Brendan Horgan
Analyst · HSBC. Please go ahead
Thank you, Michael. We will now move on to some operational and end market detail beginning with slide 14. Our strong U.S. growth continued through the second quarter delivering half year growth of 22% in General Tool, Specialty continued its remarkable performance growing 34% in the half on top of last year’s 23% in the same period. The strength of this performance continues to be broad, extending through every single geographic region and Specialty business line. Consistent with what I have been saying in conjunction with recent results, the current supply and demand equation is as favorable as we have ever experienced. This effect continues to contribute to market share gains and record levels of time utilization throughout the business. This ongoing reality which is now sustained for several quarters makes incredibly clear the step change in structural change we are witnessing, meaning, first that rental penetration is deepening before our very eyes, and secondly, those benefiting from this increased rental penetration R&D the larger more experienced, more capable rental companies who can position themselves to be there for this increasing customer base, and therefore, realizing a larger share of what is without question a larger market. With the ongoing backdrop and demonstrably improved discipline within the rental industry, it is warranted and logical that we are increasing rental rates and certain other aspects of what we charge to provide our service. These trends continue as our sequential and year-on year rate improvement remains very good, something we believe will carry-forward as we enter next year. Let’s take a closer look at our Specialty business performance on slide 15. The year-on-year rental revenue movement illustrated herein demonstrates the ongoing and compounding growth across all Specialty business lines. Total U.S. Specialty as you see, rental revenues increased 34% in the half. As history has taught us, inflection points in the cycle create flash points or swift step changes in rental penetration. In this instance, three things are different than points previously, particularly when it comes to Specialty and they are; one, there is now a reliable alternative to ownership in these Specialty business lines; two, today’s undeniable and ongoing market dynamics of supply constraints, inflation and labor scarcity; and three, these three dynamics have not been transient, and therefore, we are not in an inflection point, rather we are in an inflection period. Together, these form as enablers and tailwinds to structural change and have contributed to our great growth in Specialty over the last few years and will continue to do so into the future. Further, as you will see, I am pleased to announce the recent acquisition of Modu-Loc, Canada’s leading temporary fencing provider. This creates our 11th Specialty business line in North America, which we see not only as a great addition to our Canadian offering but a platform to expand into the U.S. with this new Specialty business line. Finally, this level of activity in our Specialty business serves as a proxy for the strength of our non-construction end market which generates a significant portion of our Specialty revenues and is an important part of our General Tool business as well. As a reminder, let’s move onto a non-construction overview on slide 16. Our Specialty and General Tool businesses services a large and broad range of non-construction end markets. When we describe the vast scale and diverse landscape of this component of our end markets, it seems some struggle to understand the relationship between equipment rental and construction. However, I do think it’s becoming clear so we are going to keep at it. We commonly refer to an incredibly large component of this non-construction end market as MRO, which is the very maintenance, repair and operations of the geographic markets that we serve, such as facility maintenance, which we covered before but worth seeing again, clearly, defined as a market in which hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually running and maintaining facilities. As we have described before from cleaning to painting to decorating to planting to temporarily powering and to cooling to repairing and so on of the many, many types of facilities that make up the 100 billion square feet of commercial space under roof in the U.S. alone. The rental of our broad range of Specialty and General Tool products will increase. As I pointed out when covering the Specialty slide, this is very much a structural growth arena in the very early stages with a long runway for growth. Now that we have touched on Specialty and non-construction markets, let’s turn to slide 17 and detail the construction landscape. For a variety of reasons, and more importantly, tangible evidence, the non-residential and non-building components of the construction end markets are proving to be incredibly strong in the present and increasingly so in the forecast. To characterize them as resilient would at this juncture be an understatement. I am going to spend a bit of time on this and the next two slides as I think it’s worth a fuller understanding and appreciation. Starting on the top left with the Dodge construction starts chart. You will see at first glance the strength of recent starts and the forecasted growth through 2026. If you look a bit closer, beginning with the downturn in 2020, 2021, that’s the first period highlighted with that dotted line you will see on the slide. You will recall that was a non-residential slowdown, as residential construction to most everyone’s surprised turned out to be a boon during that period and thus was softening to the overall fall. Same chart, now just a couple of years down the line, the second period highlighted, noticed the swift uptick in starts in the very recent period. This is not a residential uptick as experienced in 2020, 2021, rather this is the actual happening not forecast but actual of what we have been saying would happen. Specifically, as the early wave of new project starts derived from a combination of private investment and legislative led federal project funding and incentives. Moving to the bottom left-hand chart, you will see the Dodge Momentum Index is now at its highest ever level. To be clear, this measure indicates projects in planning, not projects that have started. So what should your takeaway from these charts be; one, a whole pile of new projects has just begun; and two, a supportive waivers in planning that more than validates, in our view and Dodge’s, these starts and put in-place forecast. So moving now to the top right. These figures in dollars are in put in-place values. In other words, spreading the cost of the project over the duration as opposed to all in one period as is the case with starts. As you look at these forecast for the heart of our construction end markets, specifically, non-residential and non-building, the strength over the last several quarters and recent spike in starts I have just covered translates into consistent growth and put in-place for the next several years. As seen here, growing from roughly $900 billion in 2022 to nearly $1.2 trillion in 2026. Many have commonly held opinion that as goes residential goes non-residential, that is just not the case today. It is increasingly clear, there is far less a correlation between residential and non-residential construction in this era of mega projects and larger than ever before seen federally funded initiatives both of which we will come onto. This backdrop should set up nicely the next couple of slides beginning with 18. You will recall in June, we introduced the detail surrounding what we internally refer to as mega projects. Projects with a value of over $400 million ranging from data centers to healthcare to airports to liquid natural gas plants to electric vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. A key point we attempted to get across was the abundance of these projects and how much of the overall non-res and non-building construction market starts they made-up. As listed here, these projects have made up roughly 30% of recent years construction starts values, a number much larger than in fact more than double what it was in the pre GFC era. And look at the trends, there are currently 200 projects in this genre with an average project costs of $1.2 billion that are ongoing. In planning and pre-bid phases, there are 300 with an average value of $1.9 billion, with estimated start dates by December of 2023. Projects of this scale and sophistication are ideal for resident, on-site solutions, meaning, we often have dedicated storage and working space on the actual project site housing a very large and broad offering of our products and associated services. These services ranging from on-site maintenance repair technicians, telematics equipped product producing efficiency gaining benefits to our on-site and remote teams, and of course, to our customers, providing benefits such as reduce carbon emissions, and of course, our mantra of availability reliability needs, all of which are essential for the success of these mega projects. Solutions like I have just outlined require a rental company with the scale, experience, technology, expertise, breadth of product, and of course, financial capacity. I hope you understand this is a material contributor to structural change in our industry which we are a certain benefactor of. Turning now to slide 19. Organized here are three major legislative acts that are just beginning to drive increased demand and overall market you have by now realized is already very active. Beginning with perhaps the act has been covered and understood the most, specifically Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The headline figure of $1.2 trillion may be best understood by compartmentalizing, $650 billion as a renewing of sort of ordinary run rate federal investments in roads, bridges, rail, utility, et cetera. The key to this act is not only reassuring the baseline investment but it’s delivery of an incremental $550 billion in new project spending throughout the U.S., with over 10,000 programs and projects identified ranging from $100,000 in project cost to $3 billion thus far. Despite the fact that this act was actually signed in law back in November of 2021, very little has yet to translate into actual project starts. However, this is now beginning and will go into full effect with starts largely commencing between 2023 and 2025. You will notice that $129 billion of incremental $550 billion has been allocated from the federal government to states through October, which will begin seeing actual shovels in the ground so to speak in early 2023. So this is just less than 25% of the overall incremental funds to be allocated indicating the substantial and long-tail inherent and federal infrastructure funding like what we see here. Next is the CHIPS and Science Act. A bipartisan bill swiftly passed through Congress and signed into law by the President in just August of this year. Putting the motion a revitalization of domestic semiconductor manufacturing, whereas for decades U.S. actually experienced a decline from 40% of the world’s semiconductor production to less than 20%. The overall Act will invest $250 billion to progress American semiconductor research, development and manufacturing. The Act is designed to support directly or through tax credits nearly $140 billion in new semiconductor manufacturing projects, a number of projects have already begun even before passage of the Act, indicating what one could comfortably conclude as the beginning of a new era of mega projects coming to fruition. As you will see in some of the detail on the slide, these are more than a step above the run of the mill mega project, individual semiconductor buildings are underway with more already announced to begin in 2023 with price tags as large as $10 billion per project. As you can imagine, these projects will take three plus years to complete. They will consume an enormous amount of rental fleet and require very much of what I have described earlier in terms of rental company capabilities. We will be talking about semiconductors for years to come. Similar, if you will to the way that we have been talking about data centers for well over a decade now. And finally, the Inflation Reduction Act also signed into law just this August, $370 billion of this bill will fund directly or by way of tax credits, a broad basket of energy production and manufacturing, ranging from solar field construction, which will triple the current U.S. capacity by 2030 to battery factories to wind farms, to EV production and so on. So what we have here is a trifecta of government investment equaling nearly $2 trillion in investment that will indeed create thousands and thousands of projects, which Sunbelt is poised to take great advantage of. Let’s now turn to our business units outside of the U.S., we will begin with Sunbelt Canada on slide 20. Our business in Canada continues to expand and perform well as our brand increases and customers recognize the growing breadth of products and services offered. The growth is coming from existing General Tool and Specialty businesses complemented by well-paced additions of greenfield openings and bolt-on acquisitions. Consistent with our last update, the conditions are not just similar to U.S. in terms of activity, demand and the supply environment, and thus we are experiencing equally strong performance from a utilization and rate standpoint. We are well underway executing on our Sunbelt 3.0 plans in Canada and our runway for growth remains long. Turning to Sunbelt U.K. on slide 21. I am pleased to be in a position to report our U.K. business is now fully made up for the loss rental revenue associated with the Department of Health testing phase, that was a substantial part of our revenues throughout last year. This is no small accomplishment, signaling a combination of market share gains and a reassuring level of end market activity, particularly in infrastructure and industrial projects, as well as increasing progress in areas for us such as solid maintenance, being brought about by our unique cross-selling capabilities across our unmatched product and services portfolio. Live events have been an ongoing contributor in this post-pandemic period, which of course, was virtually nil through 2020 and 2021. The team was incredibly proud to provide our products and services surrounding the Queen’s funeral. Something that I am sure those involved will remember for years to come. The consistent area of focus to improve our U.K. business has been on advancing rental rate and the associated fees we charge to provide service to our customers. Although progress has been made, the focus in this area has been significantly heightened in recent weeks, as we work to rightfully increase rates in a more meaningful manner late this calendar year and into 2023. This is something the U.K. rental industry seriously falls behind in, and our position will be steadfast in making a demonstrable change in the face of notable inflation our business and indeed our industry has absorbed. This is not the last that you will hear about our rate focus and I look forward to reporting further on material success in the periods to come. Turning now to slide 22. With October’s conclusion came the halfway point in our three-year strategic growth plan Sunbelt 3.0. And as we have done with every set of results since the launch, I am pleased to give you a midpoint glance at our progress. For time sake, I will cover just a couple and what more tangible than our expansion. In just six quarters, we have added to the footprint of our business 195 locations in North America, 122 by way of greenfield openings, complemented by 73 locations from the bolt-on acquisitions. This combines for a nice mix of Specialty and General Tool locations, further advancing our clustered market progress. We actually achieved cluster status in an additional 13 of the top 100 U.S. markets, giving us 44 of our full 3.0 program target of 49. This is great progress, particularly when you look to years down the road, as these new locations to the Sunbelt Rentals platform mature into larger contributors in terms of revenue and profits, and importantly, create more outlets to deliver the service to our customers Sunbelt is so well-known for. Also worthy of a call out is the inaugural issuance of our annual standalone sustainability report that we put out earlier this month. One could summarize by saying we are well-ahead of our plan that Sunbelt 3.0 pace. Turning now to slide 23. As demonstrated in the results today, our business has enjoyed a successful period of growth and execution against our plan. This has been accomplished despite a number of uniquely challenging dynamics happening simultaneously in the markets we are operating. We first introduced this slide to our Q3 results last year in an attempt to highlight the primary macroeconomic concerns, and more specifically, our view on duration and the effects on our business. Understanding the dynamics of supply constraints, inflation and skilled trade scarcity, as it relates to our end markets and our business is really important. This version is specifically updated today with our views on anticipated duration. Taking this in, we now know that these three monumental factors proved to be not transitory. Although, we do join the increasingly popular opinion that inflation should moderate in the quarters to come, at the very least given the lapping comparators, our view on supply constraints and skilled trade scarcity is far more of the same. We believe as it relates to our industry. We have several quarters ahead of tough access to supply of new rental assets and the associated parts for many in our industry. It’s also vitally important that we believe this constraint to be a material preventive factor of our industry over fleeting. Lastly, we are seeing no signs of excess availability in the precious commodity of skilled trade workers. The important thing in understanding the tailwind effect these have had in the recent past, will have in the near-term and we believe amounting to a real advancing steps in structural change, one that will be in the near- and long-term favorably impact the larger more capable companies in our industry. We will update you on any change in views particularly in terms of duration in the quarters to come. Moving now to our fleet plans on slide 24. Our CapEx guidance is unchanged from our Q1 update. As I have just covered the supply constraint environment is still present. However, we are working well with our primary equipment manufacturers in the landings throughout the half have been strong, picking up pace through the second quarter and into November. So with the component parts unchanged, we guide to $3.3 billion to $3.6 billion for the Group in the full year. Let’s conclude on slide 25. It’s been a very good half year of growth and ongoing momentum. It’s been a period that has added a significant amount of clarity to the strength, our end markets are very likely to yield in 2023, 2024 and beyond. Some of this clarity came in the form of the recent passing of the CHIPS and Science and Inflation Reduction Acts, adding to what was already a plentiful level of end market activity, flush with day-to-day MRO, small- to mid-sized projects and the very present and growing mega project landscape. The trifecta of market dynamics being supply constraints, inflation and skilled trade scarcity remain very real. The ongoing presence of these come with operational challenges, however, are outweighed by the secular benefits to our business resulting in the increased pace of rental penetration and considerable market share gain for businesses in our industry who again possess the scale, experience, equipment purchasing, influence and financial strength. Rest assured that our business is positioned to win in this reality. This update should demonstrate once again the strength of our financial performance and the execution of Sunbelt 3.0 well ahead of our planned pace. So for these reasons and coming from a position of ongoing strength improved trading and positive outlook. We look to the future with confidence in executing our well-known and understood strategic growth plan, which will strengthen our business for the years to come. And with that, we will turn it over to the moderator for Q&A.