APi Group Corporation (NYSE:APG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Most of that is volume, and we continue to plan to grow our inspections by — at a double-digit clip as we move into this next year. So I would suspect in the latter half of the year, you’ll see that 2/3, 1/3 moderating a little bit. But we are continuing to take price across every aspect of our business.

Kathryn Thompson: All right. Great. And just one follow-up question. Given as the year closed, just a general greater conservatism, given concerns about recession and understand that you are — your business model is, maybe perhaps not recession-proof, but recession-resistant. But still on the fringes, there could be some indicators of sign of companies changing their behavior in terms of concerns around the economy. What if any changes have you seen behavior wise in any of your businesses that would give any type of indication that there’s a more conservative stance given the economic backdrop?

Russell Becker: Well, I mean, I would tell you that right now, we haven’t seen that in our business, and that’s demonstrated by the strong backlog that we carried into 2023 as well as what we see in the pipeline from an opportunity perspective. I would say — tell you that we’re naturally a — what I would call a productively paranoid business, which means that we’re always looking at the business and to make sure that we’re in a position to adjust really quickly if we see any sort of downturn in the economy as it affects our business. I would also tell you that end markets matter, and the end markets that we serve continue to be strong and resilient as they have been over the last number of years. Some of that’s fueled by the infrastructure bill, some of it’s fueled by the chip bill and a number of different things that are potentially additive to the business.

And then I would say lastly, where there’s concerns about Western Europe, we’re already looking at restructuring and optimizing the business, and we couldn’t be really in its own way doing that at a better time than right now. So — but we remain optimistic. We’ve got a — 75% of our cost structure is variable by nature. So we have to adjust, we’ll adjust.

Operator: Our next question is from Andrew Obin of Bank of America.

David Ridley-Lane: This is David Ridley-Lane on for Andrew. How has supply chain performance been for you over the last couple of months? And when you think back about the disruption and cost impact in 2022, how meaningful will fewer disruptions be in 2023? I know it’s tough to quantify, but at least 10, 20 basis points sound reasonable?

Kevin Krumm: So — David, this is Kevin. So when you talk about supply chain disruption, I’ll say, first, we’re not out of the woods yet. Things still remain on backlog in certain categories, and we still, with our teams are battling through that. The inflation and supply chain disruption impacted our business in two ways in 2022. On the inflation side, obviously, the price pass-through that we’ve been talking about was a margin drag. We’ve referenced that. We believe as that comes down in 2023, we should get some of that margin back. On the supply chain side, just the lack of material and availability caused pretty significant productivity disruptions in our business, not just for our business, but you can imagine places where we work, there’s other companies working there too that may also have had supply chain disruptions, which causes productivity issues for us.

So we saw it on the productivity side. I’ll say, as things start to moderate in the supply chain, we’re seeing productivity improve. And the other areas as we move into 2023 as the supply chain works through its issues, we would anticipate productivity improvements coming through in margins as well in 2023.

David Ridley-Lane: And as a quick follow-up. Just as you mentioned the end markets that you’re serving, just could you kind of give a view on how strong the demand is among the major end markets, like commercial, industrial, health care, et cetera?