Fastenal Company (FAST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody. My name is Willard D. Oberton. I'd like to welcome you to the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Fastenal Company. Our first order of business is an invocation. And for that, we have Pastor Mark Dumke, retired pastor of Faith Lutheran Church here in Winona. Mr. Dumke?

Good morning, friends. It's good to be with you again. Like you, I am mindful of how the whole world has been visited with difficulty and uncertainty, upending the lives of people, communities and corporations around the globe. Some have adapted, some are just holding their own and some, like Fastenal, are thriving. Like you, I am grateful for the hopeful determined manner that drove the entire Blue Team to seek opportunities to flourish in such a challenging time. May we also be grateful for people throughout the world who continue to rise up to meet these unprecedented challenges. Mindful of the work before us today, I invite you to unite in a prayer of gratitude for opportunity, for hope and restoration. Creator God, sustain us with your hope and continue to open the doors of opportunity for this corporation and for every person within it. As we gather to review our accomplishments, challenges and the plans for the future, bless the work of our assembly and this corporation. May our common purpose bring benefits to our customers, blessings to employees, leaders, shareholders and the communities in which we live and serve. Amen.

This Annual Meeting of Shareholders of the Fastenal Company is now convened. I am Willard D. Oberton, Chair of the Board of the company, and I will act as Chair of this meeting. Mr. John Milek, who is Vice President, General Counsel for the company, will act as Secretary of this meeting. But before we get started with that, I'd like to introduce some very important people, the founders of our company. Robert A. Kierlin, Henry K. McConnon, John D. Remick, Stephen M. Slaggie and Michael M. Gostomski, 5 tremendous people. They have done so much for our community and for so many other people. I really appreciate everything they've done. I also would like to introduce our Board of Directors. This group of people, very talented people, has done a tremendous job of leading our company through a very difficult year with everything that's gone on in 2020. And I'd like to start out with Michael J. Ancius, Michael J. Dolan, Stephen L. Eastman, Daniel L. Florness, Rita J. Heise, Hsenghung Sam Hsu, Daniel L. Johnson, Nicholas J. Lundquist, Scott A. Satterlee and Reyne K. Wisecup. I will now ask Mr. Milek to report on the number of shares represented at this meeting and to conduct the voting on the proposals to be considered at this meeting. Following the vote, our Chief Executive Officer and President, Daniel L. Florness, will report to you on the company.

Thank you, Mr. Oberton. Before starting, as we publicly disclosed on February 26, 2021, due to the public health impact of the coronavirus outbreak, this meeting is being held in a virtual format. In this virtual format, you are participating in this meeting virtually, and the rules of the Annual Meeting are available on the meeting website. If you wish to participate, please submit your questions on the matters set forth in the website in the space provided on the virtual meeting screen. There are 3 management proposals to be voted on. The record date for the determination of the holders of the company's common stock entitled to receive notice of and vote at this meeting was fixed by our Board of Directors as February 24, 2021. I also present to the meeting an affidavit of a manager of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., attesting that the notice of the meeting, together with the proxy statement, a proxy card and certain other documents, were mailed on or about March 15, 2021, to each holder of record of the company's common stock as of the close of business on the record date. The affidavit of mailing of the notice of this meeting will be attached to the minutes of this meeting as Exhibit A. A certified list of holders of the company's common stock will be filed with the books and records of the company. As of the close of business on the record date, there were outstanding entitled to vote at this meeting 574,341,239 shares of common stock. Each share of common stock is entitled to 1 vote. For a quorum to be present, a majority of the 574,341,239 votes entitled to be cast must be present in person at the virtual meeting or by proxy at this meeting. On a preliminary count, there are represented at the meeting, either by attending the virtual meeting or by proxy, a majority of the votes entitled to be cast at the meeting. Therefore, a quorum is present for the transaction of business. A record of the proxy submitted to the meeting and the ballots of the individuals appointed as proxies and of the shareholders voting via the meeting website will be filed with the books and records of the company. Ellen Stolts has been appointed to act as the inspector of election with respect to all matters to be voted upon at the meeting or any adjournment thereof. The oath of the inspector of election has been administered and will be attached to the minutes of this meeting as Exhibit B. Copies of the minutes of the last Annual Meeting of the company held on April 25, 2020, are available on the meeting website. All shareholders of record as of the close of business on February 24, 2021, may vote on the matters to be considered today. If you wish to vote at the virtual meeting, please follow the directions available on the meeting website. We will now take up the business of the meeting. We have 3 matters to be considered by our shareholders today. The first is the election of directors for the coming year. The Board of Directors of the company has nominated the following 9 persons for election to the Board to serve until the next regular meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected and qualified: Scott A. Satterlee; Michael J. Ancius; Stephen L. Eastman; Daniel L. Florness; Rita J. Heise; Hsenghung Sam Hsu; Daniel L. Johnson, Nicholas J. Lundquist; and Reyne K. Wisecup. I will now open the floor to a motion to formally place before this meeting the nomination of these individuals. I recognize Ms. Shannon Ely.

My name is Shannon Ely, and I'm a shareholder of the company. I move to formally place before this meeting the nomination of the 9 individuals identified for election to the Board of Directors to serve until the next regular meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected and qualified.

As no other nominations have been made in accordance with the procedures established in the company's bylaws, I declare the nominations to be closed. The next matter for consideration today is the ratification of the appointment of KPMG LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2021. Ms. Carrie Person, a partner of that firm, is participating remotely and can answer any questions that you may have during the Q&A portion of this meeting. I will now open the floor to a motion to formally place before this meeting a resolution concerning the ratification of the appointment of KPMG LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2021. I recognize Mr. Nate Hansen.

My name is Nate Hansen, and I'm a shareholder of the company. I move that the following resolution be adopted. Resolved that the appointment of KPMG LLP as independent registered public accounting firm for the company for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021, be and hereby is ratified.

It has been moved that the appointment of KPMG LLP as independent registered public accounting firm for the company for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021, be ratified. I will now open the floor to a motion to formally place before this meeting a resolution concerning the approval of executive compensation. I recognize Mr. Kevin Larson.

My name is Kevin Larson, and I am a shareholder of the company. I move that the following resolution be adopted. Resolved that the shareholders of the company approve, on an advisory basis, the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in the compensation discussion and analysis, compensation tables and related disclosures contained in the section of the proxy statement for the 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders captioned executive compensation.

It has been moved that the compensation of certain of our executive officers be approved. If you wish to vote on these motions, please vote in the manner described on the meeting website. If you have a appointed another person's proxy to vote your shares and have not terminated that proxy, you should not vote on the meeting website. The polls are now closed and the votes will be counted. While the votes are being counted, Mr. Dan Florness, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will report to you on the company. After the conclusion of this report, we will answer any questions that you may have relating to the company and its activities. Thank you.

Good day, everybody, and thanks for joining us for today's Annual Meeting. And Will and John, thanks for getting things started. And Pastor Mark, it is a pleasure to hear your voice once again. Pastor Mark retired from our church several years ago. So I don't have the opportunity to see and hear Pastor Mark as in years past. When I think of 2020, I think of a very chaotic year for all of society regardless where you hail from. When I think of it specifically to the Fastenal organization, my biggest thought to the shareholders of Fastenal, I think you should be really proud of what the Blue Team did in 2020 and continues to do in 2021. And that was stepping forward and identifying suppliers, partners to serve the needs of our customers, both existing and new. And as you'll see, as I go through the slide deck, we have some new customers this year. And I think we did a good job of prioritizing how we could help society look out for each other and get through this in one piece. But let's first take a look at the numbers. If you look at the year, we grew about 6%. Our operating earnings and our income, net earnings, grew faster than that. And our diluted EPS grew about the same, 8.5%. It's when you get to the middle of the chart that things start to really look weird. And that is we started off the year -- end of 2019 was a weakening environment. When we got into 2020, fastener growth was sluggish. In fact, we were slightly negative. When we got into the second quarter, it got really weird. And for 2020, fasteners went negative about 7%. Now many of you know fastener product line, hence our name, is our largest product line, it's our original product line, so it's a very mature product line. Fasteners really tell you what's going on in the underlying economy. It's when you look at safety supplies, you see an explosion of need. And I'm pleased to say that we were able to step in and serve much of that need. We try to give you a comparison by if we pull out things like disposable respirators, think N95 masks, KN95 masks, the 3-ply masks that have become a norm in society, and you take out gloves, and we -- look, we removed all gloves because there's such a range of needs. You can see our growth there was still quite strong, in that organizations and people, in general, operated in a more safe fashion in 2020, and you see it show up in our numbers. That residual piece of the safety product is growing around 35%. And finally, if you look at all the other product lines combined, it's about half our business historically, that was slightly negative. And what really the story is there, it probably would have been deeper negative, but there are some products that are in there in our janitorial supplies. Think of sanitizing products, hand sanitizers, et cetera. That's what kept that from being more negative than it was. Finally, cash. Cash is an important ingredient in any organization, especially a distribution organization. Our #1 use of cash in most years is funding things like working capital, accounts receivable as we grow, inventory to serve that need. And what you see is our inventory actually contracted slightly in 2020. Now that's not atypical in a slower economic period because you're not growing your inventories. But 2020 wasn't typical. In 2020, we added more safety stock. When I talk about safety stock, I'm not talking safety products. I'm talking depth of product into our system to make it more resilient. We also added a lot of safety products, particularly things like masks. And so despite all that, our team did a wonderful job managing working capital and it showed through in our cash flow statement. Secondly, the previous 5 years -- previous 10 years, we've made very sizable investments in things like vending, in things like automating our warehouses. A bit of that is behind us from the standpoint of a massive increase. So you actually saw a lower year for capital expenditures. We did buy back some stock in the early part of the year, which put us in a position to not only pay out our regular 4 dividends that we've been doing for many years. We paid out a supplemental dividend late in the year and ended up paying a little -- a little bit more than $800 million in 2020. When I think of the key ingredients to supporting success in 2020, 3 things come to mind: strong cash flow, which I just touched on; sourcing agility; and decentralized decisions, a hallmark of the Fastenal organization. When I think of the strong cash flow, that's despite the fact, as I just said, we made sizable investments in inventory. We also deployed handheld technology throughout our network. We deployed just over 8,000 devices. Mobility. Think of an Android device or an iPad, devices like that, for our branch and on-site personnel to use. We've planned on the rollout to be very slow. It's a massive change to any organization. Because of COVID, we compressed into about 6 months, from January to June of 2020, what would have been probably a 12- to 18-month rollout of handheld devices. Because they also created a means for us to have social distance in our work, and it created a safer environment for our employees. Finally, we had the opportunity early in the year to acquire the underlying technology that is our vending platform, that operates our vending platform. The owner of the business, approaching 70, wanted to do some changes in his business, and he approached us about acquiring the technology. We jumped at the opportunity, and we believe that positions us well going forward but it was still a very sizable outlay of cash in 2020. Sourcing agility. An agile organization has speed. We have a wide-ranging supplier network, we have global sourcing capabilities and we have the ability to commit financial and organizational resources. It put us in a position to move faster than anybody else. And it shines through in that safety chart you saw a second ago in our ability to serve the market. Finally, decentralized decisions. Bob Kierlin many years ago saw the wisdom in challenging and empowering everybody in the organization to make decisions. That type of organization shines through in a year like 2020 because you aren't looking at others to make decisions for you. You're making decisions on your own because you've been doing that for years and you're quite skilled at it. It means we move faster, our customer response is faster, we can utilize the resources of the organization and our supplier network better, and we adapt. We adapt to the environment. Looking at -- getting back to a little bit of thought that we saw a few minutes ago on the product lines, I thought this would be also a helpful way to display. It is the last 5 quarters. So the 4 quarters of 2020, the first quarter of 2021 that we just reported 1.5 weeks ago. So you can see fasteners went negative, very seriously negative there in the second quarter, and reemerged with growth in the first quarter of 2021, a sign that there's some healing going on in the underlying economy because our fastener product is very cyclical. Secondly is looking at our safety products, and you see that surge in the second quarter, which continued in the third and fourth but to a much lesser degree. A first happened for Fastenal in 2021 -- in that second quarter of 2020. For the first time ever, the fastener product line was not our largest product line in that quarter. Safe -- we did more in safety products than we did in fasteners. And for a 3-month period, fasteners were displaced. As we move further away, and again, the second view looks at it without the disposable respirators, the face masks, the gloves. Just to give you a comparison, very strong surge there as well. And then you see the other product lines. Directionally, they look a lot like fasteners, just not as extreme. This is not looking at what we sell, it was looking at who we sell to. And the layout is a little different. The first 2 bars are calendar 2019 and 2020. The third and fourth bar is the second quarter of 2019 and the second quarter 2020. So you can see how fasteners as a percentage of our business dropped off meaningfully in the year, very meaningfully in the second quarter. You can see how nonres construction dropped off but not quite so pronounced. The next 2 should really stand out for you. So warehousing. What is a warehousing customer? It's a customer with warehouse operations. Typically, it's a vending customer, and we're in there supporting the needs of their employees. A lot of those warehouses support the retailers that you know and use every day, maybe the e-commerce partner that you use every day. You can see how that business exploded. It's a relatively small piece of our business, but it exploded both in the second quarter and for the year. You also see it in the government sector. Government has historically about 4% of our revenue. In the second quarter of last year, it exceeded 10% of our revenue. Again, I'm pleased as a -- not only the President and CEO, but as a shareholder of Fastenal, to know that there were circumstances where we provided a unique help to society to get through this COVID period. Finally, you see all the remaining, and it starts to kind of look like the nonres construction, it fell off a little bit. When I think of -- and I've highlighted these points in the President's letter this year. 5 things stand out to me for 2020. One, we run and learned faster than anyone else. We've had our own captive training program, our own Fastenal school of business for a little over 20 years. In 2020, we did more training than we did in 2019. And in 2019, we did more training than 2018. In fact, in 2020, we did about 11% more training, and that's without any instructor-led training face-to-face. Our online accelerated, our virtual instructor-led accelerated, and folks still needed and wanted to learn in a period like 2020. We rally to support each other. We had a customer that was coming back to work last summer. We rallied 150 people in the state of Indiana to step up and support return-to-work kits and produced them ahead of schedule for that customer. We have the skill set to help each other and to help others. And I think that's true of any organization where you have a lot of people capable of making decisions and moving quickly. When we point a finger, we typically point it at ourself, saying to our partners, saying to our customers, saying to our suppliers, saying to each other, "We've got you covered here. We'll have the product for you." And then finally, we always build for the future. And I think the deployment of 8,000 mobility devices is a perfect example of that. We didn't pull into a cocoon in 2020. We kept making, in some cases, accelerating the things we do to build into the future. So let's talk a little bit about the evolution of Fastenal. And I've shared this with you in the past but I think it's good for us to revisit because knowing where you come from helps you understand where you're going and how you get there. So when I think of the organization, I joined back in the mid-1990s, primarily fasteners. We were branch-based. We had started in Winona, Minnesota, a town about 25,000, 30,000 people We had expanded through the Midwest. By the mid-1990s, we were in the Lower 48 states of the U.S., we were in a handful of provinces of Canada. And our footprint was a bit more rural because that's where we had opened and spread across. And a lot of the major metros we went into, we thought of them as a city, and we'd open a branch or 2 but didn't really go after the potential of that market until some years later. Where are we today? We still sell fasteners but we sell a lot more. We are still branch-based largely but we're a supply chain partner to our customers. Branch is our mode if it's a smaller customer or a smaller location. If the economics justify it, we'll move on site and set up shop inside the 4 walls of the customer's facility. We're in 25 countries. We're in North America, South America, Europe and Asia, and we continue to expand in each of those continents. And our footprint has changed a bit. Just over 50% of our revenue today is in larger metropolitan areas. Think communities over 500,000. That's over half our revenue. And ultimately, in future, I think that area has 70% of our revenue. As we migrate from rural areas to urban areas, as we morph to more of a supply chain organization, our demographics are changing, too. This slide, the top 2/3, we shared with our employees back in 2020 at our Annual Employee Expo, and you see 3 discrete periods of time. 2005 to 2009, 18% of our hiring was female. And the italicized on the far right, 10% was minority. In that second 5-year period, 28% of our hiring is female and 13% is minority. In the final 5-year period that 28% has grown to 34% and the 13% has grown to 19%. I'm pleased when I look at these trends because it demonstrates that expansion of the talent pool from which we draw. In each of the 5-year periods, the percentage of females interested in joining our organization is increasing, and that's a win for everyone. The italicized figures on the far right, as I mentioned earlier, major minority hiring, and it tells a similar story. I suspect the improvement involves the growing presence of our organization in urban as well as rural areas and the growth of our business in all 50 states. Bottom line, we're expanding the pool from which we draw. There are only 2 negatives in these trends. The first isn't readily evident. In both 2018 and 2019, our female full-time hiring at the branch and on-site dipped below 30%, and we don't completely understand why. One year had a very strong economy; the second, a much weaker environment. The second negative, I'm very disappointed when I look at 2020 full-time female hiring. We dipped to 25%. We haven't seen a percentage that low since 2012. 2020 has had a lot of impact on a lot of people. Parents out there know what impact it's had on our kids and society with schools being closed. In many cases, what we see is changes in our hiring because of changes in application patterns. Fewer females are applying today, more are choosing to stay home with their kids. And I welcome the day when those numbers reversed themself, and we see 30%, 40-plus percent of our hiring being female-based. We continued, I'm pleased to say, to see progress on our hiring of minorities, about 21% of our hiring this year. And this is full-time hiring in our branch and on-site network. And the reason I separate that out from everything else, this is the piece I personally look at because our distribution centers are drawing from a local population and they look like that local population, whether it be a Winona distribution center or a Dallas distribution center in Atlanta or Modesto, California. And -- but branches are different in that we're recruiting typically from 2- and 4-year colleges in the marketplace to bring people in, work for us part time and then join us long term as a full-time hire. This is a busy slide, and you've seen it before, And again, I think it's useful to understand what the business looks like and where we've come from. So when we were that $2 billion organization back in 2007, we were largely a U.S. and Canadian distributor. We did about $30 million in that all else category that shows up at 0.0. National accounts was about 30% of our business. Fasteners and non-fasteners were equal halves to the organization. FM technology, so that's Fastenal Managed Inventory; our FAST Vend or vending platform; our FAST Bin or bins with intelligence embedded in them; or our FAST stock, where we're going out and we're either using technology or visually looking at bin stock programs, keep fill programs and supplying that, were all relatively small. In fact, on that FAST Stock, since it was a manual process, we don't have any tracking to tell you how big a business it was. It would have registered back in the 2008 time frame -- 2007 time frame. We were largely branch-based. Our average branch did about 70,000 a month. Average on site, around 100,000. And our revenue per employee, full-time equivalent at the branch and on-site, were in that $1,000 to $2,000 neighborhood, depending on the type of site. Go to several years ago when we were a $5 billion company. You see a dramatic change in the all else. So that $30 million of non-U.S. and Canadian business is now $400 million. You see national accounts representing about half of our business. And for what it's worth, that NA-like is a subset of the second line local. And NA-like is larger local customers that need some of the same resources as a national account. But since they're not multisite or multistate or multi-region, we feel the best resources we can bring to them are local resources. It might be a government customer, it might be a large local manufacturing plant or manufacturing facility in that community. So it's like a national account, but it's in our local numbers, and you see that starting to grow a bit. Fasteners are now our largest product line but the non-fasteners have gotten bigger and represent $3.3 billion out of that $5 billion organization. FMI technology, vending. We have 81,000 devices. We talk about them now as an equivalent unit, so 67,000 devices. And we're starting to roll out bins. And the reason we went to that machine equivalent unit designation, so we can compare it apples and apples to the bin platform because it's a different economic investment, it's a different revenue expectation. In FAST Stock, we're able to start measuring it. It's about 6% of our sales. Branches are still the predominant piece of our business but on-sites have changed dramatically in a few years, and we have almost 1,900, to be exact, on-site locations. Our average branch is a lot bigger. It's double the size it was in 2007. Our average on-site is a little bit bigger. What that means is we now have the ability to more aggressively invest in our locations because our scale is kicking in on a location-by-location basis. Finally, you see some productivity gains occurring as our average location gets larger. Our dollars per FTE, that's a daily number, is about $1,600 at the branch and about $2,700 at the on-site. Now let's look to the future, that $10 billion organization. U.S. and Canada continue to grow. The rest of the world grows even faster. National accounts is probably 70% of our business. The NA-like, that local business that feels like national accounts, is another 20%. And 90% of our revenue is that bigger customer, 10% of our revenue is that smaller local customer. Fasteners continue to grow but non-fasteners continue to grow ever faster. And FMI technology, I believe, becomes 65%, maybe 70% of our revenue, and these are speculation as far as the pieces, but you see our ability to illuminate the supply chain for the customers enhanced, our ability to provide data and analytics to the customers enhanced because we're gathering more and more activity, components of the business in an area that's very difficult to capture. You see our on-sites are actually a bigger part of our business than the branch. Our average branch and on-site become ever larger, and you see the economics in our revenue per FTE at the bottom. We'll become more and more efficient as we scale up the business. It's all about all these elements across the top there to serve that customer local. And I think that's an element of Fastenal that isn't always appreciated is that when we're having the discussion, whether it's the largest customer in the marketplace or the smallest, we can provide a service that's local where our competitors that are local don't have the scale to bring the resources. Our competitors that are national and international don't have that local presence to bring it right to the shop floor, to bring it right to the customer's facility. It puts us in a very unique spot, and customers recognize that, and they recognized it in 2020. So over the last several weeks, and into the next week or so we're hosting our annual Fastenal Expo. Now this is an event when we bring in customers. We share with those customers a bit about Fastenal. Our suppliers are part of it. It's been an event we've been doing for years. We typically host it in Nashville, Tennessee. Last -- 2 and 3 years ago, we hosted it in Denver, Colorado. Last year, we had to cancel it because of COVID. It's held in April of each year. This year, we couldn't do it in person so it's not as strong of an event as we'd like from an in-person perspective because there's nothing like touching and feeling the environment in which you operate. But it's a means to engage with our customer, and I'm pleased to say we're running a successful event. A little bit of fatigue, I think, on everybody's part of another video call or going to a conference electronically. But we're able to engage and share with our customer what we're about as an organization and how we can help their business. One of the elements to that environment, to that expo, is a technology road map, and it's -- and we're going to break here and let you watch it. And a couple of things should stand out: the level of service we can provide, the devices that enhance that service, the data behind the scenes. Another thing that should also jump out, we do a lot of things ourself for our customer and for ourselves. This video was produced internally in Fastenal. It's our third one like this. And I'm pleased to say not only does it do a wonderful job of illuminating what we're about, it's really professionally done. So let's take a look at the video. [Presentation]

Welcome back, and I hope you enjoyed that video highlighting some of the things about Fastenal. And before I get to recognizing members of the Blue Team, I'd like to recognize 2 people who have no connection to the Blue Team. Sandy and Pete live in Montana. And at 3 in the morning, back in February of 2021, it was 32 below 0. And Gabriel, one of our drivers, was going on the Interstate in Montana. And as some of you know this, when it gets very cold, diesel fuel can gel up even if you're running on winter mix, and Gabriel experienced that. His semi lost power, it's 32 below. And in that part of Montana, there is no cell service. Close to the Interstate was the home of Sandy and Pete. At 3 in the morning, they welcomed Gabriel into their home, let him use their phone to call for 24-hour road assistance, offered him some hot chocolate and some warm food and helped another human being in need. And I want to say thank you to those 2 individuals for helping Gabriel out of the jam and helping Fastenal and the Blue Team. As in years past, some things that we do at Fastenal is we love the idea of people deciding to join Fastenal. We ask people -- we find great people. We ask them to join. We endeavor to give them a reason to stay. One reason is how we treat each other. Another reason might be how we develop and train and challenge each other. Every year in -- at our leadership meeting, we recognize our 25-year employees. And this year, we weren't able to do that in person. So next year, when we get back together and we are planning to get back together in December, we'll have 2 years' worth. We'll have the class of 1995 and the class of 1996. That's a meaningful one for me personally because I joined Fastenal in 1996. And on June 17 of this year, I'll personally celebrate 25 years. This is our group, 74 people, 13, we couldn't convince to send in a photo. That's not their gig, but this is a group of people. And one thing you might notice and you might have noticed it when I put up the picture last year as well, back at that point in time, about 10% of our employee base was female. And so when you look at this list of 74 people, you looked at the 61 last year, about 10% are female. And earlier, I shared with you how those trends are changing. And my comment to this group of 74, and for the first time, we have a person not from United States, [ Darryl ] up in the upper right corner, about 3 in. He's Canadian. He joined us back in the mid-1990s. We opened in Canada late in 1994. I'm glad to say Darryl's still here, I know him personally. My thank you to these 74 people, not just for deciding to make Fastenal your career but for the paths you've opened and created for so many others that you've worked with in that 25-year period. You've made us a better organization and served many customers along the way. This is a quick snapshot of within our organization right now, we have 441 25-year employees. We've had over -- just over 500 or about 500 employees that have hit that 25-year mark but about 60 of them have retired. We have 131 employees over 30 years, 30 employees with 35-plus, 8 with 40 years-plus. In fact, we've had 12 people hit that milestone in the history of the company, and 8 of them are still with us. It tells me a couple of things. One, it tells me we find people when they're young, and they choose to stay and make a career of the Fastenal organization. Speaking of making a career, we are saying goodbye later this morning to 2 long-serving directors. The first one, Mike Dolan. I have personally known Mike from the late 1980s, I actually worked with him early in my career. And in the late 1990s, when we were looking to -- and Mike is a financial expert, that's his background. When we were looking to add resources to our Audit Committee, we are a public company, and the expectations and needs of the Audit Committee were rising. My wife said to me one day, she says, "You've known Mike Dolan for years. Why don't you see if Mike's available?" And I mentioned that to Bob Kierlin, and Bob's like, "That's a great suggestion." And we reached out to Mike Dolan. Mike joined our Board in 2000. He is a 20-year plus Director. And we thought we were getting an individual with financial expertise. With Mike, we've found that and we found so much more. Those of you that know Mike personally know him to be a passionate, sometimes strong opinions, willing to make a decision, willing to stand with and behind somebody to support them and also willing to join the organization not just in a perfunctory role but to join an organization and understand what is the DNA of this organization. And Mike had a lot of conversations in the early years with Mike Dolan -- excuse me, with Bob Kierlin, And in those conversations, he really wanted to learn what makes Fastenal tick, and Mike embraced that and brought that to the organization and reinforced that every day he was here. Again, I've known Mike for over 30 years. I'm personally going to miss him from our Board, and I think all of you will miss his presence from our Board. And I wish he and Celia many years of happiness in the future. Secondly, Will Oberton, Every one of you know Will. He's been a very visible part of our organization actually, since 1980, when he joined as a young man in Central Minnesota. He decided to join Fastenal because he learned, "Hey, I could run a branch. I could run a business." And Bob saw in Will the ability to make very good decisions, and Bob promoted Will along, gave him more and more responsibility. And Will was my predecessor as President and CEO of the organization. He's been on our Board. He retired from an employee status back in 2015. He's been on our Board since 1999. And similar to Mike, Will, I will miss your presence on the board. I missed your presence and your knowledge and your insight within the organization, and I wish you and Shirley years of happiness as you move forward in your life. With that, we'll turn it over to the question-and-answer, and I welcome any questions that can come up. Thank you.

The first one is do you anticipate a stock split in 2021? Now if I were kidding around with him, I would probably say that sounds like a question that comes from Steve Slaggie. But...

Might be.

Might be. But you know I honestly don't know. The -- if you look at the history of the organization, we've split the stock about 2x every decade since going public. And it's not a common thing anymore to see stock splits. We have historically decided to keep it an element of Fastenal. Ultimately, it's a Board decision, but I'm hopeful in the years to come that the opportunity will present itself through strong stock appreciation that we see the need to split the stock or the opportunities split the stock. But for 2021, I honestly don't know. The second question is what is the construction status of the downtown headquarters in Winona? And first off, it's not our headquarters, it's just another building. It is -- we decided some years ago that we needed additional space in the Winona community. As our organization has grown, our head count to serve that large organization has grown as well. And we thought it would be good for our employee base and frankly, good for the community, if we added additional space downtown as a boost to the downtown economy. So the -- we anticipate moving into the building around Thanksgiving this year. The 400, 500 people we're moving down, some are in that neighborhood. The building probably handle about 600 eventually. And I'm pleased to say I'm going to stay out on Theurer Boulevard as I frankly like walking through the warehouse periodically. But I welcome the new building downtown and what it means for our employees and the community in general. Third question is, do you plan to continue the virtual meetings in future years? Man, I hope not. We reluctantly did it last year. The chaos of the moment kind of mandated it. We had originally toyed with the idea of trying to have a meeting in person this year. Unfortunately, society and the status of COVID wasn't quite ready to allow that to happen. We are hopeful that next year we will have an in-person Annual Meeting, potentially downtown at our -- in our new facility or in the parking lot near our new facility. The next question is how do you envision 5G technology impacting the business and Fastenal's role in deploying 5G? If you think about the pieces that we covered in that video and the technology that we deploy within customer locations, typically, we ask our customer 2 simple things -- well, 3 things actually when we deploy any of those types of technology. The first is a willing relationship that allow us to serve their needs. The second is a 110 outlet, and the third is a spot for one of those little blue cords to hook up to the Internet. So most of our vending and -- FAST Vend and FAST Bin technology relies on simply an Internet connection that is a landline, if you will. There are locations where there isn't readily available an Internet connection. There, we do use cellular today. And as the infrastructure migrates to 5G, that will make that a bit more robust. But what we've really attempted to do with our technology is make it as basic as possible from a connectivity perspective because the less you overthink it -- it's like overthinking the plumbing in your house. You're more likely to have problems with the drain plugging up. I've heard an expression years ago, technologies to work like a toaster. We like our vending machines to work like a toaster. They're really, really reliable. There are severe logistics problems in the world. What are you doing to address them, containers, ship offloading, et cetera? You're absolutely correct. As the economy is opening back up, as the industrial piece and the consumer piece is opening up, there's a dramatic increase in product moving around the globe, and some capacity to move product had been lost in 2020. And like anything else, when you have a surge in demand, you have bottlenecks, and those bottlenecks shine through. A number of weeks ago, we saw that bottleneck with a ship sitting cock-eyed in the Suez Canal. You look off the West Coast of North America, you see lots of examples of ships lying in anchor waiting to unload their containers. The biggest thing that we do -- and our covenant with our customer is really simple. We're a supply chain partner. We will provide -- our goal is to provide you with a reliable and resilient supply chain, great quality product and a very efficient price for all those things that we wrap into that supply chain need. So really what we're doing is we're going deeper into predicting the future and deeper into anticipating what a customer is going to need, not in August, not in July but out into September, October, November in getting that product queued up and ready to come. And as containers are being loaded in different ports, we're also looking at it and saying, what's our gap analysis look like? Do we have a need to pull some pallets or some product off that container and send it via a different mode? Or do we need to do in some fill-in buy? Those are expensive propositions. But when the alternative is running a supply chain dry, I'll get back to our 3 covenants, and the first one is a great and reliable supply chain. Will you be holding the Fastenal Expo again in Denver in the near future? Can shareholders attend Fastenal Expos? Our plan is next year to move it back to Nashville, I believe that's the case. I used to have to check with Jean a year ahead to see where she's planning on it being next year. We have great facilities that we work with both in Nashville and 2 years ago in Denver. The one thing nice about Nashville, it's very central to a lot of our customers. It's easy to fly into. So it's a great site for us. And I suspect we will move it back to Nashville for a number of years, but time will tell. Can shareholders attend? Historically, we haven't had shareholders in attendance, unless you happen to be a shareholder and a customer or a supplier, then you might get there. I will defer that question. Our first objective is to get the event going again and to get our customers back, to get our suppliers back, to get our employees back and to get engagement going with our customer base, but we'll see in the years after that. Does Fastenal anticipate a presence in Mainland China? We have a presence in Mainland China. We have a sales organization in China. We have a sourcing organization across Asia, and it includes personnel in China. And we think the best supply chain is redundancy. The best supply chain is finding great manufacturing partners that we can rely on that are -- that make reliable product and also treat their employees, society and the environment in a respectful and caring away. And that's what we endeavor to do in our supply chain. Comment. Thank you for the impressive presentation. I will pass that thank you on to the team that created it. I think they do a wonderful job on that video that we used at our customer show. And as I mentioned in the video, I'm really proud of the professionalism within the organization on that marketing information. Next one is comment. Request both virtual -- sorry, I haven't read these ahead of time. So request both virtual and in-person annual meetings moving forward. I am in complete agreement. I'm from New Mexico, I doubt I'll ever be able to attend in person. Enjoy the virtual. Well, we'll continue to, as we did several years ago, even when we have an in-person event, we simulcast it. We started that, I believe it was 3 years ago. But we simulcast it over the Internet because not only do we find that very helpful for our shareholders, in all honesty, we find it really helpful for our employees because a lot of our employees are shareholders. Our employees are scattered across 25 countries. And if they want to participate in it, we welcome that opportunity. That was one of the reasons for moving it to Saturday. It made it a little bit more available for the -- for everybody. With that, that is the end of the questions, and I believe either Will or John are next up.

I am Will Oberton. I'll read the legal stuff here. The votes have been counted, and the report of the inspector of election indicates that Scott A. Satterlee, Michael J. Ancius, Stephen L. Eastman, Daniel L. Florness, Rita J. Heise, Hsenghung Sam Hsu, Daniel L. Johnson, Nicholas J. Lundquist and Reyne K. Wisecup have received the required number of votes and are hereby elected directors of the company. The report of the inspector of election also indicates that the resolution for the ratification of KPMG LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm for the company for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021, has received the required number of votes and has been adopted. And the resolution for the approval on the advisory basis of the compensation of certain of our executive officers has received the required number of votes and has been adopted. All ballots and a record of all proxies will be filed with the books and records of the company. The certificate of the inspector of election will be attached to the meeting -- or to the minutes of the meeting as Exhibit C. The slide should come up here. There we go, looking for that slide. Before we end, I'd like to introduce Scott Satterlee. Scott has been on our Board since 2009. Scott is going to -- has agreed to step up. He raised his hand and stepped up to be Chairman of the Board. Scott understands our business very well. He's been around, as I said, for 11 years. But I think this thing that Scott understands the best and the most important thing that Scott understands is he understands our culture. And for those of you that know Fastenal, our culture and how we embrace it and how we go to business is the most important thing about our past success and our future success. And Scott really understands that, and he embraces our culture. So Scott, welcome. Well, you've been here for a long time, but welcome into the new role.

Thank you, Will.

And before closing, I want to take just a minute and -- or take this opportunity to thank the thousands of people that have helped me in my career over the last 41 years. When I joined the company, I came for one reason, and Dan stated it earlier. When Bob Strauss interviewed me in 1979, he told me that I could run my own business. Well, I'm a young guy with no money and a lot of ambition. And I never imagined that the business I ran -- I was picturing a store, which I did run, but I never imagined that it would be a large business, especially one with 20,000 employees. So it was an amazing career. I had challenges, opportunities, probably more importantly is I made most of my best friends and I had a tremendous amount of fun. And I want to thank -- again, thank everybody in the organization, in and out of the organization, and our shareholders for making that possible. With that, the meeting is now adjourned. Thank you very much, and thank you for participating.