Q1 2023 Core & Main Inc. Earnings Call

First quarter of last year.

Another 52% in the first quarter of last year.

This makes year-over-year comparisons top, especially when confronted with disruptive weather in some of our major markets.

We had an excellent quarter from a profitability standpoint with adjusted EBITDA margin increasing 30 basis points year over year to a new first quarter record of 14%.

Prices remained elevated against improving supply chains and gross margins outperformed our expectations.

Offsetting lower sales volume and inflationary cost pressure to deliver a solid adjusted EBITDA outcome for the quarter.

Our end markets remain stable throughout the first quarter. Non-discretionary municipal repair and replacement demand continue to show resilience. Backed by healthy municipal budgets and strong project backlogs.

As we expected, residential volumes were down significantly compared to a strong prior year comparable. That said, we believe the long-term fundamentals of the housing industry are solid, and we are pleased with the level of demand we are seeing from our customers and many of the public home builders.

Residential lot development is still in balance, representing a short supply of vacant developed lots.

On the non-residential side, on ensuring trends have generated an increasing number of large projects, and our scale advantage has positioned us to capture meaningful growth from these projects and select markets. The This Willuer

While we remain optimistic about the opportunities for growth in the non-residential market, we recognize that tightening lending standards could have a short to medium-term impact on non-residential development, which could impact the demand for our products and services.

During the quarter, we made significant strides in executing the capital allocation framework we've laid out in prior quarters.

In the first quarter, we deployed over $400 million of capital to organic growth, acquisitions, and share repurchases.

We maintain ample capacity to continue investing in growth opportunities.

We continue to invest in resources to support the growth of our product, customer, and geographic expansion initiatives, which help drive market out performance and long-term value creation.

For example, we open two new locations and underserved markets on the first quarter to grow our footprint and make our products and expertise more accessible nationwide. Our greenfields continue to mature and offer new growth opportunities. We have the ability to efficiently open new branches and attractive markets.

Due to our scale advantage, talent pool, and training programs.

We are pleased with the progress we've made across these initiatives as we enter the busiest time of our selling season.

We complement our organic growth investments with acquisitions to broaden our geographic footprint, enhance our product lines, enter adjacent markets, and acquire key talent.

We completed three acquisitions during the quarter and signed a definitive agreement to acquire another business subsequent to the quarter.

Our M&A pipeline remains very active, and we expect to continue adding new businesses to the Corn Mane family throughout 2023 and beyond. Our M&A pipeline remains very active, and we expect to continue adding new businesses to the Corn Mane family throughout 2020 and beyond.

Our record first quarter operating cash flow also contributes to the liquidity to fund a $332 million share repurchase for a majority shareholder, which was concurrent with a 5 million share secondary offering.

The share repurchase reduced our diluted share count by 15 million shares.

Looking ahead, organic and inorganic growth investments remain our number one capital allocation priority, but we will look to return capital to shareholders as opportunities arise.

Turning to our recent acquisitions on page six.

We added three high-performing businesses to our family and subsequent to the quarter signed a fourth, generating combined historical annualized net sales of over $115 million. Landscapes and construction supplies as a full service provider of geosynthetics products with two locations in the Chicago metropolitan area.

Since opening nearly 20 years ago, the team at LCS has built a well-regarded business and serves customers in more than 15 states.

The acquisition adds key talent and expands our existing geosynthetics and erosion control product offering for our customers in the upper Midwest.

UpsCo is a provider of utility infrastructure products and services headquartered in the Finger Lakes region of New York, with sales offices in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest regions of the U.S.

Since 1965, Upsko has earned a trusted reputation for providing its customers with best-in-class products and services to build and remediate utility infrastructure.

In addition to prefabricated meter sets, they offer a broad range of products and services.

including pipe, valves, fittings, and fusible piping solutions to satisfy the needs of its customers.

This acquisition brings us adjacent product lines and unique cross-selling opportunities to our existing customer base.

thereby expanding the addressable market for our products and services.

The team at Upskow shares our commitment to providing high quality products and service for reliable utility infrastructure.

We are excited to have them join our business.

Midwest Pipe Supply is a single branch, full-service distributor of storm drainage and water products in Northern Iowa.

Since 2002, the team at Midwest Pipes Supply has built a strong reputation as a dependable distributor of drainage, septic, and water work solutions.

The company offers a wide range of product and services for contractors, municipalities, and agriculture customers throughout the state.

This acquisition expands our product offering and geographic reach in the Midwest, alongside a team with commitment and dedication to the communities they serve.

Buster supplies a leading producer, installer, and distributor of specialty pre-cast concrete products, storm drains, and other eroging control solutions.

Operating out of seven locations across Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. pepper , my brother.

Since 1981, the team at Foster Supply has been the partner of choice for contractors and municipalities.

Seeking innovative solutions for unique worksite challenges.

Bringing that team to corn main will allow us to combine our collective expertise and differentiated product and service offerings to better meet the needs of our shared waterworks and geosynthetics customers.

Lastly, I want to share that I'm extremely proud to see our vision of advancing reliable infrastructure realized through the achievement of our growth strategies.

Our strategy is to leverage the scale, resources.

Talent and capabilities we have is one of the largest companies in our industry.

All in our support of experience and entrepreneurial local teams to consistently deliver value to our customers and suppliers.

We've come a long way in building the foundation for core and main and executing our strategy, and we have a significant runway of growth opportunities ahead.

Now we'll turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Mark Lukowski.

to discuss our financial results in fiscal 2023 outlook. Go ahead, Mark.

Thanks, Steve. I'll begin on page eight with highlights of our first quarter results.

We reported net sales of nearly $1.6 billion for the quarter, a decrease of 1.5% compared with the prior year period.

The flight year over year sales decline was expected and follows strong comparative performance in the prior year when that sales grew 52% compared with the first quarter of fiscal 2021.

We saw positive price contributions during the quarter as material costs have sustained at elevated levels and we experienced pressure on volumes due to a return to more typical seasonality for the first quarter.

We have sent scene demand and prudent in the second half of April and into May.

with drier and more stable weather conditions across the country. Gross margins of 27.9% was 160 basis points higher than the prior year period, and it reflects the benefit of accretive acquisitions, execution of our margin enhancement initiatives.

And the utilization of low-cost inventory.

Despite the strong start to gross margins in the first quarter, we continue to expect gross margin for the full year to be lower than fiscal 2022, but likely stronger than we anticipated at the beginning of the year.

Selling general administrative expenses increased 8.3% to $223 million for the first quarter. The increase in SGNA reflects the impact of cost inflation, acquisitions, and investments to support our anticipated growth.

S-GNA as it presens and net sales increased 130 basis points to 14.2%.

Our S-GNA as a percentage in that sales is typically higher in the first quarter due to seasonality of our sales and fixed cost structure.

Interest expense was $17 million for the first quarter compared with $13 million in the prior year period. The increase was due to higher variable interest rates on the un-hatch portion of our senior turn loan.

Income tax expense for the first quarter was $31 million compared with $30 million in the prior year period, reflecting effective tax rates of 18.9%, and 18% respectively.

The increase in effective tax rate was due to an increase in income attributable to corn main ink, resulting from a decline in partnership interest held by non-controlling interest holders.

We recorded $133 million of net income for the first quarter, compared with $137 million in the prior year period.

The decrease was primarily due to lower sales volume, higher SGNA expenses and higher interest expenses, partially offset by favorable gross margin performance.

Diluted earnings per share in the first quarter was in line with the prior year period at $0.50 per share.

The diluted earnings per share calculation includes the basic weighted average shares of Class A common stock Plus the diluted impact of outstanding Class A common stock that would be issued upon exchange of partnership interest

Adjusted EBITDA increased nearly 1% to $220 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin increased 30 basis points to 14%.

The increase in the justity but that margin was due to our strong gross margin performance during the quarter, partially offset by the impact across inflation and investments to support our growth.

Turning to our cash flow and balance sheet performance on page 9, operating cash flow was a record for the first quarter at $120 million.

We continued the inventory optimization initiative. We started in the middle of last year, generating $35 million of cash from inventory in the first quarter, compared with a $207 million investment in the prior year.

We typically build inventory in the first and second quarter to prepare for our spring and summer selling seasons.

However, we were able to reduce inventory this year while maintaining service levels with our customers due to our prudent inventory investments in the prior year.

On a year-over-year basis, net inventory was down about 2% in the first quarter, even with the higher product costs, inventory acquired through acquisitions, and new inventory to support our green fields.

As I mentioned last quarter, we are targeting an operating cash conversion range of 80 to 100 percent of adjusted EBITDA, and we expect continued improvement in cash flows as we progress throughout the year. Net debt leverage at the end of the quarter was 1.7 times, and our available liquidity stands at $1.1 billion following the Capital Deployment Act.

shares.

Our capital allocation framework remains consistent with what we laid out last quarter.

Organic and inorganic growth investments remain our number one capital allocation priority, and we intend to continue returning capital to shareholders through share repurchases or dividends. We have ample capacity to invest, and we remain confident in our ability to capture growth opportunities as they develop throughout the year. I'll wrap up on page 10 with an update on our outlook for the remainder of 2020.

discretionary municipal repair and replacement activity and a relatively stable non-residential end market supported by a diverse project exposure.

In total, we continue to expect end-market volumes to be down in the low to mid-single-digit range for the year. We expect to deliver two to three points of above-market growth from the execution of our product, customer, and geographic expansion initiatives. In terms of acquisitions, we've seen an acceleration of activity

are performing well and we continue to improve our ability to integrate them into our company.

We've seen price inflation continue to moderate as we lapse the price increases from a year ago, and we continue to expect roughly flat price contribution for the full year.

We still expect gross margins to normalize in fiscal 2023, but the impact is likely to be better than we anticipated last quarter as a result of our continued utilization of low-cost inventory. The

Given our recent acquisitions and strong margin performance in the first quarter, we are raising our expectations for Fiscal 2023 net sales and adjustity that that.

We now expect net sales to be in the range of $6.6 to $6.9 billion, and we expected just the EBITDA to be in the range of $820 to $880 million. Our expectation for operating cash conversion remains unchanged at 80 to 100% of $9.9 billion to$8.?800 Rescue??1.0.

As we progress throughout the year, we will continue to focus on organic and inorganic growth opportunities, margin expansion, and operating cash conversion through inventory optimization.

We're well positioned to outperform the market in this complex demand environment, creating value for all our stakeholders. We're well positioned to outperform the market in this complex demand environment, creating value for all our stakeholders.

We look forward to helping our customers build more reliable infrastructure as we enter a key part of the construction season.

At this time, I'd like to open it up for questions.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press start followed by one and your telephone keypad now. If you'd like to evoke your question, please press start followed by two. When preparing for your question, please ensure your phone is unmuted locally.

Our first question comes from Catherine Thompson from Thompson Research Group. Your line is now open, please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for taking my questions today. Just the first, a bigger picture, a question for me, I get to work to the quarter. We look at several federally funded initiatives, I-I-J-A, CHIPs, APP, and inflation reduction map.

How does poor main orchestrate those, knowing short, how do they blend with those dollars as I go through?

Thanks, Catherine. This is Steve. You know, a couple different areas I would share with you. Certainly the projects themselves have a lot of opportunity for us, whether it's the new chip facilities that are going in, battery facilities, you know, a lot of this on-shoring activity.

that has been part of that in addition to the infrastructure piece itself all benefit us. But what I would also share is that just given our size and scale, we've been able to support a lot of these major contractors that are involved with these across multiple geographies. We've been able to help assist in getting product access that in some cases may be more than a hundred years old.

to get our unfair share of business in those areas. Okay, and maybe digging a little bit deeper to type 1000 fittings and fire protection that saw modest clients in the quarter. Type 1000 fittings assume more is more driven by Rezzy because she gives me more clarity on that. And then just.

a little bit more color on the modest softness in the fire protection segment.

Yeah, well, I'll start first with residential. So we anticipated a challenging residential quarter here, particularly given some of the softening that we've seen with the new land development as home builders have been scaling back. You know, that certainly was anticipated as we got into the quarter.

we were certainly seeing some challenges there. You know, as far as fire protection, some of the other areas, we did see some softness in a couple of different areas across the country, weather and seasonality, we're also part of the impact that we saw. It's difficult to put our finger exactly on how much was parceled out between...

was a pretty tough winter in some of those areas and pushed a lot of things into later in the spring.

Okay, great. Thanks very much.

Thanks Catherine. Our next question comes from Michael Dow from RBC Capital Market. Your line is now open, please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start off on capital allocation. Obviously, a lot of moving pieces in the corridor with a nice buyback, but then the comments that you made just now about the accelerating M&A activity. Can you help us understand kind of what's – We're rolling over one word at a moment. Operator?

What do you think is driving the acceleration and some of the deals in pipeline? Sounds like maybe progressing along better than you might have anticipated and when you think about the contribution, I think you outlined four points.

I think it's driving the acceleration and some of the deals in pipeline that sounds like maybe progressing along better than you might have anticipated. And when you think about kind of the contribution, I think you outlined four points. It's just to be clear is that

That's a little higher than I would have thought based on the deals you've already closed. So is that inclusive of any contribution from deals that you're still contemplating and expecting to close?

Well, I'll talk a little bit about what we delivered in terms of M&A in the first quarter. So as you saw there, you know, we had close to 11 branches and $115 million in annual I-Sales that came through in that quarter. Our pipeline continues to be very robust. You know, you saw last year we had a number of really solid bolt-on acquisitions for water work.

opportunity there, the multiples have been very favorable for us as we've gone through this and we continue to see a very robust pipeline. And I can let Mark talk a little bit more about the capital allocation and how we've been prioritizing.

Yeah, Michael, thanks for the question. On the capital allocation, you know, again, no change from what we described last quarter in terms of the priorities, you know, organic growth, inorganic growth, being our top priorities. And then I think the repurchase that we completed during the quarter really represented our commitment to the capital.

the addition of upscore Midwest pipe and foster for the remaining parts of 2023. So no contemplation of acquisitions that have not been signed in that. That's all acquisitions that have been completed at this point.

And my follow-up is also around capital allocation. So if we look at balance sheet and the cash flow that you're guiding to for the year, it seems like you'd probably end up all else equal, close to one, like in the net leverage range in the row one.

or around one time. So you know, you relative to your target range, I think that gives you a full turn or more of leverage, which is technically kind of like 850 million of.

of available dry powder this year based on your EBITDA guide. So, is that in terms of kind of order of magnitude on what you think you can deploy this year between M&A and potentially incremental buybacks?

Is that the right way to think about it or would you be thinking about kind of a more gradual layering of deployment?

Yeah, Michael, I think that's the right way to think about it, you know, over a period of time, you know, the timing of it, you know, will continue to assess the timing of cash flows. This year, where that leverage level shakes out and liquidity is we think about, you know, deploying that capital, but.

That's how we feel that the two to three times leverage is a comfortable level for us. And yeah, that provides for a decent amount of capital that we'll look to deploy again through our organic and inorganic initiatives and potentially additional share repurchases and or dividends.

That's how we feel that the two to three times leverage is a comfortable level for us. And yeah, that provides for a decent amount of capital that we'll look to deploy again through our organic and inorganic initiatives and potentially additional share repurchases and or dividends. That's great. Thank you.

Yep, thanks. Our next question comes from Joe Critchey. Joe Richey from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open, please go ahead.

Thank you, good morning, everyone. So I was wondering if you can maybe start by, yeah, good morning. I was wondering if you can maybe start by giving us just a little bit more color on your organic growth this quarter, so specifically, like any kind of like order of magnitude on the different end markets and how they contributed.

Yes, in terms of the sales breakdown for the quarter, I'd say from a price standpoint, we were in the, I'd say single-digit range for the quarter, definitely much less of an impact than what we saw in the prior years as we've seen some of that pricing.

stabilize and then from a volume perspective kind of low double digit range there with you know the bigger impacts obviously in the residential and market given the softness there and the really tough comps and particularly in the residential market in the prior year and I'd say you know from a volume perspective down to a lesser extent and

But I guess maybe just my follow on question to that is clearly we've been waiting now for a while for some of this infrastructure spending to come through. We got through the debt ceiling. I'm just curious on the beauty side specifically.

you know what do you see what are you hearing from your customers i know that you know clearly mentioned uh... that things seem to have gotten a little bit better in the second half of April and into early may was at predominantly but you need driven just any any car around that would be helpful

Sure, I think municipal case has been incredibly resilient as we've gone through this period. You know municipal budgets have been strong. The projects have been flowing. We certainly had some seasonality and some weather that hampered a few things in the first quarter, but continue to be really encouraged by what we're seeing in bid activity with municipal piece. From the IIA perspective, you know, we're seeing a trickle of funds starting to make its way into projects.

I was just looking at your, you're just an EBITDA margin guide for the year, the 12, 4, to 12, 8. Clearly, you're off to a much better start in 1 queue at 14%. So, like, how do we think about the rest of the year? Because it seems like this number looks, at least from ARP, and the high level looks very conservative. What are kind of some of the offsets as you progress through the next three quarters? Yeah, I think as you look at the guide in terms of...

We did make some progress on that in the quarter, but I think a little too early yet for us to revise the gross margin normalization that we're expecting, which was in the 100 to 150 basis point range. But I'd say that's the primary driver of that EBITDA margin reset that we've talked about.

Understood, thank you. Our next question comes from Anthony Petarini from Citigroup. Your line is now open, please go ahead. Hi, this is Ash, Sun and Och for Anthony. Thanks for taking my question. Just looking at that following up on the last one, the increase to EBITDA guide, it seems to be driven in part by more low-cost inventory than expected. Is that just a function of you moving through inventory maybe slower than expected with line pressure or maybe pricing has been strong enough to make more of your inventory fit into sort of the low-cost basis?

Those have been some of the factors and then I'd say beyond that we are continuing to make progress against our gross margin initiatives, in particular private label and some of the other pricing initiatives that we've got. So I think what you'll see is the longer it takes us to kind of release some of that inventory, we have more of an opportunity to offset some of that reset that we have.

Again, I just think a little too early for us to adjust the normalization that we've been expecting at that cross margin level.

Okay, thank you. That's helpful. And then just sort of switching gears. You know, in your prepared months, I think you talked about sort of the risk presented to kind of the commercial, you know, private on-res segment from, you know, credit tightening. But I just want to give you an anecdotally, have you actually seen the impact kind of come through on that? Are you seeing maybe projects get delayed or still the starters or something like that? Yeah.

you know add those as of the end of first quarter really haven't seen much impact at all from the credit challenges that or perceived credit challenges that have been out there you know and if you look at the projects that we have we have a really diverse mix of project types and non-residential

you know everything from commercial and institution buildings, data centers, warehouses, and we talked a little bit about these large projects and the ensuring trends that have happened. All of those have been favorable for us and we've continued to see volume and bit activity there. In addition to just the $110 billion of federal infrastructure funding that's been here marked the roads and bridges, you know we view that as a tailwind, particularly as we look at projects that

Our next question comes from Andrew from Bank of America. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Good morning. This is David Ridley laying on for Andrew.

Can you maybe help bridge the change in the adjusted EBITDA guidance for this fiscal year? How much of it was the first quarter outperformance versus additional acquisitions versus the gross margin here being better than you had feared? Yeah, David, thanks for the question. As you look at the...

related to acquisitions that we added that were not included in the prior guide.

Because I know you have a couple of different initiatives internally to improve gross margin. And so I'm just sort of wondering, what was the kind of underlying progress versus, kind of another benefit from just the sell-through of the lower cost inventory? Yeah, David, if you're looking at it year over year, I'd say from a gross margin standpoint, still a lot of release of inventory in there, but a good chunk of benefit coming through from private label and some of the other gross margin initiatives, in particular some of the pricing initiatives that we put in place.

I'd say if you look at it sequentially from Q4 to Q1, still had some nice improvement over Q4 number and I'd say most of that was the release of low-cost inventory, you know, hard to make a lot of progress on some of those initiatives in just a quarter, but you know, still had some nice releases of that low-cost inventory.

Those are, I'd say, the primary components of that.

primary components of that.

Thank you. We have no further questions. Oh, now hand back to your host for any further remarks. Please go ahead.

Thank you all again for joining us today. It was a pleasure to have you on the call. Our consistently strong performance quarter after quarter is a direct result of the hard work of our field and functional support teams, our focus on operational discipline, and the diversity of our products and end markets.

We are well positioned to build on our positive momentum, and we have a strong outlook for fiscal 2023.

Our platform provides for significant value creation opportunity as our growth strategy is grounded in agility, innovation, and execution. We have a tremendous amount of opportunity ahead of us and we are well positioned to execute on those opportunities. Thank you for your interest in Core and Main. Operator, that concludes our call.

Thank you. This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines. Have a great day.