APi Group Corporation (NYSE:APG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Andrew Wittmann: Hey Russ, so I guess my question is, just given the relative growth rates between your inspection, service and monitoring business that’s the flywheel that you’re really focused on growing so well and the project business where you’re being so selective, are you having to move personnel to the inspection side of the business from your project side of the business, given the tight labor market? Can you just talk about how you’re staffing this growth on that inspection side?

Russell Becker: Yes. So that’s really a separate workforce, Andy. Good morning by the way. It really is a separate workforce. And what we’ve done is we’ve continued to build out that inspection sales force. We’ve set up centers of excellence inside the Life Safety business to train, so to speak, I’ll say, our new and future inspectors as we continue to recruit. And as we build that inspection sales force, we need to build our inspector sales — or inspector sales force that’s going to actually execute the work. And we have to be able to train those men and women. We have other centers of excellence as well, like we have a design center of excellence where we do design overflow, and we train designers. We have — one of our businesses is to develop accredited apprenticeship programs for fire alarm technicians so that we can make sure that we’re not letting that skilled technician need become a bottleneck for us.

But it’s really a separate workforce. And if you’re really going to have a robust inspection, service and monitoring business, they need to be segregated. And in general, the people that are doing your installation work, they really want to do installation work, and most of them don’t want to do two small jobs every day with different customers and moving around in a van. They just have different interests and — but keeping them separate is very important.

Andrew Wittmann: Okay. That makes sense. And then I guess for my follow-up, Kevin, for you. Could you just give us an update on the cost capture plans and their status? Maybe talk about how much cost do you expect to incur in the second half of the year, maybe the run rate of cost capture synergies that you exited the second quarter and how you’re tracking for exiting this calendar year as you head into 2024 on those cost captures.

Kevin Krumm: Sure. Good morning. So from an expense standpoint, our prior guide of $55 million to $65 million in the year is still our expectation for full year 2023. As a reminder, that’s on the back of $30 million that we had in 2022. We’ve talked about the 2022 charge of $30 million should accrue to the P&L one-for-one basis for savings. We still expect that in the year to be between $20 million and $25 million that we expect to accrue from a savings standpoint from last year’s charge. This year’s charge will be back-half loaded, but we expect to see some savings there. And they’ll probably be somewhere between $0 and $5 million, so approximately $5 million of additional savings from our 2023 activity and charge.

Andrew Wittmann: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question is from Steve Tusa of JPMorgan.

Steve Tusa: Hi, good morning. Congrats on the strong cash flow in the quarter.

Russell Becker: Thank you.

Steve Tusa: The commercial exposure you guys have, I think it’s like 19% of sales or something like that. How much of that is office? And then I’m looking at that telecom utility bucket. Is that like — is that mostly telecom? Or is that — I’m just trying to figure out what part of it is the actual like maybe power energy utilities bucket. It seems like you have a transmission piece of the pie as well. Just curious on those two parts of the pie chart.

Kevin Krumm: So in the commercial bucket, I would say a very small amount of that is sort of the high rise that you’re talking about. We estimate that it’s inside of 5%. The remainder would be the end markets or the areas that you are referencing being telecom and some of those other areas.

Steve Tusa: Great. And then just a little guidance on the segment sales forecast in the second half, just organically how you expect those to trend? Are those pretty stable or accelerating or decelerating? Thanks.