Global Industrial Company

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Global Industrial's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, I would like to turn the floor over to Mark Smargiasi of the Plunkett Group. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to the Global Industrial Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. Leading today's call will be Richard Leeds, Executive Chairman and Interim CEO and Tex Clark, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Formal remarks will be followed by a question and answer session. 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 other 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 8K. This calls the property of Global Industrial Company. I will now turn the call over to Richard.

Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Our third quarter performance reflects the weak demand environment and continued softness in our core SMB customer base. We saw cautious customer purchasing behavior throughout the quarter. Revenue is down each month in the period, and up 3.4% for the quarter as compared to the year-ago period. Our strategic account business continues to perform well, delivering solid growth. In addition, retention rates and customer satisfaction across our customer base remained healthy. Gross margin was 34% in the quarter, an improvement on a year-over-year basis that declined sequentially as we continue to face increased cost of sales, primarily from ocean freight headwinds. Bottom line performance reflects further investments in key growth initiatives, specifically across customer experience, web, and a new CRM platform to help drive engagement and strengthen our competitive position. In reflecting on my observations since I returned to the CEO role, it's clear we have a talented team and a terrific business that has a strong foundation to drive long-term growth. However, we're at this point with recent results and have identified key areas for improvement. At times, we're truncated to every customer segment and are then doubling down on what we excel at and where we deliver exceptional value to the market. In addition, certain decisions have resulted in us over-indexing on new customer acquisition segments that are more transactional and not aligned with the long-term B2B relationships we seek to build. We know what we need to do. We're addressing this with a renewed and sharper focus on serving the needs of our core customers and implementing a more unifying collaboration specifically between sales and marketing. Further, we're adjusting our process to identify, target, and nurture accounts with the highest lifetime value potential. We believe this refined focus will allow us to better communicate our value proposition to the market, play to our established strengths, and engage core customer segments. We will also continue to enhance the customer experience by improving web shopping and highlighting our product knowledge, exclusive brands offering, and end-to-end solution capabilities. These are attributes that align with our more technically oriented customers and which we believe are key differentiators in our offering. During the past several quarters, we have been building a new CRM environment. In the third quarter, we started the phase rollout of Salesforce and expect to go live in the near term. We believe this new CRM will strengthen the livery of our seamless customer experience, drive operational efficiencies, and provide a more unified picture of our customers' operations. We continue to enjoy strong customer satisfaction scores, and Salesforce is a market-leading tool to ensure we continue to deliver an exceptional experience to our customers. In August, we held our annual Global Industrial National Trade Show in Las Vegas. This is a terrific event that brings together our customers and vendor partners. It showcased the broad product offering and solutions we bring to market and provides an excellent opportunity to gain direct insights from our customers. It takes an incredible amount of work to produce a successful show like this. I'd like to thank all of our associates for their efforts. Finally, I would like to welcome Lisa Armstrong to the senior management team. Lisa joined us as our CMO in August and brings exceptional expertise in B2B marketing. She is a proven executive. I'm excited to support her efforts to enhance our go-to market strategy, drive brand awareness, and strengthen connections with our customers. In conclusion, while the macro environment remains challenged, we continue to focus on the factors in our controls, including driving operational excellence and enhancing the customer experience. I believe our efforts to focus on our core product offerings and our target customers will take a few quarters to gain traction. And as they do and the market environment improves, we'll be in a strong position to drive financial performance. Maintain an exceptional balance sheet. We'll continue to invest in our growth drivers and evaluate strategic opportunities. I will now turn the call over to Tex.