Illinois Tool Works Inc. (NYSE:ITW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Larsen: Yes. Good morning, Tami. So you’re right. If you look at the margin improvement year-over-year, another really strong contribution from Enterprise Industries. I think the best performance in 2.5 years, which is really remarkable given where we’re at in the enterprise strategy. Price/cost, we talked about 210, and then 160 basis points of, I don’t want to call it headwind necessarily because these are investments that we’re making in our long-term organic growth initiatives, including new hires as well as then, obviously, the regular wage and benefit inflation that everybody else is seeing. That all adds up to about 160 basis points. And that’s how you get to — even with all of those investments, that we continue to make, you’re getting 200 basis points of margin improvement on a year-over-year basis to 26.5%, which I believe was a new record for the third quarter.

Tami Zakaria: Does that 150 basis points headwind continue in the fourth quarter and maybe in the next several quarters, how should we think about that headwind?

Michael Larsen: Yes, I think the normal run rate is somewhere — we’ve been running higher than that this year. The normal run rate and we’ll see how the plans roll up for next year. I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. But if you look at historically, that’s about 100 to 150 basis points of headwind.

Tami Zakaria: Got it. Can I ask one more quick one? The $0.12 headwind from the auto strike you’re calling out for the fourth quarter. Does that assume the strike continues through the end of the quarter? And what does that mean in terms of organic growth headwind for the fourth quarter?

Michael Larsen: Yes. So Tami, let me just broaden the lens maybe a little bit here. I think given the uncertainty around auto and the fact that the strike is now in the sixth week here, we decided that we take a more prudent approach, which is basically based on what we’re seeing in our businesses right now, maybe with room for things deteriorating a little bit further from where they are today. And if you take that quarter-to-date impact and extrapolate through year-end, that’s how you get the $0.12 of EPS adjustment that’s now embedded in our guidance. So assuming — to answer your question, it continues through year-end. If the strike ends before year-end, obviously, we’ll do better than that. If it gets worse, our businesses will do a great job in terms of reading and reacting to the conditions on the ground.

The optimist might say that some of those — that production will get deferred into next year. But obviously, a lot of uncertainty, and given that we don’t really want to pin down a revenue number, we’re just going to give you here the $0.12 of adjustment that I just laid out for you.

Tami Zakaria: Great. Thank you, so much.

Michael Larsen: Sure.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Obin from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Andrew Obin: Yes, good morning.

Michael Larsen: Good morning.

Andrew Obin: So question, I think before you were talking about sort of 25% of the portfolio slowing structure over the past couple of quarters. Have any of those markets bottom like electronics? And have any new markets started to slow? Or is it the same 25%? Just how do you look at the world?

Michael Larsen: Hi Andrew, so there’s definitely some puts and takes. I think, for example, if you had asked me that question last quarter, I would have said automotive OEM — automotive aftermarket would be in that category. They were up 10%. So just an example of things moving in and out. So I’m not sure it’s really that relevant to look at. But if you just look at what we would say now is kind of slowing to 25% on a combined basis, those businesses were down year-over-year, 3% in the third quarter. However, sequentially, they did improve from the second quarter by a percentage point, which I would say fairly stable. Talking about electronics and semi specifically, I think consumer electronics remains fairly weak. On the semiconductor side, you will recall that we’ve talked about an expectation from industry experts, I’ll call them as well as our customers that there would be a reacceleration of demand here in the second half of this year.