Demand for
Chipotle Mexican Grill’
s burritos is still spicy hot. The company’s latest earnings were better than expected, sending the stock higher in after-hours trading Tuesday.
Chipotle posted adjusted earnings of $10.36 a share for the fourth quarter, topping forecasts for $9.71 a share.
Sales of $2.5 billion increased 15.4% year over year, just meeting analysts’ expectations. Same-store sales rose 8.4%, better than predictions for 7.1% growth. Operating margins also expanded, growing to 14.4% from 13.6% a year prior.
“2023 was an outstanding year where we delivered strong transaction growth driven by throughput and menu innovation, opened a record number of new restaurants, surpassed $3 million in [average unit sales volume] and formed our first international partnership,” said CEO Brian Niccol.
For 2024, Chipotle sees same-store sales growing by mid-single digits in percentage terms, slightly ahead of consensus estimates for a 5.3% increase.
The company also reiterated its goal to open between 285 to 315 new restaurants in 2024. Chipotle currently operates about 3,400 restaurants, mostly in the U.S.
In the long run, it hopes to double that figure. And while the company plans to open stores across the country, it is focusing its efforts across the sun belt—from Texas to the Carolinas, and across various types of settings, from urban and suburban to rural areas, Niccol said in a call with Barron’s.
“We just have a lot of upside because we’re under penetrated in so many of these places that I just rattled off,” Niccol said. “So you know, it really is coast to coast.”
Chipotle’s board of directors approved an additional $200 million in share repurchases in the fourth quarter. Throughout 2023, the company repurchased a total of $589.8 million.
Chipotle stock rose 3.9% after hours Tuesday. Shares of Chipotle have risen 8.8% this year, outperforming the
S&P 500’s
3.9% gain and the 1% gain notched by the
AdvisorShares Restaurant ETF.
Optimism was running high heading into the report. Analysts tweaked their earnings estimates 0.2% higher over the past week, and 1.5% higher over the past three months, according to FactSet.
“We believe the visibility on Chipotle maintaining both healthy sales and earnings growth is among the best in publicly traded restaurants,” wrote Sharon Zackfia, analyst at William Blair, in a note last week.
Indeed, there’s a lot that worked in Chipotle’s favor over the fourth quarter. Foot traffic rose 4.3% in the quarter compared with a year ago, despite declining by 1.6% across the rest of the fast-food industry, according to data from Placer.ai. As a result, transactions were higher, rising 7% from a year earlier.
The company has also continued to see consistent demand across various income groups, even though it has raised prices to account for higher labor costs. Chipotle thinks it will inch prices slightly higher, by around 2.5% to 3%, throughout the first quarter, but still hasn’t made any plans on how to manage price increases in the second half of the year.
“We’ll wait and see just what the landscape looks like what the consumer sentiment is, what other companies are going to do,” said Jack Hartung, chief financial officer, on a call with analysts.
Ahead of the report, there were concerns that the company would tweak its guidance for the first fiscal quarter a bit lower to reflect a slowdown in restaurant industry sales thanks to a colder-than-expected January. On Tuesday, the company acknowledged it had been impacted by “unusually cold weather,” but said full-year sales trends are still strong.
“The thing that I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by is the strength of the consumer,” Niccol said.
Write to Sabrina Escobar at sabrina.escobar@barrons.com
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