RPM International Inc. (NYSE:RPM) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Josh Spector: Okay. No, that’s helpful. And I guess, I mean, if I could follow up, if you can comment kind of on the same vein. Have your order books been declining there? So I mean, some percentage of your products, you apply yourself. Are you seeing any difference in demand at this point? Or is there an expectation that you’ll see softening?

Frank Sullivan: Again, I’ll bifurcate that. In terms of industrial capital spending, we’re seeing pretty strong order books that would be in our flooring business. Our flooring business, it does their own application and we’re seeing good order flow into Carboline protective coatings into our fiber grade businesses. I think the real volatility here that would either meet our expectations or allow us to deliver some better performance than we currently anticipate is in our Tremco roofing business, where we also do a lot of the application ourselves to take the full contract. We have a really strong order book, but it seems to have been pushed later into the spring and the summer. And so back to my earlier comment, we’ve seen three sequential months of deterioration in commercial construction activity.

And so I think this spring will tell late spring, early summer as to whether the Tremco Roofing business backlog start to get to fill. The good news about that business is it’s 95% reroofing and/or maintenance and repair as opposed to new construction. But as you can see in the results, our Construction Products Group has had a weak start to the calendar year.

Josh Spector: Understood. Thank you.

Frank Sullivan: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Stephen Byrne with Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead.

Stephen Byrne: Yes. Thank you. How much of your revenue growth in the quarter was price versus volume? How much more price would you need to offset the raw material cost inflation you’ve seen over the last couple of years? How much of a delta is there to get back to where you would want to see EBIT margins?

Frank Sullivan: Sure. In the quarter, on a consolidated basis, Steve, price was about 13%. In €“ the only place where €“ segment-wise, while we don’t provide price or unit volume by segment, the only place where we had strong unit volume growth pretty consistently was in our Performance Coatings Group. On the flip side, consumer POS month by month has been down in the, let’s call it, low to mid-single-digit range. And again, that’s another category that we’re paying attention to relative to any perk up or strength this spring or summer.

Stephen Byrne: And where you need to push this price, Frank, in order to recover the raws from the last 2 years?

Frank Sullivan: In most categories, we’re where we need to be. We have taken some price in some of our roof coatings businesses and some of our other coatings businesses that are specific to certain raw materials. We still have some challenges in our consumer business, particularly related to metal packaging which is one of those outliers of 55% year-over-year. Alkyd resins prices have perked up a little bit there as TiO2. And so there are some challenges there that we will be looking to adjust to and the likelihood of what happens with price in the coming quarters is flat or up.

Stephen Byrne: Okay. Thank you, Frank. And can you just comment on how large of a customer Walmart is for you and whether you €“ whether any of your initiatives there are at risk given this recent agreement to have with PPG? I recall you had an e-commerce paint business, I thought, with Walmart. Maybe you can give an update on that?

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