Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc. (NYSE:SSD) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc. (NYSE:SSD) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 5, 2024

Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $1.28 EPS, expectations were $1.53. Simpson Manufacturing Co. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Greetings. Welcome to the Simpson Manufacturing Company Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the conference over to your host, Kim Orlando of ADDO Investor Relations. You may begin.

Kim Orlando: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to Simpson Manufacturing Company’s fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings conference call. Any statements made on this call that are not statements of historical facts are forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on certain estimates and expectations that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual future results may vary materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statement. We encourage you to read the risks described in the company’s public filings and reports, which are available on the SEC’s or the company’s corporate website. Except to the extent required by applicable securities laws, we undertake no obligation to update or publicly revise any of the forward-looking statements that we make here today, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Please note that the company’s earnings press release was issued today at approximately 4.15 p.m. Eastern Time. The earnings press release is available on the Investor Relations page of the company’s website at ir.simpsonmfg.com. Today’s call is being webcast and a replay will also be available on the Investor Relations page of the company’s website. Now, I would like to turn the conference over to Mike Olosky, Simpson’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

Mike Olosky: Thanks, Kim. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining today’s call. With me today is Brian Magstadt, our Chief Financial Officer. My remarks today will provide an overview of our 2023 financial performance, an update on our end markets and our capital allocation priorities. Brian will then talk you through our fourth quarter financials and fiscal 2024 outlook in greater detail. I’d like to begin by thanking the entire Simpson team for their strong execution in 2023 and relentless customer focus. The market improved in the second half, but it was a challenging year with lower housing starts. Together, we achieved above market growth and high profitability with $2.2 billion in annual net sales, a 21.5% operating income margin and a record $8.26 of earnings per diluted share.

Our topline performance was driven by continued share gains across all of our end markets and product lines. Our operating income margin came in below our October guidance, primarily due to additional costs incurred to pursue our growth opportunities in the areas of new products and market penetration. This has contributed to a record number of product launches in 2023 with an expected stronger impact in 2024. Importantly, our 2023 North American net sales were up 0.9% from last year to a total of $1.7 billion on a 1% improvement in volumes, outperforming the broader market, which saw an annual U.S. housing starts decline by approximately 9%. Our outperformance is driven by high single-digit volume increases in our component manufacturer in commercial end markets and modest increases in national retail and OEM, which is partly offset by a minor reduction in our residential market.

We are proud of this year’s revenue outperformance and we will continue to invest in and improve all elements of our business in 2024 to ensure that we lay the foundation for continued outperformance over the longer term. While 2023 U.S. housing starts finished below 2022 levels, we still believe this is an attractive market given the estimated shortage of approximately 2 million homes in the U.S. following more than a decade of under-building coupled with modestly improved outlook for 2024. In the fourth quarter, net sales totaled $501.7 million, reflecting an increase of 5.5% over Q4, 2022. North American volumes for Q4 were up approximately 10% year-over-year, contributing to a growth in net sales of 5.3% to $387.8 million. To further break down our North American performance, we achieved double-digit volume improvements year-over-year in our residential, commercial and component manufacturer markets as we’ve continued to benefit from various new customer wins.

Further underscoring our ambitions to be the innovation leader and partner of choice in the markets we serve. In the OEM market, our volumes improved in the low single-digit range compared to last year, while national retail was down only slightly. Turning to Europe, we generated annual net sales of $480.8 million, reflecting an increase of 20.1% or 15.8% on a local currency basis over 2022. As a reminder, our 2022 net sales included nine months of revenue from a ETANCO, compared to a full 12 months in 2023. Despite a very challenging European market, ETANCO sales were in line with 2022 levels based on annualized data for the prior year period. While the remainder of our European business was down due to tougher economic headwinds and lower construction activity, our European gross margin has continued to improve versus historical levels driven primarily by value added pricing with effective cost management.

Our solution selling approach combined with our high service levels in Europe, give us confidence Simpson will benefit from broader secular trends, including the growing use of wood construction and increasingly stringent environmental regulations that drive new applications coupled with the ongoing housing shortage. On a consolidated basis, our full year gross margin improved to 47.1% and 44.5% last year, reflecting lower raw material costs and productivity improvements, partly offset by higher fixed costs in our factory tooling and warehouses. The higher gross margins have enabled us to further invest in our business and provide even better customer support. Brian will further elaborate on our key drivers of our margin performance in Q4 shortly.

I’ll now turn to an update on our new business wins within our five end use markets. These customer wins are a result of our high service levels, increasingly diverse portfolio of products and software, as well as our commitment to innovation and developing complete solutions for the markets we serve. Beginning with the residential market, we are in the process of converting a 20 plus location lumberyard chain in the Northwest to Simpson connectors. In addition, our previously discussed path to market shift away from two-step distribution has led to incremental sales by going direct to our distribution partners. Going direct to our distribution partners enables us to sell our complete product line and provide additional services. In the multifamily space, we also recently expanded our product offering to appeal to a broader range of projects, which we anticipate will drive further share gains, given our industry-leading product availability and delivery standards.

In the commercial market, our strong relationships, field support and dedication to educating engineers, distributors and contractors about our solutions continues to earn specifications on commercial projects and generate demand in the field. Some recent examples include Simpson product specifications on a large retrofit project on the West Coast, a public safety building in the Northeast and an institutional project in the South. In the OEM market, we continue to identify new and unique opportunities to offer a broad range of solutions, including truss plates, fasteners, connectors and our new EasyFrame saws to new customers, producing sheds, modular homes, windows and grain storage containers. Also in the OEM space, we continue to participate in more mass timber construction projects, one example of which was a library renovation project in the Northwest.

Within the national retail space, we tested new products and markets, as well as enhanced our merchandising efforts and education of our customer sales staff, which contributed to year-over-year performance improvements for our home center customers in 2023. In Q4, we identified new outdoor accent opportunities and also participated in three home center roadshow events geared at Pros, which provided the opportunity to build even stronger relationships, demo products and enhance our regional presence. And finally, in the component manufacturer market, formerly known as building technology, we continue to increase our market share from truss component manufacturers by onboarding multiple medium-sized customers. In addition, we had strong interest in our EasyFrame saws, which leverage our technology solutions, enabling our customers to produce structures more efficiently by automating the pre-cut lumber process with detailed printing instruction.

The culmination of these wins is a result of our strong business model, high brand recognition, and trusted reputation built over nearly 68 years, which drives share gains and our differentiated position in the market. Additionally, our commitment to continuous improvement has fostered our core company ambitions, which we are continuing to pursue, including strengthening our values-based culture, being the partner of choice, being an innovation leader in the markets we operate, above market growth relative to U.S. housing starts, an operating income margin within the top quartile of our proxy peers and integrating ETANCO and returning our ROIC to be within the top quartile of our proxy peers. Next, I’ll turn to a discussion on our capital allocation priorities.

Our strategy remains duly focused on both growth opportunities and stockholder returns. In 2023, we generated strong cash from operations of $429.9 million, which financed $88.8 million in capital expenditures, $25.5 million in acquisitions and asset purchases, $50 million of share repurchases and $45.2 million of quarterly cash dividends. We also paid down $98.7 million in debt we incurred to finance the acquisition of ETANCO. Our relentless customer focus in providing world-class service is why we are making investments in our facilities to expand our operations and our manufacturing capacity, enabling us to achieve even greater supply chain efficiencies. As noted previously, we will concurrently evaluate and pursue M&A opportunities that accelerate progress on our key growth initiatives and help us operate more efficiently.

We believe our recent and future strategic investments will help us accelerate a compounded annual growth rate of sales volumes above market over the mid- to long-term. Our ambitions for this accelerated growth include us exceeding our historical average performance in North America for approximately 250 basis points above U.S. housing starts market, while also achieving a top quartile profitability. In summary, I am very pleased with our 2023 outperformance in an ongoing challenging market. We continue to see demand variability on a month-to-month level, and believe the market for the first half of this year will be more challenging than the market for the second half of the year. Our latest view on the market for 2024 has improved to the low single-digit growth up from the prior market outlook.

Balance we have with our different end markets helps us ensure we are in a strong position to continue to outperform with deeper expansion into new end applications. Underscoring our execution is our strong balance sheet and liquidity position that helps fuel our growth strategy and longstanding history of stockholder returns. We look forward to furthering our mission in 2024 to provide solutions that help people design and build safer, stronger structures to improve the resiliency of structures in communities around the world. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Brian, who will discuss our fourth quarter financial results in greater detail.

Brian Magstadt: Thanks, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter financial results. Before I begin, I’d like to mention that unless otherwise stated, all financial measures discussed in my prepared remarks refer to the fourth quarter of 2023 and all comparisons will be year-over-year comparisons versus the fourth quarter of 2022. Now, beginning with our fourth quarter results. As Mike highlighted, our consolidated net sales increased 5.5% to $501.7 million. Within the North America segment, net sales increased 5.3% to 387.8 million, primarily due to higher sales volumes across all major product lines, which were partially offset by price decreases implemented during the first quarter of 2023.

In North America, wood product volume was up 10.2% and concrete product volume was up 7.5%. In Europe, net sales increased 5.8% to $109.7 million, primarily due to the positive effect of $5.1 million in foreign currency translation. Consolidated gross profit increased 9.9% to $220.5 million, resulting in a gross margin of 43.9%, compared to 42.2%. On a segment basis, our gross margin in North America increased to 47%, compared to 45%, primarily due to lower raw material and labor costs as a percentage of net sales, which were partially offset by higher factory and tooling, warehouse and shipping costs. Our gross margin in Europe increased to 34.2% from 32.7%, also primarily due to lower raw material costs as a percentage of net sales. As you may also recall, our raw material costs in the prior year period included a $1.4 million inventory fair value adjustment for the acquisition of ETANCO, representing 1.4 percentage points of Europe gross margin.

From a product perspective, our fourth quarter gross margin on wood products was 44.1%, compared to 41.9% and was 42.8% for concrete products, compared to 42.3%. Now turning to our fourth quarter costs and operating expenses. Total operating expenses were $148.5 million, an increase of $29.1 million or approximately 24.4%, primarily due to increased personnel costs to drive our growth, our professional fees, as well as greater variable compensation. Many of these costs are investments to engineer and deliver new products, increased services to fuel takeoff and designs, and continued development of digital solutions which enable our customers and specifiers to select Simpson products. As a percentage of net sales, total operating expenses were 29.6%, compared to 25.1%.

To further detail our SG&A investments, our fourth quarter research and development and engineering expenses increased 36.1% to $25.1 million, including higher personnel costs and software development initiatives to support our end markets and to further those strategic growth initiatives. Selling expenses increased 16.8% to $52.5 million, primarily due to increased commissions on higher sales and increases to the team supporting sales in North America. On a segment basis, selling expenses in North America were up 19.9%, and in Europe, they were up 9.8%. General and administrative expenses increased 26.6% to $70.8 million, primarily due to personnel costs, professional fees and software licensing. As a result, our consolidated income from operations totaled $71.6 million to decline of 9.1% from $78.7 million.

Our consolidated operating income margin was 14.3%, a decrease of 2.3 percentage points from 16.6%. However, for the full year of 2023, our consolidated income from operations increased 3.5% to $475.1 million from $459.1 million, reflecting only a modest decline in our operating income margin to 21.5%, compared to 21.7%. As Mike noted, while this was below our recently announced expectations, we were very pleased with our financial performance in a difficult operating environment, as a further testament to our strong business model that enables us to perform throughout market cycles. In North America, income from operations decreased 6.8% to $79.8 million, primarily due to increased personnel costs, professional fees and variable compensation, which was partly offset by higher gross profit.

In Europe, income from operations was $3.1 million, compared to $0.8 million due to higher gross profit, partly related to the prior year’s $1.4 million inventory fair value adjustment, as well as lower year-over-year acquisition and integration costs. Our effective tax rate was 26.3%, consistent with the prior year period. Accordingly, net income totaled $54.8 million or $1.28 per fully diluted share, compared to $57.6 million or $1.35 per fully diluted share. Now turning to our balance sheet and cash flow. Our balance sheet remained healthy with cash and cash equivalents totaling $427.8 million at December 31, 2023, down $143.2 million from our balance at September 30, 2023, due to changes in working capital, stock repurchases and debt repayment on a revolver, and up $127.1 million from our balance at December 31, 2022.

Our debt balance was approximately $481.3 million, net of capitalized finance costs and our net debt position was $53.5 million. We have $375 million remaining available for borrowing on our primary line of credit. Our inventory position as of December 31, 2023, was $551.8 million, which was up $47.1 million compared to our balance as of September 30, 2023, due to increased pounds on hand in order to support expected increased sales volumes in 2024. Effective management of the on-hand inventory remains a key element of our business model as we strive to ensure on-time delivery standards and superior customer service levels that drive our competitive advantage. During the fourth quarter, we generated cash flow from operations of $31.7 million, compared to $136.4 million.

We invested $31.3 million for capital expenditures and paid $11.5 million in dividends to our stockholders. We repurchased about 361,000 shares of common stock for approximately $50 million during the quarter under our $100 million authorization, which expired at year end. On October 19th, our Board of Directors authorized up to $100 million for the repurchase of our common stock, effective January 1st through year end 2024. We continue to evaluate opportunistic share repurchases as part of our capital allocation strategy. Additionally, on January 19th, our Board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.27 per share, which will be payable on April 25th to stockholders of record on April 4th. Now turning to our 2024 financial outlook. Based on business trends and conditions as of today, February 5th, we are initiating guidance to a full year ending December 31, 2024 as follows.

We expect our operating margin to be in the range of 20% to 21.5%. Key assumptions include, expected moderate growth above the housing market, a slightly lower overall gross margin based on the addition of new warehouses and modest increases in labor and factory and tooling as a percentage of net sales, operating expenses at a level we believe are necessary to position the company to make continued meaningful share gains in our markets and growth initiatives. And $4 million to $5 million in expected total integration costs associated with ETANCO, as well as other synergies in Europe. Next interest expense on the outstanding revolving credit facility and term loans, which have borrowings of $75 million and $410.6 million as of December 31, 2023, respectively, is expected to be approximately $8.4 million, including the benefit from interest rate and cross currency swaps, mitigating substantially all of the volatility from changes in interest rates.

Our effective tax rate is estimated to continue to be in the range of 25% to 26%, including both federal and state income tax rates based on current tax laws. And finally, capital expenditures are estimated to be approximately $200 million, which includes $120 million for the expansion of the Columbus, Ohio facility and the construction of the new fastener facility in Gallatin, Tennessee. In summary, we were very pleased with our financial and operational performance in 2023, where we grew revenues above market growth rates. We remain focused on providing our customers excellent service, innovation and value by expanding our broad solution set throughout our five key end use markets. Our strong balance sheet and cash flow enable us to make investments to support our organic growth initiatives.

Thanks again to our team at Simpson for the strong performance and to all of our stakeholders for your support of the company. With that, I will now turn the call over to the Operator to begin the Q&A session.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Daniel Moore with CJS Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Daniel Moore: Thank you. Good afternoon, Mike. Good afternoon, Brian. Thanks for taking the questions.

Mike Olosky: Good afternoon, Daniel.

Brian Magstadt: Hi, Dan.

Daniel Moore: I’ll just start with — I appreciate all the color. As it relates to the outlook for 2024, you mentioned H1 maybe starting out a little tougher than H2 from an overall housing market perspective. Given your goal is to continue to generate positive growth above market, do you see flat to positive overall growth in your business and the first half of the year as being achievable or do you see maybe the cadence in H1 being a little bit tougher than that?

Mike Olosky: Yeah. It’s a good question, Dan. What we’re hearing from our customers is first half, again, flat-ish to maybe down a little bit. Second half, up a little bit. So add it all up, maybe low single-digit growth. And then we do definitely hear different stories from our different customers, our larger builders tend to be on the higher end of that and our smaller customers tend to be a little bit on the lower end of that. That’s what we’re hearing from a market perspective.

Brian Magstadt: And from the company perspective, we’re expecting to grow above the market from an annual perspective. We noted in the release that on average over the last number of years, we’ve been outperforming the housing market by about 250 basis points and we would expect that to be higher than that.

Daniel Moore: Perfect. Very helpful. And then looking at the markets you’ve targeted to increase penetration, commercial, national, retail, building tech, among others and I know you gave good examples. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for further penetration and kind of moving the needle on growth this coming year?

Mike Olosky: Yeah. Dan, similar to last year, really, we’ve had good, let me comment a little bit on last year, because I think it carries over into this year. We’ve had good solid growth across all market segments and across all of our major product lines. And you know our business model really well, we’ve got 10,000 plus SKUs, 10,000 plus customers. So it’s lots and lots of small- to medium-sized applications and moving the needles. I mean, there aren’t really huge opportunities that are going to shift things one way or another. And as we look into 2024, we’re very happy with the playbooks we have by market segment, very happy with the playbooks we have by product segment and so we continue to see really strong growth across all of our markets and product lines.

Daniel Moore: Perfect. And one more, a little bit of review. Just looking at the SG&A in the quarter, what was the difference in variable incentive comp kind of year-over-year, obviously, given the strength and the revenue that you saw, I assume it was up considerably, you pointed that out. And then what are your expectations for SG&A growth embedded in your 2024 guide? Thank you again.

Mike Olosky: Hey, Dan. Let me make a general statement on SG&A as it relates to our financial. So, again, we run a very, very specialized business model and to really drive that business model with all those customers and products I mentioned, we need people. And it’s not easy to find the very specialized people we need to run our factories, to find the salespeople that know our markets, know our end product to fit our profile, it’s not easy to find the engineers that can develop these innovative products we’re working on, nor is it easy to find the software engineers that we need to develop new applications. And Dan, the bar is high for our team, we want actually the best people, super specialized, and we find them, we tend to hire them, we do everything we can to train them up and then we want to make sure we retain them.

So, but on the cost side, I mean, we’re also, look, converse to that, we’re also very much committed to above market growth with top quartile profitability and operating income in ROIC versus our proxy peer group. So when we look at the last couple of years, we started forecasting better gross margins, we knew that would enable us to over invest in the business in some areas that would, one, help us provide even better support to our customers, while still hitting our financial targets, and at the same time, planning seeds to accelerate future market growth, and we’ve been doing this now for three years. And as Brian said, the last eight years or so, we’ve grown about 250 basis points above the market. But the last three years, we’ve been able to over invest in the business and provide that great support for our customers, we’ve grown about 800 basis points above the market.

And so when we look at that, we think that also that business model helps us keep that 600 basis points of operating margin improvement we’ve realized versus the pre-COVID years. And again, we think there’s a housing shortage as the market picks up, Dan, we’ll have the people in place that can really help us take advantage of that rebounding market to accelerate the business even more.

Brian Magstadt: And Dan, to get into a little bit of the specifics on some of the SG&A or broader operating expenses. So from an equity compensation perspective, we’ve got a multi-year performance periods, and a year ago, we were looking at 2023 to be more negative than it ultimately turned out to be. And the expense associated with multi-year equity of grants reflected the kind of lower expectations of 2023 and then a little bit forward there. Fast forward a year, we’ve seen a much more robust market in Simpsons performance relative to that. And as we look at, again, those forward years in an equity award, we have to take that expense in the period. So just in the fourth quarter equity comp compared to fourth quarter of 2022 was over $4 million different.

Now, digging in a little bit to the specifics that you set around trajectory on SG&A, we would expect it to be pretty in line with volume growth this year. One of the things that we really look to drive our business decisions are how much we’re making those investments, as Mike noted, relative to our forecasts and projections. And today we would expect SG&A dollar growth to be pretty close to be in line with our revenue growth, our volume growth. But that’s something that we pay a lot of attention to, and if we see things slowing down, we don’t want to do the things that impact us over that medium- to long-term. As Mike noted, we do see that fundamental shortage in housing, but we also want to make sure we’re not taking our eye off the ball from an SG&A perspective.

So we spend a lot of the time updating our forecasts and our internal plans, and as Mike noted, when we started to see a little bit more volume, a little bit more gross margin, we took that as an opportunity to invest in 2023, because we think that’s ultimately going to be one of the things that helps us win in those areas that we are operating in. Again, our ambition to grow above market and to grow above our longer term average currently.

Mike Olosky: Were there any other items in your question that I missed?

Daniel Moore: No. You covered it. That’s very helpful. Appreciate it again. We’ll take any further offline.

Mike Olosky: Thanks, Dan.

Brian Magstadt: Thanks, Dan.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tim Wojs with Baird. Please proceed with your question.

Tim Wojs: Hey guys. Good afternoon.

Mike Olosky: Hi, Tim.

Tim Wojs: Maybe just to start off on gross margin. I guess how would you frame the kind of price cost expectations that you’ve kind of included in the guidance? And I guess is any of the modest compression that you’re seeing there just driven by the new capacity and some higher, I guess, labor and distribution costs?