The AZEK Company Inc. (NYSE:AZEK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Peter Clifford: Yeah, the way I described Mike is, look, first quarter, we’ll have kind of mid-single digits pricing right that’s been kind of announced as carryover. You’re going to have a similar profile for M&A, which again supports and points of that kind of $85 million in volume impact and that’s where we’re saying that $85 million is really not flowing through it, maybe traditional 38%, it’s closer to 50%. Because of the dynamic that Jesse mentioned that not only is that our smallest quarter from a sales perspective, but we’re also down even more on a production basis than we are on a volume basis is we’re trying to prevent building higher cost inventory. We want to get that out of the way. So that dilution of that under-utilization and the plant is skewed into 1Q and again any dollars that we’re taking there is on a much smaller base, so it’s causing that quality of earnings in 1Q to be pressured.

Jesse Singh: Yeah, and just to put a little sense on that. We — just to reiterate what we said in the prepared remarks, we are intentionally scaling down our factory. We scaled it down in Q4. We scaled it down in Q1 and it’s at or below the level of sales specifically in the area where we’re having the biggest adjustments, which is in deck rail and accessories. And so — and then we’ll start to bring it back up as volumes normalize. There is a large benefit to that and that it tends to concentrate some of the under-utilization into — in the potentially the first quarter, not all of it, but let’s call it about half of the underutilization impact that we thought out for the entire year will be concentrated give or take in — in Q1. And once again that is intentional rather than level loading because we don’t want to make products with higher cost materials and when we start making products at appropriate levels, we’ll be making it using lower cost materials.

Michael Rehaut: Got it. Great. Thanks so much.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Tim Wojs with Baird. Your line is now open.

Tim Wojs: Yes. Maybe just on Jesse, just your feedback or the conversations you’re having with your distributors. How are they expecting to kind of think about or how are they thinking about kind of the normal seasonal ramp of kind of taking inventory going into a season? I don’t know if you want to compare and contrast that versus like a normal year. But what have you kind of heard in terms of that kind of March, June kind of load-in effect that you would kind of normally see from the channel?

Jesse Singh: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good question and I’ll answer it generally. And what I would tell you is that it really varies by channel — by channel partner, I should say depending on their business model. So I think number one is, they will be entering — all of our channels will be entering Q2 in a good inventory position that is lower than where they were a year before on a days on hand. So that’s kind of key point number one, which that means that they naturally need to re-inflate that inventory to meet demand. I think in general without getting too specific, they’re kind of either act or a little lower in terms of mindset than the year before and once again it varies. Some of our channel partners will be right up, some of them will be lower and some of them will be above at a distribution level.