Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (NYSE:SWK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mike Rehaut: Sorry, about that. Appreciate the taking my question. Just wanted to make sure I fully appreciated the base case in terms of — I think you said earlier that it incorporates a view around repair remodel activity being down also low single-digits. I just want to make sure I understand that’s right. I mean, obviously, you have existing home sale turnover trending down 30% year-over-year currently. And I think that might be, at least in our view, a little optimistic. But just wanted to understand your assumptions behind that? And also, if I could just kind of shift gears on the modeling side, I appreciate any views on some of the other line items from a guidance standpoint, corporate expense, interest expense, other net, some of those line items would be helpful? Thanks.

Dennis Lange: Hey, Mike, I’ll take that. On the base case, as we said, the whole company we view in the base cases being down two to three points organically. Volume is more than that. There’s some coverage from price. If you look at tools organically, tools will be down about three to five points, volume down a little bit back from price. And then the second half, as Don mentioned, volumes down in the kind of 3% to 3.5%. And from an Industrial standpoint, we see that being up low single digits, both from price and from volume. So that’s the case for how we got to the base case.

Don Allan: I think the other thing that I would add is we €“ if you look back at history of Stanley Black & Decker and if you put the Great Recession in 2009 in a totally different category, because we had a significant amount of overbuild residential inventory, in particular, in housing and say that’s an unusual situation that’s probably not indicative of where we are today because we don’t have that type of overbuild situation and we don’t have the same type of leverage issues within the consumer in the housing market as well. The other recessions that Stanley Black & Decker has historically experienced, the average decline has been about 3% to 5%. And so when you think about it from that perspective and recognize that we just went through a period of time where we’re dealing with supply constraints and then a bit of a consumer dip in the back half of 2022, now we believe we’re going to see a bit of a pro dip here in 2023, we’re kind of aligned with our 3% to 5% in 2023 with that historical point of view.

There hasn’t been many recessions that have impacted housing beyond the 5% except for the one that I mentioned, which was the Great Recession, which is very different than usual. So it’s just something that we need to keep in mind as you factor all the different scenarios that Corbin went through in the presentation and really center around our base case. Our base case is very consistent with what history would say.

Corbin Walburger: Hey, Mike, just to touch on your other question around specific line items. As we said, the corporate expenses, we’ve really targeted to get back to 2019 levels. That’s where we expect them and then interest because rates have gone up and the quantum has gone up, you’ll probably see an increase in interest expense of about 20%.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rob Wertheimer with Melius Research. Your line is now open.

Rob Wertheimer: Hi. Good morning everybody.

Don Allan: Good morning.

Rob Wertheimer: To the extent you can comment, how was your pricing in Tools & Storage achieved in 4Q compare with your channel partners, your home center pricing achieved? I mean, is there still a risk of major discounting to clear out inventory or otherwise reflect an environment, or do you think that we’ve come close to balance there?