For its part, FEMSA Comercio produced another year of excellent results. In 2012, total revenues rose 16.6% to Ps. 86.4 billion. Gross profit grew 18.7% to Ps. 30.2 billion, resulting in a 60 basis point gross margin expansion to 35.0% of total revenues. Additionally, income from operations increased 22.7%, resulting in a 30 basis point operating margin expansion to 7.8% of total revenues.

In reviewing FEMSA Comercio's results, top-line growth reflected our continuing store expansion and our comparable same-store sales growth. For the year, same-store sales grew 7.7%, which was ahead of the trend, reinforcing our position as an industry benchmark. Our progress in mapping and understanding consumers' needs and adjusting our value proposition to better fulfill those needs significantly contributed to our same-store sales. Moreover, we achieved a healthy balance between store traffic and average customer ticket, which both improved 3.8% for the year.

Our stores' performance also benefited from the closer logistics support offered by the addition of two new distribution centers, for a total of 15 as of the end of 2012. The growth in distribution centers brings them nearer to our stores, enabling us to increase the frequency of our centers' store visits and the quantity and variety of SKUs available at the stores. This, in turn, drives greater sales growth by allowing us to enhance our product offerings to stimulate and satisfy our consumers' needs.

In addition to FEMSA Comercio's expanded distribution network, we continue developing a system of specialized distribution routes to deliver prepared foods to our stores fresh daily. Already covering two thirds of our OXXO stores across Mexico, these routes use a refrigerated fleet of dedicated smaller trucks that can transport and deliver food at controlled temperature and visit over 6,000 stores at least three times a week. On top of that, we now have two food preparation facilities in northern Mexico, which allow us to better understand the prepared food supply chain and to ensure the quality and fulfillment of our value proposition for consumers in this category. Through these initiatives, we are just beginning to unlock the potential of this promising consumption occasion.

Our initiatives to further improve our offering of prepared foods benefit from our experience developing our very successful andatti® brand of coffee. In only a few years, this brand has not only become the leader in Mexico's freshly brewed coffee category, but also a strong player in specialty and ready-to-drink coffee product and brand extensions. To better enable us to maintain this leadership position and ensure the quality of our coffee across the country, in 2012, we established a long-term partnership with our coffee supplier, Café del Pacífico, further strengthening a proven, productive relationship with a key supplier.

At OXXO, we also continue to broaden the scope of our convenient one-stop services. For example, our expanded correspondent bank program with Mexico's largest financial institutions enables customers to make cash deposits to their bank accounts and payments toward the balance of their bank credit cards at any one of OXXO's stores across the country. As consumers adopt this new functionality, we look forward to eventually expanding this program to the majority of banks operating in Mexico.

On top of our enhanced value proposition, we carried on building OXXO's leadership position as the largest and fastest growing small-format store chain in Latin America. In 2012, we surpassed the 10,000-store mark, opening 1,040 new stores for a total of 10,601—serving more than 8 million customers daily. Recognizing that it took us 20 years to reach our first 1,000 stores, this is a major landmark that not only illustrates how far we have come, but also how far we can grow. Given the relatively low penetration of OXXO across vast areas of Mexico, we will continue our aggressive domestic store expansion, while we continue to selectively test the small-box retail platform outside of the country. To this end, we continue to steadily fine-tune our value proposition in Colombia to satisfy local market needs and to analyze other potential markets and formats where our small-box retail expertise may apply.

Beyond the pursuit of geographical growth, in 2012, FEMSA Comercio took an important first step in a parallel, complementary avenue for growth that aims to leverage our capability and our platform across formats rather than across countries. In our view, the combination of similar small-box store formats and a similarly fragmented industry structure, coupled with the considerable, transferable capabilities we have built managing our business in the past, represents a very compelling opportunity set. To this end, we agreed to acquire a 75% stake in Farmacias YZA, partnering with a leading local drugstore operator in southeast Mexico, with 333 stores in five states. We believe that we can contribute our significant expertise in the development of small-box retail formats—along with a value proposition designed to meet our consumers' needs—to what is already a successful regional player in this industry, with a view to grow rapidly in different geographies. We expect this transaction to close during the first quarter of 2013.

We also continued to advance in our strategy to focus and strengthen our Strategic Businesses' operations, particularly those that provide significant support to our core businesses and present attractive growth potential. On this front, we are working to consolidate Imbera as the leader in the design and production of refrigeration solutions for retail applications, spearheading innovation and achieving the highest efficiency ratings in the Americas. At FEMSA Logística, we continued to make progress restructuring its operations, while positioning it to drive growth organically and through selective acquisitions. Conversely, during the year, we divested Quimiproductos, another step in our effort to exit non-core operations.