Herc Holdings Inc. (HRI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Hopefully, you've had a chance to grab a coffee at the break and ready to listen in. Larry, Mark, glad to have you guys here at the conference with us. And I believe you have a presentation to kick us off. So I'll pass it over to you for introductions and the presentation.

Thank you, Sherif. Good afternoon, and thanks, Sherif. I'm glad to be here. As you can see, we brought the sun with us from sunny Florida. So thank you very much. You're welcome. We appreciate being here. I'm Larry Silber, President and CEO of Herc Rentals. Joining me today on stage is Mark Humphrey, who's our Senior Vice President and CFO; and in the audience is Leslie Hunziker, who is your primary contact, our Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications for the company. So we're happy to be here with you this afternoon, Sherif, and we appreciate the invite from Bank of America and look forward to sharing our story with you. As always, before I get started, I'd like to point out our safe harbor statement and information regarding non-GAAP financial measures. If your eyesight is very good, you can read, if you read really quickly, you can go through that, but it's certainly in the deck that we've prepared for the conference. Today, what I'd like to talk about is Herc Rentals is one of the leading full-line equipment rental suppliers in North America. We have a vision, a mission and value statement that really supports our company purpose and our company purpose is in big letters there as we pledge to equip our customers and communities to build a brighter future. Everything that we do is centered around safety in our business, critically important to where we are. And obviously, over the last several years, we've adopted ESG measures and I have set very tough standards and goals to go forward on that. A little about Herc rentals for those of you that don't know us, we are one of the oldest, largest equipment rental providers in North America. We are nearly 60 years old, formerly, back prior to 2016, part of the Hertz Corporation and separated then and became an independent company in 2016. And we have 6,600 team members as of December 31 of '22, and we operate from over 350 locations in North America in 42 states and 5 Canadian provinces. So we are a North America-focused company, and we intend to continue along that path on our journey. We serve an addressable market in North America that's estimated to be about $60 billion in rental revenue today and growing. And we think that's quite an ample opportunity for us to continue to grow our business as we've been growing it over the last several years. So we're making great progress in our business and executing our strategy as we shift this business into higher gear. First things we had to do was stabilize our base and get ready for growth. We had an Investor Day about 2 years ago. We came out with these 5 strategies, which was really around growing our core business and expanding into specialty businesses through investment in multiple area ways of fleet, of M&A, new greenfield locations in what has been a very healthy and positive demand environment. At the same time, we've invested into technology in our business to improve our customer experience and enhance our operating efficiencies. And we think today, we have one of the most, if not the most advanced technology platform in the industry, providing services and capability to our customers as well as to ourselves and our vendor partners. As we expanded our sustainability program that I just mentioned, we set specific goals around GHG emissions intensity to reduce that by 25% by 2030 using 2019 as our base year. We're at a best-in-class level, I mentioned earlier, around safety, and we think we are leading our industry segment in our safety performance, and we've been operating very strongly around that and which is important in the states where gold metal military-friendly employer recipient this past year. Importantly, as we've invested in this business over the last several years in fleet growth, we've also focused on properly allocating capital to our business through a combination of M&A, greenfields or brownfield start-ups, if you will, increased and we started, we began an annual dividend a year ago. We increased that dividend this year. And we've also executed on an opportunistic share repurchase program this past year. So our 5-year financials look like this that we recently reported our 2022 results, which showed the progress that we've made to date, and it's been nothing short of exceptional, quite frankly. We delivered record level financial performance across the board, which is indicated here. Equipment rental revenue growth grew 34% last year on top of 24% in 2021. And in supporting the rising demand that we had in the business and the growth, we invested $1 billion in net fleet CapEx purchases last year. And while improving our fleet productivity, as evidenced by our annual increase in dollar utilization on a year-over-year basis. We also invested in expanding our branch network by completing 18 acquisitions, strategic acquisitions, last year in urban markets that increased our densification as well as added to our specialty business capability that we've been looking to grow out. Also, we opened 21 greenfield locations in the key urban markets that I just mentioned in North America. By focusing on our rate of growth and operating efficiencies, we more than offset the inflationary pressures as we delivered 160 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin improvement last year and 120 basis points of higher ROIC. Before we move on to Q&A with Sherif, I'd like to talk a little more about where we're operating from and the position that we're at today, which is much stronger than any other time in the history of our company. We're experienced all trends that are consistent with an industry up-cycle. I say we're sort of the middle stages, if you will, of the cycle, and we're seeing very good performance and gaining share in a growing market where scale and capability matters and when it comes to capturing new business, winning talent and driving profitability in the business. And we are one of those companies of scale in North America. There is an attractive long-term industry growth dynamics that everybody has heard about, whether it be from the infrastructure spending, the on-shoring that's going on in North America as well as the mega-trends or the mega projects that we hear about every day, whether it's around EVs or battery plants or data centers or warehousing and the like. Nonresidential construction recovery prior to this and we don't know what the status of this banking trend, although we've not heard anything that's negative at this point from our customer standpoint is on the upswing, and that's supported by the latest Dodge data. We're investing in our business to sustain profitable growth. We've been an opportunistic consolidator over the last 2 years, creating a high-performance branch network to achieve a maximum return on investment and boost efficiency. Our expanded capabilities in our solutions business, what we call ProSolutions, we're a solutions-based provider. We've also expanded our technology capability where we can run our business and our customers' fleet requirements through an app, either on an iPhone or on an Android device. And we have a much broader offering of specialty equipment that complements our general line equipment and provides incremental growth opportunities for us. We have a very strong balance sheet that Mark will talk to during the questions that ensures fleet availability to meet the continued robust demand that we're experiencing in the market. We have a diverse flexible business model that provides resiliency as evidenced by our ability to respond and adapt to the trials and the tribulations that we all experienced during COVID. We're focused on reducing risk and balancing our revenue streams, driving efficiencies with a broader and diverse customer set, both at the national account and at the large and local customers and small businesses, both on public and private projects across multiple verticals today, which is something that was new to our business over the last couple of years. We have a very flexible asset management philosophy and it provides for organic growth and certainly micro and macroeconomic resiliency in the markets that we operate. And of course, we are very disciplined in our capital management, underpinned by our strong balance sheet. We're investing to sustain profitable growth, while returning value to our shareholders through a combination of dividends and opportunistic share repurchase. So exciting times for Herc Rentals. We're in the best of times for our business. And we're quite pleased about our performance and look forward to sharing more of our story with you here this afternoon. Sherif?

So you've spoken a bit about some of the target set and recent financial performance. But for those in the audience that are a bit less familiar with Herc, could you describe the split from Hertz and progress since?

Yes. Great question. There's been an unbelievable transformation of the business over the last 7 years. And a lot of that has been to drive performance to get on par with some of our larger peers that are headquartered either in the U.K. or in the United States. And really, it was started with first separating the business from a former parent company that had underinvested for 6 or 7 years in this business and really let those larger competitors sort of grow more rapidly against that business for a period of time. And that began with the separation, the planning for the separation in 2015, the separation ultimately and the spin to become an independent public company in July '16. We then had a focus on a total transformation of the business beginning with the fleet, refreshing that fleet, building that fleet to be premium quality equipment to serve our customer base that demands and expects premium gear to focus on their operations. We had to rebuild our whole -- our business system platform separate that, upgrade it and bring it up to modern standards, which we've completed and then recently in the last 2 years, we've accelerated that to sort of put a best-in-class customer solution out there with what we call our ProControl next gen that provides the capabilities that I mentioned before around fleet management and access to that fleet. We had to rebuild and retool our sales force, give them the tools to operate, to create dynamic pricing in the market, give them professional pricing tools to manage that, give them better tools to manage the fleet and the efficiency of that fleet. And we had to also shed ourselves of geographic markets and businesses that we didn't want to be in. When we arrived in 2015, the company operated in Saudi and Qatar, in Spain, in France, in Portugal, in China, in South America and in many, what I'll call, local, small local markets in North America that we didn't necessarily want to be in. We wanted to be -- we got to change our strategy to be in large urban markets, high-density population centers for the business. So I can go on and on here, but I don't want to run out of time for more questions, but there's really been a total transformation rebuilding our team and bringing in a professional management team that had been sort of underdeveloped and under cared for under the former parent company.

And so you mentioned the two larger peers in the competitive space. Can you speak to a bit of where Herc fits into that large rental player landscape and what differentiates you?

Yes. Great question, Sherif. And we're referred to today as the big three favorably. And we've been able to grow share most recently where we were sort of stuck at a 3% share, but over the last 2 years, we've been able to accelerate our share. And really, the difference today, other than perhaps some scale, is really where the big three separate themselves from the rest of the market. And I'd say we have all the capability to operate very similarly to our two larger peers. They have some product portfolios that we don't have and don't really want to be in. And they're in some geographies, obviously, that are outside of North America that we're not in and don't want to be in. So that is the main difference, but it's really how do the big three separate themselves from the rest of the market. And that's really the difference in the marketplace today. But capability, scale, size, ability to grow, ability to be competitive, ability to purchase at a very scalable level and to be on par is -- we're neck and neck with them. And we've certainly demonstrated that in our ability to close the gap around EBITDA margin, about -- around pricing performance and about -- and around growth, where we actually have outgrown them as a percentage of our business over the last couple of years, but we're still in a catch-up mode.

And in your opening presentation, you mentioned that given all the turmoil in financial markets, customers weren't seeing any impact. Just given the macroeconomic backdrop, could you give us your view on the longevity of the cycle?

You want to grab that, Mark?

Yes. I mean I think as Larry stated, right, I think we're sort of in those middle innings of this. And I think the opportunity that is sitting in front of us with potentially over $1 trillion of opportunity between infrastructure and on-shoring and the like gives us tremendous confidence as we look forward to '23 and beyond.

And one of those drivers has been all the investment in infrastructure, these large projects. What are the competitive dynamics like on those large projects that the large rental operators have all spoken to? And is there room to play for everyone on these?

Yes. Well, there's no room to play for everyone. It's really going to be down to the big three. And there's plenty of room for ourselves and our two larger peers to share in an outsized share of those projects because really our smaller competitors, the mom-and-pops, the small regional players really aren't going to be invited to participate heavily. It's really going to be one of the big three being named the primary provider on those projects and the other two of us being a secondary and tertiary provider. They really -- none of us probably have the capability to be a complete total supplier to any one of those big mega projects, infrastructure projects or on-shoring projects. But one of us will all get a primary and a secondary position. And many of those have been awarded today, and that's the way it seems to be rolling out. But look, there's just not enough fleet in the market for that to go to any one player or any one player to buy enough fleet to go service those. And the smaller players, the regional players, the mom-and-pops don't either have the fleet, don't have the technological capability, don't have the footprint, the locations or the infrastructure support, whether it's mechanics and the like, to support that type of activity. So it will fall mostly to the big three.

And you mentioned the supply of equipment. Has that improved at all? I understand you're adding quite a bit of CapEx this year? And have you seen better availability from the suppliers?

I would say that the supply chain issues still exist, right? I think what we have been able to see is better visibility to deliveries. But from an overall perspective, we foresee sort of as we move out into '23, it's still going to be a bit messy.

And kind of coming back to the expected growth you see is -- if a downturn in commercial real estate, anything of that nature, should occur how quickly you're able to pare back some of that CapEx? What's sort of the playbook into a downturn?

Yes. Just quickly turn back to COVID when the whole world shut down quickly, we were able to pare back very quickly. All of our OEM agreements have 30-day notice for cancellation of any outstanding orders. So we have the ability to turn the faucet off very quickly, should there be any change in dynamics. We don't expect that to happen, Sherif. We think we're in a pretty robust market. And even if there were to be some shortfall in the areas you're talking about, we think there's enough activity and investment in the other areas of infrastructure spending, megaprojects, on-shoring and the like that would more than offset any downturn. So we think we're going to continue along our path to bring the equipment in. We also have a need. Obviously, during COVID, we extended the life and we delayed the normal rotational sell of that equipment. We believe now with what we're bringing in this year, we have an opportunity to resume a normal rotational but even on a larger fleet. So that means there will be a larger amount of rotation out. So we're going to need that capital not only for growth, but for rotational purposes that we deferred during the COVID period for as much as 2 years.

And on that, what's sort of the normal level of rotation that you expect versus where you pulled back in the last few years?

Yes. I mean I think when you think about sort of in fleet at $5.6 billion at the end of 2022, right? If you think about that on a 7- to 8-year sort of rotational basis, right, there's probably $600 million-ish to $700 million-ish each year that we would probably look to refresh.

And how far down did that fall in these last few years?

I wouldn't say necessarily that we were -- we are behind. I think when you think about sort of the technological advances that all of this equipment has, right? It's more of a want to refresh and sort of customer-facing than it is a need to. So we'll do this in a thoughtful way as we walk forward. But again, just sort of at a high level, the sort of $600 million to $700 million is probably the refresh that's needed.

And changing gears a bit. You've spoken about specialty rental and some of the dynamics there. Are there any areas you're seeing that you're sort of excited about? And what are some of the differences in the specialty rental space versus the gen rent?

Yes, great question. We're excited about specialty in general. Specialty is a new area for Herc over the last 7 years. We introduced that year 1, starting with power generation and with HVAC product, moving into pumping solutions, revitalizing a business that had existed but had gone away under the old regime. And then moving into some new areas like floor care, and most recently, into areas of trench shoring through some acquisitions that have given us a foothold and some scale and some capability to expand that. We're first starting in the Western U.S. and in the Southwest and then bringing that to the other parts of the country. So all of our specialty businesses are exciting for us. They add a capability to our general rent business to get more share of wallet from our existing customers as well as pick up new customers that traditionally didn't rent that gear and now have the capability by getting -- by renting from a bonafide supplier and one that's reliable. And at the same time, it allows us to solutionize and get a higher level of pricing, if you will, higher margin for that business because we're not just providing gear, we're providing solutions to customer problems or customer challenges that allow us to put a broader array of gear with broader, if you will, engineering expertise associated with it.

And could you speak to some of those underlying services within the solutions that allow you to drive the margins there?

Yes. Well, for one thing, if this building, as an example, this room, all of a sudden didn't have air conditioning and it was a hot day to day with that sunlight being much brighter, they'd have to cool this building off. And if the air conditioning wasn't working, they would might call us to come in and determine how much air would be needed and then how much power there would be needed to power that air conditioning on a temporary basis to either heat or cool this building, as an example. And that isn't done by just say, bringing 5, 100-ton chillers. We'd have to come in and do a survey, do an evaluation, what's the cubic footage of this? How much power is available from the local utility in the market? How much extra power do we need to bring in to power that? And we would engineer that along with the building maintenance person to do that. That could happen on new projects where, for instance, Tesla or one of these EV plants might be building a new plant out in the middle of the Phoenix desert, and there's no power out there. And they say, "Hey, we're going to build this facility, we need you to come in on a temporary basis to power this until we get the grid connected to the building that we're building." So we'll come in and determine with the general contractors what they're going to be doing during the period before the grid is actually connected, and we'll engineer what needs to be brought in, how many megawatts of power, we'll bring that in, set that up, cable it, get it running for them. And in some cases, we'll even leave operators on site to make sure that things operate for them. So for that, we get to charge more money and -- for those services.

Understood. And this year, there's been a bit more of a focus on operating leverage. How do you feel that's gone so far? And do you feel that it's on targets?

Yes. I mean I think I would take you back to probably the middle of '22, where we began to see sort of those 50% sort of dollar -- sorry, flow-throughs beginning to happen in Q3 and Q4. And I think as we continue to push rate increases into 2023, and we begin to cross over a lot of those inflationary pressures that we had in 2022, I think you'll see, and our goal is to sort of return to sort of a mid-50s flow-through rate in 2023.

And just sitting here today, how some of those inflationary pressures changed since 2022, if any?

I mean I think we're probably seeing a more normalized labor component to the P&L. I mean there was a lot of there was a lot of inflationary pressures really across the board in 2022. And that's one and that's about 30% of our expenses is labor. And that feels like it's gone back to and should be able to cross over to a little bit more of a normal cadence here in 2023.

And then you mentioned expecting a bit more seasonality this year would have returned to that normal. Has that kind of begun to happen this year? Have you seen that?

Yes, we have. And I think we started seeing the return to that as we entered into the fourth quarter of last year. And certainly, we expected that to continue into Q1. And I think we are in a more normal seasonality. Obviously, we're beyond the COVID extremes and everything that happened to sort of get the world back on track post COVID. So while we're seeing that return to seasonality in our business, we're not seeing improvements on the supply side that allow us to have the same seasonality to order equipment in Q4 and deliver in Q2, we've been ratably taking equipment in Q4 and in Q1 so that we're ready for that seasonality as we enter into spring.

And speaking about, how have lead times trended recently and over the last few years for that equipment?

Yes. Look, lead times really haven't changed very much from a manufacturing standpoint. I'd say we're still placing orders a year in advance. And in some cases, just in the last two weeks with one of our major suppliers, they've actually pushed our '23 orders -- 30% of our '23 orders into '24. So lead times haven't changed. Capacity hasn't changed. They are getting a bit more reliable that when they say they're going to deliver something, they'll deliver it, not necessarily according to our order date or our expected date or our want date, but according to what they say they're going to get it at. And so we are seeing some improvement there, but not in an overall capacity or a lead time reduction standpoint.

And have any of them spoken about increasing that capacity? Or do you foresee any increase in that?

Quite frankly, I've seen one of our majors talk about and actually set up some operations, and I call it near-shoring, not on-shoring. They brought some of their business back to Mexico, still in the ramp-up stages of that facility, so it hasn't really added any capacity to this point. And then a couple of others are talking about adding capacity within North America. But really haven't seen the benefits or even the results of that yet. Look, there's still a big labor shortage in North America. Even if they were to put up bricks of mortar, the labor is -- we're at 3.5% unemployment in North America, right? We're meeting with someone earlier from Spain and just couldn't them that with 17% to 20% unemployment. But in North America, there is a labor shortage. So even if they did add bricks and mortar and even if their supply chain did get better, they might not have the labor available to pool to sort of get that production up.

And then earlier, you mentioned that you're sort of in the middle innings and Herc has had this focus on dense urban areas. How do you see that evolving over time or even over the coming few years?

Yes. Look, I think our immediate focus obviously was to get the business back to focusing on large urban markets, top 50 MSAs in North America of over 1 million people. There are another 50 markets or so, plus or minus, that have more than 1 million people, which would then lead us to then grow into what I would call the top 100 MSAs. But for now, our focus is top 50 major urban markets. Create density in those markets, add locations, grow our share. And as we do that, that will expand us into the next 50 urban markets that all have over 1 million people, and we'll grow into that area while expanding our specialty business, our core business and into, what I'll call, some adjacencies that support our general rental business.

And speaking to that expansion, you've had quite a pipeline of M&A opportunities. Is it still a good time to pursue those? And do you foresee doing -- continuing to do more bolt-ons?

Yes. I mean I think as we've previously stated, we anticipate to spend $500 million in 2023, much like we did in 2022 as well as 2021, and Larry was speaking about those performances earlier. I think the pipeline is strong, both from a gen rents as well as a specialty perspective. And we really like these opportunities because it gives us people, fleet and locations that are tough to come by today and then ultimately gives us a customer list that has very little overlap to ours.

That said, M&A is opportunistic. And fortunately, it's been on our side. We tend to be favored today, having completed the number of deals, 30 transactions in the last 2 years. And as Mark said, the pipeline is full. We have plenty of opportunities ahead of us, and we expect to continue along that path for sure.

And I think we just have a few minutes left. I'd like to open up to questions from the floor.

So 2022 was a robust year in terms of rental rates and pricing. Can you just talk about what your guidance is for 2023 based on some of the commentary of the strength you're seeing in infrastructure, some of the funding? Is there upside bias to that? And what would be a more normalized rental rate environment maybe if we get to 2024?

Yes. I mean I think as you referenced, 2022, right, we sort of posted a 5.8% rate lift in 2022. I think there are some tailwinds, certainly, as we walk into 2023 on the contract side. And we're looking for mid-single digits growth again in 2023. And I think we've stated that we would be comfortable in sort of in that mid-single-digit range as we walk forward over the next couple of years as opposed to going to a 10 and walking it back, a small stair climb is really our preference.

And you highlighted in your slide deck, a net fleet CapEx about $1 billion in 2022. Can you remind us what your outlook is for 2023? And if we do see a commercial real estate downturn, I understand it might be a small exposure for you. Would you pare back that CapEx when you enter 2024? How would you kind of think about some of these moving pieces?

Yes. I mean I think 2022 was, like you said, it was about $1 billion, and we've guided midpoint of that guidance from a CapEx perspective in 2023 is about $1.1 billion, which sort of equates to somewhere in that 18%, 19%, 20% growth off of in fleet of 2022. And I think as Larry was talking about earlier, right, if, God forbid, the winter hit, right, we have this ability to sort of shut down POs sort of plus 30 days out. And so I think those are the levers that we would pull in the event that something happened that was unforeseen as we sit here today.

Yes, short of a rough winter or COVID shutdown, we'd probably continue where we are because we do have some fleet rotation we'd like to do and to go back to a more normalized fleet rotation type of experience. So unless it's a severe winter or a COVID shutdown, we'll probably continue on where we're at. Keep in mind, I just mentioned couple of our suppliers have already moved some of our CapEx requirements into 2024 because they don't have the capacity where they're having supply chain limitations or constraints.

You may have answered the question, but I want to follow up again. The general thinking historically has been that when residential goes down, nonresidential follows, it's sort of logical. So what gives you the confidence that this time, it's going to be different? Do you have a backlog? Or are people ordering for these mega projects already?

Yes. Great question. First of all, we're not in residential. We have -- if we're there, we're by accident, right? We don't encourage our people or go after any residential business. So we have no exposure there. And everything that went down in nonres, whether it's been hotels or commercial real estate, office buildings, things like that, was already down in COVID and never came back. So we don't have any exposure there per se. But the second part of your question, yes, we are already seeing the benefits of the on-shoring of some of the mega projects and some of the extensions of some of the big projects that we've been on, whether it be data centers, warehouses, EV plants, battery plants that we've already been heavily participating in, and we're seeing the continuation and rollover of some of these new projects happen already. And so we're seeing some of that benefit today. Shovels are in the ground, and we're going to see that ramp as we go through '23.

And just to follow on that. With all these infrastructure dollars come in, what's the longevity of that? How many years of construction does that support? And how much equipment can really be absorbed over what time period?

Yes. I mean I think as I stated earlier, right, there's sort of $1 trillion worth of business here, right? And if you think about that from the rental share of that, that's in this sort of $20 billion to $30 billion range. Obviously, that's not all sort of 1 year of activity, right? We're kind of viewing it as a longer tail, something that's probably outwards 5 years.

Yes. And because of the nature of these large projects, whether it be infrastructure or mega or on-shoring or the other things that you're seeing in the industry and because only the really large players, the players of scale, which we are, and we hit on all the points of that scale that's required. We're going to get an outsized share of that business commensurate and probably greater than our existing share, along with our two larger peers, they will probably get an outsized share of that as well. So the bigger players will participate at a greater level than the smaller regional mom-and-pops may ever get a chance to, yes.

And you've spoken about this a bit, but what are sort of the one or two big differentiators between the large players that really lets you compete on those projects in terms of technology?

Yes. Look, obviously, our people, right, are #1 in everything that we do. The fact that we're so focused on safety in our business, which is really important to all of these players and our locations. Being in and around these large urban markets where these projects tend to operate as a key differentiator for us and our larger peers than everybody else. But from a technology standpoint, that's a big investment. In technology. Our new technology platform was many tens of millions of dollars of investment over several years to get to where we are. And smaller regional players, mom-and-pops, just aren't going to have the capability, the wherewithal to invest in that, and that will separate the larger players from the smaller players in terms of ability to capture that business.

And I would say, finally, they're right, it's breadth and depth of fleet as well, fleet offerings. So we've been able to sort of grow our fleet as well as our technology, people, et cetera, on-site capabilities to be able to service these needs.

And with that, I think we're just out of time. Thank you so much for coming to speak with us today.

Thank you. And if anybody has any follow-ups, -- please get a hold of Leslie, and she'll be glad to answer any questions for you. Thanks, Sherif.

Thank you. Thank you.