Patterson Companies, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDCO) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Don Zurbay: And one thing I would mention is that in this particular quarter, Q2, our — so it’s an $0.08 miss from Street consensus to our reported results. In this quarter, I think there was a bit of a disconnect between consensus and maybe where we were expecting things to be. So I would view it a little bit like that number, $0.08 is a bit less for the miss in our perspective. And then we’re taking that out of the second half. But yes, definitely. Look, the three main things I’d call out in the second half that we’re considering are the slowdown in the high tech equipment market but continued strength in our consumables, in our Dental consumables portfolio, continued strength in our production business, doing things — some things to mitigate some of the weakness we’re seeing in companion and then stack on top of that, the cost actions we plan to take in the second half and any benefit from some of the competitor disruption that we’re going to have in November, particularly.

And that’s kind of — we put all that into the math formula and those are the main things I would call out to some puts, some takes, but it nets out to the $0.10 move we did in the guidance.

Jon Block: And maybe just to push you on Part B of that first question, your competitor’s Web site was down from some point in mid-October. So you did have a good Dental consumable number in a weakening market, up 5% ex-PPE. So was that a — sorry to frame it this way. Was that a clean number or do you think you saw some of that in the month of October? And have you started to — have you continued to see some tailwinds for the month of November? And then I’ll just ask my follow-up.

Don Zurbay: So the benefit in October, it was a two week period. So the one thing I would caution against is too much calculation on simple math for any of this just because of the reality of putting new customers into your system, making transitions, customer ordering patterns, et cetera, it never works out that way. But the benefit for us in October was approximately $2 million of revenue.

Jon Block: And then just to shift gears a little bit. Can you guys just talk about the Dental — call it the backlog with equipment and where that sits? And I just called it out because you got now back to back negative Dental equipment results, but core is doing well. The culprit seems to be high tech but I think core usually has the longer like lead time. And so I’m just trying to match almost like core orders, if you would, to your results. So maybe if you could just touch on to a certain extent to the backlog.

Don Zurbay: Well, we want to try to be very helpful here but not get too far ahead of ourselves on forward-looking type information. I guess I would just say that the dynamics we saw in the quarter which were that core was solid for us, but that the high tech equipment showed some softness, particularly late in the quarter. The backlog looks good. I think there’s still good investment happening but it’s more targeted. And we expect that core could hang in there, but the high tech, we’re going to show some continued weakness here for a period of time.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Johnson with Baird.

Jeff Johnson: So Don, maybe I can just ask for two clarifying questions from answers you just gave here. But one, you talked about a disconnect maybe between consensus in the second quarter versus what the company internal expectations might have been. EPS for the quarter was down 20% year-over-year. And so I guess, one, what would have been in the quarter that you would have internally been expecting such a sizable year-over-year contraction? And two, again, kind of is it just the cost actions and some of the cost savings that you’re now going to be kind of ratcheting into the model that helps you get back to kind of flattish EPS or even low single digit EPS growth that’s implied in the second half guidance?

Don Zurbay: I think it’s a combination of cost actions and some of the benefits we’re seeing. Maybe I’ll turn it over to Kevin Barry for a few more comments on that.

Kevin Barry: I think what I’d say about the quarter specifically, Jeff, in terms of our expectations, last year, in Q2, we had a few onetime benefits in stock comp and incentive compensation that we knew were not going to repeat this year. So we have that baked into our expectations. And then we also knew that here this quarter, we had some investment spending that was going to hit. And that really relates to the software investments we’re making and some of the fulfillment center and ERP investments Don mentioned in his comments. So we knew that we had that swing happening in our OpEx line for the quarter. And then I think we’re — and so that was all baked into our expectations. And I think what deviated from our expectations like we’ve been saying was the high tech equipment that really happened late in the quarter where it was a bit late for us to react to. So that was sort of what our Q2 estimate was built on.