Fastenal Company

Hello, and welcome to the Fastenal 2024 Q1 earnings results conference call. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You may be placed into question queue at any time by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Taylor Ranta of the Fastenal Company. Please go ahead, Taylor.

Welcome to the Fastenal Company 2024 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. This call will be hosted by Dan Florin as our President and Chief Executive Officer and Holden Lewis, our Chief Financial Officer. The call will last for up to one hour and will start with a general overview of our quarterly results and operations, with the remainder of the time being open for questions and answers. Today's conference call is a proprietary Fastenal presentation and is being recorded by Fastenal. No recording, reproduction, transmission, or distribution of today's call is permitted without Fastenal's consent. This call is being audio simulcast on the internet via the Fastenal Investor Relations homepage, investor.fastenal.com. A replay of the webcast will be available on the website until June 1st, 2024 at midnight central time. As a reminder, today's conference call may include statements regarding the company's future plans and prospects. These statements are based on our current expectations and we undertake no duty to update them. It is important to note that the company's actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Factors that could cause actual results to differ from anticipated results are contained in the company's latest earnings release and periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and we encourage you to review those factors carefully. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Dan Flournette.

Thank you, Taylor, and good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter call. And I'm going to go right to the flipbook, page three, and... My comments on page three can be summarized with five statements. First one is tough quarter. Second one is tricky calendar. Third one is highlighting the customer expo. Third is strong performance on our growth drivers. And then the final is financially strong, and that strength is continuing to build, as we've seen in recent years. Going back to the tough quarter, so we grew about 2%. Coming into the quarter, we anticipated a number that was probably in that 4% neighborhood. And the tricky calendar was really a function of January and February are seasonally weaker months for us. Then March starts to pick up as we move into the spring. So having two days shifted out of March and into January and February, respectively, wasn't helpful, but that was a known event coming into the quarter. And having the quarter end on Good Friday being in March versus in April is negative. But that's probably more of a function of trying to rationalize and figure out things on the quarter. The truth of the matter is the core issue remains sluggish demand. A positive we saw is after 16 consecutive months of sub-50 purchasing managers index. We broke above 50 in the month of March. And the other day I chatted with Holden and I said, you know, how long have they been checking the PMI statistics? And he said, yeah, since the early 70s. So we did a look and there's been two periods that have had longer duration of 16 months. The one would have been in the early 1980s. I believe it was a 19-month duration. The other was in the dot-com meltdown era of the early 2000s. It was about a 17 or 18-month duration. Now, in full disclosures, they were a little bit longer. They were actually more severe as far as where it went into, how far into the 40s it went or even into the upper 30s. There were a few other periods, obviously the 08, 09 period, much shorter in duration but pretty steep. But we feel positive about the 50 in March, and time will tell if it's a head fake or if it's real. But that speaks to what we think might be happening as we move into the second half of the year. The Customer Expo, which we'll host next week on the 17th and 18th in Nashville, Tennessee, I'm upbeat about that from the standpoint. One aspect that's challenged us in recent years with customer acquisitions, has been the fact that starting about 20 years ago, we started doing an employee event where we'd bring employees in, engage with our suppliers, and it was a great opportunity to hold in the month of December some planning discussions for the next calendar year, but also have a trade show where employees get to interact directly with suppliers and learn about their products, learn about their supply chain. And also over time, learned more and more about some of the FMI devices that are coming out, which started up in that kind of that 2007, 2008 timeframe when we started vending. What we learned a number of years into it that a lot of employees want to bring their customer to this. They thought it'd be a great means to expose our customer to their supply chain. And we started doing that probably five, six years later. And we've been doing that for many years. In 2020 and 2021, because of COVID, we had to shut down the event. And we felt the impact of that over time. And it shows up in things like onsite signings. It shows up in how we're engaging with that customer. What I'm pleased to say is after restarting the event in 2022 and continuing it in 23 and 24, In 2024, we were surprised by the overbooked status of the show, and we've had to dramatically expand it. Now, Holden will touch on some of that in his comments about what that means for the second quarter as far as expenses. But we'll have 50% more people attending this year than did last year, and we'll have double the number of people attending this year than we did last year. I believe that speaks well to our ability to capture market share. with that subset of customers. And that's been challenging us for the last several years because we just couldn't engage in the same way. So it's an expense issue for the second quarter. It's a really high class expense issue for the second quarter. On the next page, I'll touch on growth drivers. So flipping to page four, onsites, we had 102 signings during the quarter. So the number of active sites we had operating at the end of the quarter was up about 12 percent from what it was in the first quarter of last year. And our sales going through that channel grew low single digits, which tells me that's where we're seeing the demand issue play out in our numbers, because that number should be closer to what we're seeing in unit growth. The FMI technology, we signed 105 devices a day, and I believe we've only had one quarter that we've ever done over 100. And if you think back to a few years ago, what we really challenged our team to do back in that 2017-2018 timeframe, we geared up our infrastructure to support 100 signings a day. And we challenged everybody to engage with their customer and to get there. And by 2022, we were doing about 83 a day. In 2023, we had grown that to about 98 a day. And those numbers are based on the average of the first three quarters of the year. So last year we did 92, 106, 95, average of about 98. Officially, we've always said that we want to get that over 100. Internally, what we've challenged our team to do is to get that number up into the 120s. And so we feel really good about onsite and FMI technology as far as the progress we're making to take market share. And in a similar comparison that I did with the unit growth of onsite, so FMI, we have 10.5% more devices today than we did a year ago. But you can see some fall off in the revenue per device. And in safety, for example, we grew about 8%. And when I look at our revenue per device, it's down 1% to 2% from a year ago. It's been pretty flat as we've gone through the years so far. And, again, that's a demand, but ultimately it's a market share. It's a land grab. And so we will take market share by deploying more devices, and then we have to live with what the actual consumption is in those customers, whether it's robust or less than robust. It's a sign of permanent market share, and I'm pleased with the progress we're seeing there, and how it shines through in things like our safety, because about half of our vending sales involve safety products. E-commerce continues to get nice traction, and our digital footprint continues to expand. We're approaching 60% of sales, and our anticipation is sometime this year that number will hit the mid-60s. 66 is our target. And ultimately, we believe that ends up being 85% of sales. So on the second page, I feel really good about the progress, but I'll finish where I started. It was a tough quarter, and we feel good about where we're going.