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

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Tim Knavish: Yeah, Vincent, we do have — no surprise, higher than normal wage inflation. I’d say in a mature markets average, you could call that about 3% but higher than that on frontline workers like store workers, but 3% would be a good average. Emerging markets, higher than that. And then from a raw material inflation standpoint, we’re still at that 20%-ish number versus pre-pandemic. And we’re expecting Q3 to see mid to high single-digits down. So we expect the combination of those two to still keep us at elevated cost versus pre-pandemic, but improving sequentially as we move through the rest of the year.

Vince Morales: And as we look at the trend lines, we’re not seeing out of the trends, a change in terms of increase or decrease of wages. We provided our merit process or our wage increase process earlier in the year and we typically would do that once a year for most of our employees. So that trend should hold for the balance of the year.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Duffy Fischer. Your line is now open.

Duffy Fischer: Yeah. Good morning, guys. Just a question around the EPS and the guide for Q3 and the implied for Q4. So In Q1 and Q2, your year-over-year number was up $0.45 and $0.44. The guide midpoint for Q3 and then the implied for Q4 is up $0.24 and $0.19 year-on-year. With raw material deflation accelerating for you guys and price still up in the back half as you were commenting, why would the year-over-year EPS improvement decline in the back half versus the first half?

Tim Knavish: Hey, Duffy. The biggest driver to that would just be the quarter-over-quarter price actions. Most of the larger price increases for us started kick in like Q3 of last year. So as we lap those and less new pricing if you will adding to the top, that’s really the biggest difference.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Patrick Cunningham. Your line is now open.

Patrick Cunningham: Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. So increasing interest rates and — are clearly showing up in existing home sales and you cited softness and resi repaint. And I want to talk a little bit about non-resi. While it appears to be strong or maybe hanging in there, how should we think about the risk to commercial volumes in the back half and in 2024 given a higher interest rate environment and, starting to see some deceleration in commercial construction and remodeling indices?

Tim Knavish: Well, I’d say in the short term, that’s not — frankly for the rest of ‘23, not something we’re particularly concerned about because there was such a backlog in those areas. If you think about the — really bifurcation of painting activity that happened during COVID, you had a tremendous amount of resi painting happening, but you had virtually no commercial and maintenance painting happening. So there’s still a tremendous amount of pent-up demand in that — in that space. Now eventually, we’ll see what happens with interest rates and macros in the longer term. But that’s — we’re just not seeing that right now being a major concern for us.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Michael Leithead. Your line is now open.

Michael Leithead: Great. Thanks. Good morning, guys. Just one question from me on traffic solution. I think you expected sales to be up high single digits in 2Q, and they were down low single digits. So just can you talk through what drove the delta versus what you thought in April?

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