LATAM FIRST TO MARKET

Research evidence excerpt

LATAM FIRST TO MARKET

Latin America Equity Research

LatAm First to Market 06 July 2026

Top Stories

LatAm Oil & Gas (Milene Clifford Carvalho)

US Energy Trip Feedback: Discipline Over Conviction

We recently spent a week in the US meeting management teams and investors across the energy sector, combining JPM's US

sector conference with company meetings in Houston and Midland. The trip pointed to a consistent theme: across a range of

macro views, discipline now takes precedence over conviction. Few management teams are willing to commit capital behind a

higher-oil thesis, and the prevailing posture is one of cost efficiency and the protection of shareholder returns at lower prices,

with upside treated as optionality. That mindset framed the conversation across four areas we explore below: a macro debate

split between near-term tightness and longer-term demand risk; a clear preference for downstream margins over E&P; a

Permian defined by capex discipline; and investor feedback on our LatAm coverage that continues to center on Petrobras. See

the main takeaways below.

Mexico Consumer (Froylan Mendez/Lucas Ferreira/Joseph Giordano)

SNAP (U.S. Food Stamp Program) Eligibility Waivers: Small Net Impact, Concentrated in Beverages

Arca Continental (AC*) screens as the highest direct read-through to the SNAP waiver debate in the US within our food & bev/

retail coverage, with our framework implying ~9% adjusted SNAP exposure at risk for its U.S. operations (and ~3% at the

consolidated level), but we still see the impact as likely modest given meaningful substitution/tender-shifting behavior. Across

the other U.S.-exposed names in our coverage, exposure is lower and uneven: Bimbo is more indirect at ~2% for U.S.