Floor & Decor Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:FND) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Tom Taylor: I’ll take the first part, and then Trevor, you can take the second part. This is Tom. So, I would say the market is growing at a slower pace than we are. We’re still growing. I mean we have a negative comp environment, but as we open stores, we’re still growing. So, our — in the quarter, we were up 4%. And year-to-date, I think we’re up somewhere around 6%. So, we’re growing. And when you just look at people that we compete with that are publicly traded, there — their growth is significant. Tile Shop reported today. There were a negative 8.4% lumber in the first period. And the first quarter was negative 15. Mohawk reported North America was down 9%. So we’re growing. So, we believe we’re taking market share at a pretty good clip, and the market is absolutely in much worse condition than we are.

Trevor Lang: And if I understand the second question, our Pro business continues to do well relative to the rest of the business. We talked about our commercial small, but our commercial business continues to do incredibly well, both on the Spartan side and our regional account managers on the retail side. The consumer, the DIY, that’s the part that’s struggling. And we measure that closely. That’s the part of the business that’s least the ability to control. And as Tom mentioned, you’ve had, call it, 5.5 million to 6 million existing home sales turnover for much of the last 50 years. You’re now at $4 million, and this cycle is now 22 months into it. And it hasn’t gotten any better. Interest rates are rates are back — our mortgage back above 7%. And so it’s just, a time of compression on the — just the housing cycle. We feel as good as ever about our medium- and long-term outlooks we just need to get past the cycle.

Steven Zaccone: Okay. Great. The follow-up I had was on just the competitive dynamics that you’re seeing in the market right now given your comments about value and savings, how do you feel about your price gaps? And do you see the competitive dynamic changing as we get into the back half of the year and into next year?

Tom Taylor: I’ll take that. This is Tom. I feel good about our price gaps versus our competition. We monitor those on a — feels like a daily basis. But we model them on a weekly basis, and we feel as good as ever about how we’re competing in the marketplace. And as I look forward, do I think it’s going to I think it’s going to get worse, so get more challenging. I mean, as Trevor said, this is the 22nd consecutive month of negative existing home sales. This has been a tough market for people to sell our category for a while. And so — we’re going to continue to monitor that. We’re going to continue to protect our moat. We know we’re getting new customers every day that are looking for value in this type of environment. So we feel good about our price gaps and we’ll continue to make sure that they stay good.

Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Steven Forbes with Guggenheim. Please proceed with your questions.

Steven Forbes: I wanted to focus on the updated capital spending plan. So, I guess, first, I just wanted to confirm that the reduction for the year is solely tied to the three stores that were pulled out. And I’m curious if you can maybe give us a preview on how you’re thinking about 2024 in terms of the store pipeline and/or what level of capital spending you’re sort of comfortable planning for as we think through the free cash flow implications of the guidance revision?

Trevor Lang: Steven, I’ll start and then Tom and Trevor will jump in. So, on the very first question, the reduction is actually more tied to fewer land purchases that we had contemplated in the original guide and then a little bit for the spin of ’24. Those three stores, we’re still spending on. They’re really just kind of pushing into next year. So, it’s not that we’ve cut that or anything else. It’s really tied to more just spending for the future class of ’24 and land purchase that we have. And we’re still looking to own probably 5% to 10% of any given class. So, it’s just a little bit less than we had kind of predicted at the beginning of the year.

Tom Taylor: That’s right. I’ll take the second part of the question. As we said through our script, I said in the last couple of calls, we know this is a cycle. Things will be difficult. We’re running the business the best of our ability, but we’re trying to gain market share, and we know that nothing’s changed in our 500-store algorithm. So we plan to open at least 35 stores next year. As we sit here today, that’s how we see the world is that we plan to open at least 35 stores next year. We may update that as we get into the next quarter. But we’ve got — our class of ’24 pipeline is terrific. We got a store in Brooklyn that we’re going to open up more stores in the Northeast stores in our good markets. So we’re excited about that pipeline are going to continue down that path.

Steven Forbes: And then maybe just a quick follow-up for Bryan. As we think back to sort of a selling store operating expense deleverage, you’ve experienced, revenues experienced year-to-date, can you help break that down into comparable store deleverage versus the weight of new growth?

Trevor Lang: Yes. Yes, the majority of it is going to be in the mature stores. And so when you think about it, what I said in the prepared remarks, we are seeing wage rate increases, higher credit card transaction processing fees. And so the new stores are still layering in the same way that they have. We’ve been able to combat kind of that inflation, but the cost on a like-for-like store is almost equal from where it was last year. So the deleverage is almost all due to just the decrease in sales. So it’s all because we’re negatively comping at those stores. We’ve been able to kind of hold costs flat even with inflation coming in by flexing our store hours and cutting discretionary spend.