GMS Inc. (NYSE:GMS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And we would expect to have some things happen over the course of the next couple of quarters, although not strategically, right? Nothing huge. Today in the pipeline I don’t think we have that kind of risk appetite. So in the midterm, we’re going to do what we just did this last quarter. We’re going to generate a bunch of cash. We’re going to continue to pay down a little bit of debt, and we’re going to continue to use the authorization that we have in stock repurchases.

Scott Deakin: Yes. Trey, to your point about leverage, we’re down at 1.6 now. As you noted, when we did the Titan acquisition, we showed a willingness to go above three to be able to get something of that level of strategic importance done, but we did it only with the expectation that we’d be able to very quickly get that down below based on the combined cash flows of the companies, and we did that. So we’ve always been clear that we will continue to be pursuing those larger types of opportunities as well as the medium and smaller ones. And if something like that presented itself and it had the strategic benefits, and we thought we could be able to bring that leverage down relatively quickly, we would definitely do that.

Trey Grooms: Okay, thanks again for taking the questions and all the color. Good luck.

John Turner: Thanks, Trey.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Dahl with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Michael Dahl: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. As just as a follow-up, when you’re thinking about the resi piece of your business, obviously you see the kinds and the starts permits, I’m sure you see the builder order trend. So what’s going into the funnel is quite a bit smaller than what’s coming out of the funnel as builders kind of pushed their year-end deliveries. Do you have a way of kind of quantifying or looking at what percentage of the homes under construction are still pre-Wallboard installation phase or anything like that, that helps you kind of gauge when this slowdown will actually more materially impact you over the next couple of quarters? I know you say little visibility maybe at year-end, but if you could just go into a little more detail on other things you’re looking at or more granular data, that would be great.

John Turner: Yes, I mean we have all the macro data that you do. And so we have the full pipeline of backlog calculated on a divisional level or an MSA level. We have some data available to us that’s provided by outside services, but mostly we rely internally on our own checks with our team, but also with our big customers that are doing that work. And so we do have a pretty good view of that. Now our big customers, generally speaking, they’re operating in terms of the next month to two months, to three months in residential. So they’re not really giving us exact numbers out four, five and six, but they do give us kind of anecdotally what their thinking is happening. So we do have that. So on a division-by-division basis, we have that.

It’s interesting at the moment, what we’re starting to experience is a little bit of, I’ll call it, bifurcation in certain markets in that you have the West Coast as an example. They’re eating through the backlog fairly quickly because there have been less supply chain disruptions. The land developers were able to deliver the lots, et cetera, et cetera. We get into the Southeast as an example, particularly Florida. You’re still having product availability issues there. And so the cycle times for the bills are still longer. And you’ve got some land issues, some land development issues down there that are slowing builders as well. But you’re also hearing the builders now start talking about the fact that the buyers that are out there are all interested in spec homes.