Earnings Labs

Owens Corning (OC)

Q2 2023 Earnings Call· Wed, Jul 26, 2023

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Owens Corning Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. My name is Daisy, and I'll be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the call over to your host, Amber Wohlfarth from Owens Corning, to begin. Amber, please go ahead.

Amber Wohlfarth

Analyst

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us for today's conference call and review of our business results for the second quarter of 2023. Joining us today are Brian Chambers, Owens Corning's Chair and Chief Executive Officer; and Ken Parks, 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 second quarter of 2023. For the purposes of our discussion today, we have prepared presentation slides that summarize 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 before we begin, where we offer a couple of reminders. First, today's remarks will include forward-looking statements based on our current forecasts and estimates of future events. These statements 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 a more detailed explanation of the inherent risks and uncertainties affecting such forward-looking statements. 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 the text and financial tables of our earnings press release and presentation, both of which are available on owenscorning.com. Adjusted EBIT is our primary measure of period-over-period comparisons. And we believe it is a meaningful measure for investors to compare our results. Consistent with our historical practice, we have excluded certain items that we believe are not representative of our ongoing operations when calculating adjusted EBIT and adjusted earnings. We adjust our effective tax rate to remove the effect of quarter-to-quarter fluctuations, which have the potential to be significant in arriving at adjusted earnings per share. We also use free cash flow and free cash flow conversion of adjusted earnings as measures helpful to investors to evaluate the company's ability to generate cash and utilize that cash to pursue opportunities that enhance shareholder value. The tables in today's news release and the Form 10-Q include more detailed financial information. 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. During our call this morning, I'll provide a broad overview of our second quarter performance and the work we are doing to strengthen and grow our company. Ken will then provide more details on our second quarter results. And then I'll come back to discuss what we are currently seeing in our markets and our near-term outlook. Overall, in Q2, Owens Corning delivered another outstanding quarter, highlighting the capability of our teams, the value of our product lines and the earnings power of the company. This strong performance continues to be driven by the actions and initiatives implemented by our team over the past several years to strengthen our commercial positions and improve our operating efficiencies, driving higher, more resilient earnings. I'll speak further to this in a few moments. But we'll now begin our review of the quarter, as always, with our safety performance. At Owens Corning, our commitment to safety is unconditional. During the second quarter, we maintained a very safe environment with an RIR of 0.59. Two-thirds of our facilities have operated injury-free this year and more than half have done so for over a year. Financially, we delivered revenue of $2.6 billion, similar to second quarter 2022, with adjusted EBIT of $534 million, up 2% year-over-year, and adjusted EBITDA of $664 million, resulting in an adjusted EBIT margin of 21% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 26% for the company in the quarter. In addition, we generated free cash flow of $372 million in the quarter, similar to the same period last year. And consistent with our capital allocation strategy, we returned $160 million to investors through dividends and share repurchases. During the quarter, each of our business segments continued to perform extremely well relative to…

Ken Parks

Analyst

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. Turning to Slide 5. As Brian mentioned, we delivered another strong quarter with consolidated net sales of $2.6 billion and adjusted EBIT of $534 million. We continued to realize the benefit of positive pricing, including carryover from actions we took last year, which partially offset the revenue impact of lower volumes in two of our segments. In addition, input cost inflation continued to moderate this along with ongoing commercial and operational execution resulted in record adjusted EBIT margins of 21%. Adjusted earnings for the second quarter were $385 million or $4.22 per diluted share, compared with $379 million or $3.85 per diluted share in the same quarter of 2022. Slide 6 shows the reconciliation between our second quarter 2023 adjusted and reported EBIT. For the quarter, adjusting items totaled approximately $47 million, all of which related to charges associated with our ongoing cost optimization and product line rationalization actions. Consistent with prior periods, these costs are excluded from our second quarter adjusted EBIT. Turning to Slide 7. I’ll comment on our cash generation and capital deployment. The strength of our earnings along with continued discipline around management of working capital, operating expenses, and capital investments, generated free cash flow of $372 million for the quarter. Capital additions for the second quarter were $122 million or 5% of revenue up $17 million from 2022. We remain focused on reducing our capital intensity over time through productivity and process innovations. As a result, our return on capital was 20% for the 12 months ending June 30, 2023. At quarter end, the company had liquidity of approximately $2 billion consisting of $968 million of cash and nearly $1.1 billion of availability on our bank debt facilities. During the second quarter, we returned $160 million to shareholders through…

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Thank you, Ken. Our second quarter results continued to demonstrate the progress we have made in elevating the performance of the enterprise to generate higher, more resilient earnings. As we move into the third quarter, we expect inflation to continue to moderate, but the impact of higher interest rates and ongoing geopolitical tensions to result in continued market uncertainty and slower global economic growth. That being said, we anticipate many of our end markets to be relatively stable with housing sentiment in the U.S. turning more positive, the roofing market remaining robust driven by significant first half storm activity and many of the key verticals within our non-residential businesses continuing to hold up. Based on this near term market outlook for the third quarter, we expect our volumes to be relatively stable sequentially with positive overall pricing year-over-year. Additionally, we anticipate input costs to continue to moderate leading to positive price costs in the quarter. Overall for the company, we expect our performance in Q3 to result in net sales similar to the prior year, while generating high teen EBIT margins. Now, consistent with prior calls, I’ll provide a more detailed business specific outlook for the third quarter. Starting with our insulation business, we expect revenue to be down low-single-digits versus prior year as positive price realization and favorable currency are more than offset by lower demand resulting from the decline in U.S. lagged housing starts, softening demand in Europe and lower commercial spending. In our technical and global insulation businesses, we expect revenue to be relatively flat versus prior year. Continued price realization resulting from our previously announced increases, which we begin to anniversary in Q3 and favorable currency are expected to be offset by lower volumes tied to the broader macro environment in Europe, as well as softer…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from John Lovallo from UBS. John, please go ahead. Your line is open.

John Lovallo

Analyst

Good morning guys. Thank you for taking my question. I guess the question would be, can you help us just sort of bridge to that 30% roofing EBIT margin in the second quarter, whether that’s sequentially or year-over-year? And maybe more importantly, how sustainable is this margin level? It seems like you think it’s sustainable, at least in the second quarter. But do you think that we were closer to those 20% trend margins over time? Thank you.

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Thanks, John. Let me maybe bridge a little bit to our – we start with the guide. As we came into Q1, we were kind of in that 23% range. We guided around those numbers for Q2. And I think a few things factored into the step up in margins in the quarter. One was a significant uplift in volume. So if we look at overall demand in the market in Q2 throughout the quarter, we saw a pretty significant increase in weather events and storm activity and that really accelerated manufacturing shipments in the quarter. In fact, in Q2 ARMA shipped a record – recorded a record number of manufacturing shipments of about 48 million squares, so a lot of material flow there. Our volumes were very strong in the quarter, but we did – we couldn’t keep pace with I think some manufacturers that had more inventory on the ground. We’ve outperformed those ARMA shipments over the last few quarters, so we came into the quarter with a little less inventory to meet that demand level. So in the quarter we saw a step up of volumes that helped drive our margin performance but lagged a little bit the overall market shipments. I think that was a big factor in it. We also continued to see some additional asphalt deflation roll through and some material deflations roll through the P&L and that came through and because of such strong volumes, I mean those costs immediately kind of flow through to the P&L and that resulted in some stronger margins. And then the third factor I’d say is in our roofing components business. We saw a really nice step up in demand there. As distributors, I think we’re restocking some lower inventory levels in anticipation of stronger roofing demand…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Kathryn Thompson from Thompson Research Group. Kathryn, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Kathryn Thompson

Analyst

Hi. Thank you for taking my question today. Focusing on composites, a two-part question Europe and U.S. For Europe, you talked about spot pricing being down. To what extent are you seeing pricing pressure in Europe specifically for Chinese imports or Chinese producers? We’re starting to hear a little bit more pricing pressure for them. And then just a clarification on composites in the U.S. Did you see a similar trend from a volume standpoint for your composites going to the roofing end market as you did for your roofing shingle volumes? Thank you.

Ken Parks

Analyst

Thanks, Kathryn and good morning. Thanks for the question. On the European question, I guess what I would say is this, we have not seen a similar amount of pricing pressure in Europe from Chinese imports as maybe we’ve seen within the Asia Pacific region. On the last couple of calls we talked about the fact that the Chinese producers and the market in China not stepping up significantly for local demand. We’ve seen more of the Chinese product moving into markets such as India. And if you think about where we have contract pricing versus spot pricing, the majority of our business in the U.S. and in Europe is really tied to more contract pricing. And as you know, we kind of set those prior to going into a year. The spot pricing environment is heavily focused on Asia. So where we’re seeing most of this spot pricing pressure is in Asia, and it does run to exactly what you talked about Chinese imports, but less going to Europe, more going to other Asia markets such as India. There’s probably a little bit of incremental in Europe, but nothing that we would call out specifically. And we’ve seen customers not only in Europe, but in the U.S. really as we’ve moved through 2023 so far to kind of stick with the contract terms that we had agreed to last year around our arrangements. And I think that kind of runs to the fact that what we saw coming from 2022 to 2023 is a step down in volumes in Europe as well as in the U.S. But they haven’t continued to step down. It feels like they’ve kind of moved to a level and then they’ve kind of stabilized as we’ve seen in Q2 and exactly what we’re kind…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Stephen Kim from Evercore. Stephen, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Stephen Kim

Analyst

Yes. Thanks very much guys. Great quarter. Thanks for all that info on composite that was very helpful. But I wanted to ask you about the insulation business and particularly the pricing outlook. We have – you certainly talked a lot about the lag starts, but as we all know, that’s yesterday’s news and the more recent data coming out, particularly single family start – regarding single family starts from the census have been extremely strong. So I wanted to get a sense, are those numbers that you've seen in the last couple of months from the census, are they stronger than what you had previously expected? And is it your expectation that this could provide an opportunity for additional price increases from – versus what you saw last December? You implemented one in last December. I'm thinking that we could be due for another one. I was curious if you could talk about the outlook, given the starts data that we've seen. And then if you could just briefly talk about what the pricing dynamic looks like overseas on the technical side of your business, in particular, I was thinking Paroc over in Europe. Thank you.

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Thanks, Stephen. Maybe start with the U.S. res question. And I think you've said it well in terms of I think the continuing strength and recovery we're seeing in housing certainly makes us more optimistic as we move through the year than we probably started the year. So as you've talked about – the demand in our res business over the last several quarters has really been driven more by completion rates than light housing starts. We expected to see that backlog continue to get worked through in Q2 and that our demand would start to follow more of that historic trend of like housing starts. We saw that in markets. There's still some markets that are very strong and builders are working through backlog. But we saw that start to come through. We expect to see that in Q3. But to your point, I mean, the fundamental housing demand in the U.S. market is still very strong and we think, getting stronger in terms of what we're seeing in some of the builder comments recently. We're certainly seeing that reset of consumers that we expected around higher interest rates and the fundamental need for more housing. Housing has been underbuilt. There's no inventory to work through. So we've continued to maintain that any slowdown would be shallower in duration or shallower in impact than previous cycles and the duration would be much shorter. And we continue to believe that. And I think to your point, we're seeing that really coming through in the second quarter, where second quarter starts were actually higher than first quarter starts. When you look at the June activity, starts, completion and permits all kind of coming together at a higher than 1.4 million rate. So that's stepping up. And we think that continues. So…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Truman Patterson from Wolfe Research. Truman, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Trevor Allinson

Analyst

Hi, this is Trevor Allinson on for Truman. Thank you for taking my questions. I wanted to touch on natural gas in your Composites and Insulation businesses. Natural gas prices have come down pretty considerably in both the U.S. and Europe. And I know you have hedging programs in place that can impact some of the potential deflationary benefits that you actually recognize. I'm just curious, what are you actually baking in, into your 3Q estimates for deflation? It looks like Composites, you're actually talking about maybe potentially modest inflation. Are you expecting to start to see any of those natural gas benefits start to flow through in 3Q? If so, can you quantify those? And then if not, when do you expect from a timing perspective that you actually start to see some year-over-year deflation benefits?

Ken Parks

Analyst

Sure. So I'll start out by just outlining again quickly how we hedge because that will help to answer the question. And then I'll give you a little bit more color. As we've talked about, we kind of have a very disciplined approach that's been in place for a while, where in every quarter, we're always looking five quarters out and we're hedging the prices on natural gas wherever we can, both in the U.S. and in Europe. So there's always layers of hedging if you just think about constantly looking at that. So if you think about – let's go to your question about the third quarter of 2023. We would have a certain number of layers of hedging that started to get placed back in Q2, Q3 of 2022. And if you think about the economic environment and the pricing environment around natural gas at that time frame, the prices had kind of peaked to their highest prices in Q3 and Q4 of last year. So if you roll all that together, what that means is that as we get to Q3, as we're layering on hedges, we've certainly got some hedges in there that are at something closer to today's market, right? We've also got some layers that were put in place back in Q2, Q3, Q4 of last year that are running at a higher rate than current market rate. What that means is we are probably going to still see a little bit of inflation. Maybe it's much more comparable when we think about the net price we pay affected by the hedge itself. But where that will start to roll off is when we get past four or five quarters past that peak of what we saw in Q2, Q3 of last year. So effectively, what's happening via hedge program, as it would be in any case, is you're taking what's happening in the market today and you're kind of moving it along the next few quarters where you hedge. And we're kind of getting now to that point in time in Q3, Q4 of this year where those higher-priced hedges are rolling off and we are going to see more of the benefit from the lower prices. We're already seeing benefit from the lower market prices. But we will see more of that as we move forward. I won't quantify it yet because the demand and the pricing all play into it. But just like you saw in Q2, we should see better energy pricing both in our Composites business and in our Insulation business. And that's a benefit to our results and included in our outlook.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Phil Ng from Jefferies. Phil, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Phil Ng

Analyst

Hey, guys. Congrats on the strong quarter. Ken, appreciate all that great color on Composites. I mean, you called out some pricing pressure. But just curious, how do you see yourself managing that margin profile? And how should we think about contract pricing looking out to 2024 as that resets? Do you feel pretty comfortable that pricing on the contract side will hold up pretty well?

Ken Parks

Analyst

Yes, it's always hard to make a prediction fully at this point in time. But I would say go back to my comment on where do we have contracts. We have contracts primarily in the U.S., we have contracts in Europe. The contracts tend to run around and with customers who are looking for specific products being sold to them that they want to purchase. And what we love is now as the business is thinking about those discussions, because of the value of the offering and the relationship and the kind of solutions that we're providing under those contractual arrangements. The discussion doesn’t just run to pricing, right? And that’s part of the reason that you saw us make the decision last year to think about the DUCS product versus our other products, is that DUCS can move around in pricing much more commodity, like it’s got a lot of – lot less specificity as to who provides it and much more who can provide it at the lowest cost. So we now look at the portfolio and say what we’re providing under contracts looks a lot more like a negotiation around a solution. That pricing is one of the elements, but it’s not the only element. So comparatively over the last several years, we are in a much better place as we’re going into contract price or contract arrangements where it’s not just a pricing discussion. Now in Asia, I will tell you, as it continues to be a spot pricing market, we will likely continue to see some tougher discussions around pricing in those markets as the Chinese market continues to kind of operate at the levels it’s been at for the last 18 months to 24 months. And local production is being not used fully in the Chinese domestic market, but as its being kind of exported to other places. And I’ve called out India in prior quarters as well as earlier in this call. So pricing discussions there could be tougher, but I like the fact that we are having good discussions that go well beyond pricing and into the solution that we’re delivering in markets where we have contracts in the U.S. and in Europe.

Phil Ng

Analyst

Appreciate the color. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Michael Rehaut from JPMorgan. Michael, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Michael Rehaut

Analyst

Great. Thanks very much and congrats on the results. I just wanted to focus in a little bit on also the Insulation outlook and just trying to understand or parse out a couple of drivers here. First off, I want to make sure that understand the slight steps down in EBIT margin sequentially into 3Q if that’s mostly driven by planned maintenance downtime and production investments. And then looking into the back half, I guess echoing an earlier question around pricing for the back half, if you could just remind us around typically for the business when there’s usually in terms of a cadence of price increases in a normal market, if historically the business does enact any price increases in the back half, if you can just remind us of that and given the potential for starts, which have more recently stabilized or improved a little bit, how does that interplay with how you’re thinking about the current environment?

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Thanks, Michael. Yes. Let’s talk a little bit on the sequential moves in EBIT margins Q3 versus Q2. I think a couple of drivers inside of that. One is that, as you mentioned, we are expecting to take a little bit more planned maintenance downtime in the quarter. We’ve been running these assets to service demand very hard. They require annual maintenance and we’re trying to stagger these out where we can hit some in Q3, maybe a little bit in Q4. But trying to get to those maintenance issues that we have and address those and be in front of then the anticipated demand recovery that we do think with higher starts to come at us here to finish this year and into next year. So I think we’re very conscious on how we’re planning our manufacturing maintenance downtimes in a way that gets to the needed equipment upgrades we need to make that drives our productivity, that drives our cost efficiencies, but also sets us up well as we go into next year with the anticipation of volumes getting stronger that we’re able to service that demand. So there’s going to be some of that in Q3 that we’re going to hit. And then I think some of it is around some narrowing price costs. And this gets to the pricing question, we are going to be comping against some price increases last year that have rolled off. So I think we’re – in our guide, we talked about a positive price cost, but narrowing, and that’s really around the fact that there has not been other new increases in outs this year versus last year on that piece. So the combination of those two is going to put a little bit of downward pressure on margin performance sequentially in the business. If I step back and just think about pricing overall, historically to your question, generally in our Res Insulation, we try to time increases that can be communicated through to our customers and through to builders in a way that they can put those into their cost of goods and estimates as they’re building homes. So generally, we try to look at something sometimes in the fall for sure, we look at end of year increase announcements historically that allows our customers to plan for the following year. So that’s been the historic cadence in the business. And to your question around how that’s going to play out relative to starts going forward again, I think we’re going to continue to look at our input cost overall, not just material costs, labor cost inflation some other areas of increasing costs that we’re seeing in the business, how we best look at that relative to pricing. And then we’ll look at the demand environment and we’ll make those decisions as appropriate when we look at finishing out the back half of the year.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Rafe Jadrosich from Bank of America. Rafe, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Rafe Jadrosich

Analyst

Hi, good morning. It’s Rafe. Thanks for taking my questions. In November 2021 at your Investor Day, you sort of set out some long-term margin ranges for each of your segments that were pretty wide and at the time probably appropriate given the uncertainty and you’ve weathered some tough market conditions since then. And generally margins have performed better than what you were looking for at the time. Just given your performance through kind of a range of macro environments. How do you think about your margins longer-term? Do you think the floor is kind of higher on some of those margin range – ranges going forward? And is there anything that that’s sort of changed structurally that will give you kind of higher margins going forward?

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Thanks, Rafe for the question. And I think this has been our ongoing communications that, that we’ve tried on a quarterly basis through these calls is to talk about the structural changes we’ve made to the business, the strategic investments we’ve made in the business, all around that frame that we outlined at our Investor Day a couple of years ago. And at that time, we talked about having a significant step up in innovation. We were going to look at acquisitions. We thought we could get a revenue growth track higher to get to $10 billion in revenue by next year, which we’ve been tracking up to. And then we talked a lot about the margin performances within the business and the company where they focus that we believe we were taking actions and initiatives that would not only increase the overall margins of every business and the company, but create a more sustainable and a more resilient margin profile for the company. And that is really the work we have been doing commercially, operationally, through strategic investments to kind of step up the growth rate, step up the margin rates that they’re not just higher, they’re more resilient, and then also continue to look at operating free cash flow, how we do capital allocation return cash to shareholders, how we make specific investments and more efficiently in our CapEx deployment. And all of that, it really is accumulation of work that we outlined the strategy. So when we look at the margin performances in our businesses today, these are what we have been working to get to. And we’ve been talking about raising the margin profile, particularly in insulation. We said we were taking structural improvements around productivity investments and automation and in process technologies, we were doing…

Ken Parks

Analyst

And Rafe, if I would just add, because I think Brian covered everything really well, I think it’s a great opportunity. I’d be remiss not to say this, which is – since November 2021, which seems like a really long time ago, but it wasn’t that long ago. All of our markets until this year have been hitting on all cylinders, right? So while we’ve been telling you guys the story and doing exactly what we said, which is kind of working through the structural changes and the market changes and the portfolio changes to get the company where it needs to be, we knew that while markets are all hitting, everybody’s kind of waiting for the proof point of the fact that do we see that come out in the results? And I just would challenge each of us, including you guys to look at our results and realize that not only have we now in 2023 in softer or mixed markets, as we may want to say, delivered exactly what we said we were going to do in Q1 with more structurally higher operating margins, again, even higher in Q2. And we just gave you an outlook for the same kind of story in Q3 on continued kind of mixed markets in different regions of the world. So I just say that because I think that it’s important to remind ourselves that we are now in a point of delivering proof points and I feel good that the organization has really executed and so far delivered two and on track to deliver three quarterly proof points of saying exactly what we said we were going to do.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mike Dahl from RBC Capital Markets. Mike, please go ahead. Your line is open.

Mike Dahl

Analyst

Good morning. Thanks for the question. Just to follow-up on the roofing dynamics, just first part to make sure we understand correctly, some shifting dynamics between 1Q, 2Q, some of it’s probably geographic on storms, but some of it was – if I heard you correctly, maybe your competitors were unable to get out in front of some of the demand that started to come through in 1Q while you could service it, which meant they kind of had some inventory waiting on the ground when demand continued to be strong in 2Q. When you say that’s kind of now equalized, I guess first is that accurate? Second is, when you think about the outlook for 3Q, is that now inventory is kind of lean across the manufacturers, so you’re all in the same spot. Have you increased your production to try to intentionally get more inventory out? And when you think about kind of the sell in versus sell out, do you think you’re basically matching with that 3Q guide or do you think there will be some restocks? Sorry, I know there’s a few kind of parts in there, but that would be great if you could address those.

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Sure. We’ll try Mike. I’m going to try to hit them, but maybe reverse order. I think yes, you’ve characterized kind of Q3 versus Q2, so Q2 our volumes versus ARMA volumes. Yes, I think we had been – had very solid demand in Q4, Q1 relative to ARMA shipments. We’d outperform the market. So coming into the quarter, we felt that other manufacturers probably were carrying more inventory. So there’s always a surge when you have a storm or event that distributors put purchase orders in, they were able to service that surge in a shorter time period because of inventory on the ground. We think a lot of that’s cleared out and back to our guide then that why we believe Q3 volumes for ourselves for the rest of the industry kind of match what can be produced and what can be shipped out. So I think we fundamentally believe we have a very strong share position. We’ve outperformed the market in the first half and we got great contractor demand, great contractor support. So I think this is just a bit of a timing issue between quarters in terms of shipments to demand and some shipments coming out of inventory Q2 that we don’t think repeats in Q3. I would think that Q3 volumes, although, it’s always tough to predict kind of sellout demands of distribution versus buy – their buying patterns in, but I would think given the strength of the market and particularly in storm markets, their sellout is going to equivalent, it’d be equivalent to sell in. So I think we’re going to see pretty even demand and in terms of that. In terms of production, we have increased our laminate production, in fact, we produce more laminates in the first half than ever given our capacity investments, given our productivity investments. But the demand for our brand and our products remain incredibly strong. So we’re going to work hard in Q3 to try to continue to service that demand and service our customers. But it’s a robust market. We feel good about our share position and we think it’s going to be strong here in Q3.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This is all the time we have for Q&A today. So I would now like to hand back to Brian for any closing remarks.

Brian Chambers

Analyst

Well, thanks, Stacy. And I just want to take a moment to thank everyone for joining us on today’s call and for your interest in Owens Corning, and we look forward to speaking with you again during our third quarter call. Thanks everyone.

Operator

Operator

Thank you everyone for joining today’s call. You may now disconnect your lines and have a lovely day.