Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc. (NYSE:SSD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Kurt Yinger: Great. Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone.

Mike Olosky: Hi, Kurt.

Kurt Yinger: You guys — hey, you talked about the price decrease on the connector side. Could you talk a little bit about pricing trajectory on fasteners a bit? And then, what kind of gives you confidence you won’t see or need to take another step lower on the connector side just given the moderation in steel?

Mike Olosky: Yes. So, Kurt, may — as you know, the steel price at one point more than tripled, then came back to half and then started to bounce back up again. And we continue to watch that closely because we need to — we believe our products deserve a premium and we believe that we need to watch that premium closely though. So, when we look going forward, we are actively watching the market, but we are also very much emphasizing innovation. We’re emphasizing service. We’re emphasizing generating for our demand partners. And so, we’re watching that whole equation closely as we go forward.

Kurt Yinger: Okay. All right. That makes sense. And then — go ahead.

Brian Magstadt: And on the faster question, no real — no price change on that.

Kurt Yinger: Okay, great. And then, Brian, in terms of the operating margin outlook, you kind of alluded to the expectation for some softening in U.S. housing starts. Is there any way to kind of ballpark what the underlying assumption is there?

Brian Magstadt: Well, we still aspire to — one of our ambitions is to grow above that housing market like we had mentioned in the prepared remarks for 2022. But just thinking how we will perform against what is looking like the prognosticators are thinking is going to be a pretty choppy 2023 from a housing perspective. I’m not going to give revenue guidance, but we would expect to continue to see a bit of noise in this year’s top-line impact on housing-related business.

Kurt Yinger: Okay. All right. Fair enough. And then, in terms of the ETANCO, is backlog something you track and/or is kind of significant there? And if so, what type of visibility does that give you into 2023 for that business?

Mike Olosky: Kurt, so ETANCO’s business model is very similar to Simpson and that we try to get orders out the same day or next day to the majority of our customers. So, we are ongoing working with the contractors and all the people that are installing the facades and the water grouping systems just to get a general sense of how the business is developing, but we’re not getting really longer-term orders and we don’t really have an open order book or backlog for that business.

Kurt Yinger: Got it. So, even though the commercial side is kind of a longer, I guess, construction process, you don’t necessarily have kind of the visibility at the front end?

Mike Olosky: Not in a way where you could put a KPI around it. No. I mean, we’re getting a general sense because we’re talking with those guys quite a bit, but not in a hardcore KPI to track. No.

Kurt Yinger: Okay. Makes sense. And then, my last one, just on EstiFrame. I know it wasn’t a big deal, but can you maybe talk a bit about that business and how you’re thinking about leveraging that with dealers and component manufacturers?