Street Calls of the Week
On Tuesday, 16 September 2025, Sysco Corporation (NYSE:SYY) presented at the Wells Fargo 8th Annual Consumer Conference, where CEO Kevin Hourican and CFO Kenny Cheung shared an optimistic outlook for the company. The executives highlighted strong fiscal performance, robust international growth, and strategic initiatives aimed at enhancing profitability and shareholder value. While Sysco remains confident in its internal strategies, it acknowledges the challenges of the current market environment.
Key Takeaways
- Sysco reported $81 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2023, with strong growth in non-commercial sectors.
- International business showed significant profit growth, with operating income up by 20%.
- Sysco plans to grow its sales force by 4% annually, focusing on retention and productivity.
- The company is committed to returning $2 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.
- Strategic investments in technology and automation are key to optimizing operations.
Financial Results
Sysco achieved $81 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023. The company’s revenue composition includes 60% from restaurants and 40% from non-commercial sectors such as hospitals, education, and government facilities. Notably, the education and government sectors grew by 15%, while healthcare and travel sectors saw growth of 7% and 18%, respectively.
Internationally, Sysco’s business represents 20% of its portfolio, with a 5% increase in top-line growth and a 20% rise in operating income. The international operating income margin has improved significantly, doubling from 2% to over 4% over 2.5 years.
Operational Updates
Sysco is focusing on strengthening its U.S. broadline local business, with positive case growth expected in Q1. The company plans to expand its sales force by 4%, adding 1,000 colleagues over the next three years. Initiatives like Perks 2.0 aim to enhance customer service, while AI 360 is set to boost sales force productivity.
Supply chain efficiencies have improved, leading to a reduction in cost per piece, and new customer acquisition is on the rise. The company is also prioritizing technology investments to optimize warehouse and delivery operations.
Future Outlook
Sysco is optimistic about its Q1 and full-year guidance, expecting continued growth and margin expansion. The company plans to maintain a strong balance sheet while investing in growth and returning value to shareholders. Sysco’s international division is actively exploring mergers and acquisitions to drive further growth.
Capital expenditure for the coming year is projected to be slightly below 1% of sales, reflecting disciplined capital allocation.
Q&A Highlights
During the Q&A session, Sysco emphasized its confidence in gaining market share through disciplined strategies. The company highlighted improvements in sales force productivity and the importance of strategic sourcing and supply chain efficiencies for international growth.
Sysco’s capital allocation priorities include maintaining a leverage ratio between 2.5 and 2.75 times and investing in technologies like routing software and robotics to optimize operations.
Conclusion
For a detailed understanding of Sysco’s strategic direction and financial performance, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call.
Full transcript - Wells Fargo 8th Annual Consumer Conference:
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: All right, good morning everyone, and welcome to the Wells Fargo Consumer Conference. I’m Ed Kelly. I cover staples, retail, and food service at Wells Fargo. We hope you all have a productive and enjoyable few days out here in California. Kicking off the conference, which is kind of typical, I think, for us now, is Sysco. We’re very happy to have you here, and thanks for participating again. Sysco is the leading food service player in the U.S. and in international markets where it competes. Joining us from the company are Chairman and CEO, Kevin Hourican, as well as CFO, Kenny Cheung. Kevin Kim from Investor Relations is also in the audience here.
I think just to kick things off, Kevin, I think you wanted to just make a few comments, and then we’re going to get into some Q&A, and if we have time at the end, we’ll open it up for anyone in the audience.
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Okay, great. Good morning everyone. I appreciate your joining in the room, Ed. Thank you for hosting and to the Wells team for inviting us back. For those that joined virtually, we appreciate your interest in participation. As Ed said, we’re the number one player in what we call the food away from home space. That’s both domestically and internationally. We produced $81 billion of top line revenue this past fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2023. 60% restaurants, 40% what we call non-commercial, which is hospitals, education, government facilities, sporting venues, business industry, and the like. The important point on the 40% is we call those less recession impacted. Those are very durable, consistent businesses that are all growing for Sysco and doing quite well. I know we’ll talk a lot about restaurants today, but that 40% non-commercial is important. We’re very disciplined operators.
We lead the industry from an operating income margin percentage perspective, the most profitable in our space. We have the highest return on invested capital in our space by a wide margin, and we’ve raised our dividend for 56 consecutive years, which for many of you as investors, we know that that’s important. Notably, my last point, we’re pleased with our start to the year. We had an opportunity to be at a conference a couple of weeks ago where we communicated clearly that our international business continues to perform at an extremely high level, and most notably and most important, our U.S. broadline local business has inflected positive, and we’re really pleased with the progress that we’re making in that regard. I’m sure we’ll talk more about all of those things. Ed, over to you, please.
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: Great. Maybe best to start, you know, sort of big picture. The industry backdrop has been, let’s call it less than ideal for some time now, but there seems to be some recent improvement. I mean, you kind of mentioned this, your peers have mentioned this. You sound more optimistic. Could you provide us with maybe your latest thoughts on the demand backdrop for the industry and how you think the rest of the year may play out here?
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Yeah, absolutely. Kenny and I will tag team, most of these questions will kind of riff off of each other. Start with this macro backdrop. It’s relatively strong, if not nominally better, this summer into early fall relative to the prior periods. Just note to those that don’t know this space as well, food away from home consistently takes share from the grocery channel. It happens year after year, every single year, with the exception of the two years of COVID. Food away from home is strong. Restaurants, that’s 60% of our business, that’s restaurants. They’re working very hard on value to their end consumer. I’m sure you’ve read all about what McDonald’s came out and talked about. They’re not a customer, for the record. I’m not making comments about them.
I’m saying all restaurants from fine dining to QSR are working on their value perception, and they’re doing that, frankly, is good for foot traffic to restaurants, which is good for food distributors. We are pleased with the fact that restaurants are leaning in to focus on value, and we at Sysco are prepared to help with things like Sysco brand, finding them alternative proteins that help them save money and the like. Specific to Sysco, as I mentioned a few moments ago, we’re really pleased with our start to the year. Number one is international, which is 20% of our business. Continues their tear, double-digit profit growth. We’ve said for seven consecutive quarters, and off to a great start, continuing those really strong trends internationally. On the U.S.
side, local business last year, fiscal 2025 did not meet our expectations, and we’re really pleased with the progress that we’re making that I said a moment ago. We’ve inflected positive in our U.S. broadline local business. Specific to us, our Q1 of this fiscal year is stronger than Q4, the quarter that just closed. July was stronger than June. August was stronger than July. We’re three weeks into September, and September is stronger than August. Ed, we’re pleased, and yeah, tone is more positive. We’re pleased with the progress that we’re making. The vast majority of that progress is, as you call it, Ed, self-help. It’s not the overall macro. We’re pleased that the overall macro is holding in, if not nominally better.
The progress that we’re making in local is internal because of the improvements in the health of our sales colleague population, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Our non-commercial business, that 40% that I mentioned before, continues to perform and is doing very well. We are optimistic about the year. We are positive on the year ahead. Kenny, toss to you for anything additional you’d like to say.
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: Yeah, thanks, Kevin. You know, a few things here. Number one is, as Kevin mentioned, off to a really strong start to the year. Two and a half months into the year, and we feel even better, even stronger around our Q1 guidance and our full year guidance. We feel really great about the year. The reason why, as Kevin talked about, is self-help. Ed, we’re not expecting, in our modeling, the market to meaningfully improve throughout the year. If anything, we model the market to be similar to the spot moment right now. If the market improves, that’s good for us, and it’s goodness overall, but right now we’re expecting to be similar to today in terms of the market environment. Again, as Kevin said, we’re seeing some slight improvement on foot traffic.
The second thing I would say is, as just possible to Kevin’s point, is around that 40%. I think a lot of people will say, well, foot traffic, is that the proxy for your business? It is, but not completely, because 60% are restaurants, 40% is non-restaurant. I’ll give you some numbers as well. Last year, our education and government business grew roughly 15% year on year on sales. Our healthcare business grew roughly 7%, and our travel and leisure business grew roughly 18%. We are the number one leader in the majority of the non-commercial sectors that we serve through. This is a diversification of our portfolio, and it bodes well in any environment. The last thing I’d say is the following, right? Kevin said it well. We’re seeing our customer backdrop, the operators and consumers. There is a value play.
Let’s not forget, there is still demand, if you will, around premium assortment, quality experience, and that especially comes in as well. If you think about our company, we serve the best of both worlds on both sides of the spectrum. You have the value side, as Kevin said, you have skill. We buy the most, better selling, better buying, Sysco brand, which is a value proposition with especially the quality of our ingredients. On the other side, you have specialty. If you take a giant step back, Sysco is well positioned to satisfy the needs of the ecosystem, right? We have the breadth of broadline, and we have the depth of specialty. Long story short, Ed, I would say we’re very confident operating in today’s environment, and we’re confident operating in any environment.
Maybe just digging in on the Sysco specific side, specifically to really relate it to sort of state of the union at the company now. I think if we look back, there have been some challenges in addition to the industry backdrop, but there do seem to be green shoots, and you are talking about some of the self-help that you’re seeing. Maybe could you provide a little bit more color on the self-help angle, the initiatives that you’re excited about? As part of that, obviously, there’s been a lot of focus on the Salesforce turnover. Things seem to be improving there, the pricing tool, et cetera. Could you just maybe walk us through where you are with all this?
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Yeah, I appreciate the question very much. Maybe we separate the two. I’ll talk about our colleague health. Kenny can add on anything you want, and then we’ll come back to the initiatives covering all that. One question is a bit of a lengthy answer. Let me just start, just backdrop for us. We have by far the highest market share in our space, but more importantly, the highest profit percentage in our space. We’re pleased with the business we have in aggregate, the size of our business, more importantly, the profitability of our business. We deserve to have the opportunity to grow consistently over time. That is our remit, to do exactly that. This past year, Ed, as you just referenced, we had elevated colleague turnover tied to a compensation change that we made in June of the prior, you know, a year ago, June.
Giant step back from that. The new comp program is working. We’re happy that we made the change. We learned a lot about change management on deploying something like that to our large distributed colleague workforce that will be applied going forward to every initiative that we put forward. One thing that occurred last year tied to that comp change is, as I said on this stage last year, we were experiencing meaningfully elevated turnover. That was Q1 of last year. It peaked in September, carried through to Q3. Q4, the quarter that we just closed, we’ve completely stabilized our colleague retention. In the spot moment, year to date, our colleague retention is the highest it’s ever been. We are all over this topic. Think about three things when I say colleague health.
Number one is retain the colleagues we have, and I just said, communicated publicly, retention is at the highest rate it’s ever been. Number two is to improve the productivity across the entire sales workforce, and we have initiatives in place to be able to drive that outcome. Number three is to grow our workforce over time. Kenny and I recently said this year we’ll grow our sales force approximately 4%. If you look at the last two years, plus the year ahead, it’ll be approximately 1,000 colleagues that will be added to our workforce. Those are the three things: retain the colleagues we have, improve the productivity of the entire workforce, increase the headcount by approximately 4%. You put those together, and it is colleague health. Now, Ed, this past year, fiscal 2025, that was a headwind for us throughout the entire year.
We have the opportunity in this year, the year we’re in, for that to be a tailwind. The why is we’re not going to repeat the customer loss that went with colleague departure. If that’s not clear, that’s what the outcome is. When a colleague departs, they tend to take some customers with them. We’re not going to be repeating that headwind. The improvement to our business, the tailwind, will come from the new hiring that we’re doing and then initiatives that I’ll talk about in a minute that will turbocharge the performance of our workforce. Kenny, anything you’d like to add?
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: Yeah, yeah. The headline news is U.S. broadline local case growth will be positive in Q1. By the way, we are already positive right now. U.S.B.L. local case growth. U.S.F.S. local, it’ll be positive for the year. Remember, we start lapping the specialty loss in Q3. That’ll be a nice year-on-year boost from a growth standpoint. As you can tell, Kevin and I, we’re really confident about our local case momentum. Let me share with you some of the green shoots, Ed, as you said. What are some of the proof points that we’re seeing to ensure that this momentum is real, is structural, and it’ll continue? The first piece is what Kevin said, right? One is the fact that we’re seeing the tenor, the retention levels, the stability of our SCs improving. Kevin said it right, the highest it’s ever been, right?
That’s important because as they ride the life cycle of the SC, the biggest jump in the tenor is actually between less than one year and 12 to 18 months. You may remember, we started hiring meaningfully towards the back half of FY2024. Do the math. Right now, we’re entering that sweet spot where they’re actually having a nice jump off point. This doesn’t mean year three doesn’t jump to year four, four, five. Yes, every single SC gains in productivity, but that below one year to 12 to 18 months is the biggest jump, right? It’s a meaningful jump, and we’re seeing that right now. That’s point number one. Number two, because of that, we are seeing the most net new adds on customer. Obviously, it provides nice current moment revenue stream, but I love it because there’s that, but there’s also tailwind for penetration later on.
The customer doesn’t give you all their cases on day one, right? Run through the existing inventory at the same time, learning your assortment as well. That’s a nice tailwind. The third proof point is NLP, new loss penetration. This is a metric that Kevin and I and the whole entire team look at on a daily basis. Interesting fact here. If you look at the spread between new, bless you, between new and loss, the exit rate for Q4 last quarter, the spread doubled versus the first three quarters of the fiscal year. That widening in the gap between new and loss is continuing into this fiscal year. That’s another proof point, Ed, in terms of now why we think this is the start of the journey of sequential improvement.
The last thing I would say is the 750 people that we’ve added and the 300 plus that we plan to add this year. Kevin and I were very, very mindful and disciplined on when and where we add. We do a look back all the time, looking at geographies, regions, and see the correlation between adds and stability, and we’re seeing a nice correlation there as well. Those are the four reasons why I would say that momentum is real, and we believe, based on these four areas that we’re looking at, that we’ll continue in the rest of the year and beyond. Yeah. I wanted to follow up on that. As you think about this idea of a productivity curve of your sales force, and you can do the math on this where you see higher turnover, you hire people that are not very productive to start, right?
Your sales force productivity really drops. Your cases kind of drop with that. The reverse is kind of happening now, right? You start to see that improvement. On the other side of that, right, is that when you lose some salespeople, you lose some accounts. They’re probably pretty rich margin accounts, high private label accounts, but then you are adding accounts that take time to build. There’s another curve there. Both of those things seem like they are pretty positive for you in terms of what’s ahead. Is there any potential offset to that? The one thing that I do continue to ask questions about is this idea of non-competes and the salespeople that maybe you lost a year ago coming off non-competes now and some headwind associated with that. Could you maybe just provide a bit more cover about all that?
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Sure. Very fair question. I’ll start. The full acknowledgement is in that fiscal 2025, that equation was a headwind for us throughout the year. He said the math. We were doing a decent job throughout the year of opening new accounts. We did that all throughout the year. Our loss rate increased this past year. He just said the math. I’ll repeat it because it’s really important. In Q4, the gap between new and loss doubled versus Q1 to Q3. That is a representation publicly of the progress that we’re making. It’s widened even further in our Q1. The second point you made is about penetration. You know, when you lose a long-tenured account, you replace them with a brand new one. Kenny just said that you don’t get all the business day one. That means penetration is down as well. That was a headwind throughout this past year.
We acknowledge it. The good news is the change that we made to the comp program was a quality, necessary change. It was a good change. We lowered base pay to put more pay at risk, and we increased the earnings potential of every single sales colleague by putting more into the incentive. I think a dollar taken out of base, we put $1.50 into earnings bonus to motivate them. For the colleagues that work at Sysco now, they’re motivated by this. We do an annual engagement survey. Our colleague morale and our colleague engagement in the sales workforce significantly improved year over year. We’re having no problems at all hiring new folks in. As I think about the year ahead, I’ll fully acknowledge the month 13, we’re not concerned about it.
The majority of the departure, when a colleague who’s served an account for 10 years, the majority of the customer at risk loss happens almost immediately. Think about it, whether or not that colleague can call on that account from somewhere else. You know, Kenny’s been calling on a restaurant for 10 years. He departs. I’m brand new to the company. I get assigned. I don’t know the assortment. I don’t know the pricing. I don’t know the account the way that I should. That’s when customers tend to look around and take a look. They can be pretty sticky when they make those choices. We’re cognizant of the month 13.
When we put that part into all of the other parts, significantly improved retention, at the end of this year, 1,000 incremental headcount, the meaningful improvement in productivity of our workforce, which we’ll talk about in a moment when I highlight some of our initiatives, it’ll be a net tailwind throughout the year. We actually think it will grow. Kenny, through healthy year, that gap between new and loss is going to widen each quarter. It’s not a light switch. It’ll just kind of sequentially get better over time as the tenure of our workforce increases into initiatives and tools that we’re deploying to help improve the productivity of our colleagues overall.
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: Could you dig in a little bit there around some of the initiatives that you have that drive that growth? As part of that, there’s always been some concern around industry competition and pricing and your ability to grow that customer base in a pricing disciplined way.
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Yeah, let’s lean in there just to start on competition. We respect our competition. There’s quality operators. We have respect for who we compete with. It’s not just the big names. It’s also regional specialty players. As Kenny said, we’re by far the largest specialty player in the industry. We have a $10 billion specialty business. The second biggest player is a third of our size. We respect our specialty competition. We respect our broadline competition. We’re confident in our go-to-market approach. We’re never going to lean in to be the cheapest in the industry to lower price in order to win share unprofitably. We describe all the time, we’re going to grow share, and we insert the word every time, profitably, as the most disciplined operators in our industry. Our highest operating margin % in the industry is a proof point of that.
Ed, we’re confident we can gain share and do so in a disciplined way. The number one thing by far, and I know we’ve hammered this point this morning, is colleague health. Retaining the colleagues we have, increasing the productivity of our colleague workforce at large, and then adding to our headcount, which we’ve said approximately 4%. That is the number one most important. Everything else is, frankly, a distant secondary. It’s that colleague health piece. We’re extremely confident in our colleague health being a tailwind for the year ahead. With that said, let’s move on to some other initiatives. We’re really enthusiastic about some new programs that we have deployed late summer. Here’s the due difference. I told you before, we didn’t roll out the new comp program as well as we could, and we learned a lot.
We have a population at our company called the DSM, which is our District Sales Manager, approximately 500 of them. They each have approximately 10 sales colleagues that they are responsible for. What we have learned is we got to get that population into the mix early to explain the why of an initiative, get them bought in, make it theirs, that they are owners of it, such that when we do roll it out, it’s their team coming along in a compelling and positive way. We brought all of our DSMs. This is the first time in company history. We’re a 56-year-old company. We brought all of our DSMs to Houston to talk about our key initiatives for 2025. The roof blows off the building. There was so much energy at that meeting talking about these initiatives. Without further ado, let’s jump in. Perks 2.0.
We’ve had a Perks loyalty program out for a couple of years. That program historically was a marketing program, a points earned, could be redeemed for discounts type program. Those programs are fine. They’re good. They’re not as good as a service-elevated program. Think about your favorite hotel where we’re sitting in a Bonvoy property. Think about your favorite airline. All of you travel a lot. You probably have a favorite hotel loyalty program. You probably have a favorite airline. If you have choice, I can pretty much guarantee you’re choosing the airline that you have most affinity to relative to their program. It’s not just because you’re earning miles or points that you can redeem. The difference is because they treat you different. You can board earlier.
If there’s a problem, they’re rescheduling you to the next flight in a timely manner when everyone else is on the phone trying to get through to a call center. I think you all understand the examples that I’m making. At Sysco, we’re converting Perks into our best customers. I want to be very, very clear. These are independent mom-and-pop restaurant customers. This is not national chains, because I got a question about that at the last meeting. Mom-and-pops. 15% of our customers. There’s an absolute pareto on the % of sales and the % of profit that they drive. Would not come public with the % and the % on sales and profit, but 15% of customers, much higher % of our sales and even higher % of our profit. These customers, Ed, they matter massively. We retooled our service offering for these customers.
We launched it a month ago. Every function at Sysco, when one of these customers has a need and they say jump, we say how high. It’s routing preferences, day of week, time of day. If ever there’s an inventory allocation problem, and these things happen in our space. Avian Flu reduced the supply of eggs. We simply weren’t getting the inbound quantity that we needed. These customers aren’t getting shorted. If you’re going to have to short someone, you’re not shorting one of these customers. There’s a damaged case on a delivery. We have fragile product. Guess what? We’re going to do a hot shot out to that customer. No questions asked. There’s no hoops to jump through.
These are just examples. We are going to have a 24 by 7 hot desk call center that is equipped to answer the phone and solve the problem right in the spot moment. The person who is going to use that call center is actually our sales colleague, because oftentimes, Ed, they are at these accounts. There is a challenge, whatever it may be, and our colleague has to jump through hoops to try to get that answer. It may take days to get an answer. We are going to get that answer right then and there. We launched this program nationwide. We had piloted it. The pilot results are compelling. The metrics of success would be significantly improved customer retention within these Perks customers and significantly improved penetration, because when you are providing this level of service offering, they give you more of their business.
We are really bullish on Perks. It is early innings. The feedback we are getting from our customers is they notice, they see the difference. In our industry, on time and in full, that is what matters more than anything. It sounds simple, does hard. We are going to deliver on time. We are going to deliver in full. For these customers, we are going to do that each and every day. That is topic number one. Topic number two is what we call AI 360, which is an AI-empowered CRM. For the long term, we are meaningfully, meaningfully bullish on this capability. It is literally in their smartphone, in the palm of their hand. For years, we have had our colleagues do call plans for their week.
Think about a sales rep having 50 plus customers. That is a lot to keep track of, a lot to know about a customer. They plan out their week. We want our sales reps to be in every single account every single week. With AI 360, when they are in the car in the parking lot of the restaurant, they can pull up their customer account, and it will prioritize for them the next best actions or the most important things to be done that day. Here is a case you can sell that you have not sold before. Here is a case you have lost to a competitor that you need to win back, and here is a pre-approved deal. That is where pricing comes in. Here is a pre-approved deal to win it back. Here is a Sysco brand conversion.
You can save that customer $11,000 if they convert from national brand to Sysco brand. That is prioritized next best action. Specific to that restaurant, their cuisine, their economics, their trade area, and the competition around. That sounds simple. That is really hard from a data perspective. We have all the data. We have a treasure trove of data. The unlock here, the power here, is literally in the palm of their hand in a super user, super easy-to-use user interface, prioritizing the focus of that visit. This is just one use case, by the way. A second use case is they can talk into their phone and ask it any type of question. This is the power of AI. They can ask it anything. Do I have gluten-free pizza crust in stock in Cleveland today?
It will give them an answer instantaneously of the SKUs, the quantity on hand, national brand, private label, good, better, best. If they want to click on it to learn more about how to sell it, they can click on it. It will actually give them a script on how to present that product or why we love that item. That is the breakthrough. Colleagues that are new, we’ve had more turnover than we desired this past year, don’t have that innate selling knowledge, a 20-year vet, 30-year vet. They will benefit from this tool. The real benefit is from the newer colleagues. What excites us is if we can shorten the length of time between a new hire getting to productive through a capability like this, it’s powerful. That is the second use case, just an example. Third is a maps app within their app.
I am only going to give three, and then I am going to toss to Kenny because I know I have taken a lot of time here. We have shopping centers that have 15 restaurants. We may serve two, but our sales colleague does not necessarily innately know is a peer of mine calling on one of those restaurants. When is the last time we called on one of those restaurants? Is it a competitor’s account? We now have in that same tool a maps app. They are in a shopping center we are delivering to, insert here. They can see on the map through pins. We have this data. We have sourced the data. When is the last time we called on that customer potential? Who called on them? What was the conversation? It is increasing the likelihood of our colleague calling on new accounts.
We are seeing an increase in our new customer open rate tied to that. AI 360 is an unlock. To be clear, we are not reducing our headcount through this tool. We are not decreasing the importance of our sales colleague through this tool. This is a relationships business. What this is doing, it is making that sales colleague more effective, more knowledgeable, more productive. For the long term, we are very bullish on it. Kenny, what would you like to add?
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: Yeah, two things. One is it’s important to understand that our listeners’ plan, the majority is driven by self-help. What Kevin just mentioned, these two things, I would call them icing on the cake, pun intended. These are meant to be a credence to what we have in the guide. We’re not banking on any of this. As Kevin said, some of this is in pilot form right now. It’s very encouraging. It’s helped by the excitement from Kevin that we’re seeing really good correlation. For example, it’s early innings right now, but we looked at actually usage versus growth from an SC, earlier SC. We see a correlation between the more you use, the more you’re doing well. This is a proof point that we’re really excited about. Right on the Perks side of the house, we’re really excited about this.
I just want to clarify, this is not scraping Perks 1. This is building on top of it. It’s building on top of the fundamental foundation we’ve already done for the past couple of years and really enhancing it. My favorite part of this is it’s a very cross-functional collaboration. My team’s involved, right? Because now they’ll have a hotline with the AP side, AR side, right? There’s a preferred routing. It’s a cross-functional. It really showcases and demonstrates the power of OneSysco.
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: The driver will see in their handheld device that it’s a Perks customer. The credit analyst on Kenny Cheung’s team will see it’s a Perks customer everywhere and across the company, leaning in hard. Ed, back to you.
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: Right. Maybe just switching gears a little bit to international. Performance has been very impressive. It’s a growing portion of your EBIT. It’s a growing portion of your EBIT growth. Can you maybe just talk a bit more about, you know, the opportunity there and sort of what’s ahead?
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Sure. Kenny, why don’t you start on this one.
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: Sure, I can start. You know, the headline news is we are very pleased with our performance in international. The momentum is we saw that last year, and it’s continuing into this fiscal year as well. You know, just kind of take a giant step back. International is roughly 20% of our portfolio is international. And if you think about the profile last year from a P&L standpoint, top line was roughly 5% sales growth. OI was roughly 20% growth. In Q4, marked the seventh quarter of consecutive double-digit growth. The question from you, Ed, is what’s driving it, and will it continue? The answer is yes and yes, right? If you think about the top line, historically in some of our bigger markets, they were indexing towards, call it, national accounts, right?
You know, Kevin and I are pushing them to grow that and grow local case growth as well. That’s working. The Sysco playbook is working on local case growth. Last year, they grew roughly 4.5% on local case, and that flows down nicely on the GP side as well as the OI side. That’s one piece of it. The second piece is the GP work that they’ve done. Leveraging the playbook on strategic sourcing. If you think about it, yeah, we serve products that we buy in markets for market, but also we’re also buying products now as a European hub, as a European scale. Think Europe. Don’t think just Canada. Think North America, right? These are things that we’re actively working on to drive leverage on the GP side.
Obviously, as you grow local case growth, your Sysco brand penetration goes up as well, given that there’s a spread between national and local. The last piece I would say is that on the supply chain SG&A side, the team has done a real nice job on supply chain. Obviously, with volume helps on the C cost per piece side, but they’ve done real nice work on piece per labor hour, et cetera. All of that coupled together with, you know, cost containment on SG&A gave us the nice four times leverage from sales down to operating income. The good news is it’s not just one market. It’s not our biggest markets, Canada and GB, driving it. Every market, every region grew double digit for us, and every region grew local case growth as well.
The other thing I would say is that, you know, one of the questions we get sometimes is the margin profile of international. When I first joined the company two and a half years ago, the margin was roughly 2% on OI, and today we’re over 4%. There’s nothing structural that would impede our ability to have the margin profile of international be similar as our U.S. business. I’ll finish with this point. Because of the confidence we have in the business from an M&A standpoint, it is, as Kevin and I have a term, they’re open for business, right? They’ve proven with the most recent acquisition with Ready Chef in Ireland, as well as Campbell’s in Great Britain, that they’ve done a nice job growing those two businesses. They’re open for business. Nothing to announce here, but we have a robust pipeline.
Last but not least, we have three buildings running live right now. That will further expand our moats and further increase our, I would say, competitive position there in Great Britain, Sweden, and Ireland. We are investing for growth as well. Great. We think about balance sheet, capital allocation. Obviously, you had a good point from a leverage standpoint. You’ve been there for a while now. You pay a nice dividend. You buy back stock. You’re acquisitive. Could you maybe talk a bit more about the priorities there specifically also as it relates to M&A, international versus U.S.? From a CapEx standpoint, how do we think about the longer term outlook in CapEx in an industry that I think maybe potentially has a chance to automate, right? Sort of the way that you’re thinking about all that.
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Yeah, I can start and then toss it to Kevin for the supply chain automation side. In terms of our capital allocation, one of the things that investors love about our company, and I love about our company, is the fact that we’re disciplined and consistent around capital allocation. We are first and foremost investing for growth, investing in our business. This includes, obviously for our customers, leasehold improvements, fleet refreshes, maintenance CapEx, growth CapEx. To answer your question, historically we ran about roughly 1% of sales as our CapEx. This coming year will be a touch lower than the 1% because, as you know, we invested quite a bit in the past few years and we want to grow into our capital expenditures. It’s part of the ROIC mentality. Think about the Tampa building that we did open, right? Think about Allentown, Las Vegas, Waco, right?
These are buildings that we built and now we have to make sure that the return is there as well. This year it’ll be slightly under that 1%. In terms of the leverage ratio, we’re comfortable operating, second party is comfortable operating within the 2.5, the 2.75 times ratio for leverage. We think this is a sweet spot where you can be investment grade and invest in business and return to shareholders, right? Maintaining IG is really important for us. Last but not least, returning back to shareholders. Last year we returned over $2 billion. This year we’ll return, you know, in the ballpark of $2 billion as well between dividends as well as share repo. That could flex up and down depending on M&A.
In terms of automation, the way we think about this, and I’ll turn it to Kevin very soon, is, you know, technology stack automation, it is part of our DNA at Sysco. We think about not just from a go-to-market standpoint, back office, go-to-market, and the fact that we scale. We have so many, you know, literally pieces in our business. When you shave a penny off or two pennies off because of routing or because of labor standards updates, it really matters, Ed. For us, yes, we’re thinking near term, mid term, and long term. We have a laddering approach for automation, but the real takeaway is that when we could drive a penny or two or three out of, you know, shrink, for example, or maintenance, et cetera, it really scales across the enterprise.
We feel we’re investing in this area and we’ll be very mindful of substantial return. So Kevin.
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Let’s go. On the automation piece, think about there’s the warehouse activities and the delivery activities. The by far more important activity is the delivery activity. It’s the most expensive part of the transaction. It’s the customer impacting part of the transaction. We’re investing meaningfully to modernize, upgrade, and have world-class routing software. As Kenny said, we can take 1%, 2%, 3% miles off the road. We drive millions of miles. It is meaningful to the P&L, taking pennies off of the billion plus pieces that we will ship in the year. When I think about supply chain technology, routing, it’s like the heartbeat or the POS of our business, point of sale of our business, is routing. Within the warehouse side, we have multiple in-flight projects at any given time, inspecting what’s possible within our space. This is about labor cost reduction. More importantly, it’s about labor availability.
10 years from now, 15 years from now. I had the wonderful privilege ahead of recognizing a selector in our freezer, 49 years with Sysco. He’s only worked in a freezer for 49 years. That’s a unique person. How many people are going to be willing to do that 10, 15, 20 years from now? We are meaningfully focused on robotics within the warehouse. I think about it less though of a fully automated facility with a $300 million CapEx and a 20-year return. Are there individual components of the work? We have a selector building a pallet. We can have an AGV load the pallet onto the truck. We can have an AGV unload the truck pallet. We can have a person sitting remotely moving the replenishment activity from reserve rack to the primary pick. We’re working on all of those things. No big announcement to make today.
We’re going to be very methodical about the form of technology, the return and investment on that technology, and we have ample capital to be able to do those types of things.
Ed Kelly, Wells Fargo Analyst, Wells Fargo: Great. With that, we are up against time. I wanted to thank you again for participating in the conference, and I hope you all have an enjoyable event. Thank you.
Kevin Hourican, Chairman and CEO, Sysco: Thank you.
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