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

Operator: Our next question comes from David Manthey with Baird.

David Manthey : My question was along the same lines on Zoro. So I guess I’ll try to refine it a bit here. D.G., what you just said in terms of the trends, it sounds like the — what you’re seeing there right now is primarily cyclical in nature. You’re not concerned about the strategy there. But then you also said that you are implementing strategic moves to grow that business. Could you just outline a couple of those for us, so we know what the drivers are?

D.G. Macpherson: Yes. So what I would say is there’s two pieces to growth to Zoro. One is that this a very simplified, but one is acquiring customers, Zoro has always been really good at acquiring customers. They’ve been a good customer acquisition engine. The other is developing repeat business for those customers, so you become the place of choice to shop. We’ve had some success with that. We have a lot of long-term customers. We need to get better at that piece. So most of what we’re talking about doing is how to make alterations, it’s not really a strategy change, but we’re testing a bunch of things to figure out how to improve that part of the business. And that will be the big area of focus going forward.

David Manthey : Got it. Okay. And then on the High-Touch side, product and customer information tools have really been a key driver of the outperformance there. Can you update us — I don’t know if you have statistics on the Salesforce’s use of those tools or if you’ve added any new capabilities lately to those applications?

D.G. Macpherson: Yes. I mean I think that — let’s start with — as you know, we are building some of our own software for the first time in a long time and customer information and product information were early in the cycle. Product information, in particular, with a core publishing system that we’ve developed to help the website, help customer positivity on our website, and this helped really drive a lot of growth through both marketing and merchandising. The customer information system is supporting marketing efforts. It’s also supporting seller coverage, which we have been adding sellers and that help us understand where we can add and become more refined in that. So both of those have been a big driver of growth and will continue to be so going forward. And I think that we still have a long ways to go, particularly customer information to leverage it for all of our sales team and all of our marketing activities, but we continue to get better in those areas.

Operator: Our next question comes from Nigel Coe with Wolfe Research.

Nigel Coe : So looking at this — the fourth quarter margin, Dee, you called out, I think, 50 basis points or thereabouts of sequential margin kind of versus third quarter. Is that math correct, first of all? And then how does that shake out between High-Touch and Endless Assortment? And then I’ve got a follow-on on the Zoro gross margins as well.

Dee Merriwether: Yes. So you’re talking about a sequential change from Q3 to…?

Nigel Coe : Yes, 3Q to 4Q gross margin.

Dee Merriwether: Yes. So total company is about 60 bps. And again, I think — I know that the pieces are the same. And so the favorability that we saw in Q2 and Q3 related to some services, project related revenue, which is accretive to the business. At a total company level, that’s about 40 bps and as High-Touch, that’s about 60 bps. And then the other piece I called out, which is really related to some smaller headwinds related to price/cost and some — that flows through rebates, that’s about another 20 basis point total company and round up to close to that on the High-Touch level as well.

Nigel Coe : Okay. And then just to calibrate the comments about price/cost normalization. We’re no longer looking at 40% gross margin High-Touch, you’re thinking you maintain a higher plateau than that?