Advanced Drainage Systems, Inc. (NYSE:WMS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Matthew Bouley: Hey. Thanks, guys, sorry, I think my call dropped during my question previously. So what I wanted to ask was back on the pricing side, and you guys gave really helpful color around sort of your own value proposition and kind of what gives you that pricing power and clearly, what’s kind of in your control? And my question is sort of what’s out of your control. What are you seeing in the competitive environment, whether it’s on the concrete side? Or other producers of HDPE and polypropylene pipe. Just how are your competitors sort of adapting on the pricing side to this end market softness? And what do you think the impact would be to you guys?

Scott Barbour: Matt, Scott Barber here. I’d say we’ve seen very good discipline, particularly on the — where we compete against traditional materials. And where we have seen higher demand like Texas and the Southeast and Florida and those kind of places. I think our pricing is very solid. We haven’t seen any, what I would call, degradation in pricing in our HP products, which are primarily positioned against the traditional materials. That’s our higher-performing gray pipe. So we feel pretty solid around that one, let’s say. The traditional corrugated plastic pipe except for a few spot places where we’ve had to go and address an issue or two, which was more due to lack of our ability to supply in very high periods of demand maybe a year ago, we haven’t seen a lot of pricing degradation.

It’s usually as customary. I mean it kind of comes down into some of the agricultural regions where you might have very localized competition. So I kind of sum all that up, and we’ve contemplated a little bit — we contemplated this in our plan for both the fourth quarter and as we’re pulling together next year. And we still can hold the — our price cost position, we can still hold those margins that we were talking about, and we wanted to give a lot of color in that today so that people kind of understood how we’re positioning and looking at this over the next year or two. So all in all, I’d say we feel pretty darn good about where we are on that, and we’ll continue to work our work our model that we can control and execute that pricing plan.

Scott Cottrill: The other thing we’ve seen, Matt, is that the concrete guys have gone up a couple of times with price increases of their own this year like we knew they would. So which I think we predicted, yes.

Matthew Bouley: Got it. No, that’s really helpful. And just one more on the resi side. Obviously, you spoke at length about the infiltrator resi piece, but just in legacy ADS on the land development side and given everything that’s going on with homebuilders here. Just what are you seeing and thinking about over these next couple of quarters on the land development business within legacy ADS.

Michael Higgins: Matt, Mike Higgins. I would say kind of go back to what Scott said earlier in terms of strength and it’s geographically mix. I think we continue to see good strength of activity in the Southeast, pretty good activity continuing in Texas, where we’ve seen softness is geographically, like we’ve talked about, kind of Northeast New England the Northwest and kind of over the third quarter, this has kind of seen the weakness emerge more broadly in the West and in a couple of key states in the Midwest. As we kind of move forward, we’ll — again, we’ll keep a close eye on it. Clearly, the forecasts are for slower housing starts next year, but kind of based on what we know today, we think those areas that have showed kind of continued strength over the past couple of years will be more resilient and that being kind of Southeast Texas, Florida be more resilient than kind of more mature areas for us like the Midwest and the Northeast.