PPG Industries, Inc. (NYSE:PPG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 4 of 10

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Stephen V. Byrne. Your line is now open.

Stephen V. Byrne: Yeah, thank you. If I understood you correctly, Tim, you talked about raws, and I believe it was in COGS, still being 20% above pre-pandemic. And, Vince, you just highlighted, you’re still sitting on excess inventory of raws. My question would be, for raws purchased today, what would be the cost relative to pre-pandemic? And how long do you think that it will take for that to flow through COGS?

Vince Morales: Yeah, Steve. I’ll take the first stab at that and Tim will add some color here. So what we’re seeing today on invoice cost, as we said last quarter, invoice to invoice year-over-year, mid to high single-digit and maybe in some cases low double-digit deflation on certain raw materials. I would remind everybody as raw materials went up 20%, 30%, 40%. So when you do it on a multi-year stack, we’re still much higher. But we’re seeing on a year-over-year basis on invoices mid to high to low — mid to high single to low double-digit declines that typically would flow through in 30 to 60 days or even 90 days depending on the raw material. And again, that’s extended right now.

Tim Knavish: Yeah. And bottom line, Steve, when you combine that with the additional $100 million or so of inventory that we’ve got to work through that we’re sitting on now, you’ve got sequentially more raw material deflation combined with that additional inventory flowthrough. That’s why I’m so confident that our margin recovery journey will continue.

Operator: Your next question comes from John McNulty. Your line is now open.

John McNulty: Yeah, thanks for taking my question. So, Tim, in your prepared remarks, you spoke to pricing continuing through the second half of the year. I guess just because the comps are kind of pretty dramatic year-over-year, I guess can you help us to think about whether you’re going to see pricing sequentially from 2Q to 3Q and how we should be thinking about that?

Tim Knavish: Yeah, most of what — most of what we’re going to see, John, is a carryover impact. There’ll be some targeted pricing that we do in Performance Coatings. But a lot of what you’ll see going forward here for the remainder of 2023 will be carryover. And to your point, we are lapping some strong price quarters from last year. So if you look at — we printed 8% for Q1, 6% for Q2. So you’ll probably see low single digit pricing printed in Q3, still a little early to tell in Q4, we’re confident it will be positive, but we’ll see what happens and what other actions we might need to take.

Vince Morales: And just to tag along here, we still expect that the price — the raw material delta to expand as we talked about the prior question, which is we expect more — to realize more deflation as we pull down our inventories.

Tim Knavish: The other thing, I mean, the pricing has been holding up very nicely, proud of how our teams are executing to that regard. And so our price story, someone earlier asked about what’s different in our guide versus earlier. Our price story is stronger than what our prior guides were.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Vincent Andrews. Your line is now open.

Vincent Andrews: Thank you and good morning, everyone. Just a question on the wage inflation and you said it will remain elevated the next few quarters. Is that just because your — you have to lap the flowthrough of some wage increases from prior quarters or is there more going in? And if you can size it a little bit, just to help us understand how much of a headwind that is versus the raw materials benefits that you’re getting.

Page 4 of 10