Vontier Corporation (NYSE:VNT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Morelli: So we’ve recognized some line in the industry. As you know, we grew more than 30%. It’s now in double digits. We see that coming down a bit as well. What’s essentially happened in the industry is that there is been a tremendous build-out. We had a recent conversation with a customer that had more than 100 car washes. And they are – the interesting thing about that dialogue is that they spend through 2022 really building out their infrastructure, building out the car washes. And 2023 has been a year where they have really been focused on building up, meaning making more operational efficiencies, sweating their assets more and answer really specifically about it. Patheon is a new offering to the market. It really is targeted and enabling carwash operators to be more effective with operational excellence, getting more throughput through which drops through to the bottom line, which is a good return on investment for them.

And so I think that, that positions us well for the market dynamics heading into 2024, and we anticipate further growth as a market leader here.

David Ridley-Lane: Got it. Thank you. And then just one quick numbers kind of question. In the repair solutions when do you lap the year-over-year reserve related adjustments and did you quantify the impact in the quarter? I may have missed it.

Anshooman Aga: Taking the first part of your question, the reserve-related adjustments the headwind ended in Q3. Q4 is actually an easier compare in Matco’s margins are going to be up materially in the fourth quarter or actually closer to 400 basis points up year-on-year for Q4. The whole decline in Q3 year-on-year was really between the reserve adjustments and about a $2.5 million tariff settlement. That – those were the two drivers for the year-on-year decline in Q3.

David Ridley-Lane: Okay, thank you very much and congratulations on the quarter.

Anshooman Aga: Thank you.

Mark Morelli: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Rob Mason from Baird. Please go ahead.

Rob Mason: Hi, yes. Good morning. I joined a little late, so I may not have caught this entirely, but I thought – you talked about derisking the second half or actually the fourth quarter a little bit. I inferred that some of the third quarter upside that we saw was related to that. Any particular areas that you would call out saw added strength due to that in the third quarter?

Mark Morelli: So let me start this off and I’ll let Anshooman jump in as well. Yes, I think what we – you may have seen our setup in the second half for Q3 had a really strong ramp also in Q4. And so what we are essentially able to do with some of our supply chain and customers that freed up some labor, product availability both for convenience store build out from not only the build-out of the convenience store and dispensers, but also a bit on the car wash side, too. So that gave us an ability to pull, if you will, Q3 – the Q4 demand into Q3, which we’re still raising full year, but it really enabled us to de-risk Q4.

Anshooman Aga: We saw that both in fueling and Mobility Technologies as our customer supply chains have eased with their project construction schedules, we were able to pull in some demand both on the fueling side above and below ground and then on the Mobilities Technology side. Also on the car wash side, as projects have continued to move, there is still a lot of demand for greenfields and as their construction schedules of these some – we saw some upside out there. So overall, we’re very pleased with derisking the second half of the year and with the strong results for the quarter.