Louisiana-Pacific Corp Q1 FY2024 Earnings Call

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q1 2024 Louisiana-Pacific Corporation Earnings Conference Call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Aaron Howald, LP’s Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us to discuss LP's results for the first quarter as well as our updated outlook. My name is Aaron Howald, and I am LP's Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development. With me this morning are Brad Southern, LP's Chief Executive Officer; and Alan Haughie, LP's Chief Financial Officer. After prepared remarks we will take one round of questions. During this morning's call, we will refer to a presentation that has been posted to LP's IR webpage, which is investor lpcorp.com. Our 8-K filing, earnings press release and other materials are also available there. Today's discussion contains forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial metrics as described on Slides 2 and 3 of the earnings presentation. The appendix to the presentation also contains reconciliations that are further supplemented by this morning's 8-K filing. I will incorporate those materials by reference rather than reading them. And with that, I will turn the call over to Brad.

Thanks, Aaron. Good morning and thank you for joining us to discuss LP's results for the first quarter and our ongoing growth, innovation and efficient capital allocation. LP's Siding and OSB businesses got off to a strong start in 2024 by launching new products, gaining share in new construction, repair and remodeling and growing strategic partnerships with our customers, all of which contributed to outstanding results in the first quarter. I'm confident that both businesses are poised to build on these gains in the second quarter and beyond. In the first quarter, LP generated $724 million in sales, a 24% increase over last year. LP earned $182 million in adjusted EBITDA, $116 million more than in Q1 of 2023. Leverage from growth in Siding and the combined effect of higher prices and record operating efficiency in OSB drove improved margins. With the completion of capacity investments in Holton, Sagola and Bath, our strong balance sheet has allowed us to resume share repurchases consistent with our capital allocation strategy. Alan will discuss our results in greater detail in a moment. But first I'll provide the operational and strategic highlights for the quarter across our businesses. In the OSB business, commodity prices were meaningfully higher than last year, contributing $62 million in EBITDA. This is of course outside our control. However, I am proud to say that the OSB team made the most of the strong demand environment by operating efficiently and safely, while delivering a strong mix of value-added Structural Solutions products. For example, the OSB business achieved a record for operating efficiency in the first quarter, which helped boost sales by about 150 million square feet compared to last year. More than 75% of this incremental volume was Structural Solutions. More importantly, the OSB business delivered these results safely with a total recordable incident rate under 0.3. I also want to take the opportunity to thank the teams at our Peace Valley, British Columbia and Maniwaki Quebec mills for leading the way with outstanding safety, efficiency and cost control. Siding revenue grew by 9% in the first quarter, which was the compound effect of 5% higher net selling prices and 4% higher volume. Prices were higher due to rapid realization of our annual price increase plus mix uplift, primarily from ExpertFinish. Higher capacity utilization from increased sales volume helped Siding achieve a 25% EBITDA margin in the quarter. As a result, the Siding business exceeded the high end of our guidance ranges for growth and margin.

Thank you. As Brad said, this was a strong quarter. Higher market prices for OSB drove significant cash generation, while the leverage from increased volumes in both OSB and Siding delivered healthy incremental margins. EBITDA of $182 million generated $105 million of operating cash flow. And with the capacity investments in Houlton Sagola and Bath, behind us, LP returned $32 million of this cash flow to investors in the first quarter through dividends and resumed share repurchases. The waterfall on Page 7 shows the year-over-year comparison for the Siding business. Average selling prices were 5% higher than last year adding $15 million of EBITDA. Roughly three points of the five points are the result of robust realization of the annual price increase helped by our minimization of prebuy late last year. ExpertFinish and other recently launched products have also seen encouraging uptake with the resulting positive mix effects on price contributing the remaining two points of the five points. Sales volumes increased by 4% to 399 million square feet which I should note, is higher than any quarter of last year. The bulk of 4% volume growth came from Residential Construction and Repair and Remodel customers.

Well, there's a significant piece of incremental volume over what we've done then just from a Siding perspective historically. And so basically what's happening Kurt is we were assigned new geographies that we are currently servicing with our Siding portfolio. And that's pretty much across the country, but obviously not every region, not every subregion was converted, but a significant amount of the volume was.

Thanks and good morning everyone. I just wanted to start off on Siding. I guess if volume is kind of the biggest lever on margins and we see kind of a sequential uplift Q2 versus Q1. What kind of constraints additional margin expansion versus what we just saw?

Hey good morning. This is Alan speaking. Well nothing really. There are a few product introductions that will be increasing the volumes and those will be slightly inherently less efficient than the current production.

Thank you. First, congrats obviously a very good quarter. And in fact I think a lot better than you had originally anticipated. Can you provide a little more color on the Siding EBITDA margin?

I'll take this one. The answer is almost everything. Pricing was certainly better in the sense that both in terms of mix and in terms of the impact I mentioned in my prepared remarks with the effect of the prebuy.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My first question is just on broader demand trends in Siding. Can you talk about how the quarter came together and this relative strength you're seeing into the Spring? How much do you think is company-specific and relative to some of the new products and initiatives?

We feel really good about the sustainability of this for the short term anyway. But let me tell you why I'm equally excited about the long-term sustainability of the growth. New product development has been real, and we've launched products that our customers have been asking for.

Thank you, and congrats on a strong quarter. Can you talk a little about how big is Builder Series today? I would imagine fairly small, but where do you expect it to be over the next three years?

Okay, Ketan, you're correct. Builder Series is small as ExpertFinish, on the order of a couple of percentage points of volume. How big we expect it to be remains to be seen.

Okay. Thank you, everyone. That concludes our prepared remarks and a round of questions and answers. So we'll bring the call to a close there. Thank you for joining us to discuss Q1 results and our updated outlook for the full year 2024.