H.B. Fuller Company (NYSE:FUL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

John Corkrean: And, I guess, I’ll just comment, Mike, on the increase. We increased the range by $10 million. I think when we came out with our initial estimates of $30 million to $35 million, we said about two-thirds of that impact was related to manufacturing costs and about a third related to SG&A. We did increase the number of anticipated plant closures, we had talked about two plant closures after Q1. We now have eight that are planned. They are small, but they do have an impact. But I would say the recently announced changes to restructuring savings estimates, actually a little more weighted to SG&A. So this sort of second round we went through, we focused in more on SG&A where we had potential redundancies opportunities to reduce costs given lower volume.

And so the balance now might be 60% manufacturing cost, 40% SG&A. But I think what Celeste alluded to is, I think there’s more opportunity in the manufacturing footprint and supply we will be focused on here in the near term.

Mike Harrison: All right. Perfect. And then my other question is on the M&A front that you’ve done several acquisitions now, with the exception of Beardow. I think most of them are relatively small, but just curious at what point do you start to worry about reaching capacity? I’m trying to integrate too many things at once. Obviously, you’ve got 30 different market segments and three GBUs that you work on and not all of them were in the same markets. But, how do you think about integration and your capacity to integrate as a bigger company?

Celeste Mastin: I feel good about it, Mike. So we have focused our M&A and capital allocation activities around our top 25 growth opportunities and we continue to update that list every year. Within that list there’s a lot of opportunities to expand and grow the business and we end up getting a lot of different market segments involved in doing so. So when we do an acquisition from the very beginning we assign an integration leader during due diligence. That integration leader participates in diligence and that embedded knowledge is very instructive as we work through the integration process. Now as we integrate we primarily use people from within the business that did the acquisition. And so when you think about it, we have integrations going on in different regions managed by different people or being performed by different people in different businesses concurrently.

We are very careful as we look at our pipeline. We would not double up on a region and a business for an acquisition if we felt like we would not have the people, the resources to place against that. And the good news is we have lots of other targets, lots of other places where we can acquire and drive high EBITDA margin and high growth rates. So I think it will be a long time, Mike before we get to the point where we are really ever saturated with integration activity, particularly because we are integrating these businesses fully within two or three years.

Mike Harrison: All right. Sounds good. Thank you very much.

Celeste Mastin: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Vincent Anderson with Stifel. Please go ahead.

Vincent Anderson: Yes, thanks. So Celeste, I just wanted to spend maybe a bit more time on the cost saving side, if that’s okay. It sounds like the savings are more around footprint consolidation versus site-specific cost out. If that’s, so, just can you help me get comfortable handicapping your expectations on the manufacturing cost savings prior to completing your review. And then just the part B to that. Are these initiatives being paired with the inventory management changes that we can expect incremental cash return on those savings?

Celeste Mastin: So what we have described in the restructuring actions Vincent, and good morning by the way. What we described in the restructuring actions is more so footprint-related. However, we have actions underway within the businesses today to optimize our shift load to drive productivity improvement in the plants. So there’s a lot of cost saving effort underway that would impact conversion cost, that’s happening already. We are just not — we are not talking about it in the form of a restructuring. And, yes, you’re right. We do have work ongoing as it relates also to the supply chain. We are adding capabilities that will allow us to more analytically manage in particular our inventory levels. We have started down a path. We’ve made an — we have acquired some, some software to do that and we actually are piloting that activity as we speak at six of our facilities. So, yes, those efforts are proceeding in parallel and not just focused around the footprint.

Vincent Anderson: Okay. All right, that’s helpful. And you touched on both of my next questions. So I’m trying to pick which one to start with. But, all right, so you mostly answered this one which was along the lines of, do you feel like H.B. Fuller is already leveraging best-in-class analytical system available for procurement, inventory management? But maybe taking that a step further, I mean the pricing and the procurement systems were really kind of formalized after the 2019 restructuring. So same question, is there more that could be investigated there?

Celeste Mastin: So we have an excellent pricing system, pricing team and pricing methodology. And I think I’ve mentioned before that, that I’m on a call with our pricing group every two weeks. So it’s definitely an area of focus. And what I’ll say is that every two weeks something new comes out of that right. We expand our capabilities. We focus on some other reporting that we could do. We identify strategies for price increases in parts of the portfolio and is not just myself. I get to see the outcome of the work that’s going on with that pricing team and in concert with the GBUs. And so we are never going to be satisfied that we are perfect pricers. We continue to work on what I think is already an excellent capability and continue to make it better.