W.W. Grainger, Inc. (NYSE:GWW) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

On the SG&A side, we expect modest leverage while we continue to make incremental investments towards our strategic initiatives to fuel our growth. In endless assortment, we are modeling operating margins to be roughly consistent to what we’ve seen in the back half of 2023 and 7.3% to 7.8% range as the segment rebaseline following Zoro’s revenue declines with the noncore B2C and B2C-like customers. At the business unit level, Zoro’s operating margins are expected to decline, while MonotaRO’s operating margins are expected to be neutral for the year. Turning now to capital allocation. We expect the business will continue to generate strong cash flow in the year with an expected range of $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion, implying operating cash conversion around 100%.

We plan to continue to execute a consistent return-driven approach to our capital allocation strategy, meaning our priorities remain largely unchanged from prior years. First, we look at investing in the business and both organic investment and opportunistic M&A. For 2024, we expect capital spending in the range of $400 million to $500 million. Spending here includes continued supply chain expansion in the United States as we worked to [indiscernible] facilities in the Pacific Northwest and the Houston area. We also plan to further invest in our homegrown data and technology capabilities, helping power our growth engines and further our customer value proposition. Lastly, sustainability-related spin remains a priority. We will continue to invest in projects with solid returns to help achieve our emissions targets.

On M&A, we remain highly selective, but are also open to investing in capabilities and acquiring the right assets to further our strategy. And we have a small dedicated team who continually evaluate opportunities in this area. Secondly, we expect to return the balance of our excess cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchase. As always, we’ll formally set our 2024 dividend in the second quarter, but I can say we remain proud of our history of increasing the dividend for 52 consecutive years we expect to do so in day this year. We do not tie our dividend payout to specific metrics. However, we anticipate consistent annual dividend increases in the high single digits to low double-digit percentage range every year. Lastly, we expect to allocate the balance of our cash flow to share repurchases and anticipate the amount to be between $900 million and $1.1 billion in 2024.

We think this return-focused allocation philosophy provides the organization optimal flexibility to efficiently manage investment while maximizing shareholder returns. In summary, rolling all this up at the total company level, as mentioned, we plan to grow top line by [indiscernible] 4% to 7% on the daily organic constant currency basis. Note that reported sales growth is a bit higher than our daily organic constant currency range as we are normalizing for the divestiture of our [indiscernible] ENR subsidiary, FX changes and the impact of 2 additional selling days in 2024 compared to the prior year. A reconciliation of these impacts is provided in the appendix of this presentation. Operating margin, as we discussed ranged from 15.3% to 15.8% leading to expected EPS growth of 3.6% to 10.5% or $38 to $40.50 per share.

From a seasonality perspective, we do expect both revenue and profitability to be more back half weighted as we move through the year. This includes a softer start in January from the timing of the New Year’s holiday and cold weather disruptions experienced mid-month across a large portion of the U.S. With this, January sales started slowly, but picked up momentum as not progress with preliminary results of 4.4% on a daily organic constant currency basis. On profitability with more muted inflation in the year, we won’t see the price timing favorability we normally captured in the first quarter. With this, those margins will show very little seasonality and remain reasonably subsistent with our full year gross margin outlook throughout the year.

For SG&A, we expect year-over-year deleverage in the first quarter as we ramp up investment spending in 2024. Leverage will improve each quarter, looking to a tailwind in the back half of the year. Altogether, this will drive EPS growth to be flat to slightly down in the first quarter and will ramp thereafter as the year [indiscernible] before I hand it back to D.G., I wanted to quickly touch on our long-term outlook and where we expect to take the business over the next several years. As we discussed on our last call, we made great progress towards the 2025 targets we rolled out at our Investor Day in September 2022. We remain on track to hit our revenue goals that are meaningfully ahead on most of our profitability targets. With this, we’re replacing our 2025 targets with an updated long-term earnings framework.

The framework is actually quite similar to what we’ve discussed previously, as we continue to target double-digit annual EPS growth in a normalized MRO market, driven by continued strong top line growth, including 400 to 500 basis points of annual market outgrowth in the High-Touch U.S. business and annual growth in the [indiscernible] stable gross profit margins, which should normalize from the 2024 baseline and SG&A growing Florida sales while still investing in demand generation activities to drive sustainable long-term growth. You will notice we made a few tweaks to the earnings framework, which largely offset. First, we’ve widened the top line outlook for analyst assortment as each business there is facing dynamics making it harder to achieve historical growth rate.

With MonotaRO, at this stage of their maturity, the business has onboarded most of the large and midsized business within the market. With this, the team is pivoting its marketing strategy from firm level of customer acquisition to end user penetration in an effort to expand total customer share win. As though, following the post-pandemic volume decline from B2C and B2C customers, the business is refocusing their efforts on B2B customers as they work to build long-term profitable relationships with the core — with this core customer set. As the business be focused, we think it’s prudent to widen range of growth outcomes for this segment over the next few years. Regardless, we still expect to deliver very strong growth through this segment and remain confident in the model’s ability to continue to take share and drive profitable operating scale to the total business overall.