Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Casey's acquisition of Fikes Wholesale Inc, and its 198 CEFCO convenience stores. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Brian Johnson. Please go ahead. Thank you, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Casey's conference call to discuss the announcement of our agreement to acquire Fikes Wholesale Inc., owner of CEFCO Convenience Stores. Joining me today to deliver prepared remarks are Casey's Board Chair, President, and CEO, Darren Rebelez, and the company's Chief Financial Officer, Steve Bramlage. Darren and Steve will also be available for a brief question-and-answer session after the remarks. For your convenience, in addition to this morning's news release, we have posted a presentation to the investor relations section of our website. We'll make some references to this presentation during our opening remarks. Before we begin, I'll remind you that certain statements made by us during this call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include any statements relating to the ability to consummate the transaction, the potential impact of consummation of the transaction on relationships with third parties, expectations for future periods, possible or assumed future results of operations, financial conditions, liquidity and related sources or needs, business and/or integration strategies, plans and synergies, growth opportunities, and performance at our stores. There are a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results or performance to differ materially from any future results or performance expressed or implied by those forward-looking statements, including but not limited to, the execution of the company's strategic plan, the integration and financial performance of the acquired stores, wholesale fuel, inventory and ingredient costs, distribution challenges and disruptions, the impact and duration of the conflict in Ukraine or other geopolitical disruptions, as well as other risks, uncertainties, and factors which are described in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, as filed with the SEC and available on our website. Any forward-looking statements made during this call reflect our current views as of today with respect to future events, and Casey's disclaims any intention or obligation to update or re-revise forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. With that, I now will turn the call over to Darren to discuss the transaction and related details. Darren? Thanks, Brian, and good morning to everyone. We appreciate you taking time out of your day to join us on such brief notice. We're thrilled to be with you today to announce our agreement to acquire Fikes Wholesale Inc. and its 198 CEFCO convenience stores. This transaction is highly strategic and will help the company accelerate execution of its three-year strategic plan. This acquisition will quickly expand Casey's presence in Texas, a very attractive market for Casey's. In addition, we'll be able to expand our footprint further into the South as well. The transaction will deliver EBITDA accretion in the fiscal year and create value for our shareholders, team members, and guests. We're also very thankful for Raymond Smith, President of Fikes, and his team for their cooperation throughout the process. We're pleased to have reached this agreement and are excited about Casey's future. Before getting into the details and anticipated outcomes associated with this transaction, I'll first remind you of Casey's current three-year strategic plan that we shared in June of 2023. At that time, we committed to adding at least 350 new units by fiscal 2026. This transaction, coupled with our strong growth in fiscal 2024, will enable Casey's to achieve that target less than halfway through our plan. Acquisitions of this size and strategic fit do not come along very often, and we seize the opportunity to add these large, high-quality stores to our network. The fit between Fikes' and Casey's is outstanding. CEFCO's large format stores average over 4,800 sq ft, comparable to the new stores that Casey's builds today. This will give us the ability to add kitchens to 85% of the stores fairly easily as we eventually expand our pizza offering to Texas and the South. The transaction will also include a dealer network as well as a fuel terminal. The fuel terminal gives Casey's another fuel capability as we continue to evolve our fuel procurement and distribution strategy. Texas has been a highly strategic state for Casey's since the 22-store Lone Star acquisition last fall, and adding CEFCO stores will give us the scale to continue to grow both organically and via M&A throughout Texas and the South. Once completed, we will have over 170 stores in Texas, making it the seventh largest state in Casey's network. This opportunity really reflects the progress we have made in recent years in our ability to source, acquire, and integrate stores into the Casey's portfolio. In fiscal year 2022, we acquired 207 stores, including 182 in 3 separate transactions. In fiscal years 2023 and 2024 combined, we acquired an additional 159 stores via multiple acquisitions. Today's announcement is another stop along that journey. Our team's deep integration experience, along with our strong balance sheet, put us in a position to execute this transaction. We've demonstrated the ability to successfully integrate stores in an efficient manner over the past several years, and we consider this acquisition to be business as usual for us.... This acquisition will not prevent us from continuing to ratably grow in the coming years as well. This transaction is a testament to our two-pronged approach to growth and highlights our ability to be highly selective when it comes to acquisitions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Steve to walk you through the financials. Steve? Thank you, and good morning. I'd like to reiterate Darren's welcome to the Fikes' and the CEFCO team. We are very excited to have you join the Casey's family, and are eagerly anticipating what you can add to our company. Personally, I am really pleased about what this combination will do for Casey's, both strategically and financially. Before I start with the financials, I would just reiterate Brian's earlier comment that we've added and posted a deck with some supplementary information, at the beginning of this call for reference. Let me begin with the $1.145 billion gross purchase price. This includes approximately $165 million of acquired tax benefits, primarily consisting of accelerated depreciation and goodwill amortization. The net purchase price is therefore $980 million. The acquired 2023 pro forma adjusted EBITDA is $89 million, and the primary pro forma adjustment is estimated EBITDA for newly or soon-to-be-open stores that had not fully ramped. These two figures result in a multiple of 11x. We ultimately expect to achieve $45 million or approximately 50% of the acquired EBITDA in synergy capture, once we have Casey's kitchens completely installed. Including the run rate synergies, the purchase multiple falls to 7.3x. Please note that the purchase price adjustment does not include an additional $20 million that we expect to monetize from the sale of some excess land, and that's primarily due to the uncertain timing associated with those prospective transactions. This transaction is consistent with our capital allocation philosophy. Opportunities to invest in EBITDA and ROIC accretive transactions that are on strategy are and will remain our first priority. Furthermore, we are committed to preserving the strong financial flexibility of the company to pursue this and other future opportunities that can add value. Taking advantage of the current strong balance sheet and the latent debt capacity that we enjoy, we expect to pay for the transaction with a combination of balance sheet cash and bank financing. At closing, we expect that the company's pro forma leverage level will reach approximately 2.4 times. We will quickly reduce this to approximately 2 times within the first 12 months of closing, through a combination of modest but prudent deleveraging, growth, and synergy capture. This transaction will not impact our dividend philosophy, which is to maintain a payout ratio of approximately 15% and to align dividend growth with medium-term EBITDA growth. We would not expect to be repurchasing shares immediately after closing, as we will allocate cash against the aforementioned priorities. The $89 million of pre-synergy pro forma adjusted EBITDA that we referenced represents a bit more than 8% of our fiscal year 2024 consolidated EBITDA. We expect to incur approximately $35 million of one-time deal and integration expenses as part of the transaction, and approximately $20 million of those costs will be incurred at closing. Additionally, we expect to be EBITDA accretive in the first six months of ownership. Depending on the amount of cash that we ultimately apply to closing and the final interest rates, we expect to incur an incremental $70 million of interest and financing expense before any deleveraging in the first twelve months post-closing. The buckets of synergies that we expect to deliver are largely consistent with other transactions. Overhead and fuel procurement synergies will come sooner. Supply chain and inside margin improvement opportunities are more dependent on our remodeling schedule and our success at getting permitting approved quickly. We would expect the deal to be modestly EPS dilutive in the first 12 months post-closing because of the incremental financing, the one-time costs, and the ramping nature of the synergy capture. Please note that given the expected closing of this transaction sometime during the fourth quarter of a calendar year, it will therefore primarily impact the second half of our current fiscal year. This means that we'll incur a large portion of the deal and integration-related costs in the fiscal year, but we won't have the benefit of a full year of acquired EBITDA to net against those costs. We plan to update our view on the fiscal year for Casey's at the end of our second quarter as normal, and we will incorporate all known impacts from this transaction at that time to the best of our ability. Now, given a successful closing of this transaction, we do now expect to add approximately 500 new units in total over our three-year strategic plan from our fiscal year 2024 through our fiscal year 2026. This obviously includes the new one hundred... or excuse me, it includes the 154 new units that we added last year. We will make some modest adjustments to our current new build schedule to ensure that we can expeditiously capture the expected synergies from this transaction via remodeling. Finally, one update for the fiscal first quarter. Our current CPG quarter to date is approximately $0.40 per gallon. With that, I'll turn it over to Darren. Thanks, Steve. In summary, and before going to your questions, I'll just offer a few key takeaways. First is our strategic rationale behind this acquisition is clear, including an opportunity to get scale in a highly strategic and attractive market of Texas, and to move further south, into the South, add fuel terminal and expand our dealer network. This transaction allows us to execute on our strategic pillar to grow units, and we have experience and confidence in an efficient integration. And this will create value for our shareholders on our path to growing EBITDA at a top quintile CAGR. Again, thank you for joining us today. It's an exciting time to be a shareholder of Casey's. And with that, we're happy to take a few questions. Operator, we'll turn it over to you to facilitate the Q&A. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star one, one on your telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press star one, one again. We also ask that you limit yourself to one question. One moment for our first question. Our first question comes from Krisztina Katai with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Hey, good morning, and congrats on what looks to be a very exciting, M&A deal that you guys put together here. So I wanted to further ask about- Hi, Krisztina. Oh, so I wanted to ask on the synergies and further, and thank you for the slides as well. So you're doing the kitchen conversions, and it sounds like there's some other opportunities, though. But I wanted to get your thoughts on where you see the biggest buckets, where you think you have the greatest potential, and how we should think about more near term versus longer term synergies that you see. Yeah. Hi, Krisztina, this is Darren. Yeah, with respect to the synergies, this is going to be comparable to some of the other acquisitions we made in the past, where we find the largest synergy that we bring is in our prepared foods business. Having said that, CEFCO has done a really nice job of building their own food business, and they have kitchens in a lot of their stores, so that should make the integration process go a little smoother for us. But, still, we see that as our biggest synergy. Fuel would be the next largest synergy that we have, just via vis-a-vis our scale. But in terms of the cadence of that, we would probably see the impact of overhead synergies and fuel synergies to come a little quicker, and then the food and merchandising synergies to come a little bit later as we remodel stores over the next few years. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Bobby Griffin with Raymond James. Your line is open. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions, and congrats on getting this announced. Darren, I was just curious for me on the distribution side of things, and as you guys roll these in, where—you know, given the locations of these stores, are they more urban-based or more, you know, rural-based as some of the legacy Casey's stores? And then is there any changes to your distribution network that will need to come as well, to complete the pizza rollout and some of the synergistic targets? Yeah, Bobby, you know, to answer your first question, these stores are not really in the big cities. So if you look in Texas in particular, if you look at the triangle that you would form from Dallas to San Antonio to Houston and back, they're really kind of in the middle of that triangle, so not really in the larger cities, but in smaller towns throughout that geography, and then a little bit further west. And then in Florida and Alabama, that's all in the Panhandle and some smaller areas around there. So very consistent from a geographic perspective with the mothership of Casey's. With respect to the distribution, the Texas stores will virtually all be able to be supplied out of our Joplin DC eventually. And then in Florida, we're assessing how we wanna handle the Florida, Alabama, Mississippi stores. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Bonnie Herzog with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. All right. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. I had a question about your EBITDA targets. Just, you know, maybe curious to hear how this acquisition fits into your 8%-10% EBITDA growth target through FY 2026. You know, does this deal give you more confidence in your ability to hit this guidance and, you know, possibly at the high end of that range or, or above? Hey, good morning, Bonnie. This is Steve. You know, our 8%-10% guide that we have out there for our strategic plan, you know, that always included some amount of unit growth, right? If you remember, our algorithm is kind of half of, half of our growth comes from new units, and half would come from, from the mothership. And so the 350 unit target that we had out there was always a critical part of, of achieving that. And so we, we feel like we're now safely beyond that 350 unit target. And, and so that should ultimately... Of course, we're doing this to flatter EBITDA and have it be EBITDA accretive. Exactly how it falls within the individual years and the remainder of the plan, you know, that's a TBD just based on the timing of closing. But for sure, we expect this thing to be quite EBITDA accretive, you know, before synergies and after synergies, but the timing's a little bit of a TBD for us. Thank you. One moment for our next question.... Our next question comes from Michael Montani with Evercore ISI. Your line is open. Yes. Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to ask if you could give us a sense for potential rebranding, and then, do you plan to retain any of the brands, you know, that are within the store? And then separately, you know, what's the intention with the existing management team? Will they be continuing on as well? Yeah, Michael, this is Darren. With respect to the rebranding, yeah, it would be our intention over the next couple of years as we are able to remodel, that we would rebrand these stores to Casey's. There are a handful of stores that have some QSRs, and they're under franchise agreements, and so we'll have to navigate that, and that's not unusual. We have other stores that we've acquired over the years that have that same situation, and we typically do not rebrand those to Casey's until we've resolved the franchise QSR situation in those stores. But that would be our plan there. With respect to the team, certainly store-level people, field-level people, we would certainly retain. And then everybody else, we would assess on a position-by-position basis to evaluate redundancy and where we need to retain folks and where we may make a different decision there. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Irene Nattel with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open. Thanks, and good morning, everyone. Great transaction. A couple of more housekeeping items, please. Can you talk about your intentions with with the wholesale distribution piece? That's, I guess, the first question. And the second is based on your commentary and the industry CPG year to date, is it fair to assume that the current LTM run rate is lower than the $89 million? Maybe I'll start with the second question, Irene, and then turn it back to Darren on wholesale. Regarding the run rate on the pro forma because of the new stores, yeah, the way I would describe it is there are—you know, there are approximately 20 stores in the store count that have been open for less than one year or are not open at all, that will be scheduled to be open in the next couple of months. And so from an LTM basis, for sure, those stores would not be in the LTM basis either at all, or they would be in there at a lower amount. And so, we will be getting some, you know, significant tailwind on a pro forma prospective basis as those stores come up to speed or open, as the case may be. And generally speaking, the newer assets are significantly larger than the average assets, and so I think that that wrap is gonna be flattering for EBITDA here as we go forward. Yeah, and Irene, with the wholesale business, I'm assuming you're talking about the wholesale fuel business that we'd be acquiring here. And if you recall, when we did the Buchanan Energy transaction a few years ago, that came with a wholesale fuel business as well. And so, the CEFCO business or Fikes wholesale business is actually bigger. They do about 80 million gallons a year versus the one we acquired, which is about 50 million gallons a year. And so, we actually see this as a complement to that, and we'll combine those two, you know, really actually help us. I believe that CEFCO is pretty sophisticated in this space, and this would actually potentially be a bit of a reverse synergy for us. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from John Royal with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open. Hi, good morning. Congrats on the deal. I was hoping you could maybe talk about the capital that it'll cost to convert 200 stores to your format, including the kitchens. I think Darren mentioned that some of these stores already have kitchens, so how much capital and what's the timeframe do you think we can expect on the full conversions? And then how should we think about what happens to CapEx for NTIs from here? Is there some trade-off between the two? Yeah. Hey, John, good morning. This is Steve. You know, our current view is we'll probably invest somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 million of remodeling capital into these stores to get them, you know, to fully bright Casey's. It will certainly be a 3- to 4-year timeline to get that completely finished, realistically, given, you know, we've got to apply for the permitting and just the timelines that we're generally dealing with right now across the footprint. As it relates to impact, I don't think there'll be any impact in the current fiscal year of capital spending, candidly, from these stores, because they're just not—It's not gonna move that quickly. As I referenced in my comment, right, we will, we will modestly make some adjustments to kind of the existing plan for the next couple of years around new builds and, and small NTI. That's primarily just to make sure we have the construction resources to put against the, the remodel initiatives that we'll need in these stores to make sure we're capturing the synergy. So there'll be a little bit of a reduction in, you know, the capital we otherwise would have been spending in the mothership, to be fair, but I don't, I don't think it'll be significant, realistically. And again, that's gonna be spread out over the same 3-4-year period of time. Thank you. One moment before our next question. Our next question comes from Corey Tarlow with Jefferies. Your line is open. Great, thanks. I had a strategic question around new builds and how you think about building in existing markets that are within the parameters of your three distribution centers, versus outside of, let's call it, the 500 or so mile radius that you typically bracket for the distances around your DCs. Because I think that there are some that are outside of this area, in the current store base for the CEFCO stores. So how do you think about the opportunity or the white space that's within the distribution network, and then that's sort of outside of it, and your ability to service those stores, in an efficient way for the business? Thanks. Yeah, Corey. The way we're approaching it is the way we've consistently approached it, which is within the distribution radiuses of those three DCs, that's where we would have opportunities to do NTIs. And really, it's a combination of having, you know, assets to be able to distribute from the warehouses, but also having some sort of store concentration. So from an operational perspective, we can have multi-unit supervisors there, we can have fuel distribution resources there, we can have maintenance resources there. So it's a combination of those factors that would cause us to build NTIs, where we have some concentration in distribution capability. So in this case, what we'll find is that in the Florida, Alabama stores, those are a bit outside of the normal distribution radius. Right now, they're being supplied by a third-party wholesaler, and there's a contract for a couple of years that we'll be working through. For the time being, those stores are being handled, and then we'll have to assess as we go forward. You know, within the next few years, we may be able to build out more concentration in some of those areas where it makes sense to us to invest in some more distribution capabilities. But at the current time, we'll focus our NTI growth in those markets within those distribution radiuses of the three DCs that we currently have. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Chuck Cerankosky with North Coast Research. Your line is open. Good morning, guys. Congratulations on a great looking deal. Good morning. Looking at the slides, you got, like, a 31% gross margin on prepared foods in the acquired business, so that's roughly half of what Casey's normally achieves. So am I thinking correctly that you could approximately double that? And if so, on what sales base would that be in the acquired operations? Yeah, Chuck, I think, we got to dig into that, a little deeper. You know, part of, part of the margin that you see in the CEFCO stores is a function of the menu that they... and the products that they sell in their food service versus what we sell in ours. You know, we're very pizza heavy, as you know. Pizza tends to have higher margins than, chicken, which is a big part of what CEFCO sells. And so, you know, the protein-heavy menu is going to always have thinner margins. And so we do think that there is some margin uplift for sure, when we layer in our pizza program into that. Whether that gets all the way up to 60%, that's really a TBD based on what that ultimate mix of products, you know, lands. But, we certainly see pretty significant upside, and like I mentioned earlier, our biggest synergy that we believe we'll bring is in prepared foods. Thank you. One moment before our next question. Our next question comes from John Lawrence with Benchmark. Your line is open. Great, thanks. Can you hear me, guys? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, Brian, thanks for doing the call, but we've spent some time in some of these stores, being in Memphis. Obviously, the traffic patterns from the Mid-South to the beaches go through a lot of these stores. Obviously, those larger stores you talk about, but can you talk about the competition? I know when you get on 98 down in the Panhandle, smaller stores, some old Tom Thumb stores that have been renovated a little bit, but can you talk about that competitive set, which seems like you'll have an extreme advantage there? Yeah, John. You know, I've actually been down to the Panhandle to take a look at these stores, and we really like what we see down there from a competitive standpoint. You know, this was more of an expansion market for CEFCO, and so a lot of those stores are new within the last couple of years. And there's a lot of legacy industry assets down there at this point. So we think from a competitive standpoint, you know, we're sitting really, really in a good position. We know there's some other competitors that are coming in. None of those competitors are new to us. We're very familiar with them, so we feel really good about that geography in particular. Thank you. I'm showing no further questions. At this time, I turn the call back over to Darren for any closing remarks. Okay. Well, once again, thank you to everyone for jumping on the call on short notice. We're really excited about this transaction, and I'm sure we'll have some further updates in our earnings call here, in roughly a month or so. Have a great weekend, everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's presentation. You may now disconnect and have a wonderful day.