James Hardie Industries plc (NYSE:JHX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Paul Quinn: Okay. Just on your ’20 — fiscal year ’22 sales of 2.55 billion. Sorry, just taken 13% of that and taken off the first half, and I got you back down in the second half. Is that right?

Jason Miele: So you’re asking is the second half net sales lower than the first half, is that the question?

Paul Quinn: Yes. Yes. And then how does that shake out on volume and price?

Jason Miele: Sorry, I missed that last part of that question .

Paul Quinn: So if you’re — sorry about that. If you’re down in the second half, how does that shake out on volume and price?

Jason Miele: As we referenced earlier, we expect second largest revenue have ever and you’re correct in saying, the highest ever would be the first half of this fiscal year. And then, yes, we’d expect the volume, the second half to be lower than the first half as well. The price — average price would be higher.

Paul Quinn: Okay. And then I’m also really confused with the guidance going forward, because LP just reported last week, and they’re guiding a 30% revenue increase in the calendar Q4, not the second half of their year, but just what is — are you seeing them showing up more competition between you and LP on the siding product?

Aaron Erter: Yes, Paul, I would say we have a lot of good competitors out there. What I would say is we have not lost a customer, and we’ll continue to utilize our value proposition that we have. And as I said before, we’re very confident we’re going to outperform the markets we’re in.

Paul Quinn: Okay. I’m confused with the result, because your first half of the year, your volumes up 8%, LP’s was up 10%. They’ve had customers in allocation 2 years in a row now. So I’m just trying to understand why you’re losing a growth when you’re not as constrained as LP.

Aaron Erter: Yes, Paul, I think as we talked about on the call, we’re flowing product to the wall consistently, and we’re not constrained in the past several quarters. And so I think part of what we’re, we believe is that as the downturn was coming, we’re feeling it faster as our backlog — sorry, our backlog, the new construction backlog became less addressable to us as our product on the wall.

Paul Quinn: Okay, that helps. Thanks, guys. Best of luck.

Aaron Erter: Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from at Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst: Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I had a quick one on your input cost, perhaps a follow-up from Peter and Andrew . So last quarter, you called out on the cost inflation, right, a few line items that you thought were pretty high. Just wanted to get a sense that for this quarter, were there any such items? And also, what are you seeing on the cost side if you have any visibility? Thank you.

Jason Miele: Yes, thanks for the question. I think you’re referring to the slide last quarter, where we kind of called up cement. So we still versus second quarter of last year, all would be up double digits. So we still saw significant cost inflation, Q2 of FY ’23 versus Q2 of FY ’22. As I mentioned, on the call, we did see favorability. So I think sequentially from Q1 into Q2, we’ve seen freight come down modestly about 10%. But we saw that offset by pulp ticking up and natural gas ticking up from — into Q2 from Q1. So net-net, our total COGS per units essentially remained flat Q2 versus Q1. And then obviously, a lot of inflation in Q2 versus prior Q2.

Unidentified Analyst: Thanks, Jason. Did you just discover what you’re seeing, like, is there an expectation that sort of the input costs continue to trend down as we head into the year-end, or what are you seeing there?

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