Advance Auto Parts Inc.

Welcome to the Advanced Auto Parts first quarter 2021 conference call. Before we begin, Elizabeth Eisaben, Senior Vice President, Communications and Investor Relations, will make a brief statement concerning forward-looking statements that will be discussed on this call. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss our Q1 2020 results that we highlighted in our earnings release this morning. I'm joined by Tom Greco, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Jeff Shepherd, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following their prepared remarks, we'll turn our attention to answering your questions. Before we begin, please be advised that our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding our initiatives, plans, projections, guidance, and future performance. Actual results could differ materially from those projected or implied by the forward-looking statement. Additional information about factors that could cause actual results to differ can be found under the caption, forward-looking statements and risk factors in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings made with the Commission. Now, let me turn the call over to Tom Greco.

Thanks Elizabeth and good morning. First, I'd like to thank our independent partners and team members all over the world for their passion and commitment to serve our customers throughout the pandemic. We also hope that you and your families are healthy and safe. The health and safety of our team members and customers has been a top priority over the past year. As you saw earlier this morning, our final Q1 financial performance exceeded the estimated results we provided on April 20th. With strength across all channels, we delivered comparable store sales growth of 24.7% and margin expansion of 478 basis points versus the prior year. On a two-year stack, our comp sales growth was 15.4%. Adjusted diluted EPS of $3.34, represented an all-time quarterly high for AAP and improved more than 230% compared to Q1 2020. Free cash flow of $259 million was up significantly versus the prior year, and we returned over $203 million to our shareholders through a combination of share repurchases and our quarterly cash dividend. In addition, we recently announced an updated capital allocation framework targeting top quartile total shareholder return highlighted by operating income growth, share repurchases, and an increase in our dividend. This further reinforces our confidence in future cash generation and our commitment to returning excess cash to shareholders. As outlined in April, we're building an ownership culture as well as a differentiated operating model at Advance. Over the past few years, we've made substantial investments in our brands, our digital and physical assets, and our team. These investments, along with external factors, enable us to post a strong start to 2021. Clearly, the federal stimulus package, along with our first real winter weather in three years, was a benefit to our industry. From a category perspective, net sales growth was led by batteries, appearance chemicals, and wipers. Geographically, all eight regions posted over 20% growth. Importantly, over the past year, the Northeast, our largest region, had been below our overall reported growth rate and well below that of our top performing regions. In Q1, the gap narrowed, and in recent weeks, the Northeast has been leading our growth. This was in line with our expectations as mobility is increasing in large urban markets in the Northeast. which were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 last year. Both DIY Omnichannel and Professional performed well, delivering double-digit comp sales growth in the quarter. We saw strong increases versus a year ago, with a double-digit increase in transactions and high single-digit increases in dollars per transaction in both channels. In terms of cadence, DIY led the way early in Q1, As the country began to reopen later in the quarter, professional came on strong, resulting in pro-growth of over 20% in Q1, with continued momentum into Q2. The changes in channel performance highlight the importance of flexibility in our operating model, as we adapt to rapid shifts in consumer behavior relative to 2020. Throughout AAP, our merchant, supply chain, and store operations teams have been extremely agile in adjusting to this evolving environment to ensure we take care of our customers. Within the pro sales channel, our overarching focus remains to get the right part in the right place at the right time. This enables us to compete on availability, customer service, and speed of fulfillment, which are the primary drivers of choice for pro garages. To achieve these goals, we continue to strengthen our value proposition through improved availability, as well as our advanced pro catalog featuring tools like Modologic and delivery estimates. As vaccinations roll out across the country, mobility is increasing across all income strata. As discussed in April, this is very good for AAP, as our diverse set of assets within pro is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this trend. Specifically, WorldPAC led our professional growth in the quarter. With a customer base that serves higher-end installers and more premium vehicles, WorldPAC gained momentum throughout Q1. This is because middle- to high-income motorists are becoming increasingly mobile, and in some cases, they are now returning to a daily commute. Stated simply, they're driving more than they did a year ago. Secondly, we're seeing benefits from the own brand product offering expansion with the integration of AutoPart International. Further, we believe our independent car quest stores are also well positioned. They're leveraging our enterprise assortment and have excellent relationships with customers. These relationships have been strengthened over the past year given the support we've provided to both independent and our pro customers during a difficult time. We continue to grow our independent store base through a combination of greenfield locations and the conversion of existing independent locations. Today, we're extremely excited to announce that we're adding 29 new independent locations to the Pacific Northwest, to the Carquest family, the single largest conversion in our history. Baxter Auto Parts announced that they will bring over 80 years of automotive aftermarket experience and strong customer relationships to the CarQuest banner. This is a testament to the strength of the CarQuest independent program, including product availability, differentiated brands, technology platforms, and robust marketing plan. We also grew our TechNet program across all Pro channels. TechNet enables independent service shops to create their own national network. We now have over 13,000 North American members and will continue to leverage TechNet to differentiate our pro offering and build loyalty. In summary, we expect that as our pro installers recover, our industry-leading assortment, customized pro solutions, and dedicated pro banners will enable us to drive market share gains in a growing segment throughout the balance of the year. Meanwhile, our DIY omnichannel business led our growth to the fourth consecutive quarter. Stepping back, and as a reminder, there was a significant increase in DIY penetration across the industry beginning in Q2 2020. According to syndicated data, an estimated 4 million new DIY buyers were added. Spend per buyer for 2020 grew close to 9%, led by online spend per buyer. DIY growth was led by project, recreation, and more discretionary categories as people worked on their vehicles or even learned how to work on their vehicles. These trends generally continued through Q1, and the industry is now beginning to lock the significant increase from prior year in Q2. From an advanced standpoint, we grew share of wallet and overall market share in Q1, led by diehard batteries. Diehard continues to have strong momentum and our advertising is clearly resonating with customers. We plan to continue to invest behind this powerful brand in 2021 to further build awareness and association with Advance. Our loyalty program remains focused on attracting, retaining, and graduating Speedports members. Our loyalty program enables us to provide personalized offers and increased share of wallet as we leverage our customer data platform. In Q1, this helped drive growth in our VIP members by approximately 14% and our elite members by 30%. Consistent with broader retail, during Q1, we began to see a shift back to store sales from e-commerce, given the outsized growth of the online business during the onset of the pandemic in 2020. Our investments in digital and e-commerce have been another differentiator for our DIY business. We continue to strengthen our online experience on desktop, mobile, and with our app, which recently crossed nearly 1.3 million downloads. The integration of our digital and physical assets is communicated through our advanced same-day suite of services. This enables DIYers to find the right part from our industry-leading assortment, order it online, and either pick it up in one of our stores within 30 minutes or have it delivered in three hours or less. Finally, we're very excited about our footprint expansion and new store opening plans for the year. We're targeting between 100 to 150 new stores in 2021. This includes the Pep Boys leases we're executing in California. The opening of the California locations will ramp up during the back half of the year and finish in 2022. Now I'd like to transition to the unique opportunity we have to significantly expand our margins. As we outlined in our strategic update, there are four broad initiatives. Leveraging category management, streamlining our supply chain, improving sales and profit per store, and reducing corporate SG&A. Our largest margin expansion initiative is leveraging category management to drive gross margin improvement. This involves three components, material cost optimization, own brand expansion, and strategic pricing. Material cost optimization and strategic sourcing has been an ongoing effort for us and will continue to be a focus. Given the current inflationary environment, we're leveraging these capabilities to push back on cost increases to keep our price to the customer low. We'll continue to work collaboratively with our supplier partners on managing input costs. Own brand expansion as a percent of our mix is an important contributor to margin rate improvement. However, growing our diehard and car crush brand is not just about margin. It's also about differentiation. Our merchant team is building out capabilities and sourcing to develop high-quality products leveraging our strong supplier relationships. Two recent examples include our diehard robust enhanced flooded batteries and our CarQuest hub assemblies. Once equipped with a differentiated product, our marketing team is building the awareness and the reputation of our own brand as evidenced by our diehard and back advertising campaigns. Finally, we supplement innovative quality parts and breakthrough marketing with an improved online experience and extensive team member training. This includes enhanced part, product, and brand training to ensure our store team members are well positioned to provide our customers with trusted advice and an excellent in-store experience. So we're not only on track with margin expansion behind owned brands, we're also leveraging these brands to enhance differentiation and improve store traffic. Our extensive research around customer journeys highlights the role that brands play in customer purchase decisions. When a customer's car won't start, we want them to think of diehard first, such that this becomes a reason that they come to advance. This is why collaborating with our supplier partners is so important to ensure high quality for our own brands. We're confident as we continue to invest in product quality, building our brands, and training our team members to drive own brands as a percent of mix, we will further deliver growth across AAP. The final component of our category management initiatives is strategic pricing. By investing in new tools, we're now able to competitively price on a market-by-market basis using detailed analytics to improve rate. We're also realizing success in reducing discounts online through a rapid test and learn approach, which is driving significant margin expansion in key categories. In total, our category management initiatives are currently on track to deliver up to 200 basis points of margin expansion through 2023. As we look beyond 2023, we plan to continue building out customer data and personalization platforms to further enhance the customer experience and expand margins. Staying with gross margin, we once again leverage supply chain in Q1 versus both 2020 and 2019. Despite the current environment, we remain focused on executing our primary margin expansion initiatives while working to mitigate the impact of global supply chain challenges. We expect to complete our warehouse management system implementation in 2022, with the majority of our largest buildings converted this year. In conjunction with WMS, we're also rolling out our labor management system, which allows us to implement common standard operating procedures across our DC network. This will also enable us to incentivize hourly team members based on their performance. In terms of cross-banner replenishment, or CBR, we've converted over 70% of stores to date and expect to complete the remaining stores we originally planned by the end of Q3. CBR significantly reduces our miles driven, which is even more important today given rising fuel and labor costs. More importantly, CBR will complete the integration of the Advanced and CarQuest supply chains and enable us to service our approximately 4,800 corporate Advanced stores and 1,300 independent CarQuest stores from a single supply chain. We also continue to integrate the dedicated professional supply chains within WorldPAC and AutoPart International. In the quarter, we converted another five AI stores to the WorldPAC system and are on track to complete this integration by the end of Q1 2022. In April, we discussed two additional supply chain initiatives building on what will soon be a more streamlined supply chain network. This includes curing our supply chain and transforming in-market delivery and customer fulfillment. Our tiered supply chain pulls the slowest moving SKUs into four strategically located regional VCs. This will allow us to make room for faster moving SKUs and ultimately improve the availability of our higher turnover products. Our second new initiative is transforming in-market delivery and customer fulfillment to improve service and productivity. The new delivery management system will select from multiple modes of transportation to move and deliver parts at lower costs. Both of these initiatives are in their early stages, and we're targeting completion of these in 2023 and 2024, respectively. In terms of SG&A improvements, our store operations team is executing initiatives to increase sales and profit per store. We've now increased sales per store for three straight years, and we're on track to get to our target of 1.8 million average sales per store by 2023. In Q1, with strong top-line growth and disciplined execution, we leveraged store payroll versus both 2019 and 2020. We've also made improvements in scheduling and task management to drive efficiency, which helps with our customer experience. as it enables us to schedule our most tenured and knowledgeable team members when we need them most. We continue to invest in our store team members in terms of training, technology, and in compensation, including our unique Fuel the Frontline stock ownership program. We believe these investments have enabled us to attract the very best parts people in the business and are enabling continued improvement in primary execution metrics like net promoter score, units per transaction, and ultimately, sales and profit per store. Finally, we took steps to reduce corporate and other SG&A costs in the quarter. This includes three broad territories, integration, safety, and new ways of working. In terms of integration, our finance ERP is near completion. and we continue to build proficiency in our global capability center at Hyderabad, India. I'd like to take this opportunity to recognize our India team, who stood up an entirely new operation literally in the middle of a global pandemic last year. We've been working hard to support them as COVID-19 infection rates have risen in India over the past few weeks. The GCC team, including IT, finance, and HR team members today, has certainly enabled us to reduce costs, both in terms of CapEx and OpEx. In addition, the IT team brings new skills in the area of software engineering, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. These critical capabilities will help enable the successful implementation of our many tech initiatives. Our safety performance continues as field leaders across ADVANCE hold their teams accountable as we build a safety culture. We delivered a 9% reduction in our total recordable injury rate compared to the previous year and reduced our lost time injury rate 2%. By focusing on people, behavior, and continuous improvement, we're reducing claims and overall costs. Third, we recently completed a thorough review on the ways we work in our corporate offices and incorporated key learnings from working remotely for over a year. The objective was to ensure our corporate team is focused on our highest value priorities while eliminating less productive work. From this work, we announced a restructure of our corporate functions and the reduction of our corporate office footprint. This will result in savings of approximately $30 million in SG&A, which will be realized over the next 12 months. We also believe this streamlined approach will be more effective to supporting our field and supply chain teams. While we're pleased with our Q1 performance, we're confident that there is so much more opportunity ahead. To fully realize our potential, we plan to continue to invest in our brands, the customer experience, our team members, and market expansion to drive top-line growth above market. Our entire team also remains focused on the execution of our margin expansion initiatives. We're energized and focused on building on the momentum we saw in Q1 to execute our long-term strategy in the months to come. Now, let me pass it over to Jeff, who will go into more details on our financial results. Thanks, Tom, and good morning. And thanks to everyone joining us today, especially our team members who continue to work tirelessly, which has contributed to the results that we're reporting today. In Q1, our net sales increased 23.4% to $3.3 billion. Adjusted gross profit margin expanded 91 basis points to 44.8% as a result of improvement throughout gross margin, including supply chain, net pricing, channel mix, and material cost optimization. These improvements were slightly offset by unfavorable inventory-related costs, product mix, and headwinds associated with shrink and defectives. RQ1 adjusted SG&A expense was $1.2 billion. On a rate basis, this represented 35.8% of net sales. which improved 387 basis points compared to one year ago. The improvement was driven by sales leverage in both payroll and rent, as well as lower claim-related expenses from the company's emphasis on safety. We discussed our labor management system previously, but we really saw the benefit this quarter as we staffed our stores based on customer needs, utilizing nights, weekends, and an improved mix of full and part-time schedules. In addition, our ongoing focus on team member safety will always remain one of our highest priorities. The savings were partially offset by an increase in field bonus costs related to our improved performance. In addition, as Tom outlined earlier, we invested in marketing during Q1, primarily associated with DieHard. This lapped marketing cuts the previous year which were made at the onset of the pandemic. We also saw an increase in third-party and service contracts related to our transformational plans, primarily within IT. Related to the increased COVID-19 cases we saw late in 2020 and early 2021, we incurred approximately $16 million in COVID-19 costs during the quarter, which is flat to the prior year. While the future impact of COVID-19 remains unknown, we expect these costs to subside throughout the year, assuming infection rates continue to decline. Our adjusted operating income increased from $113 million last year to $299 million. On a rate basis, our adjusted OI margin expanded by 478 basis points to 9%. Finally, our adjusted diluted earnings per share $3.34, up from $1 a year ago. Our free cash flow for the quarter was $259 million, an increase of $330 million compared to last year. The improvement was primarily driven by year-over-year operating income growth, as well as improvements we achieved from working capital initiatives, including higher utilization of our supply chain financing facilities that we began to see during the pandemic last year. Our AP ratio improved by nearly 1,000 basis points to 84%, the highest we've achieved since the GPI acquisition. A portion of the improvement is attributable to the actions we took during the pandemic and the continued partnerships we have with our suppliers. In the quarter, we spent $71 million in capital expenditures versus $83 million in the prior year quarter. We expect to be within our guidance for capital expenditures as we continue to invest in our transformation initiatives. During Q1, we returned more than $200 million to our shareholders through the repurchase of 1.1 million shares and our quarterly cash dividend. We expect to be within our 2021 share repurchase guidance of $300 to $500 million. Additionally, as you saw during our investor presentation in April, our board approved our quarterly shareholder dividend of $1, payable on July 2nd. As outlined in our press release this morning, we've seen continued momentum in the first four weeks of Q2 with our two-year comparable store sales growth rate in line with the two-year stat we reported in Q1. Miles driven are beginning to grow for the first time in over a year. And historically, this has been an overall positive for our industry. In addition, our professional business is accelerating and we expect pro to outperform DIY for the balance of the year. For these reasons, we're raising our comp sales guidance to up four to 6%. We're also cognizant of several macro economic factors. This includes inflationary costs and commodities, transportation and wages, along with currency headwinds. As a reminder, our industry has historically been very rational and successful in passing on inflationary costs in the form of price and that is our intention this year as well also our pro business carries a lower margin rate than diy which may partially offset the gains we expect to see in sales as a result of our top line strength and current cost assumptions We're updating our adjusted OI margin range to be between 9 and 9.2%. Our guide for comp sales is now up three full points, and our adjusted OI margin rate is now up 30 basis points compared to our initial guidance provided in February. We remain committed to delivering against the strategy we laid out in April and are confident in our ability to execute our long-term strategic plans to deliver strong and sustainable total shareholder return. Now, let's open the call for your questions. Operator?