Alan Haughie
Analyst · Truist Securities. Your line is open
Thanks, Brad. Pages 8 and 9 of the presentation show the first quarter year-over-year revenue and EBITDA bridges. Both are fairly straightforward, but a few factors bear some discussion. For Siding on Page 8, 9% higher volumes and 2% higher prices compounded for 11% revenue growth. Volume growth actually outperformed single-family starts in the quarter by 15 points, consistent with ongoing material conversion and share gains boosted by robust demand for panel products. LP’s shed customers are experiencing what appears to be a sustainable recovery after a long period of soft demand following the surge they experienced during COVID. I should also mention that although the margin on panels is healthy, they are priced below lap, trim and soffit. So, while panel growth boosted volumes and helped with margins, it also brought a negative price mix effect that offset the positive mix effect from higher ExpertFinish. In other words, please don’t infer any slowdown in ExpertFinish from the softer year-over-year price growth. On the contrary, the first quarter set records for both volume and revenue in ExpertFinish. Other variances in the quarter were minor, with a $5 million increasing in selling and marketing spend and minor variances in labor, raw material costs and freight netting to zero. Tariff impact rounded to about $2 million in the quarter. Without which, and it bears repeating, the first quarter, EBITDA margin would have rounded to 27% instead of the reported 26%. So for Siding, despite the tariff induced market volatility, it was a solid quarter for pricing power, growth, share gains, operating leverage, and therefore for margin expansion and that trend continues into the second quarter, in which Siding orders are on pace to set new records for both volume and revenue. For OSB on Page 9, the bridge is dominated by commodity OSB price fluctuations as is so often the case. Lower prices resulted in a $32 million reduction in revenue and EBITDA. A mixed shift from structural solutions to commodity, which is not uncommon in soft OSB markets, resulted in a net reduction of $13 million in revenue and $7 million in EBITDA compared to the prior year. And just as with the Siding segment, all of the variances were quite minor by comparison. Page 10 shows cash flow for the quarter. As you will recall, we typically use cash to build working capital in the first quarter, primarily log inventory to prepare our mills for the spring breakup, and working capital increases consumed about $74 million, with taxes, interests and other costs combining for a further $24 million of outflow. We invested $64 million in capital projects, spent $61 million to repurchase shares, and paid $20 million in dividends and this brought our ending cash balance to $256 million. Having recently expanded our revolving credit facility to $750 million, which I should add is completely undrawn, LP had $1 billion in liquidity at the end of the quarter. And to save you the trouble in Q&A, no, we we’re not planning to borrow from the expanded revolver to fund share repurchases. We will continue to earn the cash, invest in growth and return cash to shareholders in that order, which brings me to LP’s updated guidance on Page 11. As already stated, more than once commodity prices have softened recently, while Siding appears to be on track for a record second quarter. We anticipate year-over-year revenue growth in the 9% to 10% range for Siding, generating between $445 million and $455 million in revenue, an EBITDA margin of about 26% implies EBITDA between $110 million and $120 million. These results will not only be records for revenue and EBITDA, but would also exceed the volume record set during the peak of COVID demand, a year that saw almost 1.6 million housing starts in the U.S. For the full year, we now expect Siding revenue of about $1.7 billion and EBITDA between $425 million and $435 million. We’re applying the same philosophy to our tariff assumptions as we did in our first quarter guide three months ago, namely that the current state continues through the remainder of the year, a state which leads us to expect roughly $12 million of tariff headwind in EBITDA. Despite this, we’ve increased the midpoint of our guide by $10 million, which can be thought of as a $22 million increase in EBITDA from growth and leverage, partly offset by the $12 million of tariff impact. For OSB, with Random Lengths falling recently, a prudent modeling approach will be to assume that commodity OSB prices remained flat at last Friday’s level for the remainder of the year, which is exactly what we’ve done. So with that assumption, the second quarter OSB EBITDA should be in the $15 million to $25 million range, extending the midpoint of that range through the second half of the year, yields a full year EBITDA estimate for OSB of $110 million to $120 million. Now for the avoidance of doubt, this is not an attempt to predict actual commodity prices, but simply a conservative approach that we hope is useful for modeling. So in summary, it was a surprisingly clean quarter given the noise and turbulent market backdrop. And while consumer sentiment and commodity prices are being pressured by tariff uncertainty, our Siding order file seems to be weathering the storm nicely so far. And with that, I’d like to open up the call for Q&A. Operator?