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Owens Corning (OC)

Q3 2024 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 6, 2024

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Owens Corning's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. My name is Lydia and I will be your operator today. After the prepared remarks there’ll be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] I'll now hand you over to Amber Wohlfarth, Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Investor Relations to begin.

Amber Wohlfarth

Analyst

Good morning. Thank you for taking the time to join us for today's conference call and review of our business results for the third quarter of 2024. Joining us today are Brian Chambers, Owens Corning's Chair and Chief Executive Officer; and Todd Fister, our Chief Financial Officer. Following our presentation this morning, we will open this one-hour call to your questions. In order to accommodate as many call participants as possible, please limit yourselves to one question only. Earlier this morning, we issued a news release and filed a 10-Q that detailed our financial results for the third quarter of 2024. For the purposes of our discussion today, we have prepared presentation slides summarizing our performance and results, and we'll refer to these slides during this call. You can access the earnings press release, Form 10-Q and the presentation slides at our website, owenscorning.com. Refer to the Investors link under the Corporate section of our homepage. A transcript and recording of this call and the supporting slides will be available on our website for future reference. Please reference Slide 2, where we offer a couple of reminders. First, today's remarks will include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially. We undertake no obligation to update these statements beyond what is required under applicable securities laws. Please refer to the cautionary statements and the risk factors identified in our SEC filings for more detail. Second, the presentation slides and today's remarks contain non-GAAP financial measures. Explanations and reconciliations of non-GAAP to GAAP measures may be found in our earnings press release and presentation available on the Investors section of our website, owenscorning.com. For those of you following along with our slide presentation, we will begin on Slide 4. And now opening remarks from our Chair and CEO, Brian Chambers. Brian?

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Thanks, Amber. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. During our call this morning, I will share an overview of our third quarter performance and review several strategic initiatives and investments we are making to sharpen our focus as a leader in residential and commercial building products, while positioning the company for future growth. Todd will provide further detail on our financial performance and then I'll come back and discuss our near-term outlook. Owens Corning delivered another outstanding quarter, with our team continuing to demonstrate best-in-class commercial and operational execution despite challenging near-term market conditions. Our ongoing ability to deliver such strong results is a direct reflection of the work we've done over the past few years to strengthen our market-leading positions, improve our operating efficiencies and increase the earnings power of the company. In addition to our strong financial results, we also made progress on a number of key initiatives to further enhance our production capacity and capability, as well as simplify our geographic footprint. I'll speak more about this shortly. But first, I'll begin, as always, with a critical component to our success, safety. Through the implementation of our Safer Together operating framework, our recordable incident rate was 0.58 in the third quarter. Two-thirds of our facilities have operated injury free this year and more than half have done so for over a year. As a reminder, our recently added Doors segment has not been included in the RIR calculation. As we bring our safety first culture to this business, we continue to see improvements in the performance and look forward to including Doors in our safety reporting in early 2025. In looking at our financial performance in more detail, our results continued to demonstrate our structurally higher and more resilient earnings profile despite more…

Todd Fister

Analyst

Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As Brian mentioned, we delivered another quarter of outstanding results. The performance in the third quarter reflects the structural improvements we have made to the enterprise and the consistent commercial and operational execution from our teams. We have multiple paths to sustain our structurally higher EBITDA margins, deliver strong cash generation and continue to return cash to shareholders. I'd now like to turn to Slide 5 to discuss the quarter in more detail. In the third quarter, we continued to build on a strong first half to deliver top line and bottom line growth in the quarter for the enterprise. Adjusted EBIT of $582 million and adjusted EBITDA of $766 million grew versus last year by 12% and 19%. Adjusted EBIT margin was 19% and adjusted EBITDA margin was 25%. Part of the year-over-year growth can be attributed to the first full quarter of operating the Doors segment after our acquisition of Masonite, with the remainder primarily driven by ongoing excellent commercial execution in our legacy businesses. Organically, adjusted EBIT and adjusted EBITDA were up 5%. Adjusted earnings for the third quarter were $385 million or $4.38 per diluted share compared with $380 million or $4.18 per diluted share in the same quarter prior year. For the quarter, adjusting items totaled approximately $73 million and are excluded from our adjusted EBIT. They primarily include $61 million of Masonite acquisition related costs, $19 million of gains on the sale of certain precious metals as we shift our ownership portfolio and change the production tooling needs and deposits and $16 million of charges related to the ongoing strategic review of the glass reinforcements business. Turning to Slide 6. Our capital allocation strategy remains unchanged. We are focused on generating strong free cash flow, returning approximately…

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Thank you, Todd. Our third quarter results demonstrated the impact of the strategic choices and structural improvements we have made to strengthen Owens Corning and build a company that continues to deliver strong free cash flow and sustainably higher margins despite challenging market conditions. The near-term market outlook for many of our residential and commercial end-markets is likely to remain choppy as we close out 2024 and enter into the New Year. However, as we move through 2025, we do expect to see demand trends in both repair and remodel and new construction to strengthen in North America as interest rates come down and investments in housing and non-residential projects improve. We've also seen some signs of economic recovery in Europe that should continue to evolve and strengthen market conditions next year. Specific to the fourth quarter, we expect overall demand for our products to be impacted by challenging market conditions as well as normal end-of-the-year seasonality. In addition, we will realize some operational impact from manufacturing disruptions from the recent hurricanes in each of our businesses. In our North America building and construction markets, we anticipate nondiscretionary repair and remodeling activity to be solid, while more discretionary repair and remodeling activity is expected to remain soft. We also expect the decline in lagged housing starts to result in lower demand from single-family new construction in the quarter. Outside North America, we anticipate ongoing macroeconomic trends and geopolitical tensions will continue to negatively impact demand for our products. Given this backdrop, we expect fourth quarter revenue growth for the company of around 20% with anticipated revenue from our legacy OC business to be slightly below prior year. For EBIT, we expect to deliver another strong quarter of mid-teen margin for the enterprise, with an EBITDA margin of approximately 20%. Now,…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from John Lovallo with UBS.

Spencer Kaufman

Analyst

This is actually Spencer Kaufman on for John. Apologies if I missed this but how much incremental capacity will the new insulation line in Kansas City be bringing online in 2027? And are you concerned about any certain competitors that are also bringing capacity online or is the North American resi market just simply running too tight right now?

Todd Fister

Analyst

Spencer, this is Todd. I'll take that one. So when you look at the line in Kansas City, you could think of that as being an incremental 2% to 3% increase in capacity for the fiberglass industry. What's great about that asset is really a couple of things for us. It's a very capital-efficient asset that we're adding because we're using existing footprint and infrastructure that we have in our Kansas City facility. It also has a really attractive ongoing operating cost because, again, we're able to use the fixed cost overhead of that facility with this new line. We've designed the new line to give us flexibility across our network. Flexibility to better serve the technical insulation market. That's been a market that we've really been focused on over a long period of time and we've grown that business quite significantly, not just the last few years, but over the last decade or so. But it also gives us flexibility to rebalance our network in different ways to serve the residential market. So when we look at that addition, we like it as a way to support the ongoing growth of the Insulation business. But it also is part of our strategy to continue to focus on growth of technical insulation, growth of other attractive markets and give us a really nice cost structure of our network and our assets. So that was the big rationale for adding it.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Stephen Kim with Evercore ISI.

Stephen Kim

Analyst · Evercore ISI.

Just sort of a follow-up a little bit on Insulation. Just with respect to your 4Q guide, you mentioned some hurricane aspects. I was wondering if you could quantify that. And then also, with respect the – to I guess the big news last night. In the situation where you got a Republican sweep, I know the House is still up for grabs, but assuming you did get a Republican sweep, do you think there's risk to the HUD Energy Code mandate? And if that were to actually be reversed, I'm curious how that would affect your calculus around the Kansas City expansion?

Todd Fister

Analyst · Evercore ISI.

Thanks, Steve. Appreciate both of those, and I'll answer the hurricane first and then we could talk a bit about the HUD changes. So overall, for the hurricane, we did see some limited impacts in some of our facilities from both Helene and Milton. We had some power interruptions. We had -- one of our plants be idled, we had some startup costs associated with it. You could think of this cost as being probably in the range of $8 million to $10 million or so in Q4 for hurricane impact, really mostly associated with manufacturing costs in those facilities. There may be some positive demand associated with the hurricanes. Typically, that lags a bit. So we wouldn't expect to see a lot of that in Q4, but certainly could see some of that in the first half of the year as that demand comes through. As we look at policy and housing, we all know housing has been underbuilt in the U.S. for a very long period of time. And one of the things we saw talked about really on both sides was the need for more housing supply, in part to address the inflation that we've seen in housing pricing over time. So fundamentally, we think the macros are good for housing in North America. Fundamentally, our products add a lot of value in housing. You mentioned the HUD changes. Really none of that has made its way into any material volume in markets today. As Brian and I talked about this on previous calls, we always viewed it as an outcome that would be impacted by what happened yesterday with the election. So you know when we think about capital investments, we're making long-term investments based on the fundamentals of the business. And really we weren't contemplating volume from HUD as we thought about what we would do with Kansas City. That was not part of the calculus one way or the other as we thought about that asset that we were adding.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Philip Ng with Jefferies.

Philip Ng

Analyst · Jefferies.

Congrats on another strong quarter. On Roofing, can you cite any potential uplift from some of the recent hurricanes and how do you see that kind of getting layered in perhaps 2025? The demand backdrop on Roofing has obviously been really strong last year. So as you lap that, just curious your ability to grow, to sustain, call it, low 30% margins and perhaps to even drive prices higher as we look out to next year?

Brian Chambers

Analyst · Jefferies.

Thanks, Phil. Yes, let me talk a little bit about the hurricane impact. I think we're still assessing. I mean these are two really devastating hurricanes that impact a lot of folks. So I think there's some infrastructure that really needs to be repaired. But as we look at some of the potential impacts, I think on Beacon's call, they had done some analysis and were estimating somewhere around 3 million squares of potential impact. I think at this point, we'd be right in line with that thought in terms of how that might play out for us. And as Todd mentioned, I think given the broadness of flooding and some of the other damages that are going to need to be repaired as we go into next year. I think there's some incremental potential upside in our other businesses as well. But from a Roofing standpoint, I think that's our initial estimate. As you know, the damage repair takes a long time when we're talking about hurricanes. So we would expect this to be much more impacting demand and volumes as we move through 2025. So not a lot here early on in the fourth quarter. There might be a little bit of inventory stocking, but we don't think that's going to be significant. We think the broader play is going to be into next year. In terms of the overall setup for 2025, you've said it, I mean, the last few years; we've been in a very strong roofing market. I think we continue to see fundamental trends for R&R pretty strong this year in many regions. We think that's going to continue, especially if we start to see some lower interest rates, more existing homeowner turnover, that generally drives a little bit of R&R activity. And new…

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Anthony Pettinari with Citi.

Anthony Pettinari

Analyst · Citi.

I was wondering if you could talk about underlying demand from Doors and how that's kind of trended versus expectations since you closed the acquisition. If there's any kind of finer point you draw on interior versus exterior or U.S. versus rest of world. And then assuming we do have a stronger R&R backdrop next year. Can you maybe talk broadly about the prospect for volume improvement and maybe price improvement in Doors next year?

Brian Chambers

Analyst · Citi.

Certainly, in the third quarter, I'd say the business performed well relative to these market conditions and in line with our outlook. But we are facing tougher market conditions and a more challenging market condition, certainly here in the back half since we've closed out the acquisition. The business, as a reminder, is pretty evenly split between new construction and R&R activities. And we've continued to see some of the lagged housing starts coming down a little bit here over the last quarters and third quarter we expect that to continue. So that's going to create some demand challenges inside the new construction. And certainly, the R&R activity has been down, not just in doors, but across a lot of other building material product categories here this year. And we think that's playing into some of the more challenging market conditions that we're seeing. When we look at our business, I would say the volume declines we've seen have been pretty consistent between interior and exterior. So we are not seeing a lot of big differences there. I think, again, fundamentally tied to we've seen this step down in both new construction and R&R going forward. And the U.S. business, we've got a smaller business in Europe, those demand trends are challenged as well. So I think it's a near-term backdrop that is more challenging. But back to our discussion in terms of a 2025 outlook, we do believe that as we see interest rates come down, what we expect, will we see housing turnover increase, will we see new construction starts improve, we do see a backdrop going into 2025 that's going to create a more favorable demand environment for Doors overall. And then we are a category leader in this space. We value innovation. We value service, we value quality, we value the commercial partnerships that we're building. So we believe we're going to be able to be set up to take advantage of that volume growth in terms of going forward. In the near-term, we're continuing to execute our integration playbook. So as I talked about in my prepared comments, we're on track to deliver $125 million of cost synergies in line with our expectation. And we're also leveraging our operation and our commercial playbook. So we're looking at potential growth opportunities with our customers as we go into 2025 across the broader platform opportunity. And then, we're also looking operationally in terms of additional cost synergies as well as looking at the manufacturing footprint for optimization opportunities. And that's something that we've got a good track record of executing again. So we're going to prepare ourselves for the near-term market challenges to operate a very cost-effective business. We're going to continue to focus on service and quality and innovation as differentiators. And then, we're going to prepare ourselves, as the market does improve that we can take full advantage of that to grow our volumes as we go into 2025.

Operator

Operator

Our next question today comes from Sam Reid with Wells Fargo.

Sam Reid

Analyst

I actually wanted to piggyback off the last question on Masonite, but maybe drill down a bit more on pricing. So when you talk about pricing get-back, could you disaggregate between repair remodel pricing and maybe what you're seeing on price in terms of what you're selling into the new build channel? It sounds like most of the weakness is on the repair and remodel side, but I would just like to maybe hear a finer point on that. And then, if we were to see discretionary repair/remodel spend recover in 2025 kind of consistent with your expectations, do you think that would have a corresponding impact -- positive impact on pricing in Masonite?

Brian Chambers

Analyst

In terms of the pricing moves that we made, we talked about that in the comments. We did make some modest pricing moves relative to the market conditions. Very surgical, very specific in certain areas and very modest. And I would say, really did get us in line with some of the competitive pricing dynamics we're seeing in some markets. So we've made some modest moves there. We're still focused on value pricing and retaining the value that we have relative to our service, our quality and our innovation in the market. But we did make some of those moves in the quarter. Really broadly, I would say not a lot of differences between new construction, repair and remodeling. These were more broader market-based moves that we felt we needed to make to stay competitive while maintaining our value premium in the market. So as we go forward into next year, certainly a better volume environment and better demand environment creates the opportunity for improved pricing. And so, we'll look at that as we go forward into next year and manage the business relative to that market demand and also relative to the value premium that we would expect to have in the marketplace.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Trevor Allinson with Wolfe Research.

Trevor Allinson

Analyst · Wolfe Research.

One follow-up on ARMA shipments, they were better than you were anticipating. It looks like your volumes are kind of right in line with your guidance. Can you talk about what helped the market perform better than you anticipated? Was that just the less distributor destockings than you were looking for? And then was it capacity limitations or planned downtime? Or what was it that kept your volumes from also being better than what you were anticipating at the end of the quarter given a better market? Just trying to understand your capacity and your ability to take advantage of some of the tailwinds you're talking about prior to Medina coming online next year.

Brian Chambers

Analyst · Wolfe Research.

In terms of the ARMA shipments, they were slightly stronger than we were anticipating. I think a couple of factors played into that. One is we saw some incrementally better storm demand, particularly in Texas, related to Hurricane Beryl. There's just been a lot of repair and activity around that and that stayed stronger, frankly, through the quarter with the amount of damage that was done there. And then we saw some pockets in the Midwest and Northeast with just warm weather, good seasonal opportunities to put more roofs on. And so we saw that demand in particularly those regions kind of step up more than we would have expected. So overall, a good quarter. Our shipments outperformed that a little bit. We continue to see strong demand for our products. And so some of the limitations, as you mentioned there are really tied to our capacity limitations. That's why we are making these significant investments to increase the laminate capacity. We have very strong demand for our products, we've got a great contractor network that we invest a lot to grow the businesses together with them and that's created a great demand environment for us. And that's why we're making the investments we are to try to continue to increase that capacity. I think we have increased our land capacity year-on-year. We're going to produce more laminates this year than last. We'll continue that as we go into 2025 with another big step-up, as you said, with the Medina laminator. So we feel like the demand outlook for our products is going to remain strong as we go into 2025.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Adam Baumgarten with Zelman & Associates.

Adam Baumgarten

Analyst · Zelman & Associates.

Just on the sale of the China and Korea Building Materials businesses, any impact on earnings from that sale? I know you gave the revenue and then I may have missed this, but when do you expect it to close?

Todd Fister

Analyst · Zelman & Associates.

I appreciate the question. I can give a little more color on the business itself then we could talk about closing time. So what we shared was $130 million of revenue. It's six plants in China, it's one plant in Korea. The Chinese plants are really primarily China for China insulation products. And then the Korean plant is shingles that go into Korea and Japan. When you look at that business, it's a pretty low EBITDA margin business. So it's consistent with what we've been doing across the portfolio to really focus on our higher value product lines that add a lot of value for customers and have structurally more attractive margins going forward. So, this one had pretty low EBITDA margins, also pretty high capital intensity just given the footprint that we've got, especially in those Chinese insulation plants. When we think about timing to close, this is going to be a couple of quarters to work through everything and get everything set up to actually execute the sale. So we would expect Q2 timing for this to be complete.

Operator

Operator

Next, we have Keith Hughes with Truist.

Keith Hughes

Analyst

You've given us the guidance for EBITDA margin for Masonite in the fourth quarter. It's a little fuzzy on what that compares to. Would that compare to a high single-digit EBITDA margin fourth quarter of last year given what the structure of the business is?

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Keith, this is Brian. Tough with all the moving parts in terms of that. I think that would continue to equate to kind of a mid-single-digit EBIT margin guide from our perspective in terms of how we are operating the business. So that's where there's a lot of noise inside the purchase accounting. We're getting that set. And that's why we're really wanting to try to change an EBITDA margin guide. I think on a year-over-year comparison, that's also going to be something that is a relative data point as well in terms of how we're operating the business post-acquisition. But that's going to be the guide that we continue to focus on as we go forward versus the EBIT side.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Mike Dahl with RBC.

Mike Dahl

Analyst · RBC.

I want to focus on Roofing. So continued strength in margins. When you think about the margin in fourth quarter, I know you talked about the manufacturing cost, can you quantify the manufacturing costs and then where you are on kind of input and delivery cost? Because it seems like you still had some sequential price realization. And then the second part, if I can, would be, as you look into '25, given the strength in demand and potentially some continued price offset by maybe some of these laminate investments, can you give us a view on how you think about Roofing margins setting up into '25?

Brian Chambers

Analyst · RBC.

Mike, in terms of the fourth quarter margin guidance, we continue to operate the business very well and continue to generate very strong margins, certainly, relative to history in terms of the performance that we're seeing and the work that's being done in the business. So I think great execution by the team is continuing to lead to very strong margins going forward. In terms of input costs that we see, we're seeing really just modest inflation in a few areas and some deflation in others. So I think we're seeing pretty stable input costs across the business. And that's been a pretty constant theme here over the last couple of quarters. So the pricing realization we're seeing off the August increase, that's creating a positive price cost relative to those input materials. And we'll look and see what kind of happens as we go into 2025, but we think that's going to stay stable for the fourth quarter here. In terms of the 2025 setup on margin performance, I think we've talked about what would be positive indicators to retain and maintain these kinds of margin levels would be a continued strong market, which we expect to see in terms of setup for 2025, continued strong demand for our products, which we continue to see going into '25. Maintaining some kind of a price cost positive mix that we think, given those demands set up well for us. And then continue to see good strong demand for our components business, which also is a key contributor in our margin performance. And again, I think we've seen some step back on a year-over-year basis on some of the component volumes, but very normal attachment rates as we track that. So we're seeing still good demand for our components and we're seeing good demand from contractors selling the full system and package on the roof. So we think that's going to continue going into 2025. So I'd say the setup for next year is very well for us in terms of volume, in terms of our product demand, in terms of price cost and in terms of our components business. So we think we're set up for a good first half.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Susan Maklari with Goldman Sachs.

Susan Maklari

Analyst · Goldman Sachs.

As you think about the changes that you're making to the portfolio with the additions and exiting some of the other businesses and regions, can you talk a bit about what that will mean for the cash flow dynamics of the business over time? And with that, just any comments on priorities for that capital allocation and how you're thinking about that balance between deleveraging and the shareholder returns, especially with the buybacks that you did this quarter?

Todd Fister

Analyst · Goldman Sachs.

I appreciate the question. Let me talk a bit about the changes of the portfolio and then we could talk about implications on capital allocation. We're being very thoughtful as we think about the changes we're making. As I alluded to a moment ago about our sale of the assets in China and Korea, these were pretty low EBITDA margin, high capital intensity businesses. We've talked before about glass reinforcements as being really a great business but a business that requires capital going forward. And the Doors acquisition, being a business that structurally shifts our portfolio into a much lower capital intensity position than what we have in our Insulation or Composites businesses. So we've got an eye to the future of really building a company that's a branded leader in building products in both North America and Europe that also has an attractive cash flow profile in terms of the ongoing capital requirements of the business and also the significant free cash flow that we can generate off of that portfolio to both reinvest and also return to shareholders. When we think about our priorities right now for capital allocation, our priority is, first and foremost, is to integrate Masonite very successfully and deliver returns to shareholders from the investment. In the near-term here, we also have a little bit of deleveraging in the fourth quarter. We've got $400 million of senior notes that are coming due that we will retire in Q4, and we're building a little bit of cash on sheet to do that. Beyond that, as Brian discussed, we're making very strategic capital investments into our business, into businesses that we want to grow. And we think we can grow very effectively with capital efficient additions to capacity, whether it's Medina with the laminator, whether it's the Russellville plant for our extruded polystyrene bone business, our Fort Smith, Arkansas in non-wovens plant or the Kansas City addition that we discussed today. So we're focused on these targeted, very strategic capital investments that we think are both capital efficient but also cost efficient to really continue to drive attractive cash flows for the business. And then we've been committed to our capital allocation strategy. We like the leverage of 2x to 3x EBITDA. We're a little below that coming out of Q3, even including returning $200 million to shareholders through buybacks in the quarter. So we're happy with that 2x to 3x range. But as Brian said, we've got a very strong balance sheet and we've got a lot of flexibility on what we do in terms of capital allocation as we go forward. 0But we've returned a lot of cash to shareholders through dividends and repurchases over time, 58% over the last 12 months, including the largest acquisition we've done as a company. So we're committed to that and we're committed to very shareholder friendly and value-creating capital allocation as we go forward. And we think this new portfolio of market-leading businesses helps us achieve that.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Garik Shmois with Loop Capital.

Garik Shmois

Analyst · Loop Capital.

Sorry if this was asked as my line was dropped earlier. But on Composites, did I hear you correctly that pricing, while down year-on-year, really hasn't weakened sequentially? Is that right? Is that on spot primarily? And then, maybe just some thoughts ahead of the contract negotiations and pricing going into next year.

Todd Fister

Analyst · Loop Capital.

I'll take that one. So yes, I mean, we're down still year-over-year from a pricing standpoint. Sequentially, we've seen a good stability in composites. Both Brian and I are really proud of how that business has executed both commercially to drive sequential stability but also on the manufacturing side. They've done outstanding work this year on manufacturing productivity to really drive the kind of stable margins you've seen the last few quarters. It is really early days on contract negotiations. So it's a little early to say much about where we're at. We're in the midst of it, but the business has really prioritized how do we add value to customers, how do we keep our costs really efficient. And we're trying to drive stable margins as we can in pretty challenging market environments still in China, which certainly is impacting the global demand environment.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Matthew Bouley with Barclays.

Matthew Bouley

Analyst

I wanted to ask on Insulation and volumes, just given you're guiding the volumes to flip a little bit negative here exiting 2024. Wanted to get your thoughts on kind of how you're thinking about the first half of '25 given that exit rate. Obviously, these can be sort of high fixed cost manufacturing assets. So kind of any near-term thoughts on the volume decrementals and if any kind of need to right-size production if we do still have that volume headwind early next year?

Todd Fister

Analyst

Matt, appreciate the question. So when we look at where we're at right now, we're dealing with really a little bit of an air pocket of weaker starts that we saw from March through July. As we saw interest rates a bit high, we saw a little bit of a downturn in starts. That said, I mean, starts are still in a pretty good range for us. And I'll remind you, we reengineered the Insulation business to be able to deliver really attractive margins and cash flows and return on capital in exactly this kind of market environment, where we're around this 1.3 million to 1.4 million starts range. Our view fundamentally is the housing market is still under-built. We really have not approached the 1.5 million annual starts number since the late 2000s. We also continue to see support from codes, that when you go back over a long period of time, we see the pounds per home roughly 30% higher over a 10 year period than where we were a decade ago. So it's not it's not linear where year-in and year-out we see 2.5%, 3% increases in volume from codes. But certainly, long-term, it's a strong support for the volume dynamics in the industry. So we'll watch housing starts closely as we end the year. We'll watch interest rates as we end the year. But we're confident we've engineered a business that can deliver a good margin stability as we go forward. And that's very intentional around the choices we've made with the cost structure and how we've positioned the business for success.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Kathryn Thompson with Thompson Research Group.

Kathryn Thompson

Analyst

You touched on this earlier in the Q&A just around pricing in the Doors segment in particular. But if we step back and take a look at balancing value over volume. This certainly has been --- I wouldn't say an issue, but a focus area in Doors. But as we look at you getting out of Asia for certain products and that continued push to near-shoring or reshoring, how does Owens Corning approach the value over volume? And how do you think that changes over the next three years?

Brian Chambers

Analyst

I think the approach, I'll just kind of step back. High level, we are investors of innovation. We're investors in marketing tools, commercial tools, quality, service, the things that bring value to our customers and the things that help them grow in the market. And so we always start with a premise of how can we help our customers win and grow in the market through our product offering, through our innovation, through our commercial tools, through our commercial resources, through our service, our quality, anything that can help the business and help them grow. So we invest to create value. Now, when we say value over volume, I think that's a trade-off that I don't really look to make. We look to drive increased value. We have to be competitive in our pricing. We have to be competitive in our offering to maintain our positions in the market. So I think we don't trade-off value over volume. We invest to create more value that leads to additional volume. And I think that's our approach. So we are always going to be competitive in all of our product offerings to market conditions. But we are always going to expect that through that value proposition that we're creating, that we can see a value premium for our products in the market. And not only that we see a value premium, but our customers see that value premium as they take those products into the market. So that's our overall approach. When we look at in-sourcing or outsourcing, we have a fundamental belief that we want to manufacture close to our customers. We think that improves that quality and service angle. So we're always going to be mindful of imports and other areas that could impact the cost structure within our businesses. But we also have a philosophy of local manufacturing for local demand and local service. So that's something that is sharpening our focus on the geographic footprint as we've talked about. We really are focused on executing our strategy to reshape the company as a building products leader in North America and Europe. And we're going to invest in manufacturing assets and sourcing to suppliers that are local to our markets and local to our manufacturing facilities there to create the best service platform for our customers.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This concludes our Q&A session. So I'll now pass you back to Brian Chambers for any final comments.

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Well, thanks, Lydia. I'd like to thank everyone for making time to join us on today's call and for your ongoing interest in Owens Corning. And we look forward to speaking with you again on our fourth quarter call. Thanks, and have a safe day.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.