MSC Industrial Direct Q2 2014 Earnings Conference Call Transcript (Presentation)

Operator:

Good morning, and welcome to the MSC Industrial Direct Second Quarter 2014 Financial Results Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to John Chironna, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead sir.

John Chironna – Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer

Thank you, Denise, and good morning to everyone. I’d like to welcome you to our fiscal 2014 second quarter conference call. An online archive of this broadcast will be available 1 hour after the conclusion of the call, and for 1 month on the investor relations homepage at www.investor.mscdirect.com.

During today’s call, we will refer to various financial and management data in the presentation slides that accompany our comments, as well as our operational statistics, both of which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website. Let me reference our Safe Harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Our comments on this call, as well as the supplemental information we are providing on the website, contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Securities laws, including guidance about expected future results, expectations regarding our ability to gain market share and expected benefits from our investment and strategic plans, including the BDNA acquisition and expectations regarding future revenue and margin growth.

These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by these statements. Information about these risks is noted in the earnings press release and the risk factors in the MD&A sections of our latest annual report on Form 10-K with the SEC, as well as in our other SEC filings. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations and the company assumes no obligation to update these statements. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

In addition, during the course of this call, we will refer to certain adjusted financial results, which are non-GAAP measures. Please refer to the tables attached to the press release and the GAAP versus non-GAAP reconciliations on our presentation, which contain the reconciliation of the adjusted financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures.

I’ll now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Erik Gershwind. Go ahead Erik.

Erik Gershwind – President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, John. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. Also in the room with us is Jeff Kaczka, our CFO.

I will start by saying that  I am pleased with our execution and our overall performance during the first half of our fiscal 2014. As I usually do, on today’s call, I will discuss the current environment where we continue to see positive signs, our recent developments where despite weather-related disruptions we produced solid results in Q2 and progress with our infrastructure and our growth initiatives, including the BDNA integration which continue to go well.

Jeff will focus on our financial results and provide our fiscal third quarter guidance. And I will then conclude with an update of our full year expectations which have not changed since our last call. And finally we will open up lines for Q&A.

I will now start with the environment. Market conditions continued to improve despite some temporary weather-related hiccups in January and February. When we spoke on our last call in January, we’d just come off the holiday season and had seen the first winter storm impact our fiscal second quarter. Those weather-related disruptions continued through January and into February and did in fact impact our growth rates.

Nonetheless, the weather eventually did improve and the environment returned to the levels that we saw in November and the first half of December. In recent months, the ISM readings have come down from the high 50s to its low to mid-50s range. At the same time Metalworking Business Index which had been negative for quite a while has improved with the last reading in the mid-50s at 55.9.

For the first time in a while, those two measures have converged to a similar range. In fact, for the past two months, the MBI has actually been higher than the ISM. We are finally reaching a time when those macro indicators are generally consistent with what we are seeing and hearing from our customers.