Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'd now like to welcome you to SMU's fourth quarter results conference call on the 12th of March, 2025. At this time, all participant lines are in listen only mode. The format of the call today will be a presentation by the management, followed by a question and answer session. Without further ado, I would now like to pass the line to Ms. Carolyn McKenzie, Head of Investor Relations at SMU. Please go ahead, ma'am. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us today. I'm here with our CFO, Arturo Silva. As usual, we have some slides describing some of our business highlights as well as financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2024. After that, Arturo will be happy to take any questions at the end of the call. You can send your questions by chat, or you can raise your hand and we can unmute you. An audio recording of this call will be available on our website later today. Also, please note that we may be making forward-looking statements today. As always, please remember to take a look at the caution regarding forward-looking statements on slide number two of our presentation. As usual, we'll start with recent highlights from our three-year strategic plan for 2023 to 2025, with its four key pillars, starting with omni-channel growth on slide number three. As most of you are aware, our plan is quite aggressive on new store openings. We've set out to open a total of 58 new stores in three years, and in 2024 we opened 20 of those stores. This is on top of the 14 that we had already opened in 2023, bringing us to 34 in the first two years of the plan. We should complete the remaining 24 openings in 2025 in order to reach the target of 58 new stores. The 20 stores we opened last year included eight Unimarc's, two Alvi's, four Super10's, and six Maxiahorro's. We also converted five Mayorista 10 stores into Super10 and remodeled 25 Unimarc stores. The new stores have been performing well. On average, sales and EBITDA for the full group of new stores are exceeding our plan. When we look at stores opened in 2023, half of them have already reached levels of sales per sq m and EBITDA margin that are higher than the average for their respective formats, even though they've been operating for less than two years. On the next slide, another part of our omni-channel growth strategy is our e-commerce business, where sales grew 21% in 2024, and our online sales penetration grew from 2.8% in 2023 to 4% in 2024. Over the year, we worked to expand coverage of our Click and collect option, giving customers more flexibility in terms of when and where to receive their orders. We also expanded coverage with last mile apps. On slide 5, we move on to the customer experience pillar of our plan. Promotional activity is one of the defining characteristics of our value proposition. The insight we have into our customers' needs and preferences helps us to make data-driven decisions and adjust different parts of the customer experience, including our promotional activity. Throughout the year, we've seen how economic conditions put pressure on our customers' budgets, and consequently, they seek to optimize by purchasing fewer quantities and substituting for cheaper products. In response to this situation, in May, we launched new promotions focused on basic products to which consumers are highly price sensitive. The positive customer reaction to these promotions helped contribute to sales recovery in the third and fourth quarters. On slide six, private label growth is another key initiative within our customer experience strategy, and this is also another way we help customers optimize their budgets while still enjoying excellent quality products in line with the promotional activity I described on the previous slide. We have a broad and growing assortment of products in our private label range, with nearly 400 product launches over the last two years, contributing to our private label penetration of 13% of sales in 2024. On the slide, we have a picture with a selection of products representing our different specialty brands. On slide seven, another part of the customer experience pillar of our strategy is our loyalty programs, which help us to better understand our customers and offer new initiatives and benefits that are relevant to their needs. Over 10 million customers visit our stores each year, and at Unimarc, around 3.8 million club members have made a purchase in the last three months. In July, we launched a new concept of membership levels for our Club Unimarc, making us the first food retailer in Chile to offer this type of program. Our customers benefit from exclusive promotions and discounts at Unimarc and also partnering businesses depending on their membership level. The levels are Club, Gold and Platinum member, and there's also a paid membership for the Diamond level with additional benefits. The membership levels are associated with the customer's average spending levels, so if they increase their spending at Unimarc, they can upgrade to a higher membership level and benefit from higher discounts. We believe this contributes to customer loyalty. Since launching this initiative in July, over 1.6 million customers have upgraded to a higher level, and on average, customers who upgrade increase their spending by over 20% month-over-month. In 2024, we also relaunched our loyalty program for our Alvi Cash & Carry format, with specific benefits that cater to B2B club members and aim to help them develop their businesses so they can in turn, shop more with us. Club Alvi has a new streamlined app designed to meet customer needs in one place, from online orders to personalized coupons and other benefits. On slide eight, the next pillar of our plan is efficiency and productivity, where the initiatives we have implemented have been essential to keeping operating expenses under control in the face of inflation and increases to minimum wage. We've implemented a broad range of technological tools and systems, benefiting different parts of our operations. Self-checkouts and self-service scales contribute to in-store productivity and customer experience. Digital shelf management technologies such as Zippy, the robot you see on the slide, facilitate tasks such as making sure prices are correctly marked and products are in stock and correctly placed on the shelf. The digital treasury system helps eliminate manual cash management processes in our stores. Voice picking contributes to more efficient order fulfillment processes in our distribution centers. Automated demand planning uses artificial intelligence to more accurately forecast demand, contributing to higher in-stock levels and reduced shrinkage. We've also continued to roll out our efficient operating model for Unimarc, focused on efficient replenishment, higher frequency of deliveries from distribution centers, the use of roll containers that go straight from the truck to the sales floor without using a storage area, among other processes, improving in-store product availability. These initiatives allow us to implement an organizational restructuring plan in January and February of this year, which will allow us to generate savings on personnel expenses going forward. The cost of this plan is around CLP 9 billion, which will be reflected in non-operating income in our first quarter financial statements. The savings generated by the plan in the following months will offset the cost over the course of this year. Therefore, the net impact for the full year will be zero, and there will be further annual savings of around CLP 9 billion after this year. On slide nine, our plan also includes energy efficiency initiatives with an impact on both the environment and on our operating expenses, which is important as electricity rates in Chile have increased significantly. As such, one of our initiatives is to increase the number of facilities that contract unregulated electricity rates, which are lower than regulated rates. This depends on the electricity consumption of each location. Stores that have high enough consumption levels are eligible to negotiate directly with generation companies. In fact, last year, the consumption limit was lower, increasing the number of stores that are eligible for unregulated rates. In 2024, 15% of our energy consumption in Chile was contracted at unregulated rates, and in the fourth quarter, we successfully completed a bidding process with electricity suppliers to contract additional facilities under unregulated rates, including the stores that now qualify under the new lower consumption limit. These additional facilities account for a further 35% of energy consumption, and they will migrate gradually. By 2027, in total, we should have over 50% of our consumption under unregulated rates. As part of these contracts, the electricity supplied to these stores must come from renewable energy sources, so we will also be tripling our renewable energy. Another initiative is our sustainable store project, which includes monitoring systems and automated climate and lighting control, helping to save energy by reducing consumption between 5%-10% in the stores where the project has been implemented. With respect to the committed and sustainable organization pillar of our plan, in December, we were notified that we had been selected for the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for Chile and MILA, which was the first time we'd qualified. We also had access to our relative performance within our industry, which is food and staples retailing, and where our score on the 2024 S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment, which is the main input that determines index membership, placed us in the number 1 position in our industry in Chile, number 2 in Latin America, and number 8 in the world, as well as in the top 3% of companies in our industry worldwide. In February, we were notified that we had been included, also for the first time, in the S&P Global 2025 Sustainability Yearbook, which recognizes companies with distinguished performance within their industries. We're very proud of both of these accomplishments because they reflect the progress we have made in our sustainability management. Going on to the numbers on slide 11, we have revenue and growth margin, where we had a significant recovery during the fourth quarter. Our second and third quarter results have been strongly impacted by declining year-over-year growth margins. As we explained at that time, this was related to the change in promotional activities I described before, which we implemented in May as part of our customer experience initiatives. Our focus on basic products to which customers are highly price sensitive improves our competitive position by offering more attractive prices with a positive effect on sales. The change in the sales mix affected our growth margin, which fell 60 basis points in the second quarter and 100 basis points in the third quarter. However, in the fourth quarter, as a result of improvements to our commercial efficiency and optimizations we've made to the promotional assortment, we achieved a significant recovery, not only returning to 2023 levels, but actually exceeding our fourth quarter 2023 growth margin by 70 basis points. You can see the comparison of quarterly growth margins throughout the year in the graph on the bottom of the slide. Thanks to this recovery in the fourth quarter, we were able to achieve the same growth margin for full year 2024 as in full year 2023, despite having two much lower quarters. We also achieved sales growth in addition to the margin recovery. Revenue grew 1.5% in the fourth quarter, driven by 2.4% growth in Unimarc. In the cash and carry segment, which includes the low cost formats Alvi, Mayorista 10, and Super10, revenue decreased by 1.1% in the fourth quarter, mainly due to the comparison base. It is worth noting that since 2021, revenue in this segment has had a compound annual growth rate of over 8%. Full year revenue growth was 0.9%, with 1.6% in Unimarc. On the next slide number 12, we have our operating expenses, which grew 6.2% in the full year and 7.6% in the fourth quarter. We continue to see the impact of the higher minimum wage, which was up 10% in the quarter and nine percent. Sorry, 10% in the year and 9% in the quarter, and inflation on our operating expenses, essentially reflected in personnel expenses and service expenses, which are affected by higher electricity rates, and also cleaning and security service expenses. These two accounts, personnel expenses and service expenses, explain practically the entire increase in operating expenses. Operating expenses as a percentage of revenue grew 110 basis points in the full year and 130 basis points in the quarter. Moving on to slide 13, we have EBITDA, which also benefited from the recovery in gross margin, although it is of course affected by the higher operating expenses. EBITDA for the fourth quarter decreased 4.6% compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, which was a sequential improvement following decreases in excess of 20% in the second and third quarters. The same is true of our EBITDA margin, as you can see on the graph below, where we were relatively flat in the first quarter, followed by decreases of 170 and 220 basis points in the second and third quarters respectively. Now in the fourth quarter, we almost made it back to 9% with a 50 basis point difference compared to the fourth quarter of 2023. For the full year, EBITDA margin was 8.0%, and the recovery in gross margin positions us well to continue moving back towards our long term EBITDA margin target of 9%. As we have said before, our top line growth will determine how fast we are able to achieve that goal. On the next slide, we have net income, which was down 44.1% in the full year and 56.8% in the quarter. However, in the fourth quarter, the numbers are not comparable because of a non-recurring effect from the fourth quarter of 2023, where we recognized a gain of CLP 12.7 billion after we reached an agreement with insurance companies for the payment of an amount that was higher than the original provision for a claim dating way back to 2019. Excluding that effect, net income was down 32% in the quarter. In both the quarter and the full year, the main reason for the lower net income was the lower operating income, essentially lower EBITDA and higher depreciation and amortization related to the higher CapEx in recent years. On slide 15, at the top of the slide, we have a summary of our cash flow for the full year 2024. We started the year off with a cash balance of CLP 105 billion, significantly higher than the minimum we'd like to have on hand, which is in the neighborhood of CLP 45 billion-CLP 50 billion. Operating cash for the period was CLP 225 billion, and we also issued four bonds and refinanced bank debt for a total cash inflow of CLP 236 billion pesos. The bonds we issued are part of our refinancing strategy to flatten out our maturity profile, as you can see on the graph below. The uses of cash for the period included the amortization of bank debt and bonds for CLP 126 billion, lease payments of CLP 63 billion, interest payments of CLP 60 billion, CapEx of CLP 107 billion, and dividend payments of CLP 52 billion. Leaving us with an ending balance of CLP 154 billion in December, which is a significant surplus but lower than you would expect to see given the refinancing strategy we carried out during the year in order to cover the bond maturities we have in the first half of 2025, as you can see on the amortization schedule below. The reason for this lower than expected cash balance is a temporary working capital effect, largely due to the year-end calendar dates, where the cutoff date for supplier payments fell just before the end of the year, and the extra long New Year's weekend meant we had to build up some inventory, and we also had more days of receivables from credit card payments than normal. In January, we recovered around CLP 70 billion in working capital, returning us to a cash balance in excess of CLP 200 billion, which is also consistent to the balance we show as of September 30th of last year. We changed up the order of the slides this time because the working capital effect on cash also affects our financial ratios, as you can see on slide 16, where we have both as reported figures and figures that are adjusted for store rental expenses. On the left, net financial liabilities to EBITDA, including store rentals, was 4.6 x in December, and when we adjust for store rentals, it was 3.7 x. This is higher than recent periods, primarily due to the lower EBITDA, but also because of the lower cash. If we were to apply the working capital recovery of CLP 70 billion that we had in January of this year to our year-end 2024 figures, instead of 4.6 x, net financial liabilities to EBITDA would be 4.3 x. The adjusted figure would be 3.2 x instead of 3.7. On the right, net interest coverage as reported was 4.5 x in December 2024, lower than in December 2023 because of the decrease in EBITDA and also because we've increased our financial debt in preparation for the maturities that we have this year, which led to us having an overlap in debt and consequently interest expense throughout 2024. We did also have higher interest income from that cash, but it wasn't enough to offset the higher interest expense. When we adjust EBITDA and interest expense for store rentals, interest coverage was 8.9 x in December. On slide 17, we have our bond covenants where we continue to have plenty of flexibility. Net financial debt to equity is at 0.63 x, well below the 1.03 limit. Here we again have an impact from working capital on cash. If we continue the working capital recovery instead of 0.63, we would be at 0.54 x. As I said on the previous slide, interest coverage is 4.5 x, which is almost double the 2.5 x requirement. That is it for our presentation. Thanks so much for listening. If there are any questions, Arturo will be happy to take them now. Thank you. We'll now move to the question and answer section. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star two on your phone and wait to be prompted. If you're dialed in by the web, you can type your question in the box provided or request to ask a voice question. We'll just wait a moment or two for questions to come in. Okay, looks like we have a question from Alonso Aramburu from BTG Pactual. Your line is now open. Please go ahead, sir. Yes. Good morning, and thank you for the call. Two questions on my end. If you can comment please on whether the margin trends have continued in the first couple of months of this year. What are you seeing in terms of consumption at the beginning of the year? I was also curious to ask about Peru, which has been very weak the last few quarters. Can you just give us some color as to what's going on in that operation and what are you doing to try to turn around the sales in Peru? Thank you. Okay, first of all, the margin situation. The gross margin has performed well, remaining at the level experienced in Q4 2024. That is good because we recover our level of margin in Q4 2024 after the not very good margin in Q2 and Q3 in 2024. In the first quarter of 2025, the margin situation is good. It's similar with the Q4 2024. Consumption. We are expecting the improvement in the consumption in Chile, but we need the improvement of consumption in the food. Of course, if, when you see the consumption numbers in the economy, including the non-food, non-food no doubt has been better than food in the last two months, or in Q1 2025. We are expecting a very demanding, actually, comparable base in Q1 2024 because we had a leap year and Easter in Q1 2024. The first is more demanding in this aspect, the comparison. We're expecting that in Q2 and Q3 or in the rest of the year we have a better performance in sales growing more because the consumption will be improving and the comparable base will be more regular in the next quarter. In Peru, you're right. The performance in Q4 was not good. In 2024, the competitiveness was very hard. The margin also was not so good because we tried to improve our sales investing some money in margin. In December and also in January of this year, the margin is more regular, better. The sales is, again, more complicated because we need to improve our private label offer. We are working in this aspect to implement more assortment with or more portion of the assortment with private label in the next month. With the idea to improve our offer and pricing and competitiveness to improve our sales as well. Also we're expecting the consumption in Peru, although that was weak in 2024, should be better also in the next quarter. In Peru also we're suffering in Q1 2024 the same effect, the leap year and also Easter. In next quarter the situation should be better also because we are incorporating more new stores there. Because the store in the northern part of Peru, the performance has been better in general. Therefore, incorporating more stores in this area in our discount format, the improvement in the sales should be more significant. Thank you, Arturo. Okay. Thank you. Great. We also have a question from the chat from Joel, from Itaú. Joel has two questions. The first one is: I saw that SMU bought a company in the fourth quarter for $1.5 million. Can you provide more color on that? The second question relates to the organizational restructuring that we commented on in the presentation. If we can explain the impact on the EBITDA in the first quarter and if it's going to affect net income and the savings going forward. Yeah. The first question. Hi, Joel. The new company or the acquisition of the company is a trading company with the purpose of improving its commercial efficiency and competitiveness through the search for supply sources that allow us to reduce the level of intermediation and offer better quality products and attractive prices to our private label to customers. That is the idea. Improve our competitiveness and prices and quality with different sourcing in world through this trading company. That is the goal of this acquisition. The second question is the restructuring plan. As Carolyn mentioned in the call, we reduce our head count after implementation of different technological tools in the last years, you know, that we are implementing this restructuring plan every two years, depending on the implementation of this efficiency in our stores and also in our distribution center, including both. The investment in this plan was CLP 9 billion in Q1. The idea is to recover this amount during this year with zero effect in 2025. We will have CLP 9 billion savings in the next years, so 2026 and 2026 and go on. It's a very profitable plan in this aspect, yeah. That's it, yeah. We have another question, another text question, from Emory Pexton from Imperial Capital. The question is if we can provide guidance in terms of store openings and CapEx for 2025, and if we're seeing any increase in activity, so there's new store openings from the company that was acquired by InRetail last year. Yeah. In terms of openings in Q1, we opened 1 Alvi store until now. The idea is to open four additional Alvi stores, plus nine Unimarc and two Super10, so completing 16 stores in Chile in 2025. Plus eight stores in Peru with this 24 additional stores in 2025. That is to reach the 58 stores, including our strategic plan 2023-2025. 16 stores is absolutely possible. Last year we opened 20 stores. You know, it's in the level of opening that the SMU has actually. Of course, it's absolutely possible. What's another question? In retail. CapEx. Excuse me. CapEx. This year the CapEx will be similar of around CLP 120 billion. For this, not only considering the opening, also the maintenance plans and technology investment. The other question was InRetail - Yeah. Acquisition of Erbi. Yeah, we are monitoring this situation. What will be the commercial effect that we can see in the market or in the competitors. Until now, no change in the market. InRetail keep the same stores. But we know that the idea is for them to open more stores in the future in the hard discount segment. We are competing reasonably well in Peru with them through our soft discount stores. We have in Chile, Super10, Mayorista 10, and Unimarc, which is our multi-format strategy. We have a good format to compete with them. We are expecting, of course, what will be the commercial movement of them. We are expecting that through our current format compete well with them. We have another text question from Aldo Morales, from BICE Inversiones. Aldo asks if we can provide an update on the competitive environment in the supermarket industry in Chile, given there's been some lag in same-store sales in the fourth quarter and also new store opening announcements by competitors. Like competitive image is hard. Was hard in 2024 and Q1, you know, 2025 similar. No, not so different. As you know that we implement some changes in our commercial strategy in 2024 in Q2 and Q3. In Q4, we improve our sales and also our margin. Q1 2025, we give the same performance. Therefore we improve our competitive capacity in the commercial point of view through very good prices within basic products for our customers. We have good answer from them. The idea is to keep this strategy in 2025. We're expecting better market condition in the level of the consumption to grow more in same-store sales and also in the new store. In addition, we have a lot of new store in the last 24 months. The performance of this store has been very good. The most of them have had better performance than the plan. We're expecting that the business store will improve the growth also in the next quarter of 2025. But the competitiveness is hard. All competitor are very aggressive in terms of pricing. The similar situation of 2024. Other questions about. The new store opening announcements from- The competitors announce the new openings. We consider this input in our master plan. We're expecting in the next year. The idea is to keep the level of openings not only until 2025. The idea is in 2036, 2037, and so on to keep the level of opening 15-20 stores with the idea to mitigate or to compensate the openings of our competitor with the idea to keep our market share in the next years. There was a question about cash and carry, but that was the previous question about InRetail, so that's covered. We have another question from Verónica Pérez, from BCI. She asked, "Although you don't operate in non-food businesses, I'd like to know if you had any impact on your 4Q 2024 sales due to Argentine tourists, especially considering your high participation in the regions, if we've seen any impact in the first quarter. And do we know if any percentage of our sales come from foreigners?" I can answer that question because I'm a foreigner and I buy at our stores. We do have some sales from foreigners. Yeah. Hopefully the Argentines purchase more non-food products. Our non-food assortment is only 2%, therefore the impact in our case is not so significant. For our competitors, no doubt, because they have hypermarket and 20% or 30% of non-food assortment. So for them has been no doubt more significant to us. In our case, it's not so significant, the Argentinian demand. Therefore in our Q1 sales, we don't see an important effect. In the previous question about the cash and carry or the new participant cash and carry, if you are thinking in InRetail or another competitor, we are. Yes. Cencosud could be because they have cash and carry in Brazil and other countries. It could be an option to invest in cash and carry also in Chile. We are number one through Alvi in Chile. We have a very consolidated format in this segment. We are prepared to compete with them. Sure. We are increasing our penetration in this segment, opening more stores in Alvi. This year, five stores, the new store and also in the next year, with more coverage in the country because opening stores also in regions where Alvi is not present today. Therefore, we are preparing to consolidate even more this segment, because until now we are the number one in this, and we have very good performance in this segment. I don't know what's another- We have a follow-up question from Joel, from Itaú. He asked: Given the effect of the restructuring, higher electricity costs and inflation levels, can you give any guidance for 2025? Well, the restructuring plan was explained in detail. Electricity cost, in fact, we suffer with this change or growth in the rate of electricity rates. We are implementing more stores as unregulated rates this year and also in 2036. Therefore, we are expecting in 2037 to reach 50% of the total consumption in unregulated rates. Savings in the current regime in 2027 and so on. CLP 2.5 billion in addition. Like, we used in 2024 was CLP 1.5 billion. In total, around CLP 3.5 billion that represent 20% or 25% of the total increase that we suffer in the electricity expenses. Also the inflation levels, of course the impact in the salary is very important. But the restructuring plan, the idea is to mitigate in this very important line of our expenses that is salaries, compensate the inflation and also the minimum salary effect through more efficiency, more productivity with the implementation of this restructuring plan. We have another question. We have a question from Sergio from Credicorp Capital. Seeing that new stores are outperforming on sales, on average sales in EBITDA, would this imply that those stores are at 9% EBITDA margins or is there still room to get there given that they are relatively new stores? Well, the performance of the new store has been very good with better sales than planned in most cases and also an EBITDA margin. The new store EBITDA margin in average, because of course the Unimarc store have better EBITDA margin than Super10 and Alvi. In average, the EBITDA margin or is in the level of in Unimarc is 12%, in another is 11%, something like this. Before the headquarters expenses, that is in the level of 2.5 to 2%. Therefore, in averaging that is reached the 9% that is our goal for the future. Okay, thank you. Just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star two on your phone and wait to be prompted. If you're dialed in by the web, you can type your question in the box provided or request to ask a voice question. We'll wait a few moments and see if any new questions will come in. Looks like we have no further questions, so perhaps I can hand it back to the SMU team for the closing remarks. Great. Thanks very much, Luis. Thanks everybody for joining us today. Feel free to get in touch if you have any additional questions, and we hope to have you with us next quarter. Have a nice day. That concludes the call for today. Thank you and have a nice day.