Global Industrial Company

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Global Industries' first quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Mike Smarjasi of Plunkett Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to the Global Industrial first quarter 2024 earnings call. Leading today's call will be Barry Litwin, Chief Executive Officer, and Tex Clark, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Formal remarks will be followed by a question and answer session. During the call, we will reference both GAAP and organic metrics. Organic reflects the performance of the global industrial business exclusive of the May 2023 INDOF acquisition. Today's discussion may include certain forward-looking statements. It should be understood that actual results could differ materially from those projected due to a number of factors, including those described under the forward-looking statements caption and under risk factors in the company's annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The press release is available on the company's website and has been filed with the SEC on a Form 8-K. This calls the property of Global Industrial Company. I will now turn the call over to Barry.

thanks mike good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us first quarter revenue improved to more than 323 million dollars and on an organic basis we posted our third consecutive quarter of growth with revenue up 4.2 percent these results reflect the continuation of the cautious customer purchasing behavior we have seen for the past several quarters overall Our performance was consistent through the period. E-commerce was once again our leading channel, and we are seeing strong growth in our enterprise business as it benefits from new account generation and healthy retention rates. Order and volume trends were solid and partially offset by continued price headwinds. We remain pleased with gross margin performance, which was 34.3% in the quarter. On an organic basis, gross margin of 35.8% was essentially flat on both a prior year and sequential quarter basis. As I outlined on our last conference call, in 2024, we are focused on championing the customer experience across every facet of the business. This includes enhancing the quality and value we provide to elevating our position as a solutions provider and problem solver for our customers. Across the organization, we are executing against multiple initiatives to help us continuously improve and deliver an exceptional end-to-end shopping experience. One of the key performance indicators we utilize to measure the impact of these efforts is our customer satisfaction scores. Our voice of the customer process evaluates everything from product, fulfillment, and quality to overall experience. Satisfaction scores run greater than 90% each week, and this tells us that the customer service, same-day shipping percentage, order fill rates, and post-sales support are working well, as evident by our high customer retention rates. Customer retention drives the total lifetime value of our customers and ultimately enables us to capture market share. The gains we are seeing are a direct reflection of the efforts of our associates and recognition across the company that everything we do impacts the customer. Overall, we have been pleased with our execution against the key pillars of our customer-centric strategy. We continue to differentiate our position in the market through an exceptional experience, a leading assortment of national brands and global industrial exclusive branded products, and a one-to-one managed sales approach that delivers significant value to customers. we are making continued investments in sales, marketing, merchandising, and customer service that will help us drive operating efficiencies, accelerate customer engagement, and strengthen our competitive position and capture market share. While the current demand environment is not as robust as we would like, we believe Global Industrial is improving its position as an indispensable business partner, and in turn, strengthening its ability to drive its long-term performance. The industrial distribution market remains highly fragmented and we have numerous opportunities for growth as we drive sales enablement across our channels, expand current relationships, and acquire new customers. With an exceptional balance sheet and strong cash flow from operations, we are well positioned to execute on our strategy, invest in our growth drivers, and evaluate strategic opportunities while we build long-term value for our stakeholders. I will now turn the call over to Tex.

Thank you, Barry. First quarter revenue was $323.4 million, up 18.1% over Q1 of last year. Organic revenue was $285.3 million, up 4.2% year over year. Organic U.S. revenue was up 4.3%, and Canada revenue was up 1.8% in local currency. Revenue benefited from volume improvement, while order growth rates were impacted by continued pricing headwinds. The pricing environment remains competitive. However, we are optimistic that the negative impact of pricing trends will improve near term. We've seen the first quarter's modest organic revenue growth continue into April. Gross profit for the quarter was $110.9 million, up 12.7% from last year. Gross margin was 34.3%, down 160 basis points from the year-ago period due to the contribution mix of end-off and its relatively lower gross margin profile. INDOF gross margin was 23%, which represents an improvement to their historical performance. Organic gross margin rate was 35.8%, off 10 basis points from both the year ago and sequential period. Management of our margin profile remains a key area of focus. Performance will continue to reflect the impact of proactive promotion and freight actions as part of our competitive pricing initiative. As a reminder, we are nearing the first anniversary of our INDOF acquisition in May of this year. Composite margin impacts related to the business combination will be more muted in the second quarter as compared to last year, given this timing. In addition, ocean freight costs, while off recent highs, remain elevated. Higher cost inventory is starting to flow into our cost of sales, and this is something we are proactively managing. Selling distribution and administrative spending for the quarter was $93.5 million, or 28.9% of net sales, an improvement of 50 basis points from last year. SD&A primarily reflects the benefit of INDOF's lower cost structure. This was partially offset by approximately $0.9 million of audit and remediation costs related to certain IT general controls incurred in the period. Given planned investment in key sales and marketing growth initiatives, as well as SOX implementation costs associated with the INDOF acquisition and ongoing IT control remediation, we currently expect SD&A to be elevated in 2024 when compared to the year-ago period. Operating income from continuing operations was $17.4 million in the first quarter and operating margin was 5.4%. Organic operating margin was 5.6%. Operating cash flow from continuing operations was $6.3 million in the quarter as we built inventory in advance of the spring and summer season. The second and third quarters are historically the largest sales periods for our private brand products. Total depreciation and amortization expense in the quarter was $1.9 million, including approximately $0.7 million associated with the amortization of intangible assets with the INDOF acquisition, while capital expenditures were $1.3 million. We expect 2024 capital expenditures in the range of $3 to $5 million, which primarily includes maintenance-related investments of equipment within our distribution network. Let me now turn to our balance sheet. We have a strong and liquid balance sheet with a current ratio of 1.9 to 1. As of March 31st, we had $29.9 million in cash, no debt, and approximately $120.7 million of excess availability under the credit facility. We maintained significant flexibility to fully execute on our strategic plan and to continue to fund our quarterly dividend. As a result, our board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of 25 cents per share of common stock. This concludes our prepared remarks today. Operator, please open the call for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press the star then two. At this time, we will pause to momentarily assemble our roster. The first question comes from Laura Ravalli with William Blair.

Good afternoon, everyone. Lauren Raleigh from William Blair Allen for Ryan Markle. Hey, Laura. How are you? Doing well. Thank you. I just wanted to ask about the cadence of sales in the first quarter, specifically how each month performs and how results may be different from expectations. I know your peers talked about how March is impacted by the timing of Good Friday. Any color is really helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, I would say that, you know, from a timing perspective, we did see, you know, a fair amount of consistency through the period, you know, overall for us. And I think as we see for Q1, as we exited Q1 and certainly into the early part of the year, you know, modest organic revenue growth has, you know, has continued. So I don't think we saw – I did read something about, you know, weather challenges, holiday. I don't think that had as big an effect on us as maybe some others have.

Yeah, Lauren just added to that. I mean, as Barry said, we had very consistent growth throughout the quarter, January, February, March. And while the Good Friday holiday did fall in the end of Q1 rather than the beginning of Q2 this year, we didn't seem to see a material impact from that holiday shift.

Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Your next question comes from Anthony Leviginski with Cidadian Company.

Good afternoon, and thank you for taking the questions. So you guys talked about cautious customer behavior, yet your organic sales growth of 4.2% was better than what we had expected. So I guess maybe you could just give us more details as to which of your maybe vertical markets or, you know, or any sort of customer groups that you are seeing more pronounced weakness than others? Just wanted to get more color on that, if you could.

Yeah, I think that's a good question. You know, I think from the standpoint of... cautious customer market, you know, we definitely see that. You know, I think it stems from the SMB market, you know, the small to midsize customer market. I think certainly with some of the economic numbers that have come out recently, I think that's going to be, you know, going to be persistent for a little while. Our unused markets, when you think about some of the big ones we're in, you know, manufacturing and retail and, transportation, warehousing. You know, it was fairly consistent, you know, across those segments. You know, we'll kind of see, you know, what kind of changes are ahead as we kind of get a little further into Q2. But certainly, you know, any type of industry that has impact into fixed asset purchases, CapEx implications, things like that, you know, will probably have some of the, you know, first impacts on us. But through the period, In Q1, it was fairly consistent. It was more relating to the size of the customer. Smaller customers, I found, were a little bit more challenged. The larger kind of enterprise national customers seemed to be able to withstand the period a lot better.

That's helpful, Culler. And have those trends continued so far into the second quarter?

Yeah, I think the shape of it is similar.

Yeah, similar results as we got in. We're about four weeks into the second quarter, and as we highlighted, similar consistent results into this period so far.

Mm-hmm. Gotcha. And then in terms of your e-commerce sales channel, roughly what percent of your transactions is out? Is that actually total? And then can you give maybe more color on the new account generation that you highlighted in your press release? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, sure. So when you think about, for us, I really look at the full e-channels, which are generally north of 60%, you know, in terms of e-transactions for our business, and that includes e-commerce, that includes EDI, includes e-procurement, all the ways in which, you know, many of our B2B customers buy from us. You know, we usually don't call out the e-commerce channels separately, but it has been a solid channel for us. As you know, we've made some improvements over the last couple of years, some changes in the navigation experience, and I think that's having... positive effect relative to, you know, overall conversion rates and the overall customer experience that people have moving through the site. So that has, you know, certainly helped us going forward. You know, we did mention, as you discussed, you know, some opportunities within larger enterprise accounts. You guys know that that's been something that has been fairly new for us over the last couple of years. It's a channel that's been growing in terms of larger accounts to global industrial. We don't call that out separately. However, it's a channel that we've been pleased with the performance, and we think over the next couple of years, it's going to be very significant for us. So we've been really happy with that market and some of the work that our strategic account managers are having in that area.

Gotcha. And a couple of other questions, if I could. So I think, Hex, you mentioned that the end-offs gross margin was better than historical. What drove that, and do you see any other opportunities to further improve end-offs margins?

Yeah, absolutely, Anthony. End-offs margins came in at about 23% in the quarter, which was, again, a little bit higher than their mid-21s that they had previously reported, historically both after ownership, after we acquired them, and really pre-acquisition. In the quarter, they had closed a couple of large deals that happened to be very favorable margins. We're continuing to push efforts and initiatives to drive higher balance of private brand sales and introduce e-commerce capabilities to their business, which should continue to help that margin over time. And while this first quarter was benefited by a single large order that drove that margin rate up, we are seeing continued action, positive action of those initiatives to improve margin in the long run.

Got it. Okay. And then, you know, in terms of SD&A expense growth, I mean, it was up 16% versus last year and up 8% sequentially from the fourth quarter. I know you're doing some investments in different initiatives. You know, so as far as, you know, going forward here, you know, how should we expect as far as the run rate for expenses from here?

Sure. Let me give you a little color on that, Anthony. So when we think about the year-over-year number at 16%, you've got to remember that obviously we acquired a business that made up nearly over 10% of revenue. So that alone contributed about half of the SG&A growth rate just by having an additional business in the portfolio in Q1 this year as compared to last year. When we think about sequential changes, obviously we had highlighted in past quarters that that we were going to be investing in sales and marketing initiatives that we think that's prudent in a market that's somewhat challenged, to be able to take share where we can and make sure we're investing in those key growth elements, even if it's at the bottom line to drive that top line up right now. And that's one area that we're going to continue to focus on. One other thing we highlighted on today's call, we did have about 900K of a quasi one-time related charge in the period, which did contribute to some of that incremental year-over-year growth.

Gotcha. Okay. That's very helpful. And then last question for me. So now that you're almost one year after the end-off deal, are you looking for any other additional acquisitions? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's a good question. So, you know, we've been pretty consistent in that. I mean, I think, you know, as much as we focus on our organic strategy, we absolutely consider acquisition as a component, you know, of our business going forward. So we definitely, you know, are looking at new types of opportunities that, you know, can bring us into new categories that can add to our business model, add customers. new channels to sell our private brand. Those are all really important to us. And, you know, when we come across those deals, you know, we would, you know, take advantage of that. We've been pleased so far with what's happened with Endoff, you know, up until this point. And we think there's a lot more value to go there. But certainly we're constantly keeping our eyes out for opportunities on the acquisition front.

Sounds good. Well, thank you very much and best of luck.

All right. Thanks, Anthony.

Our question and answer session and conference for today. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.