Reliance, Inc. (RS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, next up we have Reliance. Reliance is the largest metal service center and processor in North America. It operates over 300 locations in 40 states in the U.S. and has presence in 12 countries. The company has a very diversified portfolio of over 100,000 metal products and specializes in small orders with quick turnaround and increasing levels of value-added processing. With us today is Reliance's President and CEO, Karla Lewis; and we will do this as a Q&A. So if you do have questions, please send them in through the app.

But maybe to kick us off, Karla, you just announced a name change. Can you talk a bit about the decision to do this now?

Yes. Hi, everyone, and Katja, thank you for having us here today, and thanks to BMO. Katja just gave a little description of Reliance. We actually just celebrated our 85th year as a company. And this year, we'll mark our 30th year being publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Reliance over the years has continued to grow and really look to diversify our product mix, the end markets we serve and the geographies that we're in. We're predominantly in North America, in particular, the United States. But for a while, quite honestly, so our name was Reliance Steel & Aluminum Co. That's who we've been for many, many decades. But quite honestly, many of our long-term investors had talked to us over the past few years, stating that they felt that Reliance should be comped to companies other than just the metals companies out there, whether it's the producers or the couple of other public service center companies because our financial results were very different than most of our companies because that diversification and size and our focus on the small orders, really our resilient business model has our earnings much less volatile and at higher levels than most of the other metals companies. So they felt that we should be comped more towards industrial distribution-type companies to get a multiple closer to theirs. So we've talked about that for a few years now. And really, we also look at the way that we're really excited about the growth in front of us. We look that we're providing more and more value to our customers through value-added processing, through logistics, through solving problems for them. We've been investing in our employees and returning to our shareholders. So with that, we really said Reliance is more than metal. So we dropped the Steel & Aluminum from the name, and we're Reliance Inc. now. And we just think it's a fresher, more energetic look at Reliance today.

And we have a question from the app. We heard some of your peers talk about a recent pickup in North American order books. Are you seeing the same?

So for Reliance's business, and again, we're very diversified and serving many different markets. So if you're hearing from a company mills, it's going to be very different, what they tell you about order patterns. For us, we're serving as Katja said earlier, the smaller order sizes, last year, our total revenues were about $15 billion, and our average order size was $3,200 in order. So we are doing multiple transactions. 40% of our orders, the customer calls us today, we deliver it to them tomorrow. . And so it's very rapid multiple transactions. And our customer base has continued to be busy. Certainly, you see little pockets here and there. But we're selling a lot to the fabricators, machine shops, not direct to the OEMs. We do have some of that business. But with that, we've seen our customers remain busy. Again, certain drop-offs. I think ours is more steady. Aerospace that we sell into continues to be strong and growing. Automotive, we saw a lot of growth last year compared to the prior year. And we're only processing metal for our sales into automotive, it's called toll processing. So we're not taking the price risk on the metal, but that continues to be strong. Everyone thinks [ non-reconstruction ] should not be good, but it's still good for us, right? There's this reshoring, near shoring. There's a lot of activity, not just the big mega chip plants, but just across the board, we're seeing a pickup and continued activity in that market.

And you do expect in first quarter, your shipments or volumes to be up 9% to 11% quarter-over-quarter. Now if we look beyond first quarter, what are some of the potential tailwinds and headwinds when it comes to the demand?

Yes. I think the up 9% to 11% Q1 versus Q4, a lot of that's normal seasonality. As a service center company, we can only ship when our customers are open. So in the fourth quarter, some of our customers are shut down over the holidays. So the 9% to 11% is a little better than typical rebound in Q1. And we think that Q2, typically, for us, is pretty consistent. And then you see a little seasonality, a little drop off Q3, Q4, again, just when our customers are open. So we anticipate Q1 levels holding. We think there are tailwinds coming. We sell into the semiconductor industry. There was excess inventory in their supply chain through most of 2023. We think that's leveling off, and we'll start to see a little pickup in semiconductor as we go through 2024, as I said, Aerospace will continue to ramp. But then the big tailwinds, obviously, outside of semiconductor because we also sell a specialty product into the building of the chip manufacturing plants. So as all the large companies are building their mega plants, we'll see some pickup there. That's a smaller part of our business, but a very nice part of our business. But from the Infrastructure Act, we sell a lot into the Infrastructure Act, renewable energy from the inflation Reduction Act. As I just mentioned, the reshoring and near-shoring. We don't know exactly when it will come, but we are ready. We've got a lot of capacity without having to make additional investments to ramp up to support a lot of that. There's a lot of defense work coming, whether that's in our specialty high-end products or if it's in just some of our basic carbon steel products. So we're not saying it will all come in Q2 or Q3, but we think we're set up. Our industry and Reliance, in particular, is set up for some really strong activity over the next few years.

Now you have been investing a lot in value-added processing and that has helped your gross profit margin. Is there -- but this is mostly first stage process. Is there any desire for you to move beyond the first stage?

Yes. So first stage processing, so we primarily buy metal in big sizes and big quantities from the producing mills and then we'll cut it to size is the majority of what we do to -- so that it better fits onto our customers' equipment. We do have a couple of small more downstream fabricators where they might be making a component that goes to our customers to put into their assembly, but those are pretty small locations. We do continue to invest in equipment like that and put some of it in our normal traditional service centers. We have acquired a few small fabrication companies. So we do want to continue to do that where it makes sense. But what we try to be very careful of is to not compete with our existing customer base.

And then it does seem that your peers are also investing more in value-added processing. Is there a risk that this market could be oversupplied and impact your margins?

I mean it's the metals industry, there's always a chance it could be too much capacity. But we know that some of our other competitors are investing, but we think Reliance will still be able to hopefully do it better and service our customers. We're structured in a way. We're very decentralized. We try to be close to our customers, and that takes investment and we have the balance sheet to be able to do that. So just because another company buys a piece of equipment, you have to know how to operate it. You have to know how to service your customers, how to manage your inventory. So certainly there's a risk. But we typically -- we try to focus more on -- we do everything, but we try to do some of the harder to-do items and really just focus on servicing our customers well. So it's -- people have been investing for a while in value-add. They'll continue to, but so will we. And we think with our broad network and the experienced operators we have, because of Reliance's size, we can really leverage our people for best practices to help each other, and we think we can get there faster.

And you have a sustainable gross profit margin range of 29% to 31%. If you're looking, is there anything that could prevent you from going beyond 31%. Do you see any limitations there?

Yes. So we believe we should be able to continue to grow that because we are continuing to see a lot of opportunity from our customers asking us to do more for them. We do get a higher gross profit margin generally on value-added orders, but we're also growing our distribution business, right? 51% of our orders, we perform, some type of value-added processing on. That leaves 49% that are distribution. We're still growing that side of the business, both organically and through acquisitions. We just announced -- we closed an acquisition at the beginning of February, Cooksey Iron, that's a lot more distribution currently. They're introducing value-add. We'll be able to help them with that. We have another announced acquisition. So as we continue to grow, that will balance a little bit even as we're continuing to invest in value-added equipment.

You have a very clean balance sheet, growing liquidity. How do you think about capital allocation?

We think about capital allocation the same way that we have for many years. We're fortunate because of the strong performance of all of our people out in the field throughout the company. We're generating high earnings, high levels of cash flow. We look at for really capital allocation buckets mainly growth, which we talked about organic growth, which we continue to invest in. We spent over $400 million last year in capital expenditures to add some facilities, expand facilities, invest in the value-added equipment. Katja and I were talking about acquisitions. Reliance historically, we've completed 73 acquisitions to date since our IPO 30 years ago to grow and diversify the company and we expect to continue to do that. We've seen some good activity, good opportunities recently. And then the other kind of side of our capital allocation buckets are returning value to our shareholders. We've paid a regular quarterly dividend for 64 years. We've increased it 31 time since our IPO. So we continue to do that and also to repurchase our common stock. I forget how much we did last year, but -- $500 million, close to $500 million. So we continue to be active in those markets as well.

Well, Thank you, Karla. Unfortunately, we ran out of time.

Great. Thank you