Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc. (SSD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Well, let's get going here. Thanks to everyone joining in person and those who have joined on the webcast as well. I'm Kurt Yinger, research analysts covering building products and distribution here at D.A. Davidson. Excited to be joined by the Simpson team again this year. Mike Olosky, President and CEO; Brian Magstadt, CFO; and Matt Dunn, SVP Finance, relatively new so welcome, Matt. We're going to let Mike kick it off with a brief intro, and then we're going to jump into Q&A, and we'll open it up to the audience for questions as well. So I'll let you take it from here.

Yes, Kurt. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. So let me start at 30,000 foot with Simpson. So we are a leading supplier of structural solutions into the building and construction industry. Typically, our solutions are less than 1% of the building materials yet, they're critical to the integrity of the structure they go into. As you can see up here, we serve 5 end-use markets. Our largest business is residential. And if you look at the total company, we believe roughly 50% of our business is directly linked to housing starts. The residential space being our biggest space. We are also involved in the components manufacturing business. So that's basically trust systems that also go into the residential space. We have a commercial business, a national retail business, so think big box retailers. And then the last one is our OEM business. So here, think manufactured housing, think sheds, think things that are manufactured in a production type environment and we sell those. There we go, and we sell into those 5 market segments with really 5 main product lines. And those 5 product lines, all combined make us a one-stop shop for structural solutions. We believe being -- as part of being a one-stop shop, we need to have the broadest, the deepest product line, which we do. And those products are really centered around those 5 areas you look at up there. So these are engineered, tested, thoroughly vetted products that we are selling into those 5 markets. So the connector market is our first market, that's what sort of the company. Our founder developed that connector market. Second one would be fasteners. Next one would be anchors, that's into our concrete solutions space. We also sell trust plates that goes into the component manufacturing market. And then digital solutions is more and more important part of the business. That helps us be easy to do business with. That helps us service and support our customers, help them figure out which of these products that they want to use for the particular application. And then the last part that I want to really touch on is our business model. Okay. Kurt, this is a problem when we sent the deck the last minute. Okay, so I think our business model is pretty unique. So again, one shop for structural solutions in the building construction space. So we are actively working with building code officials, architects and engineers to help them understand how they can use our solutions to build safe or stronger structures. We have very long-standing relationships with them. We've grown up with the people in that industry. That helps create demand for our products, specifications and building codes that create demand. And then we have a long-standing relationship with the builders. We have relationships with roughly 300 builders, representing approximately 50% of the housing starts where those builders tell the supply chain, they want to use Simpson solutions. And when they tell the supply chain, they want to use Simpson solutions, that means that we need to give great service to the people in between. So that's the pro dealers, that's contractor distributors. When we work with them, we make sure they understand we're creating demand through the codes, creating demand through the specs. We make sure our lumber yards and pro dealers understand we have agreements with the builders to help them pull things through. And then we provide great service and support to the lumberyard pro-dealers, contractor distributors. If they need a product, typically they place an order, we ship it out that afternoon. We try to get it to them the next day. And so that way, they don't have to carry a ton of inventory out of these 10,000 plus SKUs that we get. And so you add up that business model and another slide that we have in the deck, we think the result of that has been our outperformance in terms of market growth versus U.S. housing starts over the last 8 years. Over the last 8 years, our North American business on a volume perspective has grown roughly 250 basis points above U.S. housing starts. The last 2 years, we've been able to grow 800 basis points above housing starts. Obviously, the news yesterday, is going to help us a little bit. We do believe this year is going to be another negative year from a housing start perspective, which means we're going to finish probably 1.4, a little less million units from housing starts perspective. If you take a look at that, the last time we were at 1.4 million units was in 2020. In 2020, we had roughly a 1.25 billion business, a 20% operating income. We had a nice bump from 2019 because of COVID. If you look at us now, the same size of a market from a housing start perspective, we're going to finish over 2 billion with an additional 200 million of operating profit. So we've made very good progress over the last 4 years in a housing start market that's basically come up and then come back down. And we've done that by implementing pricing, which we've been able to keep, we've done that with an acquisition that we've made roughly $300 million in revenue, and we've done that by picking up share and having share gains.

Perfect. Thank you, Mike. Maybe just to start off in terms of current market fundamentals. You've talked about how you expect it to be another year of declines in kind of total housing starts. We're starting to see some relief in terms of 30-year fixed mortgage rates. What are you hearing from your builder customers? And maybe talk about how Simpson is impacted or not by the bifurcation between the larger national guys and the more smaller custom.

Yes. Good question. So the housing market really break it up into 3 groups, just to keep it really simple. But the big production builders, as you can see, they continue to do well. Balance sheet P&L enable them to do a lot of things that the smaller builders haven't been able to do, though they are a lot of smaller builders, we see they continue to be on the sidelines. And then the multifamily story also struggling. So the interest rate cut yesterday and further cuts that are hopefully are going to come, we think will probably help the smaller builders more than anybody. But we continue to believe that that's going to be a slow process. In fact, there's one story we've heard that maybe now that the rates have cut, more people are going to just stay on the sideline wait another 6 months because they know maybe they're going to get another 50 or 100 basis points cheaper mortgage rate. So there's a multiple impact, multiple views on how that's going to help the overall market, but I think the smaller builders are probably going to be the ones that benefit on that rate cut more than anybody else.

It's interesting. I think a lot of people are kind of sitting there trying to get better direction on '25 from the builders. And the big public guys have been pretty consistent. But how does that impact your ability to plan for your own business? And what are you kind of doing now to make sure that if we do see that be stimulative to demand, you can react to that and vice versa, ensure that if things -- if uncertainty remains, maybe it's a third year of kind of challenging market conditions that you can manage through that as well?

We believe in the U.S. housing market. As you probably heard from a lot of people, you'll hear anywhere from 1.5 to 4 million units short economy, I mean, relatively stable. We believe in the market mid- to long term. And we are in a very, very specialized business. So I can't ramp up people to build [ dies ], to run steel stamping machines, to run custom fabricated parts on a dime. We can't find salespeople and engineers to do that on a dime. So our view for the last 3 years is that, hey, there's going to be a slowdown. It's clearly lasting a little bit longer than we thought but we want to be ready with investments to support our customers as things ramp up because a lot of our customers are -- we are their single source. And when things ramp up, we want to be able to provide fantastic service to them as their business improves. So we have, over the last 3 years, from an SG&A and a CapEx investment, been pretty heavy with the view that as the market ramps up, we're going to be there to take advantage of it.

And on the home center side, it's been, I don't know, 6 quarters of kind of comp declines, if I'm remembering correctly. Your guys' national retail business has held in pretty well. Just talk a little bit about what you've done with those customers and kind of where that outperformance has come from in your view.

So a lot of the activities with the national retailers are to make sure we've got really good complementary products to our main connector product line. And a lot of the things that we do are working in the stores, working with the merchandisers to show how we could, say, take a small rack of our fasteners that are called out on a connector to show what is best used with that connector. So oftentimes in the national retailers, the connectors in one part of the store, the fasteners are in another part of the store. And sure, you can buy your connectors and then walk 4 aisles over and buy your fasteners and often, they do that. But if we could have a small movable cart right there that is -- that the fasteners that are being called out, it makes it a lot easier. That we also have teams that will come in and our set can be very complex from a number of SKUs that are there. So we want to make sure that set is very well organized. And for the most part, they are, but if we can come in and do a little bit more work with those teams with that particular location, we see a nice benefit there. And then lastly, we are spending a lot of efforts in a lot of digital solutions. And one of those is what we call outdoor living solutions. So visualizing a deck or a pergola or maybe you need as a consumer build a fence. And some of those digital solutions can call out the items that are needed, kind of like a bill of materials and the national retailers, we want to make sure that they've got the products to be able to support those kind of efforts.

That makes sense. And we were talking earlier, and I think historically, in terms of the outperformance that you mentioned, you've referenced it as kind of a singles and doubles approach, right? It's not one singular piece of the business. But component manufacturers, the trust plate market is a big opportunity. It's an area that Simpson has targeted for quite a while. Maybe just talk a little bit about kind of the competitive positioning in that market maybe relative to connectors. And what do you think is most important in terms of your ability to convert more customers there?

So for those of you that are not familiar with the component manufacturing or trust manufacturing, the business model for this segment is you provide the software that helps them design the trust systems, the roof systems. You do provide the software that helps them run their business. You provide the system helps them run their manufacturing floor. In exchange for that, they agree to buy the trust place from you. So our main competitor in that area had some service challenges that they've worked through and that opened up the door for us. In parallel, we've been improving our software -- our suite of software solutions for them. We've made a lot of progress in that area. We've also picked up some very nice sized customers and made some good progress on it. So that has been a good growth driver for us over the last couple of years, and we anticipate that being a good growth driver going forward. We still have some development work we need to do. But we know that space very well. We know a lot of the larger customers very well. We think there's some good opportunity for us.

And I mean, it kind of speaks to the integration in software, not only within the component manufacturing space, but Brian, you kind of alluded to it a little bit in national retail. In terms of furthering that solution or offering for customers. Is there a greater opportunity to develop that internally, partner with external service providers? Maybe just talk a little bit about what that investment could look like.

So again, software makes us easier to do business with. It makes our business model stickier and it helps our customers do their jobs better. And that can be from the retail people that Brian talked about do it yourself all the way to engineers and people that are running trust plan. So there are some opportunities for us to partner. We are leveraging some partners to help us develop it. We made a very small acquisition of a Canadian company that does floor panel systems, so software that designs floor panels. So there's a nice little tuck-in acquisition for us to be able to do it. But I mean, it's a fairly complicated stuff. There's a lot of engineering behind it, a lot of algorithms, and we're doing what we think is right. We don't want to leverage partners where we can, but we also think that a lot of that needs to be internally developed because it is so specialized.

And on the fastener side in terms of maybe leveraging the brand reputation, market share position you have on the connector piece, what have you maybe done differently? Or how have you approached the market or lumberyard customers differently than in the past to try to continue to advance that effort on the fastener side?

So in the fastener space, we really are focused on the structural engineered solutions, not so much any of the commodity fasteners. And a lot of the things that we do, we want to show differentiated features and benefits. So we want to get the product in contractors' hands. There's a large trade show at the beginning of the year called the International Builder Show. So we've got a big booth and we get contractors coming through, driving our fasteners just to see the ease of installation and the like. And it's just small things like that. Mike talked about lots of singles and doubles from a market opportunity and how we go to market in -- for fasteners, for example. Lots of great features and benefits in our systems, our various SKUs. We want to show how they perform differently. One of the other things that we've done for a number of years is talk about our collated system. So we've got a quick drive system that will help deliver fasteners much quicker on the job site. And one of the things that we always want to show is that ease of installation, that maybe it's a cost savings because fasteners can be installed much quicker using these collated type systems. So lots of different things, Kurt, to show the engineering, the load ratings, the installation, quickness. Lots of different things that we try to do to differentiate our product line there.

And you talked about kind of go-to market. I mean, path to market has been a strategy you've been going down for some time now. Talk a little bit about maybe what makes Simpson unique in your ability to self-distribute, particularly with quite a few SKUs? And kind of where you stand in that journey overall?

Yes, I can take that one. So we have 10,000 SKUs, right? So what we try to do is make sure that for 95-plus percent of our customers, it's 1 day. So they give us an order today, we have it at the job site tomorrow. They don't have to carry a lot of inventory. We've got our 4 main manufacturing sites in the U.S. and then multiple satellite warehouses around. So customer service is important for us. We'll have that product on the job site. You can have the lumber on site, but if the connectors aren't there, there's no work happening, right? So even though we're a small piece of the actual dollars of the build and bill of materials critical to the job site keeping going. And then you mentioned a little bit on our path to market. So about 18 months, 2 years ago, we changed -- we went to market a little bit. It used to be very product focused. So imagine a lumber yard where you have 3 salespeople calling on that lumberyard, one guy's on connector, a person selling fasteners, there's a person selling anchors. We've shifted to a much more end market focus. So we've got generally the person who had the great relationship who is the connector salesperson is now representing all 3 and carrying the bag on all 3 of those categories to that lumber yard, which has gotten us additional placement and sell-through on our fasteners and anchors, which has been one of our faster-growing segments. And so kind of going -- leveraging those relationships and going to market a little bit differently has really been a big source of our growth, as we mentioned, kind of 800 basis points over the last couple of years ahead of U.S. [indiscernible].

Are the demands among some of the different customer segments maybe different from the traditional lumberyard as you kind of expand into some of these newer areas or build up your business? Does that -- or what they require from you change at all?

For the most part, we're still using our channel partners, our pro-dealers in lumberyards. So it's really working with them to support the end customers. So for almost every one of our channels, our end market segments within our North American segment, we're using channel partners. We're going to continue to leverage them. They're great partners. They provide even better service when we provide good service to them to get to the end customer, and we will continue to do that.

Got it. Okay. Well, I'm going to take a breath here. If anybody from the audience has any questions, I'll take a pause. Otherwise, we'll keep rolling.

[indiscernible] and they talked about the [indiscernible] that they achieve in the past and [indiscernible] give us an update on [indiscernible] synergies?

Sure. So I'll start on the defensive synergies. So just a reminder, so we bought the ETANCO Group about 2.5 years ago. And within their distribution and operating footprint, we had a lot of overlap in the European Strong-Tie operations. So if there were facilities in the same country, we look to find the one that would best fit the growth model going forward, and we would move one to the other. Some legal entity consolidation, but a lot of it was just consolidating those operations into the same warehouse. We did that with all of the smaller ones. Some of the larger opportunities there are in the bigger markets where both the Strong-Tie European operation and the ETANCO operation or ad is in France. And what we're doing there is France is a very large connector manufacturing site and would also do distribution for connectors throughout part of Western Europe. The ETANCO model had a very large and very efficient logistics operation outside of Paris. So focus manufacturing in our Strong-Tie facility and then move the connector distribution through the ETANCO warehouse and logistics operations there. And those are defensive synergies that are ongoing today. We expect those to be largely complete this year. Some of the other ones are around getting our IT systems up around supporting a customer experience where they're calling into one order desk, getting one invoice from that one legal entity versus potentially selling product from various legal entities. So for us, we chose that more difficult path of consolidating the IT operations. It's proved pretty challenging. But again, we feel that, that customer experience is very critical. So defensive synergies, we think largely will be completed in 2024. Some of the offensive synergies that we built into the business case when we were evaluating the ETANCO opportunity back in 2021, we anticipated some more market growth that hasn't been there. We didn't anticipate the war in Ukraine and then the following very challenging European economy. Our European business has outpaced the market growth there or the market. So we've grown above market in Europe very nicely but we definitely experienced an environment that we didn't anticipate. So if we can get a little bit of market help, we get our offensive synergies back on track. So we think we're a few years past what we thought we would realize those offensive synergies but we definitely expect them to continue -- or to come to fruition here pretty soon.

So this one, we're seeing some more into high rise [indiscernible] buildings. Is that a trend is significant enough to benefit you?

The building codes in general moved fairly slow. I mean, we're involved in all of those. And probably the best example of that is there's cross-laminated timber or mass timber buildings are big wood cassettes that get craned in, they address labor shortages because they're craned in, and they're more sustainable because you're not using concrete. We participated in a study in just north of San Diego, where they built an 11-story building, we ran it through hundreds of different earthquake simulations. Performed very well. That type of info will eventually make its way into codes, which will make its way into new buildings. But these are all things from -- when we think about growth from a code perspective, I'm not putting a factor in there related to increase in codes or restrict that type of work.

But when we see the building materials change, we want to be very early with those manufacturers to make sure our product are tested in their solutions because they are often still going to need to meet seismic or high-wind requirements. And it may not be the traditional Simpson connector. It may be a very sophisticated fastener that is connecting those big large wood cassettes. We see that trend of mass timber buildings in Europe more than North America, but there's definitely a growing trend of that type of construction in North America. And our engineering focus is we want to be very early in that adoption. We want to make sure we're supporting that industry with tested solutions.

How have you guys [indiscernible] pricing environment? Maybe the soft [indiscernible] potential house of recovery [indiscernible] the ability to kind of push pricing into greater and greater [ heights ].

Yes, I'd say like generally, we try to maintain a 10% to 15% price premium versus our main competitor in connectors, even though we're 75-80 share that which to maintain that price premium. If you roll back to 2021, we took on an annualized basis about $500 million in pricing as steel was going from 1 to 3 to 4x its base. We gave back about 50 million of that pricing last year, but we've held on to 450 million. I would say if steel stays sort of in a tight range either way, like we're not going to take more price increases probably until that gets into the rearview mirror further. And if it goes down a little bit like it has been, we get calls from customers and we have to have those conversations. But we point to kind of the other investments that we've made in additional warehousing, additional R&D, support, customer service, things like that, to help them. Again, we're less than 1% of the building materials. So there's not a lot of money there for them if they were to save a few bucks here or there. I would say if steel were a significant drop, then we'd have a conversation about giving more back. And then I think it's still were to go up, the further that, that 2021 is in the rearview mirror, I think we have opportunity to take pricing, but we haven't historically done sort of like annual price increase.

Yes. No, I think that's a good question and sort of leads into the next, which is how have you balanced gross margins, operating margins, pricing with taking share? And I guess, going forward, this kind of investment cycle that you're in, how do we think about that persisting and just balancing all those different factors?

Let me start a little bit and you pick it up. So Kurt, we're thinking about how do we continue to drive overproportional growth versus the market. And doing that at operating income that's in the top quartile of our proxy peer group, which we think is around a 21-ish percent range. And so really, the focus is on providing great service to our customers, leveraging that business model I talked about, doing that in a way that helps us gain share and investing in it. And that's part of the reason why we've invested pretty heavily in SG&A and CapEx the last couple of years is because we think that that's the key to driving because it it's again, lots of singles and doubles. So there's not a lot of $100 million customer opportunities out there. So to go drive those specs, do the education with the customers, train them, help them trial it, walk the job sites, do a testing, it's a people-intensive business model. And we've been investing in it, which ultimately has helped us differentiate versus our peers and helped us gain share.

So as we think about those financial ambitions, and Mike mentioned operating income and return on revenue growth above market, we've got that return on invested capital goal as well. And all 3 of those play into how we make decisions around M&A, CapEx, new product development. So we don't want to under invest in SG&A to try to hit an operating income number because we think that's going to be a pretty big impact on future growth. We don't want to go all in on growth to the detriment of operating income. And then ROIC pulling the balance sheet into that equation just to make sure we're kind of hitting on all 3 cylinders. And we've definitely checked the box on above -- growth above market. We're not quite at that 20 -- or that 21% operating income that bottom end of the proxy peer group top quartile range. And we're kind of midpoint on the ROIC. So as we think about the decisions we make, we've got all 3 of those in mind from the financial ambitions perspective. And we've got a number of other ambitions that we have within the company. We want to be the partner of choice. We want to make sure we've got a great company and a great culture. But as we make investment decisions with that above-market growth, ROIC and operating income, all in mind.

And maybe setting Gallatin aside for a second, where are still the biggest opportunities from a P&L perspective to invest? Is it salespeople, engineers on the software side? What's kind of the focus there?

Yes, yes. So the way we look at the business, we have our 5 market segments, and we've got 20-plus market segments below those, and we've got playbooks for each one of those segments. How big do we think the market is, where to play, how to win, what applications you go after, what products do we need? We also have playbooks by those 5 main product lines that I showed you on the deck, same kind of story. We matrix our markets and our products together when we look at the intersection of each of those, what's the TAM for fasteners and residential. What's the TAM for connectors and commercial. And we take a look at where we think we are from a market size and then we'd say, all right, again, what are those best opportunities out of there? And then what do we need to do to go after that. And in some cases, maybe it's additional salespeople because it's a segment that maybe we think we could have better coverage in. Maybe in some areas, we need new products, so it's more of an engineering effort. Pretty much across the board, we think digital can help in all areas. We continue to invest in that. Maybe it's services. We've got a big team in Vietnam that can provide design services to our customers and get super specialized business. We just identify each one of those niches, what's that market opportunity? Where are we today? What does it take to close that gap? And then that's how we make those investment decisions.

And on Gallatin, an interesting investment. Maybe just talk a little bit about kind of the time line for bringing that facility, getting it up and ramped, how it impacts your sourcing on the fastener side and maybe longer term kind of strategically, what the opportunity is around that?

Sure. So we're doing a greenfield build in Gallatin. The facility should open roughly a year from now. So we're, I guess, halfway through the CapEx or so. And we produce fasteners in Gallatin. Today, of our total company purchase, we produced about 1/3 of our fasteners in Gallatin and we source the other 2/3 from Taiwan. So once Gallatin is up and running, we think that mix can be about 50-50, which we expect in the kind of mid, long term is kind of gross margin neutral, but gives us significant advantage in terms of inventory, lead times and as well, you mentioned mass timber. So mass timber jobs tend to be -- quote the job. You need to deliver all the fasteners in, say, 2 months. We had to shy away from quoting a lot of those because we source those products from Taiwan today, and we wouldn't be able to get them in time. So we're going to be able to make those in Gallatin, which is going to allow us to go after some more business in that space. As well today, we bring fasteners from Taiwan into Gallatin and then we move them into a couple of different outsourced sites in the Midwest and do heat treating and coatings. We're going to be able to do all that ourselves in-house in our Gallatin facility. So again, some efficiency, scale and capacity there.

Perfect. Maybe just last 2 on capital allocation. I mean, you've done a couple of smaller deals of late. You had CSD [ Monet Dessant ]. Am I pronouncing that right? Okay, good for me. And then quick frame. So what's kind of the common thread between those? Maybe talk a little bit more about the latter 2, just since we haven't discussed this.

So bigger picture -- so capital allocation, let me hit that real quick. I mean, we want to invest back in the business. If you look at it from an acquisition standpoint, it's, again, very specialized business, very few actionable targets over $100 million for us. So that means what can we do to tuck-in acquisitions that can help us strengthen our business model. What can help us give a better, deeper product line, more tool in the salesperson's bag to be able to help our customers out. So if you look at quick frame, that's a good opportunity for us in the commercial business. It's a prefabricated structural component that goes in the roof of commercial buildings to enable you to pull an HVAC system into it. It saves some engineering time, it saves some installation time. It's a nice product, good fit, structural engineering, spec in, I mean, all the things that we do, really good fit. And in the commercial business, we do believe there's an opportunity for us to increase the tools in our salesperson's bag. On the CSD piece, the software piece. So that helps us bring a fully integrated suite of design tools to our trust customers that -- with the CSD doing floor panels. So we're excited about that. That's a good fit, and we are licensing that product from them anyways. So now we can bring it inside, and we can customize it and integrate in our systems. And then Monet Dessant, a good one. That helps us bring a fuller set of solutions to the trust and the component manufacturers. Again, the business model there, you provide a broad range of software solutions, but you also provide equipment. We have -- we've made a couple of investments in equipment, Monet is one of them. So it will help us go to the trust manufacturers, which we think is a world-class and related equipment to help us better support those and trust and component manufacturing customers.

Maybe just lastly on cash returns to shareholders. I mean, you levered up a little bit with ETANCO, a lot for maybe Simpson in historical context, but not all that much in hindsight. You've lowered debt levels since then by quite a bit. These deals relatively small in size. How does incremental share repurchases and the dividend kind of fit into the overall strategy at this stage?

So as we're thinking about the investments we're making, and Mike touched on it, I mean, we're looking at the internal investments. But we do have a dividend that the Board has increased a small amount each year. And then we've supplemented our share return -- our capital return to shareholders via opportunistic buybacks. We've generally got a target of about 35% of free cash flow being returned back to shareholders on an annual basis. Some years were a little bit more, some years were a little bit less. But as we evaluate the upcoming debt, coming current in 2026, we got a little bit left on our revolver. So the ETANCO acquisition, we borrowed down on a term loan and took down some funds on a revolver, got $75 million left on the revolver and I think $350 million left on the term loan that amortizes out a little bit each year. So as that comes current in '26, we'll evaluate, do we roll that over? Do we pay it off? It depends on the interest rate environment. We're hedged very nicely at about 2.3% fixed on the -- on both of those going forward. So not in a big hurry to pay those down, but we'll evaluate what do we do with the cash we're generating, when they do come up. In the meantime, we'll continue to look for those nice acquisition opportunities that Mike mentioned.

Excellent. All right. Well, thank you, guys. We appreciate it. Thanks for your time.

Thanks, everyone.