Naveen Trivedi: Good evening, everyone. On behalf of Motilal Oswal, I am Naveen Trivedi. I would like to welcome you all to the Restaurant Brands Asia's Q2 FY 2027 earnings conference call. From the management today, we have Rajeev Varman, full-time Director and Group CEO, Sumit Zaveri, CEO India business, Kapil Grover, Group CMO, Sandeep Dey, CEO Indonesia business, and Gaurav Ajjan, Head of Corporate Development and IR. I will now hand over the call to the management. Over to you, Gaurav.
Gaurav Ajjan: Thanks, Naveen. Good evening, everyone. As we are using Zoom for the first time this quarter, I wanted to inform you of the flow of the meeting. We will start with a presentation by the management team, which you will be able to view on your screens as we move along. The presentation is also available on the stock exchanges, as well as the investor section of our website. Do note that we have a new corporate website with the address www.rbrandsasia.com. The presentation will be followed by Q&A. For Q&A, please use the raise hand option, and we will announce the name and enable the microphone for that person. The speaker must also ensure that the mic is enabled at their end, and then speak. After the question is over, the speaker's microphone will be disabled.
Gaurav Ajjan: In the interest of time, I request you to limit your questions to a maximum of two and rejoin the question queue if required. With that, I will hand over to Raj for his opening comments.
Rajeev Varman: Thank you, Gaurav, and thank you, Naveen. Folks, good evening to everyone, and thank you for your interest and passion around the Restaurant Brands Asia quarterly results. Welcome to this session. You just heard Sumit Zaveri assigned to a new role. He has been promoted to lead the business here in India. Sandeep is also on the phone, who leads the business in Indonesia. So with Sandeep and with Sumit Zaveri leading the two tall businesses, we will now proceed with the numbers, and then let me talk to you about the strategic pillars that I usually talk to you about. First of all, just to give you a perspective, you see on your slide number, yeah, that is the one, right? Slide number 4. So you know the India business, which is 607 restaurants. Today, actually, we opened our 619th restaurant.
Rajeev Varman: So there is 619, but this is a quarterly 607 number. It is in 144 cities. Indonesia, we have 137 restaurants in Burger King and 25 Popeyes restaurants. Just to give you a perspective, revenue mix, which is 83% of the revenues actually come from the India business. The balance 17% comes from Indonesia. By the end of March, this number will be more. Over 90% of the business will be coming from the India business and the rest from the Indonesia business. Consolidated numbers that you see up there. Consolidated revenues were up 20% from INR 703 crores to INR 844 crores. Restaurant EBITDA, which is in run rate year from INR 53 crores to INR 92 crores almost, 91.8.
Rajeev Varman: Consolidated company level EBITDA, which was INR 11.3 crores last year, same quarter, is at INR 43.2 crores Q2 of this quarter. So this is up 281%. Our restaurant-level EBITDA is up 73%. Revenue is up 20%. Store counts up 75 restaurants in the consolidated scheme. Next slide, please. Just quickly, I speak about the strategic pillars. We have added a new pillar to our strategic pillars, as you can see in the middle, which is called families. I will talk about it in a minute. As you go through our strategy here in India, we continue to drive a value strategy. It is integral part of who we are. This has been there from 2014 when we first entered the Indian market, and we continue to be true to that value strategy.
Rajeev Varman: We continue to offer a program, which is right now two for ₹79, two for ₹99 on our app. This continues recruiting new customers into our business. Our innovation platform, you saw the Peri-Peri roll out right after Korean Season Two, which was followed by the Season One that we had earlier. Each time we are doing these new innovations, we continue seeing incremental sales coming in through this premium layer of ours. The families program is what we are launching this month, in November. You will start to experience over the next several months the efforts around our family program, which will now become one of our pillars as we move forward as a business. In this, you will find a kids family program that is being launched. You will also find some exciting stuff coming in very quickly, which Kapil will speak to in a few minutes.
Rajeev Varman: With the Avengers program, we have a whole family of products that we will be launching in the innovation of premium layer of this business. Digital, as you know, we have invested into this digital about five years ago. We continue to strengthen that. Self-ordering kiosks, our app, which is now live with our CRM engine. We continue to drive that. App frequency is up about 7% year-over-year in Q2. You will find a lot of the digital elements again, shared by Kapil as he speaks about the business there. Profitably pillar, you have seen some headwinds from the entire industry has seen headwinds when it comes to price and cost of groceries coming into our restaurants. But as we pedal through these headwinds, we have a slight drop in our gross margins about 0.4, but not a very significant amount.
Rajeev Varman: Most of those efforts have been through our fantastic work our supply chain is doing and the efficiencies we are getting as we are building more restaurants around those DCs, which were low populated with restaurants. As we continue to do that, we see those efficiencies, and those are the ones we are using to tackle the headwinds on pricing as well. On the other end, we continue to work, Nitin Meena and his team continues to work on broilers, on efficiencies, on solar, installing new equipment, which is energy efficient, all the way from lighting and all other tools that we are putting in place so that we reduce energy costs. One of the things you are seeing is as energy costs are going up, we are actually bringing down the energy spending, and that is thanks to all the work that he is doing over there.
Rajeev Varman: This basically tightening up the P&L, getting a better flow through coming out of the P&L on the EBITDA line. The fact that we are working on the CapEx as well helps us expand from building what we were building in the past 50 to 70 restaurants to potentially go up to 80 to 100 restaurants in the future. You will start hearing more from us as we go into the next few quarters. Now let us go to the India strategic, Indonesia strategic slides. Again, Indonesia, we have been at the value, testing value in several markets. We have tried a few program and we finally did hit the nail on the head with this Super Hemat that we launched. We launched this in late September, and we have seen some fantastic results.
Rajeev Varman: In fact, we have added about 35 to 40 additional traffic per day per restaurant with just this program. We are extremely excited about this. I think this program, as we continue building this over the next few years, will become one of the cornerstones of recruiting back customers that we had lost in the past. A very, very strong platform. Well done to Sandeep and his entire team. Namita and Aditya, who have pulled this value platform very well, and they continue to get this strengthened as we move forward. Innovations. Indonesia has always been strong in innovation area, whether it comes to the whole chicken which they launched about a year ago, Nusantara. But now, the premium selection with the Boss Whopper and the Gold Collection is something that they are working on, and it is doing very well.
Rajeev Varman: This is a platform we are going to continue to build. Just like in India, we had Korean Season One, Korean Season Two, the Peri-Peri, and then you will now see the Avengers platform. We have started this platform here with the Boss Whopper, and then you will see this continuing to build over there. Digital assets. We started installing SOKs a few months back in Indonesia. We have seen some significant progress with that. We will be completing this project by March. With some additional SOKs installed, we are instilling the same software and the same kind of customer journey that we are doing in India, also in Indonesia. So that is going to continue strengthening that. The levers of CRM and our app in Indonesia, those will be very much aligned to what we are doing here in India as well.
Rajeev Varman: On the profitability front, we have worked and I have been sharing with you a lot of work that we have done on profitability. The stuff that we have done in India, whether it comes to energy efficiency, equipment efficiency, solar, and the profitability that we are working in the India market, we are now transferring those learnings over to Indonesia, and a lot of progress. I think we will make significant changes to that by the end of November. The last quarter, which is January, February, March, I think we will finish most of those changes that we are doing there in the profitability and align it very much close to India. So a lot of work over there and we will keep informing you, keep updating you as we do the work over there.
Rajeev Varman: Asset upgrade is a pillar that is going to be there in Indonesia for the next six months, maybe even slightly longer. What we are doing over there is, again, some of the equipment, energy-efficient equipment that is going in there. Air conditioning units, which were old, are being removed and replaced with the right new energy-efficient HVAC units. Kitchen equipment upgrade. Also, the front of the house, customer touch areas, where lighting, where it comes to signages, where it comes to washrooms and so forth. A lot of work is going on in upgrading the asset over there. We have got a very strong value platform that is working, a strong innovation program that was working in the past, but getting stronger with every quarter. A digital that we have just recently launched, and that we are going to continue to strengthen.
Rajeev Varman: Profitability pillar to be aligned with India, because all the work that we are doing here will be transferred by Nitin Meena over to the team in Indonesia. The asset upgrade. I think a very strong recipe for a very strong Burger King Indonesia turnaround and a progress over there. With that said, I think I will turn over to and I will come back and then take all your questions, but I am going to hand it over to Sumit Zaveri to walk you through the financial numbers. Then we will address any questions after Kapil Grover finishes up with the marketing section. Over to you, Sumit Zaveri.
Sumit Zaveri: Thank you. Thank you, Raj. This is our first attempt to do a video conference so that when we are talking, participants are also able to see the numbers as we speak. We are really happy to share with you a very strong performance for the quarter. It is the second consecutive quarter with a very strong SSG growth of 14% for the quarter with an ADS of 31,000, similar to what we had achieved in Q1, with revenue now crossing INR 700 crores, with a year-on-year growth of 24%. What we are really proud of and we will continue to build on is the INR 55 crore company EBITDA number that we have achieved for the quarter. It is at 7.8% of our revenue.
Sumit Zaveri: While we share with you the numbers that we have achieved for quarter, just to take you through the journey that we have taken over these last five quarters as far as Burger King India is concerned. As you all can see, we have got to 600 restaurants. We have a very strong pipeline to continue to take this journey forward for growth. As Raj earlier mentioned, we are already at 619. This month, we have already opened 12 stores, and we will continue to grow at a good pace going forward as well. This is obviously supported, and the confidence to grow is also strongly supported by our overall growth in profitability that we have seen, almost doubling the profits at a company level from what we had last year, from INR 28 crores to INR 55 crores, with very strong SSG of 12.6% and 14%.
Sumit Zaveri: We do understand that strong SSG performance is strong growth. We need to make sure that we are able to build on to that, and that was one of the reasons why the strategic pillars rather becomes very, very critical for us to be able to build on to the momentum that we have on our side, and we do not want to make it to a level where we start, we are not able to build any further, which is one of the reasons why we have added one more pillar of family starting from this quarter. You will continue to see the effort that we would put as a team to make sure that we are able to continue to grow this business going forward. As far as restaurant EBITDA is concerned, as you can see, we are very strong, 13% levels now over last few quarters.
Sumit Zaveri: But if you look at it from the perspective over last year, a very clear 2.5% improvement in profitability at a restaurant level and a 2.8% improvement in profitability at a company level. Going on to the Indonesia side of the business. In Indonesia, as you all know, we have got two brands, total store count of 162. We have just added one store, which was more transfer of a store from one part of the mall to the other part of the mall. Since that, it just took longer. That is why showing it as one more new store added. In terms of INR value, both the brands' ADS stands at 96,000, with consolidated revenue for Indonesia business at INR 139 crores.
Sumit Zaveri: At a restaurant level, obviously we were closer to breakeven, a little higher than breakeven, with a marginal INR 8 million restaurant EBITDA that we made, which is still a big shift because last year during the same quarter, we were negative in terms of our restaurant EBITDA. We continue to also improve or perform better over last year at a company EBITDA level, while it is a loss of INR 12 crores, but an improvement by INR 5 crores or INR 551 million over last year same quarter. Just quickly diving into the two brands' performance. As Raj mentioned, we are obviously very strongly focusing on the Burger King side of the business. We have already launched the value campaign of Super Hemat, showing very good results in terms of transaction growth in Burger King Indonesia.
Sumit Zaveri: We believe that with the other layers on the innovation side and the investment on digital side, we should be able to start moving towards improving overall performance as far as Burger King Indonesia is concerned. It is now consistently over last three quarters, generating positive EBITDA at a restaurant level. So at least that is clearly showing early signs of moving on, or early signs of showing improvement in overall results. Quickly going further into the Popeyes part of the business. This is one business where obviously we continue to have the drag. The ADS have been sliding down. Last quarter, we were at 64,000. Revenue at around INR 15 crores. So it is very marginal in terms of overall revenue side is concerned.
Sumit Zaveri: But our bigger issue that we need to address is the performance of the brand at the restaurant EBITDA level, which is what we are currently working on to get to a resolution as far as Popeyes is concerned. We are in active discussion with the brand owners as well to find a suitable answer as far as Popeyes is concerned. All in all, if I was to just quickly summarize before I hand it over to Kapil, is that India will continue to grow strongly with the store EBITDA and the company EBITDA continues to perform at good levels.
Sumit Zaveri: Plus over INR 50 crores of store EBITDA even for the quarter. Burger King Indonesia is starting to show signs of improvement and early results in October from ADT perspective are indications. Obviously, we are not sharing those numbers with you, but very clear indications of improvement in that. Popeyes is something we need to make sure that we have quick answers to that quickly enough. With that, I will just hand it over to Kapil to take us through some of the focus areas that we have on marketing.
Kapil Grover: Thanks, Sumit, and very good evening to all of you. Just reiterating our focus on the key strategic pillars. Value remains a key priority for us. The highlight is that with 2 for INR 79, INR 99 available on the app, we have consistently driven this program over the last couple several years, and this is our 14th consecutive quarter of positive dine-in traffic growth. In the environment that we have seen, this is a fairly strong performance on the dine-in traffic side. The other dimension of our value program is the app, which is our dine-in Crazy App Deals. We have seen 7% increase in frequency year-on-year in the same quarter of people using our app to claim these deals that are available only on Burger King app. That is on the value front.
Kapil Grover: On the innovation side, we continue to drive flavor innovation on the premium end, to build our taste credentials. Korean Season One was a strong performance. Korean Season Two that came in Q1 this year was 30% better volumes than Korean Season One, and Peri-Peri helped us deliver 30% better volumes in Korean Season Two. This journey now continues on flavor innovation, and as Raj mentioned, the one that is coming soon, I will share a little teaser with you. Please look up on Burger King app in the next few days. You will see a pre-book of our partnership with Avengers. This is a full integration of product, packaging, a complete program. I am hoping that you will be at our stores to experience this starting tomorrow the pre-booking starts, and third, we actually launch the program across all our stores.
Kapil Grover: The other piece we want to continue to build on is our awareness around trust and taste, our program around quality initiatives. In this heightened awareness around this subject, we continue to share with our consumers and our stakeholders that our food has no synthetic colors or artificial flavors. It matters a lot to today's consumers, the Gen Z and the Gen Alpha, and we continue to reiterate that promise to our guests who come and enjoy their food at Burger King.
Kapil Grover: We continue to build. If you go to the next slide, please. We continue to build restaurants, so 600 stores. We celebrated that this quarter. This was a store in Delhi, and we launched this store with a lot of fanfare, and reached a big milestone of 600 restaurants in the country, and the growth continues from here on. Just back to Sumit to close on the financial stuff.
Sumit Zaveri: We have just walked through the financial performance for the quarter, which I am sure you all would have gone through. I have already spoken about the numbers through which we measure our performance. Obviously, we have also shared the reported numbers. With that, we would rather open up for questions.
Gaurav Ajjan: Yeah. Thanks, Sumit. We will now begin with the question and answer session. Please use the Raise Hand option to join the question queue. It will also be great if you can mention your company name before asking your question. The first question is from the line of Dhwanil Desai. Dhwanil, we have unmuted you. Please unmute yourself and ask your question.
Dhwanil Desai: Hi. Good evening, everyone. Am I audible?
Gaurav Ajjan: Yes, Dhwanil, you are audible. Please go ahead.
Dhwanil Desai: Yeah. First, congratulations for very strong numbers through both consecutive quarters, and kudos to the entire team for that. My first question is I think last four or five quarters, our SSSG has been doing progressively better. But our restaurant EBITDA has remained in that 13% odd range. If the environment remains supportive, do we see the path to 15% kind of EBITDA margin and double-digit company level EBITDA? How should we look at that path going forward in the next four to six quarters?
Rajeev Varman: Mr. Desai, thank you for your question. Appreciate it. Yes, you are right that we have been hovering at the EBITDA level around that mark of 13%. Look, SSSG is one of those top revenue numbers, but we continue to also open new restaurants that come in at lower ADS and lower margins that continue to dilute that number. More importantly, we have been scaling some of the headwinds, whether it was on the gross margin line or the utility line. All those effects, I think we will start to see some positives. But I think the future volumes increases through our family program, and the kids program that is coming in December. Those volumes will leverage those numbers as well.
Gaurav Ajjan: Please mute. Thank you.
Rajeev Varman: Thank you. Those top line numbers will provide the leverage that you will see as you move forward. Efficiencies will continue, but I think, do not expect that the rate will be the same. I think we have made a very efficient system, and you would appreciate that at our current volumes, we rally the same industry numbers that others do. We will continue to improve on them, but you will now start seeing EBITDA number hovering over 13%, and like you said, getting to 15% coming through volumes as we start to build volumes.
Dhwanil Desai: Got it. Very clear, Raj. Second question is on the overall environment. I think across all QSR companies, the commentary is that the environment continues to remain supportive even in October, and we are expecting good festive. Do we expect this kind of a double-digit SSSG momentum to continue going into Q3 and Q4? Your thoughts on that.
Rajeev Varman: Dhwanil, I cannot make a forward-looking statement right now. We just started the quarter. I can just tell you that we are very happy with the way we started the quarter.
Dhwanil Desai: Great. Thank you. I will come back in that case.
Gaurav Ajjan: Thank you, Dhwanil. The next question is from the line of Ankit Gupta. Ankit, please go ahead. Ankit, would you like to ask your question? We will move to the next participant. The next question is from the line of Viraj Mehta. Viraj, you are left on mute.
[Analyst 1]: Hi. Can you hear me?
Gaurav Ajjan: Yes, Viraj, we can hear you. Please go ahead.
[Analyst 1]: Yeah. Hi. My first question is on gross margin. We saw a slight dip quarter-on-quarter in our gross margin, probably a few basis points. Can you talk to us about what steps are you taking for the gross margins to kind of improve from here on? Or is it that you don't think our gross margins will really improve, but it is only operating leverage which will kick in and improve our EBITDA margins to 13%, as you mentioned?
Rajeev Varman: Yeah. Of course, you would appreciate that the leverage will not change the gross margin, but it will, of course, as you said, move the EBITDA number forward. There is a very strong, nice forward plan on gross margin as well that we are working on. Like I said, as we build these restaurants and we have got a whole bunch of openings that will be coming this quarter and the next quarter. These will bring down transportation costs and actually provide some relief to some of the markets which have higher food costs because of distribution costs. Those markets will experience a lower distribution cost and hence a better gross margin. That leverage will continue. It continues. Usually, you do see those things come around as we build more and more restaurants around those DCs.
Rajeev Varman: But there is also a kind of a long-term strategic thinking on both the proteins, chicken, as well as the vegetarian menu, where we have got some work in process that we will continue to do. We do see some progress there. We had some dip. It was a very small dip, but it was a dip. This dip was because of the headwinds that we saw on chicken that happened suddenly in the entire market. I do not think this is going to be long-term. I think we will see this recede back and we should be able to get you some kind of a leverage moving forward as well.
[Analyst 1]: Sure. My second question was, and I know for us it is a little less relevant. But for a lot of other QSRs, Navratri is a festival which is important because the footfalls drop in Navratri. They also gave SSG number, which was X of Navratri. Just wanted to understand for us, even though it matters less, but given the Navratri has been shifted from Q2 to Q3, if we were to see like-to-like, how much lower the SSG would have been if Navratri was in the same quarter?
Rajeev Varman: So, to be honest with you, we have just started this quarter, and Navratri fell in this quarter in October. Last year it was in September, and so was Shradh. Shradh also kind of moved here. But like I was telling earlier to the other speaker, we actually have started the quarter very well. We are very happy about it. We will share the numbers for this quarter when the quarter is over.
[Analyst 1]: No, I am not asking for Q3. I am asking if Navratri would have been in Q2, your SSG would have been 14%. It is 14% right now, so would it have been like 12%, 13%, 11%? Do you have any sense? Because for most QSRs, the footfalls drop by anywhere between 15% to 25% in Navratri. So how does it impact us, given that Navratri was not there in Q2 and it gave a bump up to our SSG, is what I want to understand.
Rajeev Varman: Yeah. Navratri doesn't have that kind of an impact. I know where your question is coming from. We have a very balanced menu with veg and non-veg. We do not see that big a dip during Navratri. We see a small receding, but this year, I can tell you that the impacts have been minimal, and the upload, the increase in the traffic into the restaurant has overcome all those significantly. I do not think our numbers would have been any different than what we have reported if Navratri was there as well.
[Analyst 1]: Right. My last question is on capability building. You talked about significant increase in opening of the restaurants, especially next year. A large increase when you look at. When we did such a large expansion last time, there was a disproportionate increase. I understand it was a different management, but there was a disproportionate increase in the rental costs, and some of the stores were much less profitable than earlier expectation. What have we done this time that we do not see a large part of those mistakes repeating next year? What capabilities are we building in terms of people, in terms of checks and balances, so that that doesn't happen again?
Rajeev Varman: Look, first of all, I will just make one comment and then turn it over to Sumit Zaveri, who leads the growth function, to make a significant contribution to this question. First of all, the management is the same. We haven't changed the management.
[Analyst 1]: Yeah, I meant the promoters. Sorry.
Rajeev Varman: The promoters are new. Look, we have always as a company grown responsibly, right? We call it responsible growth. We are not going to go away from that. We are not going to suddenly go a cowboy approach on our expansion moving forward. There is no intentions on going radical and doing expansion that is not thought out, not fully structured. Sumit will tell you in a minute how the pipeline is built and how the pipeline is already ready for next year. It is not that we are kind of rushing to build restaurants. It is because we find the opportunity and it is the right thing and it is going to help this brand actually grow stronger with more EBITDA and more company-level EBITDA margins. That is why this potential opportunity of potentially going from 60, 70 restaurants to maybe 80 to 100 restaurants, somewhere in that neighborhood, is potentially possible.
Rajeev Varman: Sumit, you want to add something?
Sumit Zaveri: Yeah, just a couple of things, Viraj. Viraj, firstly, we have made certain ways in which we have been looking at growth. One is first, obviously, we started with resizing the overall opportunity, which gives us a confidence that there is sufficiently large opportunity that are existing as far as the country is concerned. Secondly, we have kind of obviously invested in the team to make sure that the growth becomes much more uniform right through the year. You would have seen the growth that we have in this quarter, and it has started to kind of becoming much more balanced starting from August, September. As we mentioned at the beginning as well, October, we have already opened 12 stores.
Sumit Zaveri: We are kind of going in with much more near growth approach rather than the bulked-up growth approach towards the end of the quarter, which ensures that there is enough concentration that happens in every single site that gets opened. Obviously, we have always had our own evaluation matrix with respect to payback and return. Those continues to be there. Then we started building the pipeline way ahead in terms of our plan. We have actually now started to look at pipelines for over six to eight quarters, then to kind of trying to address the growth for the year. There are substantial shifts that we have made which make sure that we can not only grow at a better pace, but make sure that the decisions of investments are also in the right directions.
Sumit Zaveri: What also happens, Viraj, is that you have obviously seen now our store EBITDA is at 13%. Obviously, there is upside to be taken with respect to leverage. But if you see the focus on profitability with working on various other lines, on utilities and all, will also help us improve the overall performance, building more confidence and to be able to grow more confidently as we go along. There is enough checks and balances and overall improvement in business, which makes us believe that we will be able to grow profitably.
[Analyst 1]: Thank you so much, and best of luck, sir.
Gaurav Ajjan: Thank you, Viraj. Next question is from the line of Devanshu Bansal. Devanshu, please unmute yourself.
Devanshu Bansal: Hi, sir. Am I audible?
Gaurav Ajjan: Yes, Devanshu. Go ahead.
Devanshu Bansal: Congratulations on very strong performance. Sir, I wanted to check, the SSSGs are pretty strong, whether there is a difference between SSTG and SSSG for us, and how has this different sort of panned out over the last four, five quarters for us?
Rajeev Varman: Yeah, Devanshu, as you know, we do not share SSTG numbers, but I can tell you that all our growth is coming through traffic, as it has been for the last 14 quarters, as Kapil Grover was pointing out earlier. We continue to grow through traffic, and that is the discipline of the first pillar that we have, which is value, and recruiting more and more people into value and innovation, which continues to recruit more people. So we continue to grow through traffic, not through check. In fact, I think for the last many quarters, our check has remained there or thereabout the same. So it is all coming through traffic.
Devanshu Bansal: Why I asked this question was to better understand if there are mining opportunities. Obviously, you are getting very strong footfalls at your stores. So can mining be the next lever of SSSG growth, is what I wanted to maybe qualitatively understand.
Rajeev Varman: You mentioned mining.
Devanshu Bansal: Mining in a way that suppose a customer is coming and spending, say, 100, whether we see him spending 105 or 110, from that perspective I was asking.
Rajeev Varman: Devanshu, the next maybe several years or so, I think the focus of this company and this team is going to be on traffic increase. I think there is potential to continue to do that for a long time to come. I think that's where our focus is going to be. The appreciation on check is contingent to the 4%, 5% that industry takes in pricing on an annual basis. That will continue. There's no two ways about that. We continue to think in same tune as we have done in the past. Our focus as a team, this company's focus will continue to be building traffic and building sales through traffic. That's where we are going to be focused. We do have the families pillar. We do have the premium pillar that we have on the LTOs, which we run.
Rajeev Varman: Those continue to kind of build up, and you will see some check appreciation as more and more people kind of indulge in that pillar of our business. That's not the intention, is not to try to drive more out of the same customer. It's about to bring different types of customers into our business. Families will give you some check. The innovations pillar will give you some check because Peri-Peri and Korean, they're all in the ₹200 range as products. So those will give you a check, and as those burgers continue to grow, as Kapil was saying, there was a 30% increase in the quantity we sold year over year from Korean Season One to Peri-Peri. As that grows, that will continue to drive more check-in there. But the intention of the team is to continue growing it through traffic.
Devanshu Bansal: Got it. Just a small bit, wanted to check if, in our P&L, the cost inflation is largely baked in Q2 numbers, or there are certain line items where it has not been fully booked in. If you could just comment, because inflation is around food, employee, and utility. If you could just throw some comments there.
Sumit Zaveri: The entire inflation impact, whichever lines that we've had, has obviously been completely taken care of in our quarterly results that we've announced. Rather, Devanshu Bansal, we would really want to mention that the efficiency work or efforts that we've put into our overall P&L, especially, let's say, in the line of utilities. We've been talking about this as we make some investments. We've literally been able to negate the entire inflation impact. This is nothing to do with leverage. I'm talking purely from the perspective of the effort that the team has put in in order to offset the overall inflation impact. I did hear you talking about labor as well, and yes, this has been a point of discussion.
Sumit Zaveri: I can assure you that in any case, when we always plan our year, we do reasonably plan for inflation on the labor side, especially minimum wages, because we've seen the trends. They're absolutely, fully taken care of. We can tell you that it's not a number or an inflationary impact, which upsets our P&L, because we plan accordingly when we really start at the start or at the beginning of the year, including some of the higher impacts that could come our way. Efficiency is going to be one of the key levers for us to continue to grow with as far as our P&L is concerned. On the gross margins, we were at around 70.4%, 70.5%. We believe strongly about those levels. We will see how we take this journey forward to improve from that level.
Sumit Zaveri: We obviously have our, at least, path defined. Yes, it is unlikely to be linear, as we've always been mentioned, but we would take the journey forward when we start to see the buildup to be, we being able to build up from the current level. We do feel very strongly about the current levels of margins that we have.
Devanshu Bansal: Thank you. Thank you, sir, for these detailed answers. All the best to the team.
Sumit Zaveri: Thank you, Devanshu.
Gaurav Ajjan: The next question is from the line of Manjeet Buaria. Manjeet, please go ahead.
[Analyst 2]: Hello. Am I audible, over?
Gaurav Ajjan: Yes, Manjeet, you are audible. If you can just speak slightly louder.
[Analyst 2]: Okay. No, thank you. Good evening, everyone. First appreciate the consistent effort over the past many years you have made BK India into a very strong franchise. Thank you for that. I just one question, how is the team thinking about allocating the excess capital which we now have after the primary raise, between seeding some new brand in India versus acquiring some existing platform? If you have had some chance to discuss this and have some framework around it. Thank you.
Rajeev Varman: Thank you, Manjeet. I think this question came up last time as well. The promoters just came in in July and the entire capital, so there is some capital to come in as well with the warrants. We are working together with the promoters. We will come back, as I said on the last quarter, with a very robust plan on how we are going to move forward with that. But right now, we are strengthening our business here. There is a growth potential over here. We are investing in our infrastructure in terms of utilities, efficiency in our equipment that we are using. That work is continuing. We are also making Indonesia business very strong. We continue to do that, and we will come out with a plan for that capital.
Rajeev Varman: Rest assured, we are very excited about it, but we will do a responsible plan, and then we will share it at due time with you all.
[Analyst 2]: Okay. Just one more question on Indonesia. I think I read in today's release that, if I am not mistaken, we are going to sort of put primary capital of INR 130 crores in that. Am I right?
Sumit Zaveri: So you are right, Manjeet. This was something which we had planned at the start of the year. We are just seeking approvals from the board as we kind of start to see some milestones being hit as far as Indonesia business is concerned. Some part of it was always planned from the perspective of supporting the business from loss and working capital improvement. One of the pillars that Raj was mentioning when he took us through the Indonesia part was to improve the overall quality of existing assets that we have in Indonesia. With a shift in performance in the Burger King side, it is almost 35 ADT growth now visible in BK Indonesia business. We feel that we should start looking at improving the quality of asset in Indonesia, and hence we have set that money aside for improving the quality of assets. That is actually the plan.
Sumit Zaveri: Obviously, we have taken the approval for the entire money that could go in. You would not see us remitting the entire block at one go. It will go in tranches based on the milestones or based on the performances that we would want the Indonesia Burger King business to continue to achieve. Yes, what you read or what we have made an announcement is absolutely correct, Manjeet, from your side. But it is going to be done on the basis of need and as we take the entire Burger King Indonesia business forward.
[Analyst 2]: Sumit, we had sort of stopped expanding Burger King India because we wanted to fix the basics, and I think data is showing that we sort of have stemmed losses. Restaurants are consistently profitable at that level. Do we envisage starting to grow Burger King Indonesia again in terms of stores, et cetera, over the next 3, 4 years now?
Sumit Zaveri: We have still not put up the plan for growth of any new stores in Burger King Indonesia, Manjeet. At this point in time, still the focus is going to be how we strengthen the existing business. Once we have completed the cycle of improving the overall asset quality and see how the overall performance of BK Indonesia starts to stack up, we will go back and then, at that point in time, go back and revisit from the growth perspective. At this point in time, we still believe that growth by adding new stores is still not an immediate strategic priority as far as Burger King Indonesia is concerned.
[Analyst 2]: Thank you. Thank you for taking the questions.
Gaurav Ajjan: Thank you, Manjeet. Next question is from the line of Dhairya Trivedi. Dhairya, please go ahead. Dhairya, we cannot hear you. You are unmuted.
Dhairya Trivedi: Am I audible now?
Gaurav Ajjan: Yes, Dhairya, you are audible now.
Dhairya Trivedi: Yeah.
Gaurav Ajjan: Please go ahead.
Dhairya Trivedi: Yeah. Congratulations on a very strong set of numbers. All my other questions have been answered. Just had one bookkeeping question. What is the current cash on the balance sheet as of H1 FY27?
Sumit Zaveri: Dhairya, the capital that got infused through the primary capital, that is the level of liquidity that we have on our balance sheet. The amounts are obviously might be sitting in multiple lines in terms of cash and liquid investments that we would have placed. But the total amount that we have on our balance sheet is close to INR 1,000 crores. And then obviously there is another warrants that could give us another INR 450 odd crores of cash. So liquidity is at INR 1,000 crores.
Dhairya Trivedi: Sure. How much of that are we planning to use it in expansion?
Rajeev Varman: Currently, Dhairya, like I said, our EBITDA is going to provide us enough money to build restaurants next year. If we do plan to accelerate that growth, we will look at that, but currently there is no plan to use that capital for growth in India at all. We will make a robust plan. We will share whether it is acceleration in BK front. Whatever those strategies are, we will share with you. Like I said, the promoters are just in in July, and we are working very closely with them to formulate a forward strategy for those funds.
Dhairya Trivedi: Sure. Just one last question, is our focus only on Burger King India with these funds or are we looking at something else also?
Rajeev Varman: Dhairya, again, we will come back to you on that as we formulate that strategy. Currently, we are just having good conversations. Once we start solidifying conversations, we will put the strategy together.
Dhairya Trivedi: Sure. Thank you and all the best.
Rajeev Varman: Thank you.
Gaurav Ajjan: The next question is from the line of Naveen Kaushik. Naveen, please go ahead.
[Analyst 3]: Can you hear me? Am I audible?
Gaurav Ajjan: Hi.
[Analyst 3]: Yeah, hi. Congrats on a good set of numbers. I just want to ask my first question on the gross margin. Essentially, my understanding is that for the last few quarters, the line items or rather the constituents that are helping us improve our gross margins have been pretty much consistent, the broilers and the energy efficiency initiatives and all that stuff. What I've seen is we've kind of comfortably overachieved on the targets we set before. Just a small two-part question that I want to understand, what went better than we expected when we set the targets for the 69% gross margin by FY 2029, if I remember correctly? What other things do you see helping us kind of move the gross margin up from here?
[Analyst 3]: I'm not expecting any numbers, just want to know what you see on the table with respect to gross margins for the next 3, 4 years, maybe.
Rajeev Varman: Good thought process, Naveen. You're thinking really almost like how we are thinking here as a team as well. See, some of this stuff that we are doing right now, whether it's on the solar, whether it's on the energy efficient equipment, this is continuing. We will start realizing a lot of this going into the next year. So lower part of these line items, you will continue to see margin improvement expansion in every line item over there. Now, when it comes to gross margin, because of our cluster approach, there is benefits on that cluster approach itself. When we build more restaurants around a DC, we find those benefits roll down to those restaurants, because the ship is becoming bigger and bigger. So when you see those in few restaurants, the magnitude on the entire P&L is smaller, not visible sometimes.
Rajeev Varman: Those efforts continue, and those restaurants continue to add value as they kind of grow around the DCs. There is also, organically, you see when you start buying for 800 restaurants versus 600 restaurants, your ability to leverage on scale kicks in. Those leverages will continue. Those will not stop, and we've got a very strong supply team. We just got Deepa into our team just recently. She has come in with some splendid ideas. Then there's always a constant work on improving our existing packaging and so forth. So those efforts continue. We have got internal targets, supply chain has and the team has. Those are something that we take very seriously and continue to deliver on those on an annual basis. So you will see some progress in that direction as we move forward. A lot of stuff will come through leverage as we continue to build volumes.
[Analyst 3]: Got it. That's been very clear. My next question and my final question is on the Indonesia business. I just want to understand two different viewpoints on what's been going on. I'm not trying to question our views on the potential for that market, our current views and our views when we acquired the business. I think all that is very clear. What I'm trying to understand is, we've infused a certain amount of. We acquired the business for a certain amount of money. We've infused a certain amount of money into the business, and we are at a particular position in the business that is not quite strong, in my opinion. Please feel free to disagree on that. My entire understanding is how do we view this dynamic as a management and maybe some thoughts of the new promoters on this dynamic as well.
[Analyst 3]: With respect to numbers, is there any expectation on how much this equity investment is supposed to do, or is there any aspiration target from that perspective? Thanks a lot.
Rajeev Varman: Naveen, very good question, actually. Feel free to ask them. Look, we have worked very hard in Indonesia in very difficult circumstances. We had the boycott number one, and then we had the boycott number two. Luckily, these things are so far behind now in Indonesia. I'm not just talking about our business, I'm talking about the industry at large, and I'm talking about the Western QSR industry at large, has started moving in the north direction quite rapidly. This new promotion that we just started a few weeks back, a little over a month, has started to give us results that we never imagined. Some of it is because the industry is moving in the right direction and the effects of the boycotts are far and behind us, from the customer perspective. Those sentiments are gone, long gone.
Rajeev Varman: Some of the tailwinds are from there, but also a very strong promotion that Sandeep and his team has put together, which is doing really well. As we saw these things, we are now looking at the asset. A lot of the things that we are doing to improve the asset is going to help drive more traffic into the restaurant and more repeated frequency into those restaurants, right? We feel very strongly about where we are now. You are right in saying that the business was not strong. In fact, it was far from being strong in the past. But we see these green shoots, and we see this moving forward. We have not made an investment into the asset in the past because we did not see the traffic. We tried several value promotions and value strategies over there.
Rajeev Varman: We did not make any progress because every time we did something, there would be a boycott or there would be some kind of uprising there that would negate a lot of our efforts. But what we have seen in the last six weeks or so is a dramatic increase in traffic into our restaurant. In fact, the outskirt restaurants are doing far more than even 35 traffic per day, per restaurant increase. This is really good welcome news. If you go back and look back at this business when it was pre-COVID, this used to be a business that drove 15% restaurant level EBITDA. This was a business that had a ADS of 27 million IDR on a daily basis per restaurant. We think that there is some good momentum. We would like to now support that momentum by doing all the right things with our assets.
Rajeev Varman: I think we can build this into a strong business. We are doing this very disciplined, with a lot of sincerity, that we think that this is going to go in the right direction. We should actually stand behind the team and move this and capitalize on what we invested four years ago, over four years ago. I think is a good time for us to not shy away from this, but to double down and actually build a very strong business for the future.
[Analyst 3]: That is very clear, sir. Just one small follow-up maybe on that. In addition to the strength in the business that you are seeing, is there any financial metric with respect to the return on the invested capital that we look at? Is there something along those lines that you also judge before making capital allocation decisions for this business?
Rajeev Varman: The current, like Sumit was saying earlier, we are not building new restaurants over there right now. We have no plans to do that this year. We have no plans to do that next year. There are no plans to do that. The plans are to the current assets to get the sales as close as possible to where we used to be in the past, to start to get the margins, the EBITDA margins, back to where they were at the past. The investment in marketing is to bring the sales back to where it was in the past. Those are the efforts. Our results will be the efforts and the results will be tallied on the fact that how close we get there, how do we get back to that 15% EBITDA margin? How do we get back to that 27 million ADS?
Rajeev Varman: The target that I have set with the team over there before I came, full honest sharing with you, is to improve every restaurant on a daily basis by 5 million IDR per day per restaurant. That is the target we have set with the team as we have come in. All the efforts and all the investment that are going into the assets, into marketing, into all the promotions we are doing there, is to get first capitalize that 5 million. We are sitting at around 19, 20 million ADS, that gets us to about a 25 million ADS, that will give us a fantastic restaurant level EBITDA.
[Analyst 3]: Got it. Very clear. Thanks a lot and all the best for a good quarter ahead.
Gaurav Ajjan: Thank you, Naveen. That was the last question for the day.
Rajeev Varman: Yes.
Gaurav Ajjan: Any closing comments?
Sumit Zaveri: Great. Thank you. Thank you, Raj. For this one is, we are as a team, honestly very happy with the way the business is building. It is not just about the performance that we have delivered for the quarter, but also the way we have built, we are getting ready to make sure that we are able to continue to do the momentum that we have on our side. We can only assure you that we are not kind of looking that this is a result of the external factors, purely at the back of the shift in the overall external factors. But we are getting ourselves ready. You saw one of the glimpse of what Kapil mentioned about, to the co-branded program that we are talking about. We are getting ourselves ready, not just for coming quarters, but for the quarters to come.
Sumit Zaveri: Saying this, how do we continue to build onto the momentum that we have on our side? That is something, is a thinking that we will continue to have, whether it is on the revenue side as we go forward or on the efficiency side as we grow forward. So it is, we will not sit purely on the back of saying that the momentum is there on our side, so we will continue to do better. That is not the thinking with which we are going ahead with. We are going to push ourselves hard to make sure that the momentum adds on to the effort that we put at our team. With that, thank you very much for continued support that we have always had as investors or as friends or as guests or customers.
Sumit Zaveri: The last thing that I would do it is with all the effort that our team has put in, we would really want you all to see into our restaurants as we go into the festive season. All the best and all the businesses for the coming festive from everybody on this side. Thank you.
Rajeev Varman: See you in our restaurants. Thank you very much.
Sumit Zaveri: Thank you very much.
Gaurav Ajjan: Thank you all for joining in. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.
[Analyst 3]: Thank you very much.
Gaurav Ajjan: Thank you.
