American Woodmark Corporation (NASDAQ:AMWD) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Garik Shmois: Okay. Great. I wanted to ask my follow-up question with respect to a comment you made in the prepared remarks. You said that recent trends have improved. Is that related to just some of the commentary coming out of the builder channel? Or are you seeing an improvement in your orders as well?

Scott Culbreth: It would be both. So, certainly, we see the same commentary that you see from the marketplace. So, we’re seeing that. But then we also are obviously monitoring our incoming order trends on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, and we’ve seen those trends improve from where they were mid prior quarter.

Garik Shmois: Great. Thanks for that. And I’ll pass it on.

Operator: And the next question is from Steven Ramsey from Thompson Research Group. Please go ahead.

Steven Ramsey: Hi, good morning. Maybe I wanted to learn a little bit more on the retail decline. Can you talk about kind of the cadence of that decline through the quarter, maybe the sell-in, sell-out impact? And if there’s any color to add on how that’s unfolded year-to-date?

Scott Culbreth: I would just say the trends were most unfavorable in November, December. And then as we got back into the January timeframe is where we saw things start to improve overall.

Steven Ramsey: Great. And then, on company inventories, which had been increasing since the fourth quarter of 2020, but declined sequentially this quarter. Is that expected to continue? And can you talk about how much of that was less purchasing? Or how much of that was finished goods being delivered, whatever other factors were involved there?

Scott Culbreth: Yes. Steven, so really kind of on inventories is during COVID, there was that stock up of that just-in-case inventories, and we are refocusing all of our efforts to be more back end just in time. We are seeing our suppliers’ lead times and everything start to normalize and stabilize throughout the period. So that is something you’d say is we’re going to be hyper-focused on our inventory levels just around the working capital plays that are out there, and making sure that, that trend will continue for us and stabilize our balances internally as well. And to your question about where it’s coming from, our teams are focused on raw, WIP and finished goods. So, we’re looking at all areas to find opportunities to improve cash flow.

Steven Ramsey: Okay. Helpful. And then, one other quick one on the dealer/distributor channel, kind of one near term, one long term. Can you talk about what’s driving the growth in that segment in such an outsized way? And then, thinking long term on this segment, your lowest market share segment, can you talk about success year-to-date and gaining share, and what you see for gaining share in a potentially slowing environment over the next 12 months?

Scott Culbreth: Yes, maybe start with the latter part of that particular question. So, as you noted, that’s where we’re the most underrepresented from a share position standpoint. So again, we didn’t even have a product line to sell into the dealer space 10 years ago until we launched the Waypoint brand. We believe we can continue to drive share gains in both the dealer and distributor channel. We expect that to over-index the company average, if you will, as we go forward. So, we want to continue to gain share in that space. Why do we think we can do that? And why have we done that? We think we bring a really good offering in the marketplace. It’s a value price play, with the quality that many dealers and distributors are excited about to serve either their remodel or their new construction customers.