Hubbell Incorporated (NYSE:HUBB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tommy Moll: But jokes aside, here, the pie chart is very helpful. And you called out two, and the larger two of the components that are on your cost side, you continue to expect inflationary pressure, but on the raws, obviously, there’s some easing anticipated there. And my suspicion might be, that would be the most visible and most talked about from the customer standpoint. And so my question is, if you’re going to realize the two points wrap, which is really I think, just to hold price through the year, have you had to reframe or provide any increased visibility to your customers, as you’re facing more than quarters of your costs is inflationary. They’re not going to see that as much. How do we get confident you can hold?

Bill Sperry : Tommy, we have to use very similar visuals as what we’re sharing with you. And I think it’s our customers are very alive, for example, to labor inflation and wage inflation. And so I think that they kind of relate to where they see the inflation. And as you point out, when you look on a futures market, and you see the raw metals getting cheaper. That’s really only a small part of the whole picture. So we’ve had to have that be part of a conversation part of a relationship discussion, right. It’s not pure transactional, it’s not sending people letters ,right. It’s about having conversations and sharing the kind of analysis that you’re looking at today.

Tommy Moll: Appreciate that, Bill. As a follow up here on the electrical solutions, and market visibility you provided, it sounds very similar to the early peak you gave us for 2023 a quarter ago, at least in terms of the direction. But has anything changed versus a quarter ago? It sounds like your visibility is pretty limited first quarter, maybe first half? But is there any change versus what we heard from you last quarter?

Bill Sperry : Yes. I think the part that we gained insight was the inventory management actions that appeared to us to have taken place in the fourth quarter. And if those are the new, Tommy, you could argue it might be a little softer than we had communicated. And that’s why it’s so important to us to see the pickup in orders in the first three plus weeks here in January. So I know it’s a month is not the largest set of data points, but at least it’s been sustained through the month. So I think that those two offsets, yet probably do get us back to where we were when we talked to you in October. But they’re kind of equal and opposite reactions, I think.

Operator: Next question comes from Josh Pokrzywinski with Morgan Stanley.

Josh Pokrzywinski: Hi, good morning, guys. So not to look a gift horse in the mouth with the IIJA disclosure and all. And I’ll echo what everyone else has said on how helpful that is. Maybe just to wonder if you could maybe estimate IRA, is that in your mind, bigger, smaller, longer duration, shorter duration, like how do you feel about that relative to what you put out there with IIJA?

Gerben Bakker: Yes, I would say, Josh, the IRA impacts us to a lesser extent, but it does benefit us as well and here rather than direct funding, this is more about tax credits. But if you think about it, they extended the renewable tax credits for solar and wind. And that’s an area that both our utility and electrical businesses benefit from the EV incentives. And while we’re not directly in EV the balance of systems that goes around with this infrastructure, we benefit well, of as well. So I would say it does affect and coming back to it’s so difficult to pinpoint what exactly what percentage of our growth will be tied to this. I would say it’s helpful as well.