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WESCO International, Inc. (WCC)

Q4 2023 Earnings Call· Tue, Feb 13, 2024

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello and welcome to WESCO's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Earnings Call. I would like to remind you that all lines are in listen-only mode throughout the presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call over to Scott Gaffner, SVP, Investor Relations, to begin. Please go ahead.

Scott Gaffner

Analyst

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Before we get started, I want to remind you that certain statements made on this call contain forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and by their nature, are subject to inherent uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. Please see our webcast slides as the company's SEC filings for additional risk factors and disclosures. Any forward-looking information related on this call speaks only as of this date, and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information to reflect the changed circumstances. Additionally, today, we will use certain non-GAAP financial measures. Required information about these non-GAAP measures is available on our webcast slides and in our press release, both of which you can find on our website at wesco.com. On the call this morning, we have John Engel, WESCO's Chairman, President and CEO; and Dave Schulz, Executive Vice President and CFO. Now I'll turn the call over to John.

John Engel

Analyst

Thank you, Scott. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. You saw from our earnings release earlier today, we had a very disappointing fourth quarter to close out 2023, which results well below our expectations. These results, they're unacceptable. They're unacceptable to me and they're unacceptable to the entire WESCO management team. We understand the issues that drove our fourth quarter results, and we're already taking actions to address them. Dave will take you through this in detail shortly. But first, I'll summarize the three key issues we had in the fourth quarter. First, reported sales declined 2% versus our expectation for flat to slightly positive sales. This was due to a market downshift and reduced purchases with some customers. Second, we experienced higher SG&A expenses. This was due to higher-than-anticipated benefits and health care costs, along with higher cost to operate our facilities and IT-related expenses. And finally, our free cash flow generation was below our expectations. This was due to a lower accounts payable balance related to the timing of purchases. On a full year basis last year, certain sectors, including utility, data centers, industrial security and network infrastructure continued to grow, somewhat consistent with our expectations, while others underperformed, including broadband and specific OEM and construction-related sectors. As a leading global provider of business supply chain solutions, the WESCO team effectively navigated through this mixed economic environment last year. And this was all done while managing changing customer buying patterns as supply chains yield. I'm pleased that our team delivered 5% revenue growth in 2023 following two years of double-digit increases given these market challenges. We finished the year with our backlog near a historical high level and stable versus the end of September. Our free cash flow generation was higher in the…

David Schulz

Analyst

Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone, and I appreciate you're joining the call today. As John mentioned, we had a disappointing quarter with sales, margin and cash flow below our expectations. On slide five, you see a summary of our fourth quarter results. Reported sales were down 2% year-over-year. Like the third quarter, growth in utility, industrial, data centers and enterprise network infrastructure was more than offset by declines in broadband, security, OEM and construction. We experienced customer destocking in our shorter-cycle businesses in the second and third quarters. In the fourth quarter, we saw a step-down in demand versus our expectations, particularly in December. On an organic basis, sales were down approximately 3%, as a two-point positive contribution from price was offset by a 5% decline in volume. While our stock and flow sales were down in the fourth quarter, we continue to see strong project demand with direct shipment sales up versus the prior year. Project backlog continues to be at historically high levels, supporting our outlook for growth in 2024. In total, backlog was down 10% year-over-year and down approximately 1% sequentially from the end of September. We expect backlog to continue to moderate in 2024 as lead times have improved for most product categories. Gross margin was 21.4%, down 20 basis points sequentially. Relative to the prior year quarter, the 50 basis point decline in gross margin was driven by the anticipated reduction in supplier volume rebates as well as the impact of business mix. We continue to prioritize profitable top line growth and as an industry leader and tend to protect the progress we've made on gross margin with our enterprise-wide margin improvement program. Adjusted EBITDA was down 15% year-over-year, primarily reflecting the impact of lower sales and gross margin as well as higher SG&A…

Operator

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Deane Dray with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Deane Dray

Analyst

Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

John Engel

Analyst

Hello, Deane.

Deane Dray

Analyst

Maybe we can start with parsing through what changed in terms of customer behavior. What can you tell us about the stock and flow business? How it changed during -- sounded like the latter point in the quarter, so specifically, the idea that customers are waiting for government funding and then what were the OE businesses that were soft? And where specifically was -- did you see construction weakness? Thanks.

John Engel

Analyst

Yes. Deane, at the highest level, EES had strong industrial, as Dave mentioned, construction was down a bit. OEM was down a bit. But it didn't -- it wasn't far off our expectations. Now if you look at the underlying mix of EES, stock and flow is a little weaker than we anticipated. We did have projects -- project shipments, the DS shipments kind of tick up. That wasn't the big delta versus our overall expectations. The big delta was a shift in both CSS and UBS. So let me take you through each of them. CSS saw a slowdown in their stock and flow, really to various contractors and some select project pushouts, specifically with a few customers that -- these are fairly sizable projects. We had expected CSS to really step up sequentially. So this was really versus expectations. UBS as well had two major drivers. Integrated Supply, which is part of that business, industrial-oriented integrated supply business called WIS grew very nicely, mid-single digit growth, very strong, actually, and very strong momentum. Broadband was significantly weaker than we thought. It had been down all year in the 20% range. It was down over 30% in Q4. So we had thought we kind of hit the bottom on broadband, but it kind of lagged down a little bit further. We did have a very challenging comparable in Q4'22, but nevertheless, broadband was worse than expected. And then finally, utility, Deane, I'd say, utility was a case where customers clearly did some inventory management as we move through, let's say, the latter part of November through December and they were adjusting their purchases that really impacted stock and flow. So they had kind of -- they were kind of riding the inventory levels they had and kind of just push stuff out. You call it year-end inventory management. I think I hit all your questions. Dave, do you want to add anything?

David Schulz

Analyst

Yes. I just want to mention on OEM. You had a specific question there. We had talked about manufactured structures being one of our issues throughout 2023. We think we've hit bottom there. There were some sales to customers that we were expecting in other sectors of our OEM business that we were expecting to ship out in the fourth quarter that we're not shipping out. So we do think that there was a market downshift with some of our OEM customers.

Deane Dray

Analyst

Got it. That was all helpful. And then just as a follow-up for '24. Can you talk about the impacts of normalization? So we're seeing pricing normalize. It sounds like you're only getting a 1% benefit from carryover. You're seeing normalizing in order patterns from customers and how they manage their inventory and you're seeing more normalizing in your backlog. Just kind of take us through those themes and then specifically regarding price and order patterns.

David Schulz

Analyst

Yes. Let me start with the pricing impact. As we've reported throughout 2023, the benefit of price was still a positive, but it was -- the growth rate was much lower quarter-over-quarter. We did two points of benefit on price in the fourth quarter. Most of the supplier price increases that we've been seeing are more typical of what we saw pre-COVID. So we're looking at the one to two points of announced price increases from many of our supplier partners. So we do expect to get some carryover. We've included about one point of pricing benefit from that carryover in our 2024 outlook. So we are seeing that normalization of price. Of course, we'll always have the commodity impact on the pure commodity products. That's always hard for us to predict. But generally, the pricing environment has stabilized to pre-COVID expectations. In terms of the order patterns, we're still seeing quite a bit of bidding activity within the businesses that we serve. So many of our customers are still out there with these major projects that we are still seeing good bidding activity. We do expect, as we go through 2024, that we'll continue to see the return to typical order patterns. And that's playing through for us and things like how much order do we have on inventory to support these projects based on these product availability and lead times coming down from our suppliers.

John Engel

Analyst

Deane, I think your question is a good one in that we've had then -- I think we'll look back to this period of time going into the pandemic, through the pandemic, coming out of the pandemic and we clearly had some dramatic effects across the entire value chain in the global supply chain as we entered, went through and came out the other side. By and large, what we're seeing now is kind of a back to more normalized level across almost all dimensions of the business. Pricing, as Dave said, lease supplier lead times continue to be -- are back at pre-COVID levels except for a few select categories like engineered products, switchgear and transformers. So most of that supply chain disruption, there is a front end, through it, on the back end has kind of worked its way through, I think, as we closed out 2023.

Deane Dray

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Nigel Coe with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Nigel, your line may be muted on your end.

Nigel Coe

Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Nigel, your line may be muted on your end.

Yes. It was muted. Thanks for that. So John, you mentioned the disappointments in the way the quarter played out. But really good companies make their own luck. And the SG&A and the free cash flow was obviously very disappointing in that regard. So I'm just wondering when you take a step back and think about kind of what transpired, is there an organizational issue here that needs to be solved? Is information flow around the organization? And maybe just talk about what changes in '24 to give us confidence that the team can deliver on commitments.

John Engel

Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Nigel, your line may be muted on your end.

Nigel, thanks for the question. I started my opening comments today by saying these results are unacceptable. They're unacceptable to me and the entire management team. I think we've clearly built a new company, and we established a very strong track record of delivering exceptional results and creating value. If you think about 2023 in summary, we had a little bit of a kind of softening in EES in Q2, we took some cost actions. And then as we go through Q4, things move pretty quickly. And look, as we enter this year, we still have our sales rates not bouncing back yet. So we have declining sales, as Dave mentioned, in January. So kind of that, it extends the Q4 trend on the top line. Although backlog has ticked up sequentially. So that's an encouraging point. We've got the best team we've had, Nigel. We've got very clear initiatives that have delivered value. As we've done over the last several years since we brought Anixter and WESCO together, we've refined our margin improvement program as we've entered -- we did that -- we launched it initially several years ago, and we refine it every year. So we refine that again, adding new tools and capabilities to that program, and that's effective in January of 2024 and we continue to see tremendous cross-sell opportunities. I think we've built a very good process, a rigorous process and have a real strong recipe around delivering the cross-sell results. So highly confident that we'll get the momentum back here quickly. As we kind of look at guide for the year, I think we are very thoughtful and measured in terms of how we set up the guide. We do expect more of a normal seasonality as we walk quarter-to-quarter across this year sequentially. And if you factor that in, that takes us well above the midpoint of the guidance range that we put out there. So I look at '24 as being a year that most of the external market factors seem to normalize and now we're down execution. And again, I feel very confident in the team we have in place, the initiatives that we have in place, building off the momentum and the results we've delivered since we brought these two companies together back in middle of 2020. Dave, I don't know if you can add anything? Maybe Dave talked to cash flow because I think -- just speak to the cash flow.

David Schulz

Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Nigel, your line may be muted on your end.

Yes. Again, I think that -- very disappointed with the cash flow performance. Obviously, there are two big factors, the biggest one being the accounts payable. And one of the things that we experienced throughout 2023 is our purchases stayed relatively stable, particularly in Q2 and in Q3, and we generated a significant amount of cash from our payables balance. The driver of reduction in the accounts payable balance was really driven by the timing of purchases. And as our stock and flow business began to underperform our expectations, we were not replenishing that inventory, therefore, not creating new payables. So as we're paying our vendors, we're not getting new payables onto the balance sheet. Clearly, was unexpected, but really driven by that stock and flow business decline and not replenishing those purchases.

Nigel Coe

Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Nigel, your line may be muted on your end.

I appreciate the detail there. Thanks, guys. And then my follow-on is a modeling question. If I take the $1.75 billion EBITDA guide and roll out through to in my model, I'm getting to the high end of the earnings range based on the below line guidance items. Is there anything I'm missing there or is my math is just bad? But is there some contingency within the EPS range based on EBITDA guidance?

David Schulz

Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Nigel, your line may be muted on your end.

One of the things that I would highlight is we've called out that other expense, which impacts our EPS. And this year, we had the high end of the range. We provided you with a range of $10 million to $25 million. We did $25 million here in 2023. That is the combination of our pension and the impact of our pensions on the P&L and then also the impact of foreign exchange rates on our balance sheet. But again, there's nothing else, I think, outside of what we provided you, those underlying assumptions should roll through to get to relatively close to where we are from the midpoint of our range.

Nigel Coe

Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please go ahead. Nigel, your line may be muted on your end.

Okay. I'll go back into the queue. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Sam Darkatsh with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Sam Darkatsh

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Good morning, John. Good morning, Dave.

John Engel

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Good morning.

David Schulz

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Hello, Sam.

Sam Darkatsh

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

John, you're on the US steel board. You've had a fun last couple, two, three months, it sounds like. So first question, I guess, with respect to inventory days, I think WESCO is like, I don't know, 10, 12 days higher versus pre-pandemic when adjusting for Anixter. And in isolation, this is obviously understandable based on the extended lead times. But when I look at your competitors, whether it's Graybar or Rexel, it looks like they're back at pre-pandemic days of inventory. And I'm trying to understand the difference. Is it different mix with direct ship? Is it utility? Is it a Schneider versus Eaton thing? Is this something WESCO-specific? How do you -- help us reconcile while the inventories are still elevated here, but not at your peers.

David Schulz

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Yes, Sam. Again, I want to provide a little bit of perspective relative to the peer group that you outlined there. We do believe that we have a much higher percentage of our business is project related. And many of those projects include engineered components that have much longer lead times as we went through the recovery of COVID in '22 and into '23. We clearly saw the increase in our inventory days, primarily driven by that project and that project backlog, getting what we could get when we could get it and then waiting for those customized engineered components. This is something that we are very clearly focused on. We did not make the progress that we were expecting to make here in the back half of 2023. It's something that we have included in our outlook for free cash flow going forward is that we will reduce our inventory days in 2024. But clearly, some of it is relative to the competitive group, some of it is the business mix, and some of it is the types of projects that we service around the globe that, in some cases, include longer lead times and then longer time for us to service the customer.

Sam Darkatsh

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Thanks. And my second question, the thinking behind lowering the target debt range, John, I know your company is historically comfortable with leverage. You have, I would say, at least an inarguably undervalued equity in a year, you're going to call the preferreds. You've got countercyclical cash flows. I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks that you're real pleased to do this. Why is this the optimal capital structure versus the prior 2 to 3.5 turns?

John Engel

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Two things, Sam. One is the confidence in the upsized cash generation characteristics of the combined company. We've got a guide that will give us record free cash flow this year. So I mean, we're -- I remain more confident than ever about the underlying characteristics of our business model and the ability to generate cash. What we outlined at our Investor Day, we're confident and strongly committed to, that's the underlying cash flow characteristics of the business. What we outlined there as well as outperforming the market over the top line consistently over time and then delivering the EBITDA margin expansion. So that's the first driver. We delevered very quickly, much faster than we had committed externally, and we're very confident in the underlying cash flow characteristics. Secondly, I think it's a recognition of -- and based on some investor feedback, that we should -- we -- in general, we should operate with a little bit lower leverage ratio. And we've looked at our investor peers and others. And so I think this represents -- we always were going to move here at some point, Sam. It's just a matter of when. And it's a decision we've looked at for some time and made that decision, obviously. But we think it sends a very strong message that we'll operate consistently as a target within a lower target leverage range and still with increased capital return to shareholders in the form of dividends, which were increasing, announcing the intent, our intent to increase it as well as continuing our share buyback program that we've got authorized. So I think it's a very strong message. We hope that you see it as such.

Sam Darkatsh

Analyst · Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Christopher Glynn with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Christopher Glynn

Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Good morning. Just wanted to dive into some of the uses of cash going forward. Share repurchase, you had $1 billion authorization intent to use it by '26. It seems like you're talking more about opportunistic levels now. I think we're expecting you'll have the cash for $540 million preferreds in the second quarter, '25. And just curious, in those context, if you could help us think about those, what amount of balance sheet cash is appropriate is sort of a threshold benchmark?

David Schulz

Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Yes, Chris, let me start by just grounding everyone on the primary sources of cash. We've walked through that. We provided you our outlook, $700 million of free cash flow at the midpoint of the guide. The dividend payments, including the common and the preferred, rough around $140 million of cash in 2024. That still leaves us with about $560 million of cash that we can allocate against our priorities. So from that perspective, we're going to be opportunistic on the share buyback. We have the $1 billion authorization. That is not time bound. So that is something that we can always leverage here up to that $1 billion limit. We're still at the very early stages. We have not done a considerable amount of share buybacks over the past two years. So from our perspective, we'll be opportunistic on whether we continue to pay down existing debt or we leverage that cash for share buybacks. And like we use that word opportunistic quite a bit. That's exactly how we look at it is where can we get the best return. As we think about paying down our existing debt, that just frees up capacity on our existing facilities that we're keeping in mind that we do have that preferred that needs to be taken out in the second quarter of 2025. So that is part of our calculus as we think about deploying cash here in 2024.

Christopher Glynn

Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

That's great color, Dave. Just one other component, is about $0.5 billion what you should have on the balance sheet to support your operations on average?

David Schulz

Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

That's correct. I mean that's the amount that we typically have been carrying. So we're comfortable with that $500 million to $600 million of cash on the balance sheet. And again, we think about that as supporting the day-to-day business, particularly as we go through the different elements of building sequential sales throughout a typical year. So we want to make sure that we've got the available capital on the balance sheet.

Christopher Glynn

Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from David Manthey with Baird. Please go ahead.

David Manthey

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, guys.

David Schulz

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

Hello, David.

David Manthey

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

First question, so this time next year, when we look at the right-hand side of slide nine, that EBITDA bridge, what you're telling us is that all three of those bars should be green? They might be really skinny, but they'll be green. Is that your expectation?

David Schulz

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

So Dave, we did highlight that -- and just for the audience, we're referring to the fiscal year 2023 sales and EBITDA bridges that were in our prepared remarks, slide nine. We would anticipate that sales will be a positive green, gross margin rate and gross margin sales as we commented, we would expect that to improve year-over-year. SG&A would still be negative, but we expect to get leverage -- operating leverage on SG&A.

David Manthey

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

Okay. All right. That's fair. And then I'm thinking about the -- what you mentioned on rebates being stable. When I think about the supply chain issues working out, backlogs down, I mean the inventories are still somewhat elevated as we've kind of talked about, maybe you don't think that relative to the project business, et cetera. But when you say rebates are going to be stable, it would seem like downside would be more likely. Can you just talk us through why you think that flat is the right idea there?

David Schulz

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

Yes, certainly. We negotiate our supplier volume rebate programs with our supplier partners every year. And it's generally based on a joint view of what the market growth opportunities are and then what are the specific products or product categories that our suppliers are incenting us to ensure that we push through to the channel. The -- as you take a look at the history of our supplier volume rebates, we did about 1.6% of sales in 2022. That was on a performance that included us being at the higher end of those growth rates during 2022. That moderated here in 2023. So we lost about 20 basis points, about 1.4%. Our expectation is that we're going to continue to negotiate and hold that supplier volume rebate given our outlook for sales that we provided to you. Again, those supplier volume rebates get reset to market expectations every year. So you can see what some of our supplier partners have put out in terms of their expectations for 2024. We're still negotiating but our expectation is that our SVR as a percentage of sales will be relatively consistent 2024 versus 2023.

David Manthey

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

Okay. And if I can just close the loop on this thought finally here. Dave, you said you don't want to talk too much about the SG&A reductions. But maybe if you could talk about the areas you're targeting for reduction as opposed to quantifying that? You talked about two-thirds of your increase in the current quarter coming through facilities, IT, sales promotions, the other third benefits in health care. Is it one of those? Is it something outside of those? Can you just talk in broad strokes about the areas that you're targeting?

David Schulz

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

Certainly. And again, we've done this before. And we are coming off of two years with significant double-digit increases in '21 and '22, our sales growth moderated unexpectedly in the back half of 2023. We had some SG&A items. There's always some puts and calls whenever we close the year. In 2023, everything went the wrong way. And again, as we think about what we've got to target from an SG&A perspective going forward is we've got to get the profitability back. And that means we've got to reduce our SG&A as a percentage of sales. Like we've done in the past, we'll target a combination of discretionary spend plus some structural spend. That includes how do we consolidate some of our facilities to reduce our costs. We'll be very, very focused on headcount management based on the demand that we see out there. We do want to continue to invest in our digital transformation. So that is something that we want to make sure that we're able to continue to pull forward. And so from my perspective, this is a combination of tighten the belt on discretionary expenses and then focus on some of the structural changes that we need to make to ensure that we've got the profitability that we expect internally but also you and our investors expect from us.

David Manthey

Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Patrick Baumann with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Patrick Baumann

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks. Just wanted to go back to slide six and go over some of these fourth quarter items in terms of missing on the sales expectations you had. Maybe first on the CSS business. Can you talk about like where specifically you saw projects delayed? Was this like the Rahi business you acquired? Is it data center-related? And then what's your visibility of that coming back in '24? Is that embedded in your outlook? And then on the EES segment, a couple of ones here. Like how big is solar for you? I don't remember you guys talking much about that before. And then what's in OEM, like what's declining? I mean, I feel like this is a business where you don't have a lot of visibility to -- over the course of the year, you talked about manufactured housing. You've talked about small vehicles. It's not clear to me what exactly is in the OEM business besides that and kind of what drove the weakness here in the fourth quarter would be helpful.

David Schulz

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Certainly. Let me start with CSS. Relative to our expectations, and if you take a look at how we finished the fourth quarter, the biggest miss relative to our expectations was within the CSS business. That's where we did see some of our large projects to technology customers, including some data centers, got pushed out of 2024. We were clearly focused on having those ship in November, December, they've been pushed to the current year. So that is something that was unexpected. We have included those sales as we think about the growth rates in the current year into 2024. On EES. So EES came in, as John mentioned, relatively close to our expectations, but we had some puts and calls within the makeup of those sales. I'll mention on OEM. We had called out the manufactured structures business, which is, as you said, Patrick, it includes some specialty vehicle. It also includes some manufactured housing. That business has been relatively stable. I mean, I think we've hit the bottom in terms of the overall market opportunity and our sales. But we did have some customers in other segments where sales were expected to ship in November, December that we did not see ship. So we do think that, that was driven by a market downshift relative to our expectations. And then I'll just highlight again on UBS. Broadband came down more than we thought it would. The other thing that we had highlighted was utility, just comping some very strong numbers. We still see very strong demand from the utility business. But again, against the tough comparison, we came in below our expectations in the fourth quarter.

John Engel

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Patrick, I'll add that the secular growth trends are still intact. And so I'll just -- I'll add to Dave's comment relative to data centers and what we call our WDCS business, our WESCO Data Center Solutions, which is the combination of Rahi plus Anixter's legacy data center business, which was exceptionally strong. So that had very strong results in the fourth quarter, and it grew double-digits. Obviously, it was up very strongly across the year. But there were some projects that did slip out that we had expected to get in December. The momentum vector is still exceptionally strong there. And we got very high good bidding -- bid activity levels and quoting levels. The AI-driven demand is expected to only further accelerate, I think, the opportunities with data centers. And we expect very strong results in 2024 because I think that was part of your question as well. Very high single digit to low double-digit growth for that portion of our CSS business.

David Schulz

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Yes. Let me just go back. I failed to mention solar. So solar is high single-digit percent of our EES business. We've not provided the specific number. We do support a combination of nonresidential plus residential customers related to that solar business. We've seen a significant downturn just based on inflation, interest rates and some of those demand patterns in our EES business for solar.

Patrick Baumann

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Thanks. And then just one follow-up just on the first quarter. You mentioned, I think, sales down mid-single digit. And then I was wondering if you could give some color on margin expectations for the year-over-year because for the full year, you have them up, I think, 10 basis points at the midpoint. But since you're starting slow, I'm going to imagine that you're down to start the year-over-year on margin. If you could just help provide some parameters around that. That's be helpful.

David Schulz

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Yes, Patrick. Let me walk you through how we developed our 2024 outlook, and I'll focus on sales first. As we mentioned, we're down about 5% in the month of January on a preliminary basis. That's in line with typical seasonality. And the way that we built our 2024 sales outlook is we started with our Q4 2023 and we applied the typical seasonality on a sales per workday basis. So from that perspective, we typically see January down mid-single digits, typical seasonality, and we see the first quarter down low single digits. We've applied that same methodology for each of our quarters. The one thing I'll note here is that Q1 and Q2 of 2023, the reported sales were up 12% and up 5%, respectively. So we've got tough base period comparisons in the first half. In the second half of the year, again, we've applied typical seasonality sequentially by quarter which includes sequential growth Q1 to Q2, relatively flat Q2 to Q3 and then just a very modest growth rate into the fourth quarter. In 2024, we have two extra workdays, they're both in the back half of the year. So as we think about the construct of our sales outlook, it's roughly 48% front half, 52% back half. That 52% back half, of course, being helped by the two extra workdays. So again, we've applied typical seasonality against our sales outlook. If you look at typical seasonality, it would point you towards the higher end of the range of our 1% to 4%. But we, of course, have taken a look at some of the other external factors and we've incorporated that into how we've set the range for 2024. Our project activity, our bidding levels continue to be strong. That also supports the range of 1% to 4%. On the margin profile, we've given you the margin profile and our expectations for the full year. We're not going to provide the specific margin drivers for the first quarter.

Patrick Baumann

Analyst · JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Appreciate the color.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to John Engel for any closing remarks.

John Engel

Analyst

Okay. Thank you again for joining us. I'll bring the call to a close. We've addressed all your questions. I thank you for your support. It's appreciated. We look forward to speaking with many of you. I know we have many follow-up calls planned today and tomorrow in the coming days. We also will be participating in a series of conferences over the next two months. First, the Raymond James Institutional Conference; second, the Loop Investor Conference; and third, the JPMorgan's Industrial Conference. And additionally, we expect to announce our first quarter earnings results on Thursday, May 2nd. So with that, thank you, and have a good day.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our conference. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.