. We work together. We support each other. We welcome people for who they are, what skills they bring to us, and provide an environment for them to grow and achieve. We do the right thing. Again, sounds simple. We do the right thing in everything we do. We support our communities. It is at the core of our decentralized model. You know, we just went through a pretty nasty snowstorm in the Southeast United States. We always have two priorities. Louise and I talked about this just recently: keeping our people safe. First and foremost, we will do anything to keep our people safe. Make sure they have housing. Make sure they have food. Make sure that if they're stranded at work, we can get them home from work. And then we look to keep our stores open because we need to service our communities. And our communities really rely on us in times of disaster. It's really important for them. And having water and fuel, basic food is really important. And we deal with them a lot. But it's even more than that. You won't see, I don't have a big corporate marketing budget. I don't think you'll see a Couche-Tard or a Circle K on the Bell Centre. If anybody's going to make that decision, it's Steve who's sitting in the back. We go to our business units. Our business units carry those budgets. And we encourage them to participate with local charities and support their communities for the things that they value. My favorite value is play to win. One thing I've loved since the day I joined this company is we get after it, right? We get after it. We work hard. We want people to make decisions. We want to push down decision-making. We want them to own their business. That is my job. I view my job as success. The fewer amount of decisions I need to make, the better. I want our people on the ground empowered to make decisions and owning their business. So now it's time to announce our strategy refresh: core plus more. We are focused on long-term profitable growth, consistent organic growth. The customer is at the center of everything you will hear about, leveraging our scale. That's in our network, our platforms, and our systems. The thing I'll tell you, everything you're going to hear about today, we are in action on today. It's not on a slide. You're not going to hear about a lot of bright, shiny objects or some massive change for Couche-Tard. You're going to hear about us focused on our core and the things we think we can do more of and leveraging our scale. The financials that Felipe will share with you at the end of this don't include any M&A. They are all organic. We are going to grow organically. And what we are talking about, and you see the word on this slide, is we want and need to grow traffic. We want more people visiting our sites and shopping in our stores. And I referenced that I was proud of the last two quarters, been improving. That trend has really continued into this quarter. We are seeing positive traffic in a number of business units. I really feel great about that. We're going to amplify the core. This is our core business: fuel, nicotine, and thirst. It is the predominant reasons today that people come and visit us. We like this space. Two of these three things are growing from a macro sense. We are taking share in all three and increasing the amount of shares. Trey has sent me Nielsen, all of us Nielsen data, in the last two periods where we outperformed market by 500-600 basis points. We have never achieved those types of gaps. We can't do that without executing in the core. We're going to do more. You're going to hear more about the food reset. Our numbers, we've grown nicely in the first two quarters of this year. That has continued and, again, progressed further in this latest quarter. Offer, what is offer? It's assortment. We need to evolve our assortment, change our assortment. We think we can. We're going to underpin that with our investments in supply chain. And you're going to see a video later from Trey on that. Network, I've talked already a lot about it. Aaron's going to talk about it later. Mobility solutions, that might surprise you. You know, I think if you live in the U.S. or you live here in Canada, you know, it's like EV, wow. You know, I just watched all these automakers take these huge write-offs and, you know, and the subsidies aren't there and things. But I can tell you in Europe, EV is very real. It is growing. And we have built just a fantastic platform under Hans-Olav's leadership. And he's going to talk to you more about it later today. Our enablers. I'm really excited that Ed and Ericka are here to talk with you today because I don't, it's always. I know for me, it's a black box. And what are we doing in tech and these systems? This is our scale, right? This is our scale: data, digital, platforms. This is where AI comes in. They're here to talk to you about it. We're going to continue to drive efficiency into our business so we can keep our costs controlled and make the right investments. If I've heard Alain say once, I've heard him say it 50x, "Alex, put people around you that are smarter than you." You're going to meet six of them or hear from six of them later today. I think maybe where I've added to Alain's guidance to me is these six people have very different backgrounds, different experiences in life, and probably most importantly, different skill sets. We are good at different things. We complement each other. I'm really excited for you to hear them later today. I guess last, I'm going to finish with people. Anyone that knows me knows that I fundamentally believe the most important thing in a business is people. We have incredible assets in this company. But our people are our blood. Our people are how we execute, how we get things done. Nothing is more important to me. I created Operations First when I became COO. That was a focus on our people and our customers. I referenced our people metrics. We are hitting levels this doesn't sound humble. We are crushing industry on turnover levels. We are beating them by 20%-30%. And we continue to get better at it. We're increasingly being recognized by various entities for being a wonderful employer. That is really important to me. It is really, really important to me. And great people enable this strategy. So with that, I'm going to finish. I'm going to hand it over to Louise, who's going to take you into the core. Thank you. Hi everyone. I'm Louise Warner. I'm the EVP of North American Operations. I have the privilege of presenting the core on behalf of all of our teams across the world. You heard from Alex about the importance of the people in our stores and in our teams across the world. You'll hear later from Aaron that location is the number one reason why people visit a convenience store. Ericka and Ed will tell you about all the amazing things we're doing in tech and digital and the personalized offers we're bringing to our customers, which they love. But in the end, we need to have the products that people need and want when they visit on a convenience occasion. As Alex said, those things today and into the future are things that are pretty simple: fuel, nicotine, and thirst. For fuel and nicotine, these are mature products. They've been around for a while. Many of you will think that these are declining products. We don't see it that way. Firstly, we believe and can evidence that we take market share. Second, the underlying consumer is actually growing in both of those areas. For mobility, we see fuel and e-mobility growing in totality. In nicotine, the underlying use is actually growing as well. Hopefully, I don't need to convince you about thirst. Thirst is a category that is growing overall and broadening the diversity of the occasions, the diversity of the products that are offered. It's amazing how many different things can be in a thirst occasion. I'll tell you a little bit about why we're so excited about thirst. You can also see the financial significance of these products to our business. On this slide, you can see the significance to revenue and gross profit. And so for us to continue to grow organically, as Alex referenced, we believe and can continue to outperform in these categories. In the coming slides, you'll also see me talk about U.S. statistics quite a bit. Why do I talk about the U.S.? It's our biggest market. So obviously, that's a good reason to talk about it. But it's also the most transparent market. So it's where we're able to get lots of good data to share with you transparently and tell you the story of why we're winning. So let's start with fuel. We're incredibly proud of the business we're building fuel. Alex told us his journey as the first dedicated fuel employee of the company. Today, we employ thousands of people working in this business with an integrated business all the way from customer to supply. These customers are pretty diverse. They're individual guests like you and I filling up our cars. But there are also businesses, large and small, visiting our sites. The majority of our stores globally are now under the Circle K banners. So Circle K, Couche-Tard, Ingo, the controlled banners, our brands that we control. And you'll hear from Aaron and Ericka also why that is really important as part of the unlocks in the network and our digital solutions. But it's more than that. Having our own brand isn't about some marketing presentation that someone came up in a dark room. The red canopy allows our customers to recognize us, to see Circle K as they come down the road. It allows us control and cost advantages in our supply chain. It also simplifies our tech platforms, allows us to own it and then tailor our solutions to our customers. With this formula that we've built with fuel, we're on the same path with nicotine, thirst, and the more categories to emulate this success. So one of your favorite topics and also, fortunately, one of mine, fuel margins. We presented a view very similar to this a couple of years ago. Our conviction continues to grow in this view. On the left-hand side, you'll see the cost of doing business continuing to grow. Alex mentioned inflation. We see ourselves, with our strong cost discipline, continuing to be able to beat that inflationary pressure that we see across the industry. Secondly, we also see industry margins continuing to rise, people acting rationally saying, "Hey, my cost of doing business is rising. I need to find a way to pass this cost on." So we see fuel margins continuing to rise in line with CPI, taking also into effect the volume demand destruction in some of our markets. And we see this trend in all of our geographies. This is not something new. This is not something that you will see period to period, quarter to quarter, and maybe even year to year. But it is a continuous trend that we see and we believe in. The other thing on this chart is our outperformance. So you see the gap between the industry and our performance continuing to rise. We believe not only is this sustainable, but we have more opportunities to outperform. And it's from all of the things that we've been working on over the years. This is not one thing. These are the hundreds of things our fuel team are doing every day. So what are some of those things? Well, less is more. So I won't tell you them all. But it's thinking about our customer, thinking about keeping our forecourts fast, keeping them clean online the whole time. How do we approach our business customers? How do we build personalized loyalty offers that they love with fuel at the core? How do I think about my supply chain, my sourcing, my logistics, the efficiency? Every little piece goes to the bottom line, and also making sure that we're dynamic with our fuel pricing strategies. So let's move on to nicotine. We see rapid shifts in the products that are available to our customers in the nicotine category. We see our customers choosing to either broaden or substitute the products that they've traditionally used into these more modern products. So let's use a couple of examples of what this looks like. In some cases, a traditional cigarette user will add another product. So this might be one of our white nicotine products. Or maybe I'll put my friend Trey on the example. He would have traditionally used snuff. And now he's fully transitioned to a white nicotine product. So what this means overall, we see across the industry a decline in the traditional cigarette products but an increase in the consumption of the more modern alternatives like vaping and white nicotine. And in the later part of the decade, we believe that these new products will have more significance than cigarettes in our overall business. And like fuel, we are outperforming the market in this category. And we're doing that by working closely with manufacturers, watching these trends, and making sure that we have the products available to our customers as and when they need them. It goes without saying that the regulatory environment is a significant influence on this category. And how and when we introduce products is dependent on that regulatory environment. Our commitment to our communities, as Alex talked about in this space, is to be a responsible retailer and to only introduce products that are legally allowed in the communities that we operate in. And our customers then have confidence also that they can trust us to be that responsible retailer. As you can see a few statistics on this slide, we are outperforming the markets we operate in in all of these categories, both the traditional cigarette categories but in particular, these new modern products. So let's give a couple of examples. For traditional cigarettes in the U.S., we sell twice the number of volume of the average industry location. For modern oral, in the markets we trade, more than one in every five cans that are sold in those markets go through our register. And that means our manufacturers come to us when they want to help us bring an offer to our customers. Some of you will be aware of the amazing information we ran last fall. In the space of four weeks, with the support of our manufacturer, every time someone bought a nicotine product of any type, we were able to offer a free can of ZYN to our customers. And in the space of those four weeks, we gave away millions of cans of ZYN. And that's maintained momentum of those customers coming back. So how are we winning? Well, hopefully, you can see some themes here. One, we're committed to providing the broad range of products that we can, making sure they're available to our customers. Second, we're committed to providing compelling value to our customers through deals like the ZYN promotion I talked about and the digital solutions we're bringing together. This is also frontline pricing and personalized offers so we can attract all types of customers. And later, you'll hear from Trey in our video about how supply chain is going to help us continue to grow in this space. OK, but let's move on to thirst. I think you heard the excitement from Alex. We're all so excited about thirst across our business. We see demand for drinks growing. And it's an all-day occasion. You can see on this slide, we talk about some. Sometimes it's hot or cold. Sometimes it's a big drink or a small drink. Sometimes it might be dispensed or packaged. It might be non-alcoholic. Or it might be beer and wine. Or it might be ready to consume, something on the go, or someone wants to take home. For all of those things, we've invested over many decades to serve all of those needs. And so we're outperforming in this category. Our customers know that we're the destination for thirst. You see on this slide, we talk about globally, seven out of 10 customers, when they come into our stores, they buy a beverage. In some of our valued BUs, this is over eight out of 10 customers. And these are often our private label or controlled brands. So in the U.S., we're known for Polar Pop. In Europe, it's Circle K coffee. In Canada, the most popular is Froster, which, weirdly, at this time of year, is incredibly popular. Our customers are evolving. You may have seen in some of our publicly listed suppliers' reports that they have headwinds on some of these categories. But that's not the whole story. We see thirst evolving, and in particular, energy and functional drinks being the growth category. This, as Alex referenced, is not a small change. We see double-digit% growth in all of our markets on energy, showing that the customer is just embracing these drinks and wanting to buy them on the go and every day of the week. We're winning. We saw this trend coming through our analysis, through our data, through our market research. We invested and partnered with manufacturers to make sure that we were ahead of the curve, first to market. On a store-by-store basis, our C-stores sell 2x our convenience store peers. In fact, when we look across all channels, we also sell 2x the industry average of all channels. So what are we doing to make this a success? First, the investment in our stores. Alex talked about upgrading, investing readily in our stores over time. This is our cooler capacity. These are our beer caves. We're able to fit extra capacity into stores in all shapes and sizes. Our people are creative. They find some more space. We're investing in physical plant. We also are investing in data, so looking at market trends, seeing which products are selling, making sure we stay ahead of these curves. Our strong relationships with suppliers allow us to bring product exclusives or amazing deals to the market to win that customer. Unlike some of the channels that we're competing with, we have some extra opportunities for ourselves to use our digital platforms to help us. Two examples. Actually, you can see it on the picture here. Because we sell both thirst and fuel, we're able to use our loyalty platforms and personalize offers to our customers. So if they buy three energy drinks, they can get a fuel discount. Customers love it. Or we're partnering with a company called Swiftly, who allows our customers to get an instant rebate through our digital platforms, sometimes $5 or $10 off a pack of beer. So it's a way of us driving both thirst and other sales in our core and winning that customer to keep returning to Circle K. So hopefully, you've heard from Alex and I this morning about the passion for our business, our strategy, our history, and how that flows into our core. We're winning in fuel, nicotine, and thirst. And we not only currently outperform the industry, we believe we have more growth to contribute more earnings from these categories. This is through our scale. This is through our brand. And we have more opportunities, as you'll hear later, particularly in the merch categories, to build on that success through our supply chain. But none of this is possible without the people in our stores. They're the ones that bring these products to life, that encourage our customers to come back every day with their friendly service. So it's time for a bit of a break. Hopefully, you get a chance to go outside and have a chance to have some of our Circle K coffee. Then after the break, I'll be joined by my colleagues Hans-Olav and Aaron. We'll get into the next part of the strategy, which is investing more. Thanks for your time.