Matt Missad
Analyst · Stifel
Thank you, Dick and good afternoon, everyone. As you can see from the press release, the UFP family is en fuego. While Mr. Bezos is flying into suborbital space, the UFP team made a quantum leap to another galaxy in the second quarter. The first six months of 2021 constitutes the best earnings year in UFP’s 66 year history. I send a sincere thank you to all of the UFP family of companies for your incredible effort. When the company is successful, we share that success with our teammates and we are grateful to share over $10 million in additional benefits and bonuses with our hourly employees for the first six months of 2021 to thank them for their exceptional effort too. You have seen the truly remarkable financial performance, and Mike will provide more analysis shortly. I would like to highlight a few items while providing some insight into the balance of 2021. We saw more records in the second quarter than the Grammys, yet our team is not focused on receiving awards. For them, it is about competing, improving, growing our people and opportunities and making our company stronger. They had a grand slam in the second quarter. We can't talk about Q2 without acknowledging the significant impact of the lumber market. We had top line help from a rising lumber market during the first half of the quarter. However, the last half saw a drastic drop in lumber prices, which made an impact on our retail variable price products. While we had anticipated a market reduction in that late second or third quarter, we did not anticipate that it would fall as far and as fast as it did. Included in our quarterly results was a charge of $23 million to reduce the value of inventory on certain of our variable priced products in our retail segment. Since the Southern Yellow Pine market has dropped nearly $1,000 per 1,000 in the last several weeks, the impact would have been much worse if not for the skill and dedication of our purchasing and operations teams who managed inventories very well under the circumstances. This lumber market drop also highlighted another benefit of our new structure as our teams were able to coordinate movements of inventory and maximize utilization of on hand items to limit the impact of the market decline. Thanks to our balanced business model, diverse product and customer mix and a variety of pricing methodologies, we are well positioned to weather these kinds of events. As we have discussed on many occasions, these diverse markets and pricing methodologies enable us to create a natural hedge against lumber market fluctuations like we just experienced. Last fall, when prices were rising, the Retail segment benefited overall, while the Industrial and Construction segment suffered. Going forward, for the balance of 2021, we expect that Retail will lag while Construction and Industrial will benefit. We expect the lumber market to normalize and believe that mills will try to balance inventories to match demand. We believe the lumber market is trading today within the range where it should remain for the next 30 to 60 days with slight fluctuations. Since most of the lumber products are sold under agreements between suppliers and customers, a significantly smaller volume is actively traded and reported via random lengths and other market reporting services. Therefore, this metric is subject to more fluctuation and is less reflective of the overall lumber market than it used to be. Certain products such as OSB remain tight. However, DIY demand is not as robust as it was a year ago, while professionals are still very busy and maintaining robust purchases for their businesses. Many believe that DIY demand is paused due to other pursuits such as vacations and travel, which were severely curtailed due to the lockdowns in 2020. Overall, however, we remain confident in our original PBOP targets for the year. A quick review by market shows that our retail solutions team was the most impacted by the lumber market decline. The segment recorded a 6% decline in unit sales versus a year ago. Looking at retail business units, the ProWood unit sales were down 17% as demand returned to more normalized levels from a significantly higher sales in Q2 of 2020. The Sunbelt team has done a great job growing their business and more recently, integrating the acquisition of Spartanburg Forest Products. We have been impressed with our treating operations and quality and have worked together to target synergies in our purchasing and administrative areas. This team suffered the most from the lumber market drop as customer orders did not match customer forecast. UFP-Edge, our Siding, Pattern and Trim business unit, was up 27% in unit sales as new capacity came online during the quarter. More capacity will be added in Q4 and early in 2022 to meet expected demand for our high quality finishing services and our Pattern and Trim products. The Deckorators unit sales increased 11% over record Q2 2020 levels. The patented Deckorators' Voyage and Vault mineral based composite products continue to grow their fan base among contractors as the strength to weight ratio, product flexibility and ease of installation make it a preferred product. As a result, the production is sold out through year end. And as previously disclosed, additional mineral based capacity will be coming online starting in November of '21. And by the end of '22, we will have doubled the mineral based capacity. Our wood plastic composite line is sold out through November with additional capacity coming online in 2022, which will add around 30% to 35% more capacity in those product lines. Deckorators continue to feel some of the impacts of higher resin and transportation costs in Q2, while passing along some of these costs to customers during the quarter. Handprint, the new home and decor business unit, formerly known as Dimensions, will be rolling out its new Web site in late Q3 and will be adding to its ready to make craft and product and project line of products. Handprint continues to gain more sales volume with its cut to size product offering for building materials’ retailers too. Outdoor Essentials has expanded its fencing range to include a variety of materials, including aluminum and composite. It is also unveiling a new raised planter for 2022, specifically targeted for customers’ e-commerce portals. Moving to the UFP Construction segment. Unit sales increased 29% over the second quarter of 2020. Strong single family residential demand continues in the geographic markets we serve and multifamily remains solid and may even begin to expand again as developers who held off due to high prices reengage as commodity prices normalize. Steel products, such as the connectors used in our trust manufacturing, remain in short supply due in part to overseas shipping constraints. Unit sales to the factory built business unit rose 56% as strong demand continues. The robust growth in factory built reflects the growing recognition that it is an authentic and much needed affordable housing option, and our factory built team has been working hard to meet this need. Our team continues to grow its new product portfolio for the factory built market, and we should see growing new product sales units by Q4 in several new product lines. The factory built customers have also seen shortages in certain items, such as appliances and other items using microchips, which has moderated their growth somewhat. Unit sales to the site-built customers rose 32% in the quarter. The customers in this business unit are bullish on the market and have been very complementary of the ability of our teams to supply product in this challenging market. They are also imploring us to add more capacity to serve their growing needs. Unit sales to the commercial construction unit rose 11%. More importantly, our commercial business unit was profitable in Q2 and focused on improving margins and rationalizing customer concentrations. We continue to position the commercial business unit for significant improvements in performance and have been refining our customer mix to ensure that we do not work for free or, worse yet, pay a customer to do work for them. Our Concrete Forming business unit continues to grow. The team has been offering new solutions to its customers and expanding its supply network geographically. We expect continued organic growth in this market and are looking at potential targeted acquisitions as well. UFP Industrial segment grew unit sales 73% over lockdown impact in 2020. Organic growth accounted for 26% of unit sales growth. Acquisitions led by PalletOne, T&R and Pallet USA, comprised 47% of the unit growth. The assimilation and integration of these acquisitions is going very well operationally. Both T&R and Pallet USA have been part of the family for over a year and have been working well in their geographic regions. PalletOne was a very large acquisition for us and the cultural fit has been incredibly good. They have great team members and have a can-do spirit and treat each other well. They are also becoming an integral part of our industrial leadership team and the exchange of best practices has been exceptional. We have already utilized the PalletOne experience with automation and technology to fuel our adoption in existing facilities, and we expect that process to grow. Unit sales of protective repackaging products, our newest runway in Industrial, rose 53% in the quarter. Gross profit for the Industrial segment rose 262%, well in excess of unit sales growth. And PalletOne made a big impact by contributing 54% of the increase in gross profit. Rationalizing capacity, enhancing operating leverage and utilizing better analytics helped improve this gross profit return. The industrial team is working together to drive increased automation, consolidate capacity and utilization of its vast facility network to serve national and regional customers better. New product sales increased to $232.1 million for the quarter and are $396.9 million year-to-date, well in excess of our year-to-date budget. We also launched our new Innovation Accelerator initiative in June and it will work with the business units to identify new product opportunities and rapidly design, prototype and test them to increase our speed to market. We have increased the breadth of products in each business unit, but we need to be even faster to vet and bring these new products to consumers more quickly. We continue to deploy capital targeted on automation and expansion, to promote and invest in new products and technology and to develop our teams. We have been forced to increase our spend on regulatory issues, cybersecurity and other nonvalue added requirements as well. Acquisitions remain a strategic growth initiative as we pursue targets in each segment with an emphasis on scalable and synergistic new products or services, complementary value added products and core competencies. Our capital allocation strategy targets acquisitions at reasonable ROI based values first, followed by greenfield growth and automation and efficiency projects. During the quarter, we completed Sunbelt's acquisition of Spartanburg Forest Products, which added scale to the Sunbelt operations. We expect to scale the Endurable Building Products acquisition with our existing site-built business unit geography as it adds adjacent product lines for both new and existing customers. And our Handprint unit added Walnut Hollow Farm, which introduces handprint to craft and decor customers and allows expansion through the existing manufacturing and distribution network of UFP Retail. Given the number of automation opportunities available to us, which help us become the low cost producer and grow our businesses, we are adding an additional $25 million for capital expenditures in 2021. Given long lead times for equipment, most of the installations will not occur until late Q4 or early Q1 of 2022. Labor continues to be a challenge as we have more than 500 open positions posted on a weekly basis. In geographic areas where the states have eliminated the additional $300-a-week bonus, the labor market has loosened up somewhat. In other areas where taxpayers are subsidizing cash and benefits to the tune of nearly $20 an hour, not surprisingly, hard working employees are tougher to find. However, our HR teams and business operators have worked together to craft creative solutions for the markets where our facilities are located. And by taking care of our strong performing team members, using as one example, I previously mentioned the $10 million in year-to-date bonuses and extra benefits paid to our hourly employees, we hope to be able to alleviate challenges in finding and retaining talent. We have expanded our recruiting to discover additional sources of employees and broaden our outreach to make sure that all demographic groups are aware of the opportunities for them at UFP. And we have incentivized existing team members to recruit from their own network of friends and acquaintances. Now I'd like to turn it over to Mike Cole, who will provide more details on our financial performance.