Caesarstone Ltd. (NASDAQ:CSTE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Brock Cannon: Hi, everyone. This is Brock Cannon filling in for Stanley Elliott today. I’m just going to get in to it here. So looking at your porcelain rollout in the U.S. and Canada, what kind of price point are you expecting there compared to other countertop materials? And going along with that, what kind of relative margin you’re expecting?

Yuval Dagim: Hi. Good morning. First, it’s a good direction to where we are taking the company to. We are definitely becoming more and more a multi-material countertop company. We launched last year the porcelain offering in the U.K., Australia and Israel. And now in the second quarter of this year, we are moving to the launch in North America, U.S. and Canada. Price points will be similar to what we see in the market related to the countertop industry. But I may say that as a whole, the porcelain category in our business is margin accretive, so we are building on some gross margin and EBITDA margin improvements as we are progressing the penetration of Porcelain into the market and as part of our business.

Brock Cannon: Okay. Great. Thank you. And then moving on here, could you provide any update on how CS Connect is going and kind of the adoption there?

Yuval Dagim: Yeah. Sure. Although still starting from a small base, we are expecting to double, if not tripling the revenue this year in 2023. As you remember, we launched CS Connect in our three major markets, the U.S., Canada and Australia, and the momentum that we experienced in Q4 is continuing into 2023. So this is definitely acting as the growth engine, and we are looking forward to be servicing more and more customers in these three major markets of ours as it progresses.

Brock Cannon: Great to hear that. And then last thing here, could you possibly provide any color on how things have been trending so far in the U.S. through February, possibly anything on volumes or R&R activity?

Yuval Dagim: Although, we are not providing guidance for Q1. But we continue to see the same trends in the U.S. market as we as we saw it in Q4 after a strong H1 of 2022, we began to see the housing market decline in the second half of 2022, especially in Q4 of 2022. And so far, we see basically the same trend.

Brock Cannon: Got it. Thank you. Thank you for actually taking my questions and good luck going forward.

Nahum Trost: Thank you very much.

Yuval Dagim: Thank you, Brock.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we reached the end of the question-and-answer session, and I’d like to turn the call back over to Yuval Dagim, CEO, for closing comments. Over to you, sir.

Yuval Dagim: Thank you for your attention this morning. We look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter. Thank you.

Nahum Trost: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.

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