Hello and welcome to Wesco's 2025 First Quarter Earnings Call. I'd like to remind you that all lines are in a listen-only mode throughout the presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this event is being recorded. I will now hand the call over to Mr. Scott Gaffner, SVP, Investor Relations to begin.

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 uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. Please see our webcast slides and the company's SEC filings for additional risk factors and disclosures. Any forward-looking information speaks only as of this date and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information to reflect changed circumstances. Additionally, today, we will use certain non-GAAP financial measures. Required information on these measures is available on our webcast slides and in our press release, both of which you can find posted on our website at wesco.com. On the call this morning, we have John Engel, Wesco's Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Dave Schulz, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. And now I'll turn the call over to John.

Thank you, Scott. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our call today. We're pleased that our positive sales momentum in the fourth quarter last year carried into 2025 and that's with posting 6% organic sales growth in the first quarter. This was ahead of our expectations coming into the year. Our total data center business was again a strong driver of our growth and was up 70% along with high single-digit growth in our OEM and Broadband businesses. This was partially offset by continued temporary weakness in utility end markets, which is what we expected. We continue to expect our utility business to return to growth in the second half of the year. Gross margin was relatively stable on a sequential basis versus the fourth quarter and improved sequentially in CSS also as we expected. We continued to focus on effective working capital management as we do always in the first quarter and delivered positive free cash flow that exceeded our expectations at the start of the year. Our increased inventory will help us manage the potential supply chain impact of global tariffs. We also issued $800 million of new senior notes to redeem our preferred stock in June and repay a portion of our revolving credit facility. This refinancing along with the preferred stock redemption strengthens our balance sheet, it extends our debt maturities, it increases our financial flexibility and it significantly improves our earnings and cash flow run rates. Dave will take you through those details shortly. Following this preferred stock redemption, we have strong liquidity to address our capital allocation priorities reinforcing what we outlined at our last Investor Day. After supporting our common stock dividend payments and continuing stock repurchases to offset the dilution of our annual management equity awards, we have well over 75% of…

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. Turning to Page 4, I'll walk you through our first quarter results. Organic sales in the first quarter were up 6% at the upper end of our outlook for growth of low to mid single-digits. Price was approximately 1.5% and volume was up about 4%. Reported sales were flat as a strong organic growth was offset by the impact of our integrated supply divestiture, foreign exchange rates and one fewer work day. Recall that we divested the integrated supply business on April 1 of last year, so this will be the last quarter where we see an impact on reported year-over-year growth rates. In the first quarter, our data center business continued to grow rapidly and was up 70% versus the prior year. Additionally, we delivered high single-digit growth in our OEM and Broadband businesses. As expected, utility remained soft as customers continue to work through inventory destocking. On the lower half of the page, you can see that adjusted EBITDA margin was down 60 basis points. Gross margin was stable sequentially and down 20 basis points year-over-year, primarily due to project and product mix, which I'll cover in more detail later. SG&A was up about 2% year-over-year due to normal inflationary pressures, particularly within transportation and facility costs. However, the higher cost on relatively flat reported sales was about a 40 basis point headwind to EBITDA margin in the quarter. Adjusted earnings per share of $2.21 was down 4% from the prior year. Let me walk you through our business unit results, beginning with EES on Slide 5. First, please note that we transferred about $155 million in annual revenue of specialty wire and cable, including $35 million in the first quarter from EES to CSS to better align the customers we…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Stephen Volkmann of Jefferies.

Hi, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Hi, Dave, I just want to be clear on what's in your revised outlook relative to a couple of things. One is the tariff stuff. all the announcements that you described in the first quarter, the up 11% mid single-digit, is that in your guide, but the 2Q stuff that you've seen so far is not? Is that the right way to look at it?

There are no tariff related price increases incorporated into our outlook. So our outlook assumes organic growth rate of 2.5% to 6.5%. Of that, about a 0.5% is carryover pricing from 2024. We have not incorporated any new pricing that was announced in either the first quarter or the second quarter to date into our outlook yet. And let me explain why. We generally see a two quarter lag between a price increase effective date and when it begins hitting our revenue. A couple of drivers of that. First, about half of our revenue was project based. Those projects have negotiated pricing. So these price increase notifications don't impact those projects. Most of the impact would be to our stock and flow business. And again, as we're seeing these price increase notifications, we're managing that back to meet our commitments with our customers, working back with our suppliers. So generally, when we see an announced price increase of, say, 8%, for our company, we generally see about half of that benefit flow through to the revenue line on a two quarter lag. So we have not incorporated any of that yet because we're still seeing some of these price increase notifications come through. And again, that is consistent with our past practices over the years.

Understood. Okay. And is that 8% that you just threw out is that sort of ballpark where we would be today if everything was mark-to-market or was that just illustration?

That's just illustration. Again, we would only be marking to market about half of our revenue that would be associated with our stock and flow business. The other half is negotiated pricing for specific projects with our suppliers.

Okay. And does your revised guidance include the $0.65 from the preferred? And then I'll pass it on.

The guidance that we provided did assume that we would be calling the preferred halfway through the year. So when you go back to what we provided back in February and what we've reaffirmed, we did assume that there would be a benefit to earnings per share based on half of the year of the preferred dividend coming out, offset partially by the financing cost.

Got it. Thank you.

The next question is from Nigel Coe of Wolfe Research.

Thanks. Good morning.

Good morning, Nigel.

I really hate -- good morning. I hate to be sort of kind of come back to the tariffs here, but can you maybe just give us a flavor of the supplier price increases that you've seen so far? And I understand the project versus stock and flow conversation, but are you seeing any surcharging where you might have to kind of pass that up through quicker than normal? Any color there would be helpful.

Yes. So let me expand a bit on Dave's commentary. In Q1, the number of supplier increases that we saw ended up being down about 15% versus prior year Q1. And the average was mid single-digit plus -- mid single-digit range, some were low single digits, some were mid, some a little bit higher, but it was in that kind of band, which is more -- which is Nigel is more of a normal pricing increase as part of a normal cycle. I think what we saw was some effect where some of the suppliers delayed their normal price increase announcements as they were working through as the tariffs were getting announced working through what the impact was on the whole supply chain and their operations and figuring out what price increases they wanted to put. There were a few suppliers that posted increases that actually pulled them back and have come back since. So interesting dynamic for Q1. As we got into Q2 and look, we're only the first month is in the record books, April. Thus, the number of price increases have stepped up significantly. So far in April, what's been announced for Q2 is up 150%, not in price, but in number of increases announced versus Q2 of last year. And I know we'll expect to see some more get announced here in May and in and in June in second quarter. And the average price increase has moved up to mid-single-digit plus to high single-digit. There are some that are double-digit range depending on the particular SKU -- set of SKUs in a given category. So that gives you a sense of the pricing dynamic. We really believed as the tariffs are getting announced that we wouldn't see a meaningful impact in terms of announcements in Q1. And we don't see any meaningful impact of the tariffs at all in our Q1 results. We thought Q2 would really where we'd see the ramp and so far that's come true. Relative to line item surcharges, there are some suppliers that do that, others do not. As a matter of process and as a matter of practice, I will tell you that we work aggressively with them to try to have them build that into the price increases. So we can provide complete transparency into our customers on how the prices are increasing based on the tariff impact. So that's how we try to work it. Many of the suppliers support us in that, some want to have separate tariff line item pricing or line item surcharges as you described. We typically push back on that. In some cases, we do have to show that separately with customers and we work that process. But by and large, we like to build it into the price.

Okay. Thanks, John. That was great color. And then my follow-on, I think this is maybe for David. So the materials referenced continued destocking at the utility customers. But the comments you made seems to suggest it's a bit more rate sensitive, maybe projects pushing out to the right. So just want to understand kind of the wipe in the reference from what you're seeing right now in the utility vertical and your confidence in that inflection of the growth in the back half of the year?

Yes. We've not seen a significant change from how we describe the utility market back in February to what we're seeing now. We are seeing some customers begin to increase activity levels. We're still seeing some customers that are behind that. But based on the discrete set of customers that we manage these large contracts with, we're in contact with them every day. And based on their projected activity levels, we see a return to growth in the second half of the year. We have seen this end market over the past three years be tremendously impacted by higher product costs. Recall in some quarters, we were announcing double-digit price increases, which increased the cost of the day-to-day business, increased the cost of projects. That cost has to be approved through the regulators, through the local utility commissions and then is part of a capital budget for each of these utilities. So we've not seen a dramatic change from February to now. The conversations we're having, the activity levels that we're seeing plus we've got some new accounts that we won that's providing us with the confidence of a back half recovery.

And I'll add a bit again, this is exactly how we thought the year would start out. In Q1 and Q2, we expected a second half recovery. The budgets have been set now. They're going to maintain their budgets. It's a matter of do they have to reprioritize them in any form or fashion. I'll also tell you that the extended lead times are still in place for transformers and high voltage apparatus. And we're working numerous opportunities with our customers in securing supply chain and supply for shipments that are going to be impacting the out years in a major positive sense. So again, I think the overall secular growth trends around power generation, grid modernization, et cetera, that we've talked about at length are intact.

That's great. Thank you.

The next question is from Deane Dray of RBC Capital Markets.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

Good morning, Deane.

Good morning.

Hi. I appreciate all the color you've given on tariffs and pricing and so forth. So I'll ask some questions related to data center, if I can. You put up some really growthy numbers the past two quarters, 70% last quarter, 65% this quarter. The market is not growing that fast. So maybe you can expand on your point that customers are increasing their scope of business they're doing with Wesco. And as you flesh that out, maybe talk about the mix of products versus services that you are engaged in data center.

Yes, Deane, great question. Look, we're really pleased with the very strong and growing momentum in data centers, our data center business. Really strong I'll say sales results. The backlog is up very strongly as well. Our bid activity levels are exceptionally strong. And you'll see that we made a very clear disclosure this quarter. I want to point it out again that we're now showing the EES related data center sales that's into the gray space portion of the data center and that's now approaching a $400 million trailing 12 month basis run rate. And that's up in the same kind of 70% plus range in the quarter. So we are absolutely seeing -- as we expected we would see, we targeted -- we signaled this to you because our customers are looking to increase scope of supply with us. In the white space, it includes I'll call it rack power, everything around the rack, the rack installation and the services that we now have. Our acquisition of Rahi continues to contribute strongly. That was a number of years ago. And the recent ones of entroCIM and Ascent are having a very positive impact on our business. They're strongly contributing. They've allowed us to grow up the value chain even further and provide solutions across the whole life cycle. Customers are absolutely asking us to do more as a one stop shop and include pulling in the gray space as well, which we foreshadowed. So I think we're very encouraged with the trends. We're not seeing any reduction in our booking or sales rates, not one iota. I think really this is important to understand. Again, look at the cycle of data center projects where we play in this space. We're clearly expanding scope of supply and our customers…

Got it. Really appreciate all that color on the data center framing especially across the two segments. And then just a follow up, can you address mix in EES? You cited in the slide deck more project activity. Also is there direct shipments involved in that mix issue as well because that's usually a high quality problem because it is fabulous returns on direct ship at just low margin? But just help us understand the mix issue.

The short answer to your question is yes. I'll ask Dave to expand in a minute, but let me give a little color to set the context. I think, look, it was fourth quarter last year that EES returned to growth. And now we've got organically low single-digit growth in Q1 and the backlog is up nicely, both year-over-year now and sequentially. So I think that's an encouraging start to the year. Obviously, data centers are helping there. And the same data center margin impact on the front end of those project cycles that we saw in CSS is weighing on EES, but we will work those margins up over time as well as we provide the complete data center solution, white space, gray space and focus on services, including power. And again, I think when you look at EES, we've had a few quarters in a row now of strengthening OEM business. That's really a good indicator and then typically a leading indicator of what our industrial business will do in the coming quarters. And so I think we expect that OEM positive momentum to continue and we expect industrial to improve as we move through the year, which that will have a positive margin mix impacting. With that, Dave, probably good to double click again on EES in the quarter though.

Yes, certainly. So within the quarter two things that I'll call out. As John mentioned, we had project mix, we also did have some product mix. So we had some large shipments of products that tended to be at a lower margin. That impacted the overall gross margin of the business. We also had year-over-year some higher provisions for inventory. As we've called out the last several quarters, the solar business within EES has been under pressure and there are technology changes within that. And so just given some of the inventory that we were holding, we took a higher provision for inventory within EES impacting the gross margin here in the first quarter.

Did you just size that solar write-off?

I would say that overall, some of the adjustments that we had both the write-off, differences in supplier volume rebates rough around about 25 basis points.

Got it. Thank you very much for all that color.

Thanks.

The next question is from Sam Darkatsh of Raymond James.

Good morning, John. Good morning, Dave. How are you?

Good morning, Sam.

Back to price because of course. So is prospective pricing overweight in any of your verticals? I'm saying that in light of the fact that you obviously called out some pricing competition specific to EES and construction. I know Greybar was mentioning the same sort of thing. Just trying to get a sense of where the prices that you're likely to push through. Is that overweight, underweight or pretty uniform across your businesses? That's the first question.

It's an excellent question, Sam. And I don't know that we've gone through this in the detail we historically. But to give you a little sense, when you think of the three business units and this is a generalization, CSS has as a large portion of the supplier base, at least some of the biggest supplier partners that have U.S. based operations, U.S. based manufacturing. One of our largest supplier partners announced yesterday. And so you get a good sense of what tariff impact is proportionally versus others that have greater offshore manufacturing, let's say. And I would say that results in a different -- and the value chain is working differently, just exceptional growth, exceptional demand pulling on that capacity. So that creates a certain set of price dynamics. We're not seeing anywhere near the same price increases in the -- for our CSS business that we are for -- that we expect to see for our EES business as these increases have been stepping up here in Q2. These are predominantly in the EES business, which also impacts our utility business. And those supplier partners have a mix of manufacturing that in U.S., Mexico, somewhat -- sometimes Canada and other countries, including China. Some of those supply chain changes have been occurring. They've made some changes, meaningful changes over the last few years post pandemic. But I think now they're taking a hard look at that as well given the current tariff environment and what expectations are for tariffs going forward to continue to optimize that footprint. So I want to give you a little color of that. Dave, you may want to comment as well, but the weighting I would say is more electrical in utility versus CSS on an STU basis.

Absolutely. So if you think about just here in the first quarter, both CSS and UBS had essentially no pricing benefit to their top line. We talked about our pricing being about 0.5 that was primarily driven by EES. If you take a look at even 2024, CSS had essentially no pricing benefit to the top line and we saw low single-digit benefit into both EES and UBS. So again, it goes back down to how some of these supply chains are currently managed, the impact of tariffs. Obviously, that's going to flow through to us as a price increase. And I just again want to reiterate that we are treating these tariff related price increases like we have always historically treated price increases. What we're seeing now come through from our suppliers is a combination of their typical early part of the year price increase to recover inflation and other costs associated with their business, plus we're seeing them pass through some of the tariffs. It comes to us as one price increase. In the past, we never would include those price increase notifications in our outlook. That is the consistent approach that we've taken here in 2025.

So my follow up question to that would be, remind us how your order contracts are structured, especially when you have tariffs. I mean, do you end up repricing the backlogs? Do you -- does your vendor eat that because you've already established price and cost? Do you eat that? I guess what I'm getting at is, is there some sort of a rule of thumb where if you get mid single or high single-digit pricing, how much of a gross margin benefit might be and how much of a potential risk might that be?

Yes, certainly. So for our large projects, generally, we either have fixed pricing based on the duration that, that project has between order point and when it gets executed. If it's a couple of months, generally, we've got locked in pricing from the supplier. If it is a longer lead time contract, many of those contracts have a cost escalator, which would include any tariff impact that the customer has agreed to take. So we would work back with our suppliers. We have that true-up clause within the contract that we would then be able to execute to protect our overall value on that particular project. We have not seen any suppliers reach out to us yet with a confirmation that they are repricing our backlog. So we have not seen that. So therefore, we don't see any risk there at this point. That answer your question, Sam?

Thank you. And is there a rule of thumb then, Dave, in terms of if you get a mid-single, high single-digit price increase, how much of a short-term benefit that might be to gross margins in a basis point standpoint?

It varies so much. It would be hard for me to give you a rule of thumb. But just thinking from the context of you're seeing price increases. Generally, there's a two quarter lag at the company level. We only see about half of that published price increase impacting our revenue at some point in the future. So as we saw back in like 2022, particularly with some of the raw materials going into commodities and pure commodity products, we did get a slight benefit, but you're talking tens of basis points is not hundreds of basis points for that phenomena with our inventory.

Very helpful. Thank you.

The next question is from David Manthey of Baird.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. First question, a two-parter here. First off, when you say guidance doesn't anticipate any future pricing and Dave, your commentary, it sounds like you're excluding announced and even expected price increases as a hedge to any potential demand destruction. Am I reading that right?

You are. And again, that is consistent with our past practices. If this was a year ago and we were seeing price increase notifications from our suppliers, we would not be including those price increases into our outlook. So you are correct that we have not incorporated it until we begin to see it recognized in our income statement. And we understand that there could be some demand destruction given higher prices, particularly in some of our more price sensitive businesses. And we feel that if there is a tariff action that comes through to us, we would see a pricing benefit. We believe that pricing benefit would mitigate any demand destruction that we would see due to the higher price.

Okay. So logically, the second quarter guidance, if you take a 7.5% reported growth midpoint and 6.8% EBITDA, it's right around $400 million EBITDA give or take, which is kind of where the street is. So within that, what you're telling us is there may be some price increases that are hitting April, May, June that by convention you're just not including in that outlook, correct?

That is correct.

Okay. Fair enough. Second question, flipping over to SG&A. I think you have a merit increase coming up in the second quarter and maybe you could talk about what that should add in dollars. I'm thinking maybe it's $15 million or $20 million, but are there other puts and takes we should consider as we bridge from first quarter SG&A to second quarter?

The primary driver sequentially from Q1 to Q2 would be the merit increase. So to size that, I think it would be -- you're starting with our Q1 2025 adjusted EBITDA -- I'm sorry, adjusted SG&A, which was right around $829 million. About two-thirds of that is people costs for which we saw about a 3% increase overall to our cost, both salaries, wages plus benefits. So that's what you should assume for the sequential to the second quarter.

Okay. And then, of course, volume escalators and that sort of thing. But any takeaways from that number we should be considering?

Nothing significant.

Okay. All right. Thank you.

Thanks, Dave.

The next question is from Patrick Baumann of JPMorgan.

All right. Thanks. Just following up on that question. The outlook for the year, I missed the beginning of the call, but have you changed the components of the margin guide. I think at the midpoint, you had assumed a little bit of gross margin benefit from supplier volume rebate initially for the year and that would be offset by some of the incentive comp headwind in SG&A. Now with the guide I think implying something below the midpoint, any thoughts on those components relative to how you initially guided them for the year?

Yes, certainly. So on gross margin, we initially thought that the gross margin would be up slightly year-over-year. Given what we experienced in Q1 and our expectations for Q2, we do think that the gross margin would be down year-over-year. On an SG&A perspective, our SG&A assumptions are essentially still holding. We will, of course, have some additional variable costs as we see increases to sales. And we have highlighted that we expect sales would be in the upper end of the range. With that, we would see some operating leverage coming through on the SG&A margin line.

And you just mentioned second quarter gross margin. What did you say on that? I guess I missed it at the beginning of the call.

For the full year, we would expect our gross margin would be down versus 2024. Recall that we did 21.6% in 2024. We initially guided back in February that we expected gross margin to expand slightly. That was part of our margin recipe that would be offset by some of these incremental costs due to incentive compensation on the SG&A line. So our expectation at this point is that gross margin would be down slightly versus the prior year. With the higher sales being in the upper end of the range, we will get some operating leverage though on that SG&A line.

Right. I guess I was talking -- I thought you had said something about second quarter gross margin.

EBITDA margin in fact.

EBITDA margin, we've provided you our expectation that would be down 50 basis points versus the prior year.

Understood. Okay. And then if you can maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the Canada market? Kind of a decent sized exposure for you guys and curious the macro out there, different end markets up there, what you're seeing in your business and your expectations there for the balance of the year?

Yes. To your point, we have a very strong Canadian business and we had a very strong quarter to start the year. Very pleased with our Canadian results. There is a separate market report that the industry publishes up there that both distributors and suppliers are part of that association and that report showed -- our performance versus the market was very strong. We outperformed the market and took market share and felt very good about our start to the year. And so backlog grew very strongly as well in the first quarter. So I think we're set up for a really strong year in Canada with our momentum vector. There is a new administration now in Canada. We'll see what the impacts are across their various core industries, including oil and gas and we'll see what happens there. But I feel very good about our momentum vector with how we started the year and our position.

And what are the key verticals driving that up there?

So when you look at the structure of the Canadian market and where we're positioned, it's more meaningfully more consolidated than the U.S. by a large margin. U.S. is significantly more fragmented. We are clearly the leader in the Canadian market and it's our entire portfolio, Patrick. So we got a strong electrical business. It's the legacy Wesco business. The big acquisition we did that was EECOL in the Western provinces and then Annexure with our leading wire and cable capabilities. So we have a tremendously strong I'll call it EES value proposition, the full solution portfolio across really from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, all the way up through the Northwest territories. We have a very strong utility business as well and serve all the major utility customers up there, equally strong, same value prop that we have in the U.S. and we have a very strong CSS business, very strong datacom, strong broadband. Our broadband business grew overall in Q1 after growing very strongly in Q2. So seeing a little different dynamics of broadband in the U.S., but the Canadian broadband business is off to a very good start after a very strong Q4. So the short answer is our entire -- all three SKUs are well-represented and overall, we have a very strong leadership position in Canada.

Okay. Thanks for the color.

Yes. Okay. I think we've wrapped up all the questions. Thank you for those. We'll bring the call to a close. Thank you all for your support. It's very much appreciated. We do look forward to speaking with many of you over the next couple of days with the follow-up calls. And then over the next two months, we'll be attending the following conferences, Oppenheimer Industrial Growth Conference, the Wolfe Transportation and Industrials Conference. We'll be participating in the Baird Industrial Distribution field trip. We'll be attending the KeyBanc Industrials and Basic Minerals Conference and the Goldman Sachs Leveraged Finance and Credit Conference. And finally, we expect to announce our second-quarter earnings on Thursday, July 31, 2025. So with that, have a good day. Thank you.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.