Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Westlife Foodworld Ltd Q1 FY 2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. We would like to remind you that certain statements made by the management in today's call will be forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect management's best judgment and analysis as of today. The actual results may differ materially from the current expectations based on a number of factors affecting the business. Please refer to the safe harbor disclosure in the earnings presentation. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Chintan Jajal. Thank you and over to you, sir. Thanks, Steve. Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us on the Westlife Foodworld earnings conference call for the first quarter of FY 2026 ending 30th June 2025. I am Chintan Jajal, Head IR at Westlife. From the management team, I have with me Mr. Akshay Jatia, President and CEO, Mr. Saurabh Kalra, Managing Director, and Mr. Hrushit Shah, Chief Financial Officer. We will kick off today's conversation with Akshay sharing his thoughts on overall business progress and outlook, which will be followed by Saurabh taking us through operational, financial, and strategic highlights. Before that, we can open the forum for questions and answers. We will be referring to earnings presentation and financial reviews available on the NFPBSC and Investcourse page of our website. With that, I now request Akshay to commence this session. Thank you and over to you, Akshay. Thank you, Chintan. Hello and good afternoon or good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We started this financial year on a steady note, navigating a persistent soft business environment. However, we remain optimistic that eating out frequency will gradually improve, supported by lower consumer-level inflation. That being said, this marks our third consecutive quarter of positive comparable sales, reinforcing our confidence in the strategic path we've chosen and our ability to build momentum on this through the year. We continue to stay focused on what truly matters: driving guest counts, enhancing our value propositions, building customer excitement through product innovation, and making strategic investments that set us up for long-term growth. We've consistently highlighted the immense potential we see in the South market. There's definitely a lot of work ahead of us to build our leadership across categories and to improve our accessibility in the South. To that end, we've decided to strengthen our regional leadership team. Our expanded South India business team structure will help us understand customer preferences better, accelerate decision-making, improve operational efficiency, and enable us to achieve our regional growth aspirations. To foster sustained growth in the long term, we've established a new vertical focused solely on long-term initiatives, often termed as Horizon 2 projects internally, with a strategic outlook extending beyond 2027. These represent a portfolio of highly promising endeavors that will ensure our continued market leadership in the foreseeable future. I'm working in close collaboration with our Chief Strategy and Growth Officer to drive this growth. Another highlight of the quarter is how we have improved the gross margin by over 160 basis points sequentially, achieving a historic high of 71.6% gross profits despite all the commodity price and demand volatility. This has come on the back of structural changes to unlock supply chain efficiencies. I'm very proud of the work done by the team to achieve this. I'm also proud to say that Westlife recently ranked 33rd among India's best companies to work for, a powerful reflection of our people-first culture and the passionate teams that we've built over the past many years. In line with our commitment to shareholder value creation, I'm pleased to share that the Board of Directors has approved an interim dividend of INR 0.75 per equity share. Looking ahead, we remain optimistic on progressively improving the momentum during the year. Thank you for your continued support and trust in Westlife. I now hand over to Saurabh to take you through the operational and financial details of the quarter. Thank you. Thank you, Akshay. Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. As Akshay mentioned, the operating environment during the quarter broadly is consistent with recent trends, stable but remains soft. Despite the muted macro trend, I'm quite happy that we've continued to build on our execution excellence and have delivered resilient performance across our core metrics. Consolidated revenues stood at INR 6.6 billion, reflecting 7% YoY growth. Sales growth stood at 0.5%, with stable guest count and average share despite continued pressure on distribution spending. From channel performance perspective, our on-premise business grew by 8% YoY as we captured more dining occasions across three cities. This momentum reinforces the effectiveness of our value proposition and execution for strategy. Off-premise channel contributed to 41% of our total sales, remaining in line with our three-year average. This balanced mix validates our thinking and our strengths and the relevance of our omnichannel model in serving evolving customers' needs and balancing versus the consumer outlook. Gross margin increased by 160 basis points sequentially to 71.6%, supported by significant enhancement in supply chain efficiency. Restaurant operating margin increased by around 80 basis points, led by a strong focus on operational excellence. Operating EBITDA at INR 855 million was higher by 7% over last year. Cash profits after tax stood at INR 474 million, contributing to 7.2% exchange. We remain focused on enhancing store productivity, strengthening cost governance, and improving unit-level economics to mitigate the impact of short-term volatility and strengthen our long-term brand equity and top-line growth. Our digital business continues to contribute around 75% of our total sales, continues to be a significant driver of growth and consumer engagement. We maintain strong traction across self-ordering kiosks, McDelivery app, and My McDonald's Rewards program, with over 44 million cumulative downloads and more than 3 million monthly active users now, as we call it. I can proudly say that we have one of the most digitally advanced store networks, omnichannel store networks across the country, enabling us to personalize experience and drive repeat engagement at scale. From our network expansion perspective, we opened nine new restaurants this quarter, taking our total store count to 444 restaurants across 71 cities. Nearly all our restaurants now feature McCafé and Experience of the Future format, with 24% of them offering drive-thru services. Our store development pipeline for the year remains robust and aligned with our Vision 2027 target of 580- 630 restaurants. Our team is sharply focused on execution excellence, and we continue to invest behind long-term growth opportunities with prudence and precision. To summarize, our growth factors are intact. We are fundamentally reevaluating what truly matters to the customer. While the business environment remains soft and the market is largely drawn towards affordability, we are instead focusing on customers and redefining what value truly means to them. Accordingly, you will see a lot more excitement around holistic value in the coming two quarters, which will accelerate our momentum. Thank you for your time. I will now hand over to the moderator and open the floor for your questions. Thank you very much, sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star one on your touch-tone telephone. If you wish to withdraw yourself from the question queue, you may press star two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Devanshu Bansal from Emkay Global. Please go ahead. Hi, Akshay. Saurabh, thanks for taking my question. Sir, there is some level of regional nuance to your growth performance as well, right? Where South region is sort of seeing relatively slower traction. In your initial remarks, you did attribute some leadership investments specific to that particular region. I was checking if you can talk a little bit more on this and how do you see growth shaping up in the region for the remainder of the year? Thanks for the question, Devanshu. As we've highlighted consistently now in the last few calls, there's a very clear strategic path that we are taking, and the West is obviously a region that's responding very well. We've seen good traction. It's also due to our strong presence in the West and brand strength that this is playing out quite well. In regards to the South, we've been in the South for 20+ years now, so we have kind of entrenched ourselves well. We are a well-known brand, but there are nuances in the South across the key cities itself, be it Bangalore, be it Hyderabad, be it Chennai. We have a very good understanding. However, we did feel that for enhanced decision-making, operational efficiency, sharper focus, we wanted to augment our business unit to have a focused view in the South, which is why we've augmented our leadership team in the South. It involves a business officer structure working directly with Saurabh and myself to drive growth. That structure involves support across functions, be it HR, operations, marketing, at the regional level. This is not something new. We've done this in the past, but we did feel that for the scale the organization is at and the focus we want to deliver in the South, this was something that was the need of the hour, and we're quite confident in terms of our execution of the same. This is a solid amount of time. Just a follow-up on this. Is this the particular reason why our restaurant cost is slightly on the higher side this quarter? Is this specifically the reason for that? Sorry, could you repeat? We couldn't hear the first part. I'll just continue to answer the question. Yeah. Devanshu, the majority of the cost is on certain strategic projects that we have kicked off. It is a result of upfront costs that we have incurred for those strategic projects. The benefit of which you'll see in a couple of quarters down the line, that has led to slightly higher G&A costs. Part of it is also on the cost of people, but the majority comes essentially on account of the strategic projects that cost in the current quarter. Understood. Sir, last question from my end. I was just seeing your optimized and optimized joke. With figures that footfalls in markets are definitely reducing. Consumers are preferring convenience versus moving out in markets. Are we also sort of directing our expansion towards this travel, be it more through drive-thru stores or growth in metro stations, airports, offices, and standing stores in markets now? As per our strategy, first in Vision 2027, we wanted to open more drive-thru stores because that's an integral part of our omnichannel strategy. Needless to say, we do want to do more drive-thrus. We are experimenting on metro stations, stores, etc. I don't think that's strategy yet. Our goal is very simple. We've got to be where consumers are trending. Whether it's long-distance transit in some of the areas, like all the access control highways, we would like to be a part of all access control highways. We would like to be a part of all airports. We would definitely look at short-term transit with metro as opportunities for the future. That doesn't mean that we are compromising on other areas like a high street or a mall opportunity. I would not say we have changed anything dramatically. We would like to do as many seat standing drive-thrus as possible because what it does give us is another channel to serve our consumers, which we feel at some point in time will become a big growth opportunity. Understood. Saurabh, can you just lastly help us understand, as in what is the typical food court distance between our drive-thru store versus the other seat standing stores? Any difference in terms of CapEx that we sort of incur for drive-thru stores versus, say, other stores? The way we structure, what I can tell you is there's not too much of a difference. Obviously, food court is lower capital. The rest of it, we are able to manage within our resourcing. We don't give clear breakout. Obviously, needless to say, earlier we have given this indication, drive-thru does cost INR 1.5 lakh-2.0 lakh extra. That's about it. We are able to manage. The way we look at it is you're feeding something to the future. As many as we can get so that over a period of time, it becomes a long-term opportunity. We have seen almost all drive-thrus do exceptionally well after five, six years of their growth, and they go far higher than our customer average. Fair enough. Thanks for taking that question. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Aditya Soman from CLSA. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. Good evening. Sir, two questions from me. Firstly, can you just explain the gap? I know you talked about strategic projects that led to a higher cost, but I still don't get why the restaurant operating margin grew 11.4% and then the pre-IndAS EBITDA grew only 0.5%. I'm assuming there's an increase in the range because there's a gap in sort of the post-Ind AS and pre-Ind AS EBITDA growth as well. The second question was just on growth overall. I think this was partly asked in the previous question, but the on-premise growth, basically over two years now is about 2.5% if I just do a simple average. Off-premise growth is around 5%. This is significantly lower than what we are seeing, let's say, the aggregators deliver even a single year or even over two years. Any sort of perspective on that? The on-premise, I understand last year was impacted by a lot of the geopolitical events, but this year you shouldn't have had that impact as much. Aditya, just answering your first question, I think you spoke about the difference between ROM and operating EBITDA, right? We did call out that our GNL expenses have been a little higher this quarter due to investments in strategic projects and people-related costs. That is probably the difference. I'll ask you to take this offline with Chintan if required. Apart from that, we've actually seen an improvement in ROM as well as gross margins. We have delivered good operating efficiencies despite pressure on the top line. Second is our business model and the aggregator's business model are very different. I don't think our optimized growth can be compared to theirs because we have number one delivery, we have takeaway, we have drive-thru, and our business model is more organic. Theirs is led by a variety of levers. I think despite the pressure on the delivery business all around, which we've seen even aggregators report, we've continued to navigate that environment quite well without it impacting margins, as well as drive more growth on our on-premise business, which is actually where our competitive advantage lies. It's our omnichannel model that's going to drive the structural growth that we have given guidance towards. Yeah, thanks. Just to press on, actually, in both, I mean, on my first question, actually, my question was more on the EBITDA growth is 6.9% post-IND AS and pre-IND AS is 0.5%. I'm assuming the gap between those numbers has to be relative, right? Because your other costs will all come in both, both before IND AS, post and pre-IND AS. I'm just trying to figure it out. I mean, like I said, Aditya, if it's an accounting discussion, we can take this offline. Like I'd maintain, our, you know, ROM has expanded, our gross margin has expanded. Please, you know, pre-IND AS, post-IN. AS can be discussed offline. Yeah, fair enough. The second question was more actually on the off-premise growth itself, right? I mean, it was, as you talked about, 4% last year, 6% this year. Over two years, it's put up on average 5%, which was the one I was comparing with aggregators. Anyway, I get your response. From an aggregator standpoint, I think last time also we made this call. From our understanding, we are pretty much the leaders as far as aggregator business is concerned. We are being competitive in the market which we place in. Beyond that, we wouldn't have any comments on how we get what are the drivers in this. Understood. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Gaurav Jogani from JM Financial. Please go ahead. Thank you for taking the microphone. My first question is with regards to the gross margin. I mean, we have seen a handsome gross margin expansion this quarter. How much of this is really sustainable, and what kind of gross margins can we target on a two-year, three-year medium-term perspective? The guidance on the total number has been given in our Vision 2027. We are still maintaining that guidance of how will we scale. I think gross margin was always a part of it. We believe that the number which we are just posting is a sustainable number. We should be able to sustain, and with average volume going up, we should even be able to improve on. Okay. Because, you know, this is like 160, 60 basis. Is there any, I mean, would it be fair to assume both like the 71 are the specific cases or even this number is specific to what we are? I think this is a valid point, like we've always maintained, right? It's not about, it's about restaurant operating margin. It's about operating EBITDA. There are line items. Sometimes some goes up, sometimes some other thing goes up. If tomorrow there is an inflationary pressure on some, I will not increase my price overnight. That doesn't mean as an organization we're not going to focus on improving ROM. To sum it up, right now we see this as a stable base from where we will start working on. Sure. That's helpful. My second and last question is regarding the average unit volume of our store. I mean, this has also declined on a QoQ basis. Given that it's still continued to remain in that INR 6.2 crore kind of a range, how are you looking to drive that up given that the guest count is now stable and it stays because your offering, the value offer, is also being stable? What are the key levers to take this ahead to achieve the Vision 2027 numbers? Gaurav, I think we've given flavor of that in our Vision 2027 document. Even in my commentary, we discuss certain opportunities for the long term that we are scoping out. More importantly, there's a strong focus on our business in the South, which we believe is poised for growth. By delivering that itself, we should start moving in the right trajectory and we should be on a good trajectory. Additionally, we've always spoken about the levers being centered around our core categories of burger, chicken, coffee, our digital and omnichannel model. I think with this comprehensive focus, our Vision 2027 growth is quite clearly laid out. I do understand your thought because at that time, the demand conditions were also very different when the Vision 2027 guideline was laid out. Now, given that we have seen the prolonged slowdown in the overall demand environment, are there any other steps that you are taking versus what you were deciding then that should help you to grow at least ahead of the market? Our strategy is on change-based basis, the macro environment, you know, conditions, because we've taken that into account when we thought through our strategy. Yes, I think one immediate response to your question is our entire focus on value for money. That's not only about price, but it's more about being relatable as a brand, having the right offerings across occasions for our customers. That's our number one priority. That again is relevant for both West and South. There may be some more work required in the South, which is why we've spoken about the South as well separately. I think, again, that falls within our menu and brand lever. The categories that we play with remain the same, burger, chicken, coffee. That's why the strategy doesn't change, you know, comprehensively. There are some tactical interventions that will be required. I think, you know, we've covered most of that. Sure. Thanks. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Avi from Macquarie. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. Am I audible? Yes, sir. You're loud and clear. Go ahead. Hi, Akshay. I wanted to kind of just pick on this gradual pickup that you're talking you're expecting in the coming year. Are we witnessing any early signs of this, which gives us some confidence, or is this more linked to our South initiative? If you could just spend some time to help us appreciate this. The reason is, if I look at the same-store sales growth, it's probably similar to fourth quarter two levels. I wanted to kind of just understand, you know, is this more a macro-led comment or you're more bullish because of what gives you confidence over the years? Avi, this is Saurabh this side. Hello. Nice to see you. I really comprehend seeing you only during call. We need to meet up soon. Having said that, what gives us a lot of confidence is a lot of things which we put in motion. We have seen it work quite well in this and started to give us results which we expected. That gives us a lot of confidence whether from a strategy and execution side, we're in the right direction. As Akshay spoke about, we need to be sharper with a nuanced execution for South. We're putting across, we put across a team, and we believe if we are able to solve for South, we will be at the path which we have spoken about. That's the work ahead of us. We are fairly confident about it. That's what gives us some amount of confidence that we should be able to sharpen this part. Any early signs, Saurabh, that we are witnessing which we can share? I'm not an expert yet to this point. Yeah, there are some experiments which we were doing in South, which seem to be doing some great things. Got it. Just the second bit is that on, you know, EBITDA margin. Now, I mean, if I were to read between your comments, you sound your performance as well as your comments make it sound a lot more confident in EBITDA margin. Would it be fair to argue that if excess growth does not decline, EBITDA margins are probably bottomed out and we should not see a margin decline from here on? I would imagine, unless and until there is something which is beyond our control, I would imagine that should happen, that EBITDA margin is pretty much at the level where we should be able to sustain and improve from where it stands today. Your initiatives have ensured that we can manage costs a lot more better now, even if same-store sales growth remains stable the way it has been. That's what I was trying to get to. That is what the indication is. I don't want to be pompous because you never know in an environment like India, something goes up, tomorrow something goes down. Right now, it looks like it is relatively stable. At this number, we should be able to show some amount of sustainable improvement and maintain for growth. Got it, Saurabh. Thanks a lot. That's all from my side. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Tejash Shah from Avendus Spark. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. A couple of broader questions on two dimensions of demand, one on IT and another on competition. The first, IT and appraisal cycle, hiring in both appraisal cycles has been weak this season. Just wanted to understand, are you seeing any incremental weakness in your cohort which caters to that part of the demand? IT parts are, if you monitor it that way. Yeah, we generally don't see this breakup. I would show again, just to add to Saurabh's point, we don't break it out by cohort because, like he said, sometimes one cohort will go up, one cohort will go down, things will stabilize. That's the beast of the business that we're in, right? A retail business, a hyper-competitive business in a country like India. These cycles will keep going up and down. Our endeavor is to ensure that we have a sustainable business across all occasions and all types of cohorts. Where if there is one that's not performing, there are others that will make up for it. That's how we look at the business. The breakup that we are talking about now is more regional because we've seen that more relevant, where if we are able to kind of tackle the regional nuances that come with our business, we'll be able to deliver on the guidance that we've given the market. Perfect. I know I was just trying to understand because, versus other QSRs, you are more over-indexed because of Pune and then South being there. I was just trying to understand if there is any read-through there. Second question is, how intense is competition currently and what form is it taking? Is it more aggressive pricing at value and increasing share for voice share or increasing spend for voice share, or competitors are crowding out prime real estate because that's what we are also picking up, that the rental costs are going up? I just wanted to understand that part from you. I think it's from a mental model standpoint, we've always looked at ourselves saying, how do we differentiate and look at the consumer? Like you rightly said, when going gets tough, everybody talks about affordability and value. What we want to be able to do is not only think about affordability and value, but what truly matters to the consumer. What I can assure you is we're trying to do a lot more things looking at the consumer in mind and be differentiated in the marketplace. Some of the launches are planned in the next two quarters. You will see we're focusing on our core. We are trying to do things which are a little away from what everybody else is doing right now. Is value important? Absolutely important. Is affordability important in the current context? Absolutely important. The first question you asked, is there pressure in some of the IT that is here? The way to look at it is if you're truly a value brand, you should be able to gain share during these things. That's how our mental model is and that's how we are trying to look at it. Now, how it plays out, we are quite gung ho that we should be able to find an answer to it because some of the places we do see some answers in ourselves. That's how I would leave it. Thanks. Just one follow-up on that. Considering the impetus that industry is giving its value end of the offerings, including us, our gross margin expansion has been very, very robust. You attributed a large part of it to supply chain efficiency. I just wanted to understand, is there any category in which dynamics are also playing there, that chicken indexation actually gives you more room to play on margins versus if it's a non-chicken product? I don't think it's exactly like that. Like we said, it's supply chain efficiencies that we've unlocked. Product mix, we have almost 70% of categories available through our menu in Westlife Foodworld as we have calculated. Product mix will always go up and down, but our endeavor is obviously to keep improving operating margin. Got it. That's all from my side. All the best for the coming quarter. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Jignanshu Gor from Bernstein. Please go ahead. Hi. I wanted to understand two specific things. One, on our reporting of AUV, we have changed the definition. Do we intend to continue with this further change? Second, how do we think about its relation with the earlier definition for our NC's understanding? I think the earlier definition was pretty much all the operating stores. We have just made it comp. I think that is rich data for you guys to be able to calculate. Comp means stores which have been operational for more than 12 months. What is their average? Needless to say, you can yourself calculate what total AUV looks like. Okay. The base for this time, the central sales number would be the same, right? Yes and no, because what happens is some of the times restaurants close down. They get removed from the comp to AUV base. All those are modulations around it. For example, a comp base might have a store like Phoenix, which got shut down, etc., etc. It is not exactly like to like, but the idea is to be able to make it as close to like to like as possible. Okay. Great. Thank you. The second question was on gross margin. Would you be able to share what part of the gross margin increase is a factor of supply chain efficiencies and what part is, have we taken any price increases in the quarter or through the year on a wider basis? There was a marginal price increase taken in March, but it was a very marginal price increase, like Akshay talked about. A lot of them are supply chain efficiencies, commodity efficiencies, which have come in, and we believe that they are structurally neutral, and we should be able to sustain them. Got it. Great. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Jay Doshi from Kotak. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity. Hi, Akshay. Hi, Saurabh. My question is, you know, your confidence on further improvement in South. At this point of time, are your SSSG growth rate numbers very different between the two regions? Do you think that South, which is probably, is it South dragging your SSSG? Do you think South will accelerate and that will help your growth now? I'd say South underperforming, or? The simple answer to that, I would not say. I don't know about the word underperforming because you're adding to a lot of things. Is it dragging down the SSSG? Absolutely. While you're doing quite well in West, you're not doing as well in South. We did put a few experiments in. Some of them are gaining green shoots, and we need to develop our execution excellence for South specifically, which is what Akshay talked about when he said that we are putting up a team, including a Business Officer who will directly work with us to ensure that this execution excellence happens in South. Our belief is that if we are able to do it, we should be able to get the trust in South, therefore uplifting our overall growth. Is this an operational aspect of execution, or is it something to do with, you know, product portfolio or competitive competition? Yeah, there. That's why we mentioned it's, you know, a business factor. It's a business problem to be solved. It's not only operational. The main thing is you have to put the customer in the center and understand why the stores are not performing as well as we want them to. That is something that's already a work in progress since the last few months. We've already intervened with some experiments and like Saurabh said, we are seeing green shoots. We're working quite closely with the team involved to ensure that we bridge the gap. That is the endeavor. The confidence is high because we've done it in the West. We believe that once we're able to solve this business problem, we should be on a very good trajectory, which should then continue to get better as we keep implementing all the opportunities in front of us. Understood. Thank you. My next question is, at the time of articulating Vision 2027 ambitions, the demand environment was very different. Now, in context of the current macro, which is not kind for the overall industry, as we continue to see muted same-store sales growth, right? Back then, the expectation was that same-store sales growth will continue to be 7%-8%. If it ends up at 2%-3%, then what is realistically, what is the margin band that one should think about, right? At 7%-8%, if you were targeting 15%-17%, if it is 2%-3%, whatever. I think we can discuss this when we do come back if we need to. As of now, we continue to maintain that those are the targets that we are driving towards. We're still in the middle of 2025. We have till the end of calendar 2027 to drive towards those targets. As an internal team, those are the targets that we set ourselves in all our discussions. If there is a need to revise them, we'll be the first ones to call them out and call out that need, sorry. We will then come back with a discussion that will be populated to everyone. Sure, thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Resha Mehta from Green Edge Wealth. Please go ahead. Yeah. Good evening. My question is also kind of related to the previous participant's question on margins. In our vision statement, we have outlined our aspiration to reach, you know, 18%- 20% margins. If we look at the current margins of 13%, and take the lower band of 18% aspiration margins, it's still a 500 basis points gap. How much of this improvement do we expect, you know, by 2027, let's say, from gross margin expansion, from cost efficiencies, and from improving footfalls? What is the assumption here for, you know, a baseline SSSG to achieve, let's say, an 18% kind of margin? If you're not able to quantify this, would appreciate if, you know, you could kind of give some flavor, you know, on the margins aspiration. Yeah. I think very clearly, we have strong demands saying how do we go to a so high single digit beyond the median of 5%-6%. If we are able to do this, we believe we have done a good job in terms of being able to keep our breakeven from cost and control. If we are able to get at least a year, year and a half of high, single-digit comp growth around 7% also, we should be able to achieve what we are set out to achieve. That's what we are planning to. That's why we are saying we are not giving up on it. We are very clear that in this kind of environment, we've got to look at the consumer and be able to show what do we need to do in order to get where we want to be. That's how we are looking at it. Like I said, these are broad-based numbers. A lot of it, the moment we want to do a math on our 6%-7% of same-store sales growth, you will see whether it's data, whether it's Vision 2027. At the lower end, it will be achieved without too much often happening. The big task to be done for us is how do we accelerate to be able to reach at that number? That's where the endeavor is. That's where we are working towards. Would it be correct to conclude from your comments that largely this margin gap would be bridged by SSSG expansion, which is to the tune of expectation of 6%-7% SSSG to achieve, you know, an 18% kind of a margin? Broadly, I mean, this is what would be fair to conclude? Yes, broadly. What would be the sensitivity in terms of, let's say, if there is a 100 basis points or a 1% improvement in same-store sales growth, then what kind of operating leverage does that lead to? Yeah. While it was all broad comments, as you do here, you all can calculate the operating leverage or blue leverage, which comes out of SSSG being negative or positive. I wouldn't comment this here. At an organization level, when you're creating a plan, you're creating the plan to be able to show how do we grow revenue, how do we bring profitability in, what's the endeavor, that's how we look at it. Can situation go wrong? Absolutely. It can be something like COVID happened, all the profitability went down. We don't know what we don't know. What we are saying is if everything remains stable, we do believe that there is a path of accelerating growth, and we are working towards it to make sure that that happens sooner than later. Right. Just the last one. Our royalty is around 5.6% currently. How does that move over the next two to three years? What are the thresholds for it to increase, if any? It is available on our website. Please take a look at that. If you have any other questions around that, you can contact Chintan Jajal and his team. They'll be able to answer that. We've given all the guidance available for royalty on our website. Sure. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Amruta from Wells Managers India Private Limited. Please go ahead. Thank you for this opportunity. My question is regarding, you know, there was this new McDonald's deal which was announced, like where a new thing deal was launched by the McDonald's North and East. Is this offer available pan-India? Like, you know, Yum! brands have this uniform rollout nationwide. Does McDonald's have such a strategy too, or does it have a usual specific where, you know, both the franchisees can have different products of like the dishes development and also the new offers on anything? The first answer is no. Ranveer Singh Meal is not available with us. We strategically aligned it a year in advance of where we want to partner. Like we are already talking about North Shore. Wherever we want to partner, we will partner. These two businesses are in very different stages, and it's up to the licensure to be able to say whether we'll partner or not. Right now, we decided last year itself that we're not going to partner. There is freedom within the McDonald's framework in which we get to do what is right for our business and our customers, and they get to do what is right for their business and their customers. We did not participate in anything. I see. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Jagdish Sharma, an individual investor. Please go ahead. Hi, sir. Am I audible? Yes, sir, you're audible. Thank you, sir. Thanks for doing this opportunity. I just have one broad question. While in the QSR sector, if we have to see the gross margin of our teaser competitors, both are in the same level, similar level, 70%-72%. I know you in your vision document, we want to take our EBITDA margin to 18%-20% and all these things. Why is the EBITDA margin different even now? They were talking about 23%-25%. We are talking about 18%-20%. What is the difference between us and our teaser competitors in the other two years? We have different business models. You have to talk about our business model. Can't really comment on their business model in terms of their gross margins. What we can say is we've clearly given our guidelines in terms of our EBITDA margin aspirations, and we stick to that. Okay. Okay, sir. My last question is like, what is the guidance for this year's same-store sales growth and your revenue growth? We don't break it out into yearly guidance. You have our Vision 2027 guidance, and we hope to get to a point where we can do that, so that there's more predictability. There is improving momentum expected through the year. We've been at this flat level for the last couple of quarters. Like we've discussed through the entire call, there are multiple growth initiatives in the pipeline. We definitely don't see things worsening. We feel the bottom has already passed us, and the improvement should be apparent in our results as we move forward. Thank you, sir. Your Korean burgers are really awesome. I'm a fan of your, this thing. One suggestion or one recommendation is, if possible, give the shareholders some discount in terms of coupons or something like that. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. A reminder to all participants that you may press star and one to ask a question. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question to the management, you may press star and one. As there are no further questions from the participants, I would now like to hand the conference over to the management for closing comments. Thank you so much for attending our call, and we look forward to seeing you again next quarter. Thank you. Have a good day. Thank you. On behalf of Westlife Foodworld Ltd, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.