W.W. Grainger, Inc. (NYSE:GWW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

W.W. Grainger, Inc. (NYSE:GWW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript October 26, 2023

W.W. Grainger, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $9.43, expectations were $8.85.

Operator: Greetings, and welcome to the W.W. Grainger Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Kyle Bland, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Kyle Bland : Good morning. Welcome to Grainger’s third quarter 2023 earnings call. With me are D.G. Macpherson, Chairman and CEO; and Dee Merriwether, Vice President and CFO. As a reminder, some of our comments today may include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various risks and uncertainties, including those detailed in our SEC filings. Reconciliations of any non-GAAP financial measures with their corresponding GAAP measures are found in the tables at the end of this presentation and in our Q3 earnings release, both of which are available on our IR website. This morning’s call will focus on our third quarter 2023 results, which are consistent on both a reported and adjusted basis for all periods presented.

We will also share results related to MonotaRO. Please remember that MonotaRO was a public company and follows Japanese GAAP, which differs from U.S. GAAP and is reported in our results 1 month in arrears. As a result, the numbers disclosed will differ somewhat from MonotaRO’s public statements. Now I’ll turn it over to D.G.

D.G. Macpherson : Thanks, Kyle. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. Today, I’ll provide an overview of our third quarter performance and then pass it to Dee to walk through our results in detail. As I typically do, I’d like to start today’s call with some reflections on how our Grainger Edge framework continues to drive our success. Unlike last year, our results in 2023 have not benefited from outsized macro tailwinds and we don’t expect this to change for the remainder of the year as MRO market volume growth remained slightly negative. This means we must emphasize the value we bring through our customer experience and supply chain network to drive profitable share gain. I’ve recently had the opportunity to spend time with several manufacturing and government customers in California.

While the first on their operations, it was clear that our advantaged supply chain, strong digital capabilities and ability to solve complex problems adding value for these customers. All of this is helping us to continue to gain share. Before we get into the results, I want to share a few examples of how our team members continually deliver our principles and improve the communities where we operate. Last month, our team members assembled more than 4,000 buckets to help natural disaster victims across the U.S. These buckets were strategically placed in regions vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding to ensure residents are prepared to quickly respond when a crisis hits. And for the second year in a row, Grainger has been recognized as one of Fortune’s Best Places to Work for Women.

This recognition is based on team member responses to key questions based on trust, respect, credibility, fairness, pride and camaraderie. We know that when team members till heard and recognized, we unlock the full potential of our team and the full potential of our business. Now let’s dive into the quarter. On Slide 5, you can see we had another strong quarter as demand stayed reasonably steady as we continue to provide strong service and deliver tangible value to our customers. We finished the quarter with sales growth of 6.7% or 8.7% on a daily constant currency basis. Results again were driven by positive performance in both segments, most notably within the High-Touch Solutions segment, where we continue to drive profitable share gain.

Total company operating margin was 15.9%, an increase of 60 basis points over the prior year, has improved gross margin performance driven by continued freight and supply chain efficiencies, along with favorable product mix, largely fell to the bottom line. Combine this with our strong top line performance, and we delivered another quarter of robust EPS growth, record operating cash flow and strong ROIC of over 44%. We also returned a total of $287 million to Grainger shareholders in the quarter through dividends and share repurchases. In the High-Touch Solutions segment, we are advancing our 5 key growth engines as we continue to leverage our technology and data assets to unlock further value for customers. We remain focused on extending our service advantage and officially broke ground on our previously announced distribution center outside of Portland which we expect will help enhance our service performance in the Pacific Northwest.

Within the Endless Assortment business, while we continue to see a softer demand environment, we remain focused on acquiring new customers and improving repeat purchase rates across the segment driving long-term profitable growth. Overall, 2023 is shaping up to be another great year as we follow the Grainger Edge, make progress on our strategy and drive value for customers. We remain on track to deliver over 20% earnings growth for shareholders. And with that, I’ll pass it to Dee to go through the details.

Dee Merriwether: Thanks, D.G. On Slide 7, you can see the high-level results for the total company, including strong sales growth of 8.7% on a daily constant currency basis driven by growth across both segments. This is a relatively stable growth rate compared to the second quarter, even as price contribution declined as we wrap inflation pass in the prior year period. Total company operating margin was up 60 basis points, primarily due to expanded gross margin in High-Touch, which more than offset lower EA gross margin and slight SG&A deleverage across the business. In total, we delivered diluted EPS for the quarter of $9.43, which was up over 14% versus the third quarter of 2022. Moving on to segment level results. The High-Touch Solutions segment continues to perform well, with sales up 8.5% in daily constant currency underpinned by growth across all geographies.

Volume accelerated sequentially and contributed 6 percentage points of growth, excluding price contribution for the first time in 5 quarters. In the U.S., we continue to drive year-over-year growth in all customer in segments with government and transportation growing faster. Canadian daily sales were strong, up 9.1% in local days in local currency. For this segment, gross profit margin finished the quarter at 41.7%, up 110 basis points versus the prior year. We continue to benefit from improved product availability, which drove freight and supply chain efficiencies in the quarter. Product mix also remained a tailwind, partially driven by an outsized number of project-related value-added services in the current year period, a level which we don’t expect to repeat going forward.

As expected, price/cost spread was negative as the timing favorability captured in 2022 continues to unwind. This price/cost trend will continue in the fourth quarter, and we anticipate finishing nearly neutral on a 2-year stack for the full year 2022 and 2023 combined. At the operating line, we saw improvement of 70 basis points year-over-year as GP favorability was partially offset by continued marketing and headcount investments to drive long-term growth. SG&A leverage was further impacted by one less selling day in the current year period. Overall, it was another strong quarter for the High-Touch Solutions North American segment. Looking at market outgrowth on Slide 9, we estimate that the U.S. MRO market grew between 2.5% and 3.5%, indicating that we achieved roughly 550 basis points of outgrowth for the High-Touch Solutions U.S. business in the quarter.

Performance remains above our annual target to outgrow the market by 400 basis points to 500 basis points, driven by consistent execution across our 5 growth engines. We continue to remain confident in our ability to achieve our annual outlook target through any economic cycle. Moving to our Endless Assortment segment. Sales increased 4.3% or 9.2% on a daily constant currency basis, which adjust for the impact of the depreciated Japanese yen. Zoro U.S. was up 1.2%, while MonotaRO achieved 12.6% growth in local days, local currency. At the business level, while we’re seeing some signs of macro-related softness at MonotaRO, the business still drove strong growth with new and enterprise customers and remain focused on growing repeat business with its core B2B customer.

At Zoro results reflect a continuation of headwinds discussed last quarter with tough prior year comp decline was noncore B2C volume and a slowing macro environment all contributing to more muted top line growth. Noncore B2C customer performance was down nearly 20% year-over-year as we continue to focus our growth efforts on stickier B2B customers. Core B2B customer growth remains in the high single digits for the quarter and continues to reflect a slower macro for small businesses and in end markets where Zoro is more skewed. We expect these pressures to persist for at least the balance of the year. From a profitability perspective, gross margin for the segment declined 20 basis points versus the prior year as MonotaRO favorability was offset by year-over-year declines at Zoro.

MonotaRO results reflect continued freight efficiencies and strong price realization in the quarter while the Zoro decline was driven by negative product mix and the impact of unfavorable timing from prior year price increases. These gross margin headwinds coupled with the continued demand generation investments in softer Zoro top line drove a 70 basis point decline in operating margins for the segment. On Slide 11, we continue to propel the Endless Assortment flywheel as we add new users and grow our SKU count. Total registered users were up 15% in total across the segment, and we continue to grow our assortment at Zoro having added roughly 600,000 SKUs in the quarter, pushing the portfolio total to over 12.8 million products offered. Now looking forward to the rest of the year, you can see that we’ve narrowed our guidance ranges for the full year 2023.

The new outlook includes total company daily sales growth between 8.5% and 9.5% and an EPS range between $36 and $36.60. These updated figures imply a Q4 daily sales growth between 4.5% and 8.5%, which includes 4% month-to-date growth in October, which is in line with our expectations and reflects a total comparison given hurricane-related sales in the prior year. This month-to-date growth is roughly 100 basis points higher in constant currency. From a margin perspective, we are raising the lower end of our ranges and now expect operating margin for the full year to be between 15.6% and 15.7%, a record year for the total company. The new range implies fourth quarter operating margin will be lower sequentially as we anticipate product mix to normalize with fewer value-added service engagement and SG&A margin to delever in line with typical seasonality in the fourth quarter.

Supplemental guidance covering cash flow and share repurchase expectations, which have also been increased can be found in the appendix of the presentation. All told, we’re pleased to achieve full year results that includes the absorbed price for sales, profitability and cash flow further strengthening of our track record of delivering strong returns for Grainger shareholders. With that, I’ll turn it back to D.G. for closing remarks.

D.G. Macpherson: Thanks, Dee. Before we close out, I wanted to quickly reflect on the tremendous progress that we’ve made over the years since our Investor Day last fall. As you may recall, we outlined an earnings framework that got us to some attractive 3-year targets that included us delivering strong top line growth, ramping to record operating margins and producing double-digit EPS growth through 2025. With the 2023 guidance you just outlined, even if you were to normalize for some of the onetime benefits elevating our margins this year, we are trending favorably towards the 2025 targets. As we look beyond 2023, the core tenets of this earnings framework remain intact. We will continue to focus on maximizing earnings dollars generation by delivering strong top line growth, maintaining healthy gross margins, which we expect are going to stabilize after adjusting for the onetime benefits we realized in 2023 and gaining expense leverage by growing SG&A slower than sales.

Executing against this framework positions us well to deliver attractive returns and consistently produce double-digit EPS growth for our shareholders. With that, we will open up the line for questions.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Ryan Merkel with William Blair.

Ryan Merkel : Nice quarter. I wanted to start with a high-level question on gross margin, if I could. I think your guidance for gross margin ’25 is 37% and you’re a good bit above that here, 39% plus. Can you tell us why your gross margins are so much higher than the expectation you laid out at the Investor Day?

Dee Merriwether: Ryan, this is Dee. Thanks for your question. Like, if you kind of go back in time and think about where we were about a year ago, we were in the midst of kind of coming out of the pandemic. Product availability was not exactly where we wanted it to be, even though our relative performance was pretty good. And we were expecting to get back in line with product availability much later in this year. That snapped forward really quickly in Q1, and it helped us significantly improve our margins. That’s one piece. The other piece I will point you to is we target price cost neutrality over time. And last year around that time, we expected cost to come in a lot sooner than what they did this year. We had passed price earlier last year in anticipation of that cost.

Costs really are now flowing through GP as we expected. So a lot of things are timing related. We do — we are performing better than what we had anticipated at that time, but really it’s due to product availability, price/cost timing as we continue to focus on neutrality. And then we’ve continued to do very well as it relates to freight and supply chain efficiencies. That was also another timing element.

Ryan Merkel : Got it. Okay. That’s helpful. And then just a question on trends. Government looks like it’s performing very well, transport, same thing, maybe just unpack what the drivers are there? And then can you put a fine point on the October, I think you mentioned 4% month-to-date growth, and that’s down from September that’s closer to 9%? Just what’s going on there?

D.G. Macpherson: Yes. So government, I think a lot of that. Government has been very strong across the board. We have won some new contracts that have come on board that have helped us this year. And so that has been certainly a tailwind. When we say transportation, I think, arguably, we mean aerospace there. Aerospace has been very, very strong. I think the aerospace companies can’t build enough airplanes now. So we’re benefiting from that. And I would say the market in general remains stable. There’s puts and takes, but those two have been certainly on the plus side for us. In terms of the 4% in growth that we’ve seen through October so far, there’s a couple of things going on there. One is our market share gain, we think, is going to be pretty strong in October, but we did have Hurricane Ian basically generated a lot of startle and other sales last year for us.

And so that compare makes the month look a little worse than it actually it is. The underlying volumes are actually still quite good.

Dee Merriwether: And as it relates to the second part of your question, related to the October month-to-date top line growth at 4% and versus our implied for Q4 being in the range of 4.5% to 8.5%. I’ll point you to one thing. This time last year, we did support sale-through of products for the recovery related to the Hurricane Ian. And so we are in a period where we’re cycling a tougher comp but as the quarter moves on, comps will get easier. So we feel pretty good about the range that we’ve laid out for the quarter.