W.W. Grainger, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to WW Granger's third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Kyle Bland, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning. Welcome to Granger's third quarter 2024 earnings call. With me are D.J. McPherson, Chairman and CEO, and Dean Merriweather, Senior Vice President and CFO. As a reminder, some of the comments today may include forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Additional information regarding factors that could cause actual results to differ materially is included in the company's most recent form, AK, and other periodic reports filed with the SEC. This morning's call will focus on results for the third quarter of 2024, which are consistent on both a reported and adjusted basis. As a reminder, we have included a daily organic constant currency sales growth metric within these materials to normalize for the divestiture of our E&R industrial sales subsidiary, which was sold at the end of 2023. Definitions and a full reconciliation of this and any other non-GAAP financial measures with their corresponding GAAP measures are found in the tables at the end of this presentation and in our earnings release, both of which are available on our IR website. We will also share results related to Monotaro. Please remember that Monotaro is a public company and follows Japanese GAAP, which differs from U.S. GAAP and is reported in our results one month in arrears. As a result, the numbers discussed will differ from Monotaro's public statements. Now, I will turn it over to DG.

Thanks, Kyle. Good morning, and thanks for joining the call. Everything we do at Grainger starts with the Grainger Edge and with a focus on the customer. I've had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with customers the past few months, and while the demand environment remains muted, these visits have highlighted the value that we bring every day. Our strong capabilities, including digital, supply chain, and on-site support, allow us to help our customers succeed. No matter what each is facing, we are there to help them overcome challenges. Before I get into the financials, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the Grainger team for their continued work in helping those impacted by the recent hurricanes in the Southeast. Fulfilling our purpose to keep the world working means supporting our customer operations when they need us most. Our branch, keep stock, distribution center, and sales team members have gone above and beyond over the last few weeks, providing vital supplies and relief resources. And as we always have, our team will continue to work side by side with our partners to make sure that these communities what they need to navigate the road to recovery moving to the third quarter while demand remains soft the business continues to perform well as we remain focused on being the go-to mro partner for our customers those segments grew in the period and we continue to make strategic progress across the company in the high touch solution segment we're leveraging our customer and product data assets and strong supply chain capabilities to help us advance our strategic growth engines we've done great work in 2024 but I'm particularly pleased with how we're continually utilizing our vast array of proprietary data to improve our customer and team member experience. We've launched new capabilities such as analytical tools that arm our sellers with better insights and data to drive more fruitful conversations with our customers. We're also testing a generative AI model in our call centers, which helps us scale our know-how and equip our customer service agents with fast, relevant responses to help customers get what they need quickly and efficiently. These are just some early examples of how we can leverage our data to help drive share, reduce cost, and further improve our service advantage. I'm excited about the opportunities ahead in this space. Driving a great customer experience is also underpinned by our world-class supply chain, one that is built specifically to serve B2B customers and ship next day complete orders. During the quarter, we made progress on enhancing our service capabilities and expanding our distribution center network by officially beginning construction on our new Houston area DC. This, along with the continued progress at our new Pacific Northwest distribution center, will ensure we maintain our service advantage now and into the future. Within the endless assortment segment, our focus on growing share of wallet with enterprise customers at Monotaro and the changes we've made to better communicate delivery expectations of Zorro have both helped re-accelerate growth over the last couple of quarters. These businesses are on the right track for a strong finish to 2024, setting us up nicely to continue gaining share in 2025 and beyond. Now shifting to third quarter financials, total company reported sales for the quarter were up 4.3% or 4% on a daily organic constant currency basis, which normalizes for the E&R divestiture and one more selling day in the current year period. Operating margins for the total company remain healthy at 15.6%, and EPS finished the quarter up 4.7% to $9.87. Operating cash flow came in at $611 million in the quarter, which allowed us to return a total of $328 million to Grainger shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. Overall, 2024 is playing out largely as expected as the business continues to perform well and we stay focused on serving customers. With this, we are narrowing our earnings guidance ranges to close out the year, which Dee will outline in a few minutes. As we wrap up 2024, I'm confident that we will continue to execute well, meet our goals, and drive solid results for all stakeholders. Now I'll turn it over to Dee.

Thank you, DG. Turning to slide seven, you can see the high-level third quarter results for the total company, including 4% revenue growth on a daily organic constant currency basis. This number includes a headwind of roughly 50 basis points from the lap of a heightened level of service engagements in the prior year quarter. Within the period, we saw relatively stable gross margins across both segments, along with slightly leverage and high touch. This led to total company operating margins to be down 30 basis points in the third quarter, largely in line with expectations. Diluted EPS for the quarter of $9.87 was up 44 cents over the prior year period, as higher sales were further aided by a lower share count in the current year. Moving on to segment-level results, the high-tech solutions segment continues to perform well, with sales up 3.3% on a reported basis, or 2.5% on a daily organic constant currency basis. Results were driven by solid volume growth and improved price contribution within the segment. We also delivered growth across all geographies in the period and local days, local currencies. In the U.S. specifically, we continue to see flat to positive growth in nearly all customer end segments, including persistent strong performance with contractors, warehousing, and healthcare customers. For this segment, gross profit margin finished the quarter at 41.6%, down 10 basis points versus the prior year. In the quarter, we experienced an unfavorable product mix headwind as we lacked a heightened level of service engagement from the third quarter of 2023. This 60 basis point year-over-year headwind was largely offset by several small tailwinds, which included the lack of a one-time adjustment made to clear out unproductive inventory. Price cost for the quarter was roughly neutral. SG&A costs for the segment increased over the period as we continued to invest in demand generation activities, including marketing and seller headcount, as well as normal wage inflation. Coupled with the softer top line, this led to SG&A deleverage of 30 basis points. Taking all this together, operating margin for the segment was down 40 basis points versus the prior year, which was largely in line with expectations, and remains at a healthy 17.6%. Looking at market outgrowth on slide nine, using headline industrial production and producer price index, we estimate that the US MRO market grew between two and 2.5% in the quarter, with price once again contributing nearly all of the market growth. With our high-tech solutions US business growing at 2.6% organically, Our mathematical market outgrowth in the quarter was roughly 50 basis points in total. This includes approximately 200 basis points of volume outgrowth contribution for the quarter, netted with continued price headwinds when comparing our price contribution to PPI. Volume outgrowth year-to-date is roughly 350 basis points, just shy of our 400 to 500 basis point outgrowth targets. As we've discussed this year, we're currently in a cycle where the growth rate implied by the headline IP and PPI metrics used in our market model is higher than a number of other external data points across the MRO landscape would suggest. This difference continues to cause noise in our share gain calculation. Although we will not mathematically achieve our market outlook target in 2024, when using our headline market model, we remain pleased with returns we're driving across our outgrowth initiatives and are confident we're taking solid share in the current environment. We believe this market measurement dislocation will normalize over time, and we continue to target 400 to 500 basis points of outgrowth annually on average. Now focusing on the Endless Assortment segment. Sales increased 8.1% or 11.5% on a daily constant currency basis, which is just for the impact of the depreciated Japanese yen. Zero U.S. was up 11.3%, while Monotaro achieved 15.4% growth in local days, local constant currency. At a business level, Zorro built on its second quarter performance and once again saw strong growth in the mid-teens from its core B2B customers. The headwinds from non-core B2C and B2C-like customers continues to dissipate with sales to those customers roughly flat versus the prior year. The headwinds we've seen from this group are largely behind us and we should go forward on even footing. At Monotaro, sales growth remained strong with enterprise customers coupled with solid acquisition and repeat purchase rates with small and mid-sized businesses. On a reported basis, these results were partially offset by foreign exchange, as the yen continues to be a year-over-year headwind. On profitability, the operating margins for this segment increased 130 basis points to 8.8%, with both businesses contributing leverage year-over-year. Monetario margins remained strong at 12.4%, with DC operating efficiency driving continued year-over-year improvement. At Zorro, operating margins were up 120 basis points to 4.3%, aided by solid operating leverage and a favorable one-time reserve true-up of roughly 70 basis points. These items more than offset an increase in marketing spend. Overall, we're encouraged by the strong progress We've made it across the segment and remain on track to finish the year at or above our original expectations. Now moving to the updated outlook for the full year of 2024. As D.D. mentioned at the beginning of the call, while the market has remained muted, results have largely played out as expected for the year. With this, we're narrowing our full year 2024 earnings outlook. The narrow guide includes daily organic constant currency sales growth of between 4.5 and 5.25% and a diluted adjusted EPS range of $38.65 to $39.35. The updated revenue outlook implies a fourth quarter 2024 daily organic constant currency growth rate in the mid single digits. which includes month-to-date growth in October of approximately 6.5%. This preliminary daily organic constant currency sales growth rate for October includes roughly 200 to 250 basis points of hurricane-related sales, meaning normalized month-to-date results are closer to 4 and 4.5%. Our operating margin expectations haven't shifted much from our prior guidance. If you were to squeeze the operating margins from the updated annual guide, it implies a seasonal sequential step down in the fourth quarter to just above 15% at the midpoint. Supplemental guidance has also been updated, including an increase of $150 million to our operating cash flow outlook at the midpoint. As a note, we've lowered our full year 2024 tax rate assumption to approximately 23.2% or 80 basis points less than the prior guide, which implies a fourth quarter tax rate somewhere between 20 and 21%. This reflects anticipated favorability in the fourth quarter as we adjust audit reserves from prior year tax returns and execute various tax planning strategies. Full year foreign exchange rates have also been updated in the revised outlook. Overall, the year has played out largely as expected, and our updated earnings guidance remains within the original ranges we communicated at the beginning of the year. We look forward with confidence in finishing the year strong. With that, I'll turn it back to DeeDee.

Thanks, Dee. Before I open it up for questions, I'd like to recognize the Grainger team on earning another notable workplace achievement. Earlier this week, we were named the top-ranked company across all industries on the American Opportunity Index, which primarily focuses on the experience of workers in non-college degree roles and a company's ability to offer them growth and development no matter their career path. The index measures the career trajectories of 5 million employees at 400 of America's largest companies via publicly available data. In other words, it's all about the facts, not a submission or a survey, so it's completely objective. This ranking is a testament to our culture, most importantly our commitment to ensuring every team member can have a meaningful and fulfilling career here at Grainger. We are honored to receive this recognition. With that, we will open up the line for questions.

Thank you. And at this time, we will conduct our question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. Please limit yourselves to one question plus one follow-up question for each time you queue. You can press star 2 to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, It may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. And our first question comes from Ryan Merkel with William Blair. Please state your question.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to start, DG, with the endless assortment growth rate really stood out to me this quarter. It was a nice acceleration from what we saw in the first half. Is there anything you'd point out, company-specific or otherwise, that really drove that growth a lot higher this quarter?

Yeah, so what I would say is that Monotaro continues to have really good success with enterprise customers and has also made some improvements with small businesses as well. So that has been a continuation of some improvement. And then Zorro, we talked about B2C and B2C-like customers being a headwind. That is really no longer a headwind. They were roughly flat. with those customers. And so what you're seeing now is, is mostly the strong business to business growth, which was strong last quarter and strong this quarter. So the results are much improved.

Got it. Okay. And then on the fourth quarter, a nice start to October. I'm just curious, are you assuming the macro really just stays the same? And then in November and December, should we assume that the hurricane bump of two, two and a half falls off or is that unclear? I think on both of those, we would say yes.

We would agree with you that macro stays the same, and then the hurricane bump falls off in the November-December timeframe.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Jacob Levinson with Mellius Research. Please state your question.

Good morning, DGD.

Good morning. Good morning.

I think it's been quite... quite some time since we've had at least for you folks, such a sluggish macro backdrop and you're still spending, understandably spending quite a bit of money on demand generating investments. So I guess trying to understand how do you, how do you kind of balance that investment spend when you're trying to manage growth in this type of environment versus, uh, holding a line on margins?

Yeah. So, you know, I think, um, The simple answer, of course, is if something on demand generation is worth spending in good times, it's probably worth spending in bad times. You may adjust the levels depending on sort of the market growth, but we'd still expect to spend in areas that we think are going to create long-term advantage for us and help us grow. I think the most important thing to do is to make sure that in all the core areas of the business we continue to drive productivity. So we have a lot of core operations. We are very much an operation-intensive business and making sure that we're consistently getting productivity in those parts of the business. We've worked on that in the past and continue to work on that going forward. It's really critical to make sure that you're able to continue to invest in those demand generating activities.

Okay. That makes sense. And then just quickly on the balance sheet, I think you're sitting on the largest cash pile you've had since maybe the height of the pandemic here. The balance sheet leverage is pretty low. Obviously, the stock has had a pretty phenomenal run at this point, but Can you just give us a sense of how you're thinking about your balance sheet options at this point, whether it's buying back stock or even if there are M&A bills out there on your radar?

Well, thanks for the question. And, you know, if you look at our cash balance over the quarter, we did increase cash meaningfully because we closed on our new $500 million bond offering, which we'll use to pay down senior notes. early in 2025 and if you you know pull that to the side it's important to note that the pace of our cash growth really over several years has been in line with our sales growth and when you look at the excess cash you know that we do have and look at our capital allocation strategy we don't envision any changes to that strategy and we will most likely return that cash back to shareholders in the form of share repo. And if you look at our updated guide for the end of the year, you can see that represented in that number.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Sabrina Abrams with Bank of America. Please state your question.

Hey, good morning.

Morning.

Morning.

I just want to ask about the self-help initiatives to gain share in HTS between, you mentioned the marketing, seller headcount, just looking to understand the traction, anything going particularly well, anything you're looking to improve on, and just early thoughts on expectations for 2025 in terms of the outgrowth. Thank you.

Yeah, so, you know, I'll start and then D may add on to this. But, you know, basically, you know, what we are doing broadly is leveraging our proprietary data and product information and customer information to provide better solutions, whether that's in marketing, where we get more refined in how we market to customers, or whether that's in merchandising, where we look to make sure that the website is easier for customers to navigate or add products. And then we also are leveraging some of that customer information to improved seller coverage. So we have continued to add sellers this year at a relatively modest rate, but a consistent rate. And all of those are showing very strong returns and continue to show strong returns. Our expectation is that they will continue to show strong returns in the next year as well. We won't update our market expectations for 2025 until after fourth quarter earnings. It's probably safe to say that 2025 will start similarly to the way 2024 ends. That's usually the way it works. So it will probably be muted to start the year. But in any case, we are going to continue to invest in leveraging our data assets to provide better customer solutions and better outreach through marketing, through coverage, through merchandising.

And the only thing I'd add, Sabrina, is that we still are targeting from the collective investments in demand generation to outgrow the market by 400 to 500 basis points. As I noted in our prepared remarks, we are in a period where we do have some dislocation versus our headline IP and PPI metrics. However, when we continue to internally test the return on those investments, those investments are still returning as we would expect. and there still is really a lot of noise, I would say. If you look at market surveys, other competitive results, or other economic data points related to what volume really is, we believe it's actually muted, and we are performing fairly well versus the competition.

Okay, great. Thank you, guys. And then just to follow up, I think you mentioned price cost was neutral in the prepared remarks. Do you feel you need to take incremental pricing actions following the May 1st price increase? Or do you sort of feel you've taken the appropriate measures for the levels of inflation we are at right now?

So, yeah, we did take an additional increase in September. as you know, versus where we expected price to be at the beginning of the year versus where it appears it's landing. And based upon 70% of our business and high-touch being contract-related, we've had to kind of chase to catch up on some of that. And so our goal would be, as you noted, to exit the year price-cost neutral, and we are in line with that. Now we're right in the midst of our cost cycle with our suppliers heading into 2025. And as Didi noted, really not ready to disclose where we think that will head, but we do have a philosophy, of course, as a distributor of passing on cost inflation through price to our customers since we sell on value, and we don't expect that to change in 2025.

Thank you. And our next question comes from David Manthe with Baird. Please state your questions.

Thank you. Good morning. My question is on slide nine, essentially you're saying that disconnect between your sales and industrial production is just inflation, I guess, or deflation. And so the third quarter 23 share gains might have been overstated while the third quarter of 24 are understated. Is that what you're saying?

No, no. We think that... Third quarter of last year was probably stated correctly. What we're seeing right now is the way we calculate share gain is based on IP and based on market price increases as well. And as we look across different other performance indicators, market surveys, competitor results, economic data points, we think we're performing quite well right now. And so we think that the share gain number we're quoting isn't necessarily reflecting all realities. And so in any case, we expect that dislocation to correct itself over the long term and will continue to gain 400 to 500 basis points on average annual market growth.

Okay. And then, DG, if I'm trying to square up slide 19 with slide 9, 19 as maybe a lens of the U.S. commercial industrial economy, it looks like steady deceleration in most of those categories. And so I'm just trying to understand that relative to you saying the MRO market is kind of steady right now. Is that just Grainger comps that's influencing that, or how should we think about 19?

So, you know, we would say that the demand trend has been pretty consistent most of this year. You see some fluctuation, warehousing's up as an example, but certainly things like heavy equipment is down right now. So there are puts and takes. Net-net, it's not a huge change from the beginning of the year to now, but it's been pretty slow growth all year, I would say.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Tommy Maul with Stevens. Please state your question.

Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. Good morning.

Good morning.

So you mentioned that the year's playing out largely as expected, and I was curious if we go one layer deeper just in terms of the pricing versus volume trends. Would you say the same for each of those, or are there maybe some offsets where pricing maybe is coming in a little bit better than expected, volume's a little bit weaker, or the reverse of that?

Market price, as you noted, has been fairly resilient all year. Now for us, as I kind of talked about in a prior question, we started off the year pricing fairly light versus what has actually occurred and have been pulling through price as appropriate while we're still maintaining price competitiveness. From a volume perspective, I think the market is closer to to right there, and if you look at those components, you know, it's like flat to down on volume, and as you can kind of see in the U.S., we have actually grown volume positively. You know, I've been around here for about 11 years, and when I looked at IP and PPI over time, you'll get to the next year, and it does a really good look back and makes a lot of corrections You know, when we look at what DG kind of talked about, other surveys or other metrics, it feels like those corrections will be to the downside as we look back at 2024. And that's what all of our data as it relates to our A-B testing and a lot of our pre- and post-testing on our investments are telling us.

And sticking on the market share theme, are there any anecdotes you could share just on competitive contract wins or things you're seeing in the business that you're winning every day that would also corroborate what you're communicating in terms of the share capture?

Yeah, I think the easiest one is just to look at sort of revenue growth across all the competitors to get a sense for that. I would say from a customer input, I've been with a lot of customers the last couple of Generally, there's no panic, and we are viewed as adding a bunch of value to their business, and I think we're doing all the right things and winning contracts and, of course, losing some as always. But generally, the customer interactions feel pretty good right now in terms of how they view us and the value that we're creating.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Patrick Baumann with J.P. Morgan. Please state your question.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe first, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about KeepStock. It feels like it's not something that's come up in a while, not because you haven't had success there, I think. I think it's been growing nicely, but maybe you could provide some perspective on how big it is now in terms of the high-touch segment, what type of growth you're seeing, and any thoughts on that announcement from Amazon around the Amazon Business Restock Program, like where might they be trying to go after customers in terms of vending, in terms of inventory management, just seems like they're moving to a higher touch offering than historically. Wondering if you had any thoughts on that at all. I know it's early, so you might not.

Yeah, so KeepStock continues to grow faster than the business on the whole. A large majority of our revenue volume comes from customers that have some sort of KeepStock installation at this point. So, you know, you can track it, sort of the volume through KeepStock, which would be probably high teens or something like that. But you can also track it in terms of how many customers, the total revenue half that KeepStock installation, and there's a lot of them. What I would say is that doing KeepStock well requires, particularly in the spaces that we operate in, understanding dirty places and manufacturing plants and making sure you locate them right. And there's a lot of work that goes into that. Consulting having the right industrial products and getting them to customers quickly and being able to stock bins and make sure we're at the right locations within a plant. And so we don't know everything about the Amazon announcement, but it's pretty simple to get vending going, which is what they're talking about doing, and I think they're planning to use third parties they announced to stock. We don't know how that will play out, but we feel pretty confident in our ability to provide a lot of value on the platform.

Thanks for the color. And then maybe one for Deke. On the gross margin outlook for the fourth quarter, I'm squeezing into something that's higher sequentially than the third quarter and would be up nicely year over year. Just wondering if I'm doing the math right. And if so, what's driving that? And if that's right, like, should we expect gross margin expansion in 25? It just seems like a nice exit rate for the year.

Yeah, you know, maybe I point you to like sequential, you know, versus year over year. And Price cost, which kind of came up, we were expecting to, you know, in the year of positive, mainly do the supplier rebates. That's going to definitely help us. We do have some business unit mix offsets to that and a little bit of freight, but net-net on a sequential basis going from Q3 2024 to Q4 2024, we do expect to expand gross margins. You know, since we're not talking about 2025 outlook, you know, like I noted earlier, we're in the midst of our contract negotiations on COGS and, of course, watching market pricing. But as DG noted, we expect the first quarter or the first half, you know, to look a whole lot like, you know, we're ending this half. And that has been, you know, price moderating, you know, continuing to moderate a bit since we've exited the pandemic. So I don't see it being particularly strong, you know, in 2025, but do feel like there will be some price in the market.

Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. I'll hand the floor back to D.G. McPherson for closing remarks.

All right. Well, thank you. Thanks for joining our call. Really appreciate it. As we discussed, we think we continue to perform well in a certainly muted demand environment, but we're really confident in the things we're doing and feel good about the way the company is moving. And we're going to continue to execute on the things that really matter. Appreciate the time. Have a safe and fun Halloween if you're into that. And we'll talk to you next quarter. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's call. All parties may disconnect.