HNI Corporation (NYSE:HNI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Reuben Garner: Okay. And then on the residential side, you mentioned existing home sales. Just curious how much fireplace activity, retrofit activity is tied to inspection that a big part of what can drive demand, and if we do see a rebound in home sales when rates drop that can kind of get the R&R segment turned around?

Marshall Bridges: Yes, I’m not sure we have precise data on inspections. But we do know that remodeling events are pretty highly correlated with the purchase of the new home usually remodeling events occur within a year or two after the– after the purchase and given the new homes are not selling as much existing homes, not selling as much, we’re definitely seeing some softness in that segment. But if it did — if we do see existing homes tick up, we would see remodel and tick up eventually.

Reuben Garner: Okay and last one for me. Nice snapback in margins in the Residential business. I think if I’m looking at it correctly comparable to a year ago on much lower base is there any positive price cost in there as well or is all of that from the initiatives you’ve put in place earlier in the year?

Marshall Bridges: Yes. We were flat at 17.7% operating margin in Residential Building Products in the third quarter and yes there are multiple factors that are kind of the same three factors I mentioned, we did have favorable price cost there, we also had better productivity as well as some better SG&A efficiency.

Reuben Garner: Okay, great, thanks, guys.

Jeff Lorenger: Thanks.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Greg Burns with Sidoti & Company.

Greg Burns: Good morning. The outlook for flattish Workplace growth. I think last quarter you were talking about low single-digit growth in the second half. So a little bit of a reduction there. Could you just talk about what changes you’re seeing in the demand environment there to lower your outlook?

Marshall Bridges: Greg, I want to strike this is a major change. We did talk about low-single-digits. I think organic revenue in Workplace excluding and Poppin was 1.7% in the third quarter. So right in that range and then flattish maybe puts us at the low end of low single digits for the back half, but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t call it a major change.

Greg Burns: Okay. Kimball had a good size health business, can you just talk about maybe some of those adjacent markets like healthcare education where maybe you could drive incremental growth if the core office segment? Isn’t recovering to pre-COVID levels like what initiatives you have in place and I guess specifically how was Kimball Healthcare business this quarter?

Jeff Lorenger: Yes, Greg, good question. I think where the activity is pretty been pretty solid throughout the year and starting to build in the health segment and KII had quite a bit of product pipe in that– in that piece of the business that will be coming online in ’24 as well. So we like that position and we do believe that’s an opportunity for growth overall. Education, they’ve been strong in education, similar to our legacy business both have had pretty solid year-to-date, we see the education vertical as an opportunity for growth going forward as well. And then I would mention, they have a hospitality business that’s competing well at this point, we see some good second-half growth in their hospitality business, kind of pent-up demand to catch up from kind of the post-COVID remodel activity, refresh rates for hotels. So all three of those, healthcare, education, hospitality, we can rotate into and lean into notwithstanding core commercial.

Greg Burns: Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Budd Bugatch with Water Tower Research.

Budd Bugatch: Good morning and thank you for taking my question and congratulations, on a very good quarter, to your team and to your members, really impressive. Marshall, I would love to get — maybe if you could walk on the workplace, the Legacy Workplace even just on a GAAP basis from a $5.6 million operating profit in last year to $39.6 million this year. And I can’t remember if the $5.6 million included much of Lamex a drawdown of that. I thought that might have been included all balled into the gain number. So maybe you could give us some more color on that — on a walk from that — those margins because that’s pretty impressive.