Illinois Tool Works Inc. (NYSE:ITW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Julian Mitchell: That’s helpful. Thank you. And good to hear on MTS. Maybe just a broader question, perhaps amidst the sort of the CEO transition that was announced and congratulations to both Scott and Chris. But maybe on the sort of thinking about the top line a little bit and it looks like maybe some of the share gains that ITW had enjoyed just after COVID maybe have eased to-date or eased in the last 12 months or so. I realize there’s some destocking noise in various channels and so looking at market share in that context may not be that helpful. But just wanted sort of perspectives on market share across the larger ITW businesses and whether there’s perhaps a need to redeploy a greater share of enterprise initiatives or price/cost savings into sort of organic reinvestment in the base business?

Michael Larsen: Yes. Maybe I’ll start and then, Chris, you can jump in. I think I’ll start by saying we completely disagree with the premise that we are not gaining market share. Recognizing that it may be difficult for you looking in from the outside to decipher those market share gains on an annual basis, but if you go to every one of our divisions, they will have a very clear picture, all 84 of them in terms of what market growth is and what their growth rate is and what their competitors are growing at. And in all cases, we would say that given our competitive advantages that we derive from the business model in terms of our customer-facing metrics, in terms of our — the value add that our customers are getting from buying our products, we’re continuing to gain share in the markets that we’re focused on.

And in some cases, you’re able to look at public company peers you can peel back the onion a little bit. And if you do that work — if you were to do that work, Julian you’ll see that we are gaining market share in the areas that we are focused on. And I might just add, not only are we gaining market share, but I’ll just note the margin performance of our businesses relative to our competitors which typically we are running at two, three times, our competitors, and you can look at Food Equipment and Lincoln and the Welding side, for example, and you’ll see that, that is the case. But maybe, Chris, if you want to comment a little bit?

Christopher O’Herlihy: Yes, I would echo everything Michael just said in terms of the quality of our portfolio, in terms of the amount of room we have to grow in each segment customer-facing performance and so on and the focused investments that we’ve made in areas like sales and innovation, coupled with the fact that we’ve seen a nicely improving yield on customer-back innovation. All this gives the credence to what we’re hearing from our businesses that we are getting share in most of our key markets in relation to our competition.

Julian Mitchell: That’s great. Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Mig Dobre from Baird. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Mig Dobre: Yes. Thank you. Good morning and congrats to Scott and Chris. Just a quick question on construction. In your comments, you mentioned that the resi renovation channel has done doing quite well. Maybe a little more color there. Is that a function of new products or anything going on in the channel? I just found that to be a little bit surprising given where productivity and interest rates and all of that seems to be?

Michael Larsen: Yes. So again, Mig, you’re right. This is on the residential renovation remodel side of things. So these are typically sales through big box retailers, names that you’d be familiar with. And I think if you look at I think somebody asked earlier about market share, this is a great example of really strong market share gains in this particular end market, because I agree with you, if you just look at the underlying data, you might be a little surprised that, that part of the business is up 7% year-over-year in the current interest rate environment. And like I said, this is essentially all volume and share gain through the big box retailers.