Builders FirstSource, Inc. (NYSE:BLDR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Peter Jackson: Yes, no, that’s a good question. So 2021 guide for those of you who don’t remember, was $7 to $10 billion of deployable capital. And the way that was, think about that is 7 was at a onetime leverage at the end and 10 was at a two times leverage at the end. So that’s one to two times the, the base business EBITDA from a leverage perspective. The short answer is, we’ve talked about this a lot and I’m not sure everybody gets it, but commodities for us is an important part of our business, but we make money regardless. We make a lot more money when the price is very high. So it becomes a bit of an option where if you have a high future price, you get a lot more cash flow into the business. And that’s exactly what we experience in year one of our execution against our Investor Day targets.

We had an incremental amount of cash that has put us far ahead of the pace necessary to make our number, even though you’re right currently the forecast of where 2023 is going to be for starts as well below what we have built into our forecast, we talk about low single growth is being, or low single digit single family starts growth is being embedded into the model. But we’re certainly in a very strong position with the start that we’ve had to be able to deliver on that regardless. And as I mentioned, we still expect to see healthy free cash flow delivery throughout the remaining years on top of that nice strong head start.

Reuben Garner: Thanks Peter. Congrats on the strong results guys and good luck on board.

David Rush: Thanks.

Operator: And we’ll take our next question with Collin Verron with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Collin Verron: Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to start at the, the fiscal year 2023 scenario of single family starts down 15% to 25%. The sales range there is $15 billion to $17 billion, which is only about a 10% decline in sales versus the 2022 base business sales of $17.7 billion you reported. Can you just talk about the factors there that would get you to that outperformance versus your largest end market?

David Rush: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that’s a — I’m glad you’re asking the question that way. I think it’s the right way to think about it. The variables obviously are starts. Starts in single-family being the biggest impact on us, the other being the impact of M&A right? We’ve been acquisitive and the year-over-year growth from those acquisitions are certainly impactful in terms of how we’re performing versus the prior year numbers. There’s a bit of growth margin in there. The normalization will be a bit of a headwind, but we are also seeing some share growth that we’ve embedded in that as well. So that’s an offset. So, but you know, across the board being able to offset a share, a portion of that single-family decline through the strength of our core business and, and the differentiated model is a healthy thing for us and we’re certainly quite proud of it.

Collin Verron: Great. That’s helpful color. And I guess my last question here is just on the productivity savings, you guys are expecting that $90 million to $110 million. Can you just give some examples of those productivity improvements that you’re executing on here in 2023 and just how achievable those are in these different volume type environments?

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