Henry Schein, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSIC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ron South : Yeah, John, I would say there’s really two primary things, one being the absolute volumes of customers that — we have some customers who only use the website to order. And while the website is down, they’re not ordering. And now that the website is up, we expect a significant percentage of those customers to return. To the extent that we have to — that we want to provide incentives to those customers. And that kind of leads us to the second factor that we’ve taken into consideration, and that is the margins, to the extent we have some discounting in the quarter that would show up in the gross margins. So I think those are the areas that really are impacting our models in terms of what we believe the Q4 impact will be. We’ve run multiple scenarios and we’ve really kind of have triangulated to that $0.55 to $0.75 at this point. We’ll gain much more intelligence over the coming weeks — with the website associated with that.

John Stansel : Great. And then just on the kind of the 85% to 90% of pre-incident volumes, can you give us kind of a sense qualitatively of how that’s trended since that, I think, the 24th and onwards when you were generally operational? Has that kind of increased week-over-week? Has that been kind of static? And then, I guess, you kind of indicated there that a big portion of this may just be people who prefer to use the online portal. Is that how you’re thinking about the remaining customers who kind of haven’t been ordering with you?

Ron South : Yeah. So we’re — we’ve operated four weeks since we deactivated the system. Obviously, the most significant impact was that we’ve won. We saw a significant improvement in week two. That led into improvement in week three. And I would say week four was consistent with week three in terms of the volumes that we were processing. I do think there is a ceiling on that 85 to 90 where we are now that we can get through with One web up. And that will be — like I was saying earlier, that’s the intelligence we need to gather over the next couple of weeks when we see which customers have returned to us to close that 85 to 90 to get it to 100. So that’s really where we’re operating right now.

Stanley Bergman : Just to add to Ron’s comment, for a period of time, the only way our customers’ good order with us was through a field sales representative or through telesales. A huge percentage of our orders, something like 70% of our orders, come digitally. That’s the good news. We trained our customers that the best way to do business is digitally. The challenge is that 70% of orders had to go through our field representatives and telesales. That funnel was not large enough for a few weeks. So customers couldn’t — not all customers could buy through us. As we expanded our digital ordering capability, as our field sales people got more efficient ways in which to into the orders and we have incredible work around that came up very quickly, but for a period of time they were not there.

And the telesales team had limited capacity. Of course, we were able to expand the telesales team’s capacity. We had a model in place. We have a procedure in place that actually was tested during COVID, and literally overnight, we expanded the capacity. The challenge was the funnels for a few days were not big enough to accept all the orders. So now we can accept the orders. It will be much more efficient with direct customer entry through the website, and we expect that is going to result in customers coming back who had to maybe go elsewhere for urgent products. But I think a number of our customers, specifically some of the smaller ones held out. And I think they will come back and give us the orders that maybe they were holding on to. But it’s going to take some time through the end of the fourth quarter for us to ensure that our systems are back to normal and in terms of the customers’ thinking

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jason Bednar with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

Jason Bednar : Hey, thanks for taking questions. Sorry for the background noise. [Indiscernible] here. I wanted to ask, of the 85% to 90% that you’re talking about, Stan and Ron, are there certain categories that have been slower to come back or certain geographies, maybe bifurcate North America versus Europe or dental versus medical, just anything there. And then I have a follow-up.

Stanley Bergman : I would say on balance, it’s spread out reasonably. There are parts of the world where electronic ordering is not as large as, say, in the United States. So those customers have been more comfortable ordering through telesales representatives or field sales representatives. But it’s more or less okay. Actually, on average, Europe is a little bit higher but then actually don’t have all the systems we have in the U.S. So I don’t think you can read anything into that. This is a period when we started out with minimal systems on first day. And by the end of the third day, we had a lot of systems working. And then as the month went by, more and more systems came up. So it’s been a period of the customers adjusting to what’s available, some places that may be adjusted faster than others.

But I don’t think we can read anything in the first month of this incident, anything specific. And some products are more elective than others, aesthetic products or maybe products relating to like toothbrushes, et cetera. They’re not necessarily that urgent. So we’ll see how this materializes. But I don’t think, Jason, I wish we could give you some conclusive information. But there’s too many puts and takes here to understand exactly whether these trends are related to particular products or regions. Let me remind you that our equipment business was operational throughout this period, did not have full support of systems. But mainly for customer needing service, they’ve got it. Not all the equipment orders that we received are being installed right now.