Acuity Brands, Inc. (NYSE:AYI) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And then on the project side, it’s this relationship between price and volume. So we’re going to be strategic about where we take volume and we’re going to continue to deliver these margin levels.

Chris Snyder: I appreciate that. If I could maybe just squeeze one last one in. There’s some communication earlier around potential inventory destock. Because when I look at the quarters, it seems like volumes were roughly flat year-on-year, whereas non-res activity has continued to grow quite nicely. Any way to just quantify maybe the level of destock that impacted the quarter? And then kind of maybe where are we in that destock cycle?

Neil Ashe: Yes. I mean, I think there’s — I think we’ve tried to answer this question kind of consistently so — every time we’ve been asked it. The one thing I would just want to make sure that people appreciate is that the — we believe that the lead time compression is part of what the destocking story is. So we don’t think that there’s a significant other — there’s not a significant amount of a hold-for-sale inventory in the distributors or retailers or our Contractor Select portfolio wouldn’t be performing as well as it is right now. So these are projects that are in the market or in the distributors. Where this is impacting us, we think, the most is on this lead time compression. So that has an impact on the order rate and that’s continuing. So we expect that to continue through the — at least through the third quarter.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jeffrey Sprague with Vertical Research Partners.

Jeffrey Sprague: It’s Jeff Sprague. That broke up when she was introducing me. Hopefully, that was me. Just — yes, we got you. Okay. I just want to come back to just kind of the lending environment, Neil, not to parse words here but in your opening remarks, it actually sounded like you felt the negative impact of lending changing already in the quarter but really, it sounds more like you’re just flagging it as obviously an issue to be concerned about and the order softening was more of this compression of lead times. Can you just kind of clarify that? Are you actually seeing like tangible evidence of, for lack of a better term, a credit crunch in your end markets?

Neil Ashe: So thanks for the question, Jeff and the opportunity to provide as much clarity as possible on this. The Fed C&I loan survey started to turn negative kind of last fall, basically. So that is clearly rolling through. And we’re highlighting that as a new factor because the — our data would suggest that, that will — that is now flowing through and will continue to flow through. Does it stay the same? Obviously, we don’t have a crystal ball. We all can just look at that. But the data source we’re looking at as the Fed C&I loan survey. And that will impact obviously the nongovernmental pieces of it. So it won’t impact education season but it will have some effect on things going forward with the tightening. And then the second half of that is and we’ve said this consistently, is that if there’s higher discount rates, there’ll be less projects.

So — and I think we’re seeing the combination. We are collectively, as an industry, seeing the combination of these going forward. And that’s — it will be determined. We’ll have to see what the Fed does to see how that plays out.