PPG Industries, Inc. (NYSE:PPG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Ghansham Panjabi: Hi, guys, good morning. As it relates to the U.S. architectural, I mean, obviously, there’s bifurcation so far between yourself and some of the professional markets. How do you sort of see that evolving over time as the year unfolds? And then for European architectural, just given the extent of the volume weakness in the markets, can you just give us a sense as to how competitive the pricing backdrop is in the industry, just given the volume weakness?

Tim Knavish: Sure. Thanks, Ghansham. So let me start with the U.S. environment. I’ll start at a high level from a macro standpoint. Clearly, DIY is down partly because of what’s happening with consumer confidence, but also a bit a holdover from the COVID piece of DIY. And clearly, new housing construction going down, again, only 1% of our sales, but those two segments are down. Fortunately, for us, we’re much stronger in commercial and maintenance. And there, we still see backlogs with our customers. I think you know we do a survey every quarter with our professional customers here in the United States. And their backlogs are still floating in that 12- to 13-week range. So we still see some good demand there. And then as we move forward, we expect to continue to see growth from our Home Depot Pro program moving forward.

Now going over to Europe, the volume started to really deteriorate after the invasion last Q1, and was down double digits throughout all of 2022. The professional painter business down not nearly as much more in the single digits, but as we enter 2022, we’ll see particularly for Q1 — I’m sorry, 2023, Q1, we’ve got a little bit of a comp issue where we’re still comping part of the quarter to the pre-war era. But then once we get to Q2, we start to have, frankly, some positive comps because our total business in Q2 in Europe was down about 10% double digits, low double digits. So we do see it more or less kind of bouncing off the bottom, if you will, as we end Q1 and then comping better as we get into Q2.

Operator: Our next question comes from John McNulty with BMO. John, please go ahead.

John McNulty: Tim, you spoke in your prepared remarks about the target of mid- to high-teens margins for PPG going forward. Is it a function of just raw materials getting back to normal and kind of having that catch-up kind of finally been made? Or do you see a lot of manufacturing efficiency improvements that may have uncovered themselves through some of the supply chain problems, what have you? And if so, if it’s the latter, can you help us to understand what some of those levers might be?

Vince Morales: John, this is Vince. I’m going to start, and I’ll let Tim add some color here, but really three levers. One, we’ve been chasing, which is the raw material price, or total inflation price gap, which, again, we think will be kind of on that in early 2023. We call it weeks not uneven months. But the second, which I think is important is and you hit on it, John, we haven’t had a strong manufacturing couple of years here due to disruptions, due to supply disruptions, due to customer disruptions, COVID disruptions, due to churn in the workforce that many companies are seeing. So we do — that is not a significant number for us from a manufacturing perspective. But the third, which is very important, though, is we’re still down about 10% versus pre-COVID levels in terms of volumes spread throughout our portfolio. So, those are the three big levers and Tim can add color here.

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