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service and in terms of frozen food for example, and all of the initiatives that we’re doing right now with of course, the change of behavior given COVID. That’s going to be presented next week as well in our conference.
Nicholas Alan Clayton
Great. And we have a few more questions about the acquisition strategy. One is, “Has your acquisition strategy been historically (INAUDIBLE) underperforming assets, or high performing or is it a mix, how do you approach that side of it?”
Arie Kotler
You know, we don’t buy underperforming or high performing, we’re basically buying businesses. Most of the businesses that we bought over the last seven years—you know we did 18 acquisitions, the majority of them came from either secondary generation, third generation and fourth generation. What we actually see when we buy those assets, we buy those assets based on cashflow. So, when we buy those assets based on cashflow, immediately at closing or after closing, we are able to capture the synergy, just given our size. I mean there is no question when you buy five stores in a market and I think you saw it in the presentation, when you buy five stores in market, I mean those guys cannot buy directly from the wholesalers or from Coca-Cola or from Frito-Lay and things like that. So immediately, you’re capturing the margin because of those basically—because of the size of those companies. As a matter of fact, the more years this basically changes in the market, I think it’s a lot of opportunities for us because we are bringing new life, new program, new marketing initiatives to all of those stores. Just for everybody’s benefit, I mean we did 18 acquisition as we mentioned, a lot of small chain and mid-sized chain but overall—you know we are working with one platform, one basically Fas REWARDS, as a matter of fact, actually we announced today we just launched Fas REWARDS II, and this is going across the entire chain. So, we bring everybody together under basically one roof and we just make them better. I mean, that’s what I can tell you.
Nicholas Alan Clayton
Right and another question we have here is, “Some of the larger players, 7-Eleven, Couche-Tard and others have grown rapidly through acquisitions and is this something that we expect the whole industry to continue doing, moving forward? And how do you differ from some of those strategies we see from some of the existing players?”
Arie Kotler
Yeah, so yes, I think this is my personal opinion, I think the industry is gonna continue to consolidate very, very heavily. You just mentioned 7-Eleven buying Speedway number 3, 14 multiple as you can imagine, we don’t pay those—we don’t play, and we don’t pay basically those prices. We just never had to do that, given that there is so much opportunities and so many inventories available. And I think what differentiates us from them, is that we are looking on small chain. We are looking on 20 store chain, 50 store chain, I think some of those guys, given the size of the acquisition they’re going after, they’re not looking after them. The other thing that differs us from the others is that in most of those cases, we buy chains that got brand equity. We don’t change the brand. And you would be amazed how many times people that sell their business—you know a company that operated for 40 years with a local brand and I’ll give an example, Easy Mart, we bought Easy Mart two years ago. Everybody competed on this market, this is in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, all of the big players play over there.
When we actually approached them and told them that we are planning to keep their father’s legacy that stared 40 years ago and he passed away, this was one of the things that really, really intrigued them, given that we are in multi-brand chain versus just the one chain. We also
Arko GPM and Haymaker Acquisition Corp. II
Thursday, November 12, 2020, 2:00 PM Eastern