Donaldson Company, Inc. (NYSE:DCI) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

We want to have reasonable commercial relationships with both our suppliers and our customers. And so just like on the upside, we’re going to manage it if things trend down. Some commodities are down, as you noted, but media is still up and other costs are still up. So we have to manage the price equation on a consistent basis. We certainly want to be fair and expect fairness on the other side as well. And we’re going to continue to manage it and updates each quarter on our price impact that we can deliver. If things go crazy up or crazy down, obviously, we have to adjust as we’ve done recently, and we’re going to continue to manage that in what we consider to be a fair and equitable manner.

Tod Carpenter: Yes. Maybe just a quick add. The relationships that we have with the customers, I think what really hurt so badly is the degree of change that we experienced through this past cycle and now as we march forward, we’re hoping that the overall range of change would be much smaller than what we’ve experienced, so we don’t get the larger swings, which will allow us to really have a more normal type of a pattern on the up and down. And as Scott appropriately said, we’re just looking to have good, fair commercial relationships with our customers, and we’ll continue to work to do that.

Nathan Jones: Thanks. On Life Sciences, to get to 20% growth, you’re obviously getting a significant sequential ramp up as we go through the year in revenue. Last fall quarters have been pretty stable at about $60 million of revenue there. Can you talk about how we should think about the cadence of the ramp up through the year, I assume most of that ramp-up is driven by the actual Life Sciences piece, finishing the capacity adds and starting to ramp up volume. So can you just talk about how we should think about that as it goes through the year to get to that 20% growth number?

Tod Carpenter: Sure. It’s a sequential step up, Nathan. It goes from a very broad-based approach, particularly notably in some of the larger projects that we have in the bioprocessing world, that will ship in the back half of the year as well as more of a stabilization and looking forward crawling forward, if you will, in our disk drive base business and some of our traditional also wins within more of our venting applications type of programs. But within the bioprocessing side, clearly, we’ll be stepping forward on the back half of the year. So I would say it’s very broad-based in Life Sciences. And you’ll see us have a sequential improvement looking forward and that the backlogs do support the current guide.

Nathan Jones: And last one for me on turbine projects. It’s been a while since I’ve heard you guys talk about winning large turbine projects. I know it has been something that you’ve been deemphasizing because the margin profile wasn’t that good? Can you talk about whether or not you’ve managed to make these projects something that’s solid margin for the business or how these came about? It’s just been a while since we’ve talked about any of those things.

Tod Carpenter: We talked about some years ago that we were changing our strategy and really entering a very disciplined approach relative to those larger projects and that we felt that we were not getting the overall profitability for those projects. And so we back down, obviously. However, I would tell you, we also said that should we win large turbine projects, it will be on our terms. And I can tell you, we remain very disciplined in that regard. And so consequently, we’re very happy with the large turbine project wins because they’re on our terms – and frankly, they’re fair with the customer relationships and what we would expect to profit with that type of a business. It is in the neighborhood of at this point in time this year of about $30-ish million, give or take a little bit. And so we’re really happy with where we are.

Nathan Jones: Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Operator: Next question comes from Rob Mason with Baird. Please go ahead.

Rob Mason: Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Tod, you described the mobile aftermarket business growth, this mid-single-digit growth for the year kind of driven by price and market share gains. Should we infer that volume is neutral there? Or will volumes be down?

Tod Carpenter: No, volumes will be up driven by the share gain that we have clearly across the independent channel. So the independent channel is driving the up and then stabilization in the OEM channel and lapping that destocking activity is really what gives us that kind of an outlook, if you will. And if you just look at what happened year-over-year first quarter, the OEM channel was down high single digits. The independent channel up obviously, low single digits. But looking forward, we would expect now because we lap the OEM destocking that will be up year-over-year. And then on the independent channel, we’ll continue the share gain momentum that we have.

Rob Mason: Okay. So the share gain impact in independent, that is – you’re already seeing that because, frankly, aftermarket seasonally was better than typical seasonality, fourth quarter to first quarter. So I’m just curious…

Tod Carpenter: It’s all share gain, Rob. It’s all share gain.

Rob Mason: Okay. Very good. Maybe I’ll get my gross margin question as well. Just maybe more pointedly, is a 35 handle on fiscal ’24 gross margin? I mean is that a likelihood possibility?