Whirlpool Corporation (WHR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Greg Melich. I cover the Retail Broadlines and Hardlines here at Evercore ISI. It's a pleasure to keep the tradition alive, especially with an esteemed group of panelists, our Annual State of the Consumer Panel hosted by Oscar Sloterbeck. I will turn it over to Oscar to go to our group of 3 and get going to figure out what's actually happening in the consumer and the economy. Oscar?

Thanks so much, Greg. So yes, I think we've got a great panel here to talk about the consumer and sort of the macro view as well as I'm sure some company-specific sort of issues. But to start on the top left corner, Jim Peters, is joining us. He's the EVP and CFO of the Whirlpool Corporation. Thanks, Jim, for being here. Top right, David Rawlinson, who's Chief Executive Officer of Qurate Retail. Thanks, David, for joining. And in the middle, below me, Richard Hare, EVP and CFO of Havertys Furniture, a very warm welcome to you as well. And thank you all for joining us. And I think the purpose of this is to give all of our clients a sense for big picture, what different segments of the consumer spending environment are doing from a big picture perspective. And I thought I'd start and move sequentially through each of you with some of these questions. First of all, just a little bit of comments on recent sales trends, how that compares to sort of recent history? What are you seeing from your business? And maybe I'll start with you, Jim.

Yes. So here's what I'd say is we saw a period of time post the financial crisis where appliances grew and grew pretty steadily. And then you get to the COVID period and everybody was in their house and they were buying appliances like crazy because everyone was cooking, they couldn't go out to eat. We had a little bit of slowdown after that, and then we kind of saw the business stabilize, but what we've seen now is as mortgage rates have come up in this inflationary environment as interest rates came up, which drove mortgage rates up, one of the biggest drivers of sales for us is existing home sales. I mean, new home sales and existing home sales are 2 of the biggest drivers. And existing home sales have hit a multi-decade low, it's really caused a segment of our business that we refer to as the discretionary part, which is about 1/3 of our business to really slow down significantly. And so consumers are not upgrading appliances right now. You're hearing a lot of the retailers say they're not seeing the big ticket purchases. Our replacement industry on the other -- replacement side, which is about 60% of our business is doing great right now because it's looking back about 10 years to a period when the industry grew. So replacement very good, discretionary, just doesn't have the catalyst and the drivers right now. And then the other part of our business is new home sales. And I'd say that's steady right now, but we're just not seeing a lot of growth in it. So I would say, all in all, what we see is the consumer being relatively conservative unless it's a duress purchase, i.e., replacement right now.

Great. Thanks, Jim. David, why don't I hand it over to you, same question, recent sales trends, how that compares to recent history.

Yes, that's great. So I would potentially -- maybe I'll start macro and go micro to our business. On the macro, I'd say -- see 3 themes, I think, number 1 is felt inflation was greater than measured inflation. And so more inflation in noncore categories than core categories, which tend to be what we thought about and inflation doesn't -- the primary numbers don't always capture the impact of interest rates. I think Larry Summers just talked a lot about that recently. I think theme #2 is housing market still frozen. Obviously, you just heard a little bit about that. I think new housing starts -- it's about the same as it was 60 years ago when the population is about 85% greater in the U.S. than it was 60 years ago. And so still a very depressed level of new housing starts. And then on the discretionary side, I'd say the sentiment we're seeing is steady, but at a lower level, and that's especially true across home and electronics. We also had a bit of a COVID bump and then coming out the other side of COVID, if you look across discretionary retail, we think that the discretionary retail has been sort of down mid-single digits for the better part of 1.5 years to 2 years or so. We are doing in line with or a bit better in terms of year-over-year comps than the broader discretionary retail industry is doing, but Obviously, it's not in a growth pattern, and I think that traces back to a lot of the things I pointed to in terms of the macro environment earlier.

Thanks, David. Richard, your turn.

Thank you. Very similar commentary is what you've heard before. We are a home furniture retailer in 17 states, primarily in the South. And we are definitely tied to housing starts and existing home sales. And we saw a tremendous bump in business during COVID during the home resting period. We were up over 35% in revenue in 2021, and then that leveled off again in '22. We're back to historical levels of our backlog. But we've seen -- I believe the last 5 quarters in a row, we've had declining delivery business. And we don't -- we're just looking to see when interest rates will decline and can get mortgage rates a little, hopefully in the 6% range, and we think that would increase some activity in our markets for home starts and home sales.

Great. Thank you. So one of the themes I know we've heard about in our retailer survey a bunch over the last several quarters has been about sort of trade down or consumers choosing sort of less expensive products to the extent they're available. I'm curious what you all are seeing from that perspective? And also maybe just a little bit on sort of input costs and what overall inflation in some of the product categories you have might be doing. Jim, you alluded to it a little bit, but I'll start with you again.

Yes. And I'd say, first off, I'd say we definitely are seeing the consumer trade down some, but it's more based on the drivers I discussed earlier that right now because you don't have the level of existing home sales that you had before, which really drives when a consumer comes in and they replace their entire kitchen, which is a very good rich mix of appliances. Instead, the biggest part of the market is that duress purchaser, who's walking in, it's something that they need to do. They need to replace their washing machine. They're dealing with higher costs in all other parts of their life right now. And so as they look at this, they're like, listen, here's what I want to spend. And here's what I'm willing to spend. And so we see that duress consumer tends to trade down a little bit. I'd say within the discretionary segment, as I said, that's just not growing or it's actually reduced pretty significantly, and that's where we tend to get that richer mix, at least in our business. And so today, I don't know that I see the consumer trading down in there. I've just seen that segment shrink pretty much. If you really look at material costs and you kind of tie that in, what I would say is, listen, we saw an extremely high level of inflation back in '20, '21, '22. And obviously, labor inflation, we saw logistics cost inflation. We saw raw material inflation. And a lot of that went into the pricing of our products. So obviously, appliances we're selling it at probably higher level than they had been in most recent years. Now that has settled down some. And what we've actually seen is we've seen materials stay about steady, labor costs continue to be high. Logistics costs continue to be high, but we're not seeing the increases that we saw before. And so what that's driven in the marketplace is probably a little bit more of a promotional environment between the retailers and the manufacturers. You're seeing a lot more promotions that's at least bringing prices back in line probably where they were in more of a pre-COVID type of period and putting them about there. And so again, that's how at least we see it right now.

Thank you. David?

So on trading up versus trading down, we have seen some trading down, I would say. We continue to see consumers who are ready to spend when they have exactly the right offer. And when we get the offer right, whether it's $1,300 electric bike or $4,000 diamond tennis necklace, they'll move. But if she's not very excited about it, she tends not to purchase. She seems to want to hang on to her money. And we do see some deal chasing behaviors. That being said, we've actually been on a pretty nice run of increasing average sales price in the business and being able to expand gross margins. I think we've expanded gross margin now 4 quarters in a row. And that goes to the other part of your question, which is -- goes to input costs, transportation costs. We've seen a nice leveling off of some of those costs. We've also been able -- had time now to reconfigure our supply chain to be able to take some cost out while trying to get delivery speeds a little bit faster. And so we've been in this range of performance where despite the challenges to discretionary retail that has us down slightly on the top line, we've actually been able to deliver pretty nice results on the bottom line. We've had OIBDA, our profitability metric, expanding for the last 3 quarters. Free cash flow has been expanding for the last 5 quarters. Gross margin has been expanding for the last 4 or 5 quarters. So being able to control the cost side of the equation has really helped us to continue to be able to deliver on the bottom line and on the cash line, even though the top line demand market continues to be choppy.

Thank you. Richard?

We did see a little bit of disruption right after COVID in our case goods, but that has caught up, and now we're seeing some nice -- as a percentage of sales, our upholstery business is leading the way. And we're not seeing any necessary trade downs per se. Our home design business is up over 30% now, and our customer order upholstery business continues to grow. But what we are doing is we want to make sure that our assortment appeals to different price points. And so we're making sure or going back and making sure that we have the good, better and best product offerings forward on all of our showrooms so that in the event the customer wants to trade down, they have that opportunity and we have it available. In terms of input costs, things have basically normalized. As you heard from some other panels today, we did take advantage of the opportunity when we got our prices were increased to us, during COVID, we, in turn, increased our price to consumer. So we were able to actually expand our margins and continue to do so. But labor costs have somewhat stabilized and our product costs as well, a little bit of a blip on freight, but nothing significant at this point.

And pardon my not understanding the terminology, but you said case goods, what does that mean?

That's furniture that we bring in from Asia. So it's anything that's wood like a table mirror. Our broad categories are case goods; upholstery; bedding, which is mattresses; and accessories.

Great. Great. So I guess the other sort of topic we've been trying to address through a bunch of our surveys is on interest rates, credit availability, sort of consumer credit quality, those types of questions and matters more to some of you than others. But Jim, how would you -- so you spoke a little bit about interest rates and mortgage rates. How would you refer sort of comments on credit?

Yes. And here's what I'd say is probably when it comes to interest rates, the biggest driver for us is what it does to overall mortgage rates because, as I said, that really drives a big part of our business and between the discretion -- typically, replacement is about 50%, 55% of our business, and then the remainder of it is tied to housing, whether it's discretionary tied to existing home sales or tied to new home sales. And so that's really where we see the biggest impact. I mean many of our consumers don't necessarily buy appliances on payment plans or other things within the U.S. Now outside the U.S., it has a significant impact on our business, but we're seeing a lot of markets growing outside the U.S. And so rising interest rates in other parts of the world hasn't really impacted us at all. But with the U.S. consumer, as I said, probably the bigger driver is just what drives housing and then the people who come in to make a duress purchase, whether they're purchasing it on credit or with just whatever cash they have available, the bigger driver and the more important factor for them is that they need to replace the appliance. They need a washing machine. They need a refrigerator. And so that really keeps us kind of insulated at least in that part of the business from big movements in interest rates. So right now, we're not seeing a significant change at all outside of what I talked about in housing.

David, is this a factor for you all, rates and credit availability?

Yes, it is in a couple of ways. So we have what we call our cornerstone business, Frontgate, Ballard Designs, Garnet Hill, Grandin Road. That business is very indexed towards home, a lot of indoor, outdoor furniture across some of those brands. And so that's impacted by all of the housing dynamics we've talked about. That market is very depressed, probably down sort of double digits, low teens. And I think that rhymes with a lot of the things that you've heard from some of the other panelists. And our main video commerce business is a little less impact, but you do see a few things that I think are relevant. One is a rotation out of discretionary categories to stable categories, I think because inflation is just making that take up a larger part of the household income. And so I think that's why you've seen continued challenges on the discretionary purchase side. We also have our own sort of Buy Now Pay Later like program that we call EasyPay and FlexPay that allows the consumer to pay over the course of a number of months for a purchase that now makes up a majority of our business. We think a high interest rate environment makes those sorts of programs even more attractive. So we've continued to see consumers buying in that way. Thankfully, we've also continued to see very, very low delinquency rates in those accounts. And so that seems like it's turning out to be a good value proposition for us and a good value proposition for our consumer. On our credit cards, on our private label credit cards, you're starting to see the slightest tick up in delinquencies. We haven't seen a tick up as much as the credit card industry writ large has, but you do start to see just a little bit of an impact.

Thank you. Richard?

About 1/3 of our customers utilize credit, and we outsourced all of our credit to Synchrony, they are credit provider. Our consumer is a little better than most. You have the promotional players we're above that kind of middle to upper middle and then you've got restoration in our house above that. Our average consumer is $100,000, $125,000 suburban home. Usually, the female is the decision-maker on furniture purchases. We've seen our in-store approvals still around 90%, very strong, and delinquency rates are back to pre-pandemic levels. I think they were slightly lowered in COVID because of all the influx of money in the system, but they're back to a normalized level. So one thing we have done is, we've reduced our offerings of 60-month financings that's more expensive now with rates being higher. We're focusing more on 36 and 24 months. We're not seeing any pushback from our consumer on that. But that's one area of focus that we've had this year. We do offer 60 months from time to time, but certainly less frequently than in years passed.

So one 1 of the -- we just published a big piece on AI asking companies how they're using it, how they're thinking about it or digital technology is just trying to figure out how that's affecting businesses and consumers these days and wondering if you all could share a few of your thoughts on some of these digital tools and AI investment. How important is it? How are you using it or thinking about it? And Jim, maybe I'll start with you.

Yes. So I would say probably for an extended period of time here, we've been really working with and for lack of a better word, experimenting with connected appliances, but it's more been around developing the consumer use case. And what is the consumer value with the connected appliance, where do they get the value, how is it going to increase the convenience in their life and all that. And so I think that's been a big place where we've been investing more in the technology of our products and how it interfaces with the consumers. And on the back end, what it gives you is it gives you data and it gives you lots of data and it gives you data on how consumers use your appliances. It gives you data that can help you identify problems or service issues before they occur. It can give you remote diagnostic or remote diagnosing capabilities. And so there are a lot of things as we look at this and we look at the data that we have and then our ability to assess that data quickly and understand how the consumer is using an appliance, what they're using it for, what are the things that they really value within the process. And then what, as I said, are the potential service things coming up. And what we've seen with a lot of this is most of the data has told us that consumers continue, actually, an elevated level of usage right now post-COVID, and we look at the levels of usage before, during but even afterwards, consumers seem to still be cooking more. They still seem to be doing a lot more things within their home. They're washing more loads of laundry. They're going to the dry cleaner less. There's a lot of data and all that, that we're beginning to understand. And now we're just looking at how we continue to turn that data, utilize that data in the development of our products to continue to try and enhance and improve the consumer experience. So I'd say, it's not so much that we're using AI, but we're using our ability to connect with the consumer and then take that data and turn it into something that hopefully will help the consumer in their lives go forward.

Are there any particular challenges around sort of cleaning the data, processing the data, anything that stands out as sort of a greater gating factor to taking advantage of some of those opportunities?

Well, I think the biggest thing when you start to do something like this is you realize the amount of data you get because our products have so many -- I mean, they're electronic products with so many sensors in them, and they create massive amounts of data. And so it's a matter of how do you filter through that? How do you understand what's relevant, what's not relevant, and that's been the big learning experience for us because if you would just collect all the data that the machine can generate, it's massive amounts. And so for us, it was really what is relevant. And as I said, we started to look at it more on certain types of usage patterns and then certain things that would be indicators of something within the appliance that might indicate that it needs service or something like that. And so that's really where we're focusing more of our efforts in this process and less of it around just a lot of the routine data that you might get on how the machine is performing when it's performing well.

Great. Thank you. David?

We're excited about AI. I'd say we're moving from experimenting to scaling some of the technologies. We set up a center of excellence located in Europe, and we're probably working against a couple of dozen use cases. Most of those use cases right now are about efficiency or making our employees more effective, and we see some good use cases there. We're also exploring some use cases that we think will help the -- make the customer journey more impactful. We're trying to be careful there. I think one of the things that makes QVC, HSN those business model is really unique is we have celebrities and host personalities that people love who are explaining products and creating a very personal relationship one-to-one through the screen with our customers. We think it makes a standout in retail, and we don't want to put a machine in the middle of that very prized customer relationship. So we're being very careful in our customer applications of AI right now, although we're rolling it out gingerly and a few specific applications, but mostly where we've seen the difference has been either on the back end on efficiency or in tools we're building to help employees like customer service agents find what they need to know more quickly to be able to help our customers.

Thank you. Thank you. Richard?

Yes, I think probably the first thing we did from a risk standpoint, my CFO had on, was we tried to work with our internal auditory and set up some guardrails so that we don't let important information or data get out, it shouldn't be. So we've kind of -- we have limited areas where we've shut down open access to everyone. So it's kind of a very -- we try to put some governance into the process. And it's -- where we're using it primarily is customer service. We do have live chat agents, but we also utilize AI in that regard. And then our marketing area is also in charge of digital. And on our website, we use CGI to do some really good photorealistic work. You think it's a photo, but it's really not -- it's pretty impressive. We also use AI with our search engine on our website to improve search metrics when you go to our web page. I know they're using copywriting over on the web as well. And our supply chain is starting to use it with some demand forecasting and predictive ETAs on when we'll get merchandise from our vendors. So we -- I think we're just now getting started with it, but it's exciting. But it also has the risk that we're trying to manage.

Greg and Oli, maybe turn it over to you all to see if you have some questions. And I know for those on the call, if you want to submit your questions through the chat box, we welcome your suggestions too.

Maybe I'll kick it off and David, this is for you. You've demonstrated the continued improvement in your turnaround. So if it's gross margin, if it's free cash flow or what you use for profitability. Can you maybe walk us through some of the driving forces or drivers behind that?

Yes. Thank you. So when we announced the turnaround called Project Athens, about 18 months ago, we really announced transformative program where we're looking at every single lever in the business, everything from demand generation to supply chain to how efficiently we were staffed, spans and layers to where we chose to go to market and where we didn't choose to go to market. We divested some businesses primarily Zulily, and we really redesigned a lot of our go-to-market capabilities as well as redesigning our supply chain. And so those things, it's taken a while to get it going, we finally sort of reached the turning point of being able to start bottom line growth, again, in the third quarter of last year. And so once we were sort of got the ball over the hill and rolling downhill, we've been able to see successive momentum on bottom line results throughout the business. I'd say the thing I've been most excited about is the last couple of quarters. The number of new customers for us has been growing very strongly year-over-year. When I announced Project Athens, I said it was a transformation program that would run out through 2024. So as this year is going back faster than I expected, we're starting to get to the end of it. I think what comes after this Athens turnaround has to be a pivot towards top line growth. We've really concentrated on the bottom line in the turnaround. I think post 2024, we're going to start concentrating on the top line again. And I think seeing some of the tailwinds from starting to see real new customer growth with our brands is encouraging as we go into the next period.

Great. I love to chime in. I think probably more for Jim and Richard. I think you both talked about the importance of existing home sales and what that means and with churn at a 40-year low, we're seeing the pressure all over and rate-sensitive things and particularly housing. I'd love to go a little bit further on AUR. I think it was Wayfair earlier was telling us they were -- they got over $300 average basket from maybe $225 pre-COVID. It slipped back a little under $300, but doesn't seem to be -- seems to be stabilizing there. So I'd love to hear in your business, Jim and Richard and yours across furniture, are you seeing a similar phenomenon where you had this big AUR expansion, maybe off a little bit? And what do you think the likelihood is that we can actually keep that average unit retail 20%, 30% higher than it was pre-COVID or in the case of appliances, do we end up just going back to where we were a few years ago, Jim?

Yes. And here's what I'd say, at least in appliances, as I kind of broke down those 3 segments earlier. And in the replacement business, that's where you typically get the 1, maybe 2 appliance type of purchase, but it's typically somebody comes in to replace one thing. That discretionary bucket that's driven by existing home sales primarily and the new housing construction, that's where we see the multiple unit purchases. People buy suites. They come in, they replace the entire kitchen at one time. And as I said, it tends to be a better mix of appliances too, that they're buying within that and especially because in our business, the kitchen appliances for the kitchen tend outside of things like microwaves, tend to sell at higher price points. Many of them, they tend to have better margins on them, too. So I would say that what we've seen is we saw it was pretty stable. Throughout COVID, it actually grew because as people were buying, they were replacing their entire kitchens, big purchases. Now in the environment we've been in so far, since then, I would say it's come back down. I would expect -- at some point, you're going to see some movement in existing home sales. Now whether it's driven by lower mortgage rates or what I like to call life events that people, they still have families, they still get married, they still get divorced, they still move, they still do all these things, there's a lot of pent-up demand out there. And when that pent-up demand begins to come back, we would expect that to return to what we used to see in a pre-COVID type environment. I mean, additionally, as we know, housing formations or the availability of housing in the U.S. is well below where it needs to be. So that's why, I would say, as we kind of look forward, I think we're going to get back to something we've historically seen. But right now, just due to the dynamics of the market, yes, I would agree, we've seen a decline. Yes.

I'd say looking at our average ticket and its trend. There's a couple of big drivers there. We've seen some nice improvements over the last 2 or 3 years. Our average ticket now is over $3,200. When you get a home designer, it's $6,900. And if we can get the home designer in your home, it's over $10,000. So I think you're going to see us to continue to emphasize home design and that service, which is free to the consumer. Also, our custom upholstery where you can mix and match your own fabrics, it only takes about 4 to 5 weeks to get it from design to your home. That's over 35% of our upholstery business now, but that also helps drive that average ticket. But that's what we're going to focus on. It's certainly more challenging now in this market, but we continue to make improvements in those areas. The other 2 -- the big 3 things we look at are traffic, closing rate and average ticket. So the traffic is a little tough right now. So we're focused on the closing of one of the traffic that we do get and a continuing emphasis from that average ticket.

And maybe I have a question on just overall promotions and what that does to traffic. Maybe Richard, is that something that you play around with? And have you seen any uptake? Or is it just really more about events, right, that people come during Memorial Day or now 4th of July. And maybe Jim, for you as well is on the discretionary side, do you see when you run promotions with or on your own with -- retails on your own? Is that driving traffic? I mean, the replacement, you probably don't see it that much, but just seeing if promotions, actually, are helping.

Yes, I'll go first real quick, promotional periods are very important in the furniture business. During COVID, it didn't really matter because of the home nesting period, everybody was investing in their homes. But now you're back to more traditional promotional periods. You'll see different players behave differently. But the key is during those promotions to execute them well, get the word out in terms of advertising and give it to the right people. And then we've also done some experimenting with how you advertise those promotions and how you showed the discount and how do you characterize the promotional period. But in essence, the dollar percentage off remains the same. You have to tweak your messaging about the promotional periods, but they are very important in this business.

Yes. They've always been a significant part of our business and very similar. If you would have looked at during COVID, where you had just a lack of availability of product and supply chains were constrained. The promotional environment just pretty much dried up and went away. And as we came back out of that and different producers and manufacturers, their supply chains normalized. You started to see it pick up. Now what I would say is it really hasn't driven any incremental demand and due to a couple of reasons. One, I said this is we're -- a big part of our business right now and the biggest part is that replacement industry that doesn't really change due to the promotional environment. Those are consumers who are in the market no matter what. And then the new housing part is also not affected by it. So it's just that discretionary bucket. And as that discretionary bucket has gotten smaller, we're just not seeing a lot of consumers say, hey, despite everything that I haven't moved, I'm going to go out and replace all my appliances right now. So we see -- you just can't promote to a higher level of demand there when the other dynamics such as existing home sales just aren't there. So it is an important part of our business. It's something that both the retailers and the manufacturers have driven over the years. But I would say that I don't know that it's necessarily that effective and that's why probably, as you look at us as a player within the industry, we've always said we really try and be as smart about it as we can and only participate when it's going to make sense and when we think it's going to create additional value. And even recently, you would have said we came out and said we're going to take our promotional prices, what we support at the retail level up because we don't think it makes sense right now. So it is a big part of our industry, but I don't think it's driving a whole lot, and that's why we're really focusing now on let's try and only support what we think might create incremental demand.

Well, I think we're probably up to our ending time. But Oscar, I want to make sure that I'm not cheating out of a couple of minutes here.

Yes. I'll give maybe a 10 second if anyone wants to throw a response. But I know there's a lot of -- we've just been through a period, not the current [indiscernible] everyone with all sorts of tariffs and trade issues, and there's certainly talk of that perhaps coming up again. How does -- and to the extent you all are importing a fair amount of the product you sell, how -- can you give us a few comments on trade tariffs and how that may or has historically impacted your business? Anyone want to...

I could say real quick within ours. We actually -- we produce about 75% to 80% of what we sell in the U.S., actually in the U.S., we do have some coming in from Mexico that's been affected by that a little bit. The biggest thing that's probably affected our industry is the steel tariffs in terms of steel coming in from outside the U.S. and coming in from China that you have tariffs on that. But if a product is made with steel, outside of the U.S. with Chinese steel, it comes in without a tariff on it. So I would say that, yes, it affects our input costs, it does actually create a competitive advantage in a small part of the business for some of our competitors because of the way it was structured. But outside of that, that's probably the biggest thing that tariffs impacts our business today.

And I'll just add real quickly. In the furniture business, this happened back in 2019, most of our suppliers in China just shifted over to Vietnam. So I would expect a continuation of that if this happens. Although we still do have several [indiscernible] from China, but I would expect the production to move elsewhere if it got really high again.

We saw a move from Korea to China to Vietnam to Thailand and back.

I would say we haven't seen big impacts. We've diversified our supply chain incrementally over time. And I think we're going to be prepared to stay flexible and responsive as the environment changes.

Great. Thank you all very much for participating in this panel. I really appreciate your insights, and hope you have a great rest of your day.

Thank you, Oscar. Thank you.