Good morning, and welcome to the JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the call over to Christopher Teachout, Director, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. We issued our earnings press release this morning and posted a slide presentation to the investor relations portion of our website, which we will be referencing during this call. I'm joined today by Gary Michel, Chair and CEO, and David Guernsey, Acting CFO. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during this call, we will make certain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our earnings release and provided in our forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC. JELD-WEN does not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements, including the guidance we are providing with respect to certain expectations for future results.
Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable financial measure calculated under GAAP can be found in our earnings release and in the appendix to this presentation. I would now like to turn the call over to Gary.
Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'll start this morning by thanking our global associates, and especially those in Europe, for their continued commitment and dedication to serving customers during this challenging time. Our thoughts are with those that are impacted by the war in Ukraine. Our local teams are providing direct support, and we have been actively recruiting refugees in our European operations. Together with the generosity of our associates, JELD-WEN has already contributed more than $50,000 to the American Red Cross in support of humanitarian efforts in the region, a true testament to our values-driven culture. Turning to the first quarter results, we delivered another quarter of core revenue growth, our seventh in a row, driven by solid end market demand, strong price realization, and progress on our key initiatives.
That said, a significant step-up in inflation relative to our expectations at the start of the quarter, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, had a significant impact on results. Absent these extraordinary inflationary impacts, we would have achieved the high end of our expected range for the quarter. We're pulling all levers to mitigate these pressures and deliver our financial commitments for 2022 and beyond. In addition to price action, we are executing initiatives to enhance margins, including expanding the rationalization and modernization programs to reduce fixed costs, focusing on consolidating our footprint and improving technology and facilities to improve labor efficiency and throughput, minimizing raw material consumption through value-added, value-engineered product design, and continuing to partner with suppliers to provide the best quality, cost, and availability for our operations and customers.
While global inflationary pressures continue, we remain encouraged by the favorable underlying demand fundamentals across most of our primary end markets. We are confident that the initiatives we have deployed to drive profitable growth and margin expansion will benefit us through the balance of this year. I will share more detail on these initiatives shortly. We remain laser-focused on leading the industry with customer-centric solutions and delivering on our 2022 and long-term financial commitments. Please turn to page four as I share a few highlights from the first quarter. Q1 net revenues increased 7.2%, driven by a 10% increase in core revenue, with all three segments contributing to core revenue growth. As I mentioned a moment ago, this marks the seventh consecutive quarter of consolidated core revenue growth.
As we continue to deliver innovative and margin-accretive new products and improved service to our customers, we've realized higher pricing, and we expect to maintain this price due to differentiated customer service, product solutions, and market-leading position. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter decreased 18% to $80.2 million. While pricing actions offset raw material and freight inflation, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions on many Russian exports led to greater volatility and higher than anticipated prices on a number of key inputs, including energy, metals, logs, and millwork. In North America, core revenue grew 13%, largely due to price increases and continued solid demand for products in both residential, new construction, and repair and remodel or R&R activity.
Strong end market demand drove increased orders throughout the quarter, resulting in both a sequential and year-over-year increase in backlog, our highest backlog since the start of the pandemic. We executed on a variety of material cost reduction initiatives, including resourcing, substitution, value-added, value-engineered, or VAVE projects, and also enacted cost controls aimed at alleviating the impact of inflation. We realized some benefit from these initiatives in the quarter and expect to realize most of the savings from these and others currently underway over the coming quarters. In Europe, core revenue grew 8% due to continued price momentum, partly offset by softer than anticipated volume in certain markets due to geopolitical uncertainty and significant inflationary impacts stemming from the crisis in Ukraine. Some project business was pushed out into future quarters, and we experienced limited destocking by certain customers.
In Australasia, core revenue increased 1% as accelerating price realization was largely offset by softer than forecast volume mix. Demand in Australia remains at record levels. However, continued builders labor challenges, severe flooding in Queensland and New South Wales, and an increase in COVID-19 related absenteeism had a temporary impact on delivery timing and throughput. We expect these issues to alleviate in the second quarter. To conclude my comments on the quarter, we repurchased $40.2 million of our stock during Q1, or approximately 2% of shares outstanding. This follows the $323.7 million or 11.5% of total shares outstanding that we purchased in 2021. We continue to believe that our shares represent a great investment for us and an excellent use of cash. Please turn to page five.
As we move into the second quarter, we continue to focus on carefully managing costs and making accretive investments to bolster the capabilities, service, and resources that matter most to our customers. Let me expand on some of the efforts we are pursuing to drive profitable revenue growth and margin expansion. Over the last few quarters, I've provided details on how we're accelerating the deployment of our business operating system, the JELD-WEN Excellence Model, or JEM, through transformation efforts in our 14 model value stream sites across the globe. I'd like to provide some detail on new aspects of this transformation, the evolution of model sites to product lines, the addition of sites in Europe and Australasia, and the introduction of our first smart factory. As we've mentioned, JEM deployment enables us to improve throughput, maintain market-leading lead times, and reduce per unit cost.
To accelerate the pace of transformation, our approach to these model value streams is evolving from being site-specific to spanning full product lines. This approach allows us to roll out the findings of a single rapid improvement event, or RIE, to similar product lines at multiple facilities almost simultaneously. The additional efficiency we gain from this approach, plus the six sites we're adding in Europe and Australasia, will unlock approximately $100 million in additional revenue opportunity for JELD-WEN in 2022. We've also deployed new technology, including sensors and software, to our first smart factory, and we have plans to roll out this platform to two additional sites in the second quarter. This technology allows us to proactively identify issues and further optimize throughput by reducing unplanned downtime, minimizing stranded labor, and improving quality through standard work.
We look forward to sharing the benefits of this new smart factory technology in the coming quarters. As always, we continue to execute standard work process improvements across our remaining manufacturing sites. To provide some context on the magnitude of improvement we're seeing, three projects completed in the first quarter have driven throughput volume improvement between 77%-92%. Customers see this as better lead time that they can rely on. In the past three years, we've achieved more than $100 million of savings from our footprint rationalization and modernization efforts, which have improved profitability and performance, increased throughput, delivery capabilities, and capacity. With additional projects underway and more in the pipeline, we believe we have considerable runway to generate continued meaningful cost savings and margin improvement. We've also kept a sharp focus on strategic sourcing to create more predictability and stability in our supply chain.
Our philosophy at JELD-WEN is to manufacture where we sell and to source where we manufacture. This localized approach has helped us maintain self-sufficiency in key manufacturing processes and deliver quality products with industry-leading customer lead times. This gives us flexibility as we optimize the supply chain to manage the effects of inflationary markets through rapid resourcing and insourcing, substitution, and redesign decisions. Our reach and scale gives us purchasing power, and as a key customer for many of our suppliers, we're using this position to manage our material purchases more effectively.
We've continued to identify multiple sourcing locations that have allowed us to quickly pivot when we experience supply chain challenges in certain regions of the world. Another part of our strategy is helping our channel partners and customers solve their challenges by offering new and innovative products and services that add value to their business, helping to strengthen our position as a supplier of choice. For example, we're offering more pro-specific SKUs of pre-finished, pre-configured doors and integrated door systems to help reduce installation labor requirements. We are piloting quick ship programs in North America that focus on rationalizing SKUs to deliver higher volume on trend products that customers want while enabling our production runs to be more efficient and reduce lead times. I also want to share a brief update of some of our key growth drivers this year.
We recently announced the production launch of our new Auraline composite windows and patio doors in North America. This launch addresses the rapidly growing demand for products that are design-focused, energy efficient, and sustainably sourced with a high degree of recycled content. An estimated 40% of dealers today don't have a composite window in their product lineup, so we're excited about the opportunity to provide them with this next-generation, energy-efficient composite product. Pre-orders for Auraline have been strong. Shipments will commence in the second quarter, and we expect rapid expansion through 2022 for this margin-accretive product line. Additionally, our exterior fiberglass doors continue to be a growth driver for us. We've added new door and skin capacity in our North Wilkesboro facility that help drive customer conversion, leading to growth above 20% and share gains for JELD-WEN.
In a few weeks, we're bringing additional capacity online in our West Coast facility and expect to see continued growth and share gains this year. We continue to broaden and deepen our relationships with multifamily and commercial customers throughout our VPI Quality Windows business. Since the expansion of our new East Coast facility in Statesville, North Carolina, in the fourth quarter, we secured seven new projects in 2022 with one of the largest multifamily builders in the United States and expect to secure incremental business with new customers as the year progresses. We expect these unique growth drivers and continued positive housing demand to accelerate top-line growth, while the steps we're taking to get ahead of inflation will deliver margin expansion and improved profitability in the back half of 2022. Now, I'll hand it over to David to give more detail on the financials.
Thank you, Gary. Good morning, everyone. I'll begin on page seven with our consolidated first quarter results. Q1 marks our seventh consecutive quarter of core revenue growth. Net revenue increased 7% to $1.2 billion, driven by 10% core revenue growth, partially offset by 3% adverse foreign exchange impact. Core revenue increased from a sequential and year-over-year improvement in pricing, partly offset by lower volume mix. Adjusted EBITDA decreased 18% to $80.2 million, driven by significant increases to input costs. Adjusted EBITDA margin compressed 210 basis points. Net loss per share and adjusted EPS were $0.01 and $0.16 respectively, compared to EPS and adjusted EPS of $0.25 and $0.27 a year ago. Page eight provides a detailed breakdown of our revenue drivers for the first quarter.
We delivered another quarter of strong core revenue growth with positive core growth in each segment. Pricing increased sequentially as we executed additional price increases to mitigate the impact of inflation. Price realization was strongest in North America at 14%, followed by Europe at 11%, while Australasia increased 6%. Volume mix decreased 2% in the quarter, driven primarily by slower backlog conversion in Australasia and softer demand in Europe, as well as having one less selling day in the quarter. Please turn to page 9, which shows the magnitude of raw material and freight inflation over the past four quarters and the price increases we've instituted to mitigate the effects. While material and freight inflation was greater than expected, we successfully offset the impact with price. Inflation was further moderated through our sourcing partnerships and value engineering initiatives.
We expect price cost to become a tailwind as we move through the year. Moving to page 10, you can see our segment highlights for the first quarter. Core revenue growth in North America was 13%, primarily driven by strong price realization, while volume mix was a slight headwind. Revenue growth accelerated through the quarter, driven by strong pricing and positive volume mix contributions in both February and March. JEM actions and improved labor productivity drove meaningful improvement in throughput through the first quarter, with weekly volumes in March up high single digits compared to the fourth quarter, setting the stage for future growth. Order rates remained strong, particularly with our traditional channels, which increased roughly 40% over last year due to strength in residential new construction.
Adjusted EBITDA margin in North America decreased 320 basis points, primarily due to the higher input costs, including raw material, freight, labor, and energy, as well as start-up costs for new capacity. North America fully covered raw material and freight inflation with price on a dollar basis, but the impact has diluted the margin rate. Europe revenue increased 8%, 1% including the impact of foreign exchange. Another quarter of strong price realization drove core revenue growth, partially offset by lower than anticipated volume mix. Our order book remains strong, particularly in Central Europe. However, inflation pressures and a general uncertainty related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine impacted demand in other markets. Europe adjusted EBITDA margin decreased 450 basis points. Again, pricing improved year-over-year and sequentially.
However, the deleverage impact of lower volumes due to market uncertainty, delays in higher margin project work and inflation pressures, particularly for energy, metals and labor, were considerable margin headwinds. Australasia revenue increased 1% in local currency, declining 5.2% FX-adjusted. Orders remained very healthy, reflecting our strong market position and continued solid demand for new housing. Volumes, however, were temporarily impacted by severe flooding along the eastern seaboard and from a spike in COVID-19 related absenteeism. Pricing stepped up meaningfully both year-on-year and sequentially as we implemented additional actions to mitigate the impact of inflation. Australasia adjusted EBITDA margin decreased 170 basis points in the first quarter, primarily due to the deleverage impact of lower volumes. Please turn to page 11.
Operating cash flow used during the first quarter was $186.9 million, compared to $64.9 million last year. The increase in operating cash flow used in operations was primarily due to higher working capital needs, driven by inflationary impacts on the balance sheet and lower net income. We expect improved cash flow conversion this year as inventory investments convert to revenue and ultimately to cash. Our balance sheet and liquidity remain in a solid position. We ended the quarter with total cash and liquidity of $265.6 million and $584.7 million, respectively.
Net debt leverage increased to 3.5x from 2.8x at year-end, primarily due to the temporary impact of inflation on our cash flow and from utilizing our sizable cash position to repurchase 40.2 million of our shares, or about 2% of the total shares outstanding. Our net leverage charter remains at 2x-2.5x, and we expect to make considerable progress towards this goal through growth and margin expansion this year and accelerating cash conversion. We'll continue deploying our cash in a disciplined, returns-focused manner and compounding the returns on that cash over time. Looking forward, we remain confident in our full-year outlook. Input cost inflation will continue to have some negative impact in Q2, and we expect extended market uncertainty in Europe.
However, pricing actions have been announced in all of our markets and realization will accelerate through Q2 and the balance of the year. Additionally, we have meaningful ongoing initiatives in place to drive growth and additional margin expansion as we progress towards our 2025 financial goals. With that, I'll turn it back over to Gary, who will provide our closing comments.
Thank you, David. Before we discuss the market outlook, I would like to provide an update on the divestiture process for our Wood Fiber Building Products business in Towanda, Pennsylvania. As we shared in the third quarter of 2021, the court appointed a special master to oversee the divestiture process. In February, the special master issued a report that identified multiple acceptable bids and recommended that one of the bidders no longer be considered a viable contender due to antitrust concerns. As part of that process, the court asked the Department of Justice for its views on the special master's recommendation, which is expected to be delivered later this month. We continue to work with the special master and his advisors to identify a buyer and close the transaction.
While timing is uncertain, we are well-prepared to navigate each possible outcome and remain focused on ensuring a fair and orderly transition for associates and customers while delivering value for our stakeholders. Please turn to page 13 and our market growth outlook. In North America, we continue to expect strong demand for both residential new construction and R&R activity. This demand is driven by favorable demographics, healthy consumer spending and high personal saving levels, record home equity and an aging housing stock. We recognize potential affordability challenges may create a temporary lull in demand during the second half of the year, but we believe the tailwinds to demand, including migration and move-up, will be more powerful and durable and long-lasting. For Europe, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has created uncertainty in the near term.
However, our operations are in many of Europe's strongest economies, and we expect activity to accelerate once there is greater clarity on the duration of the war in Ukraine. In Australasia, demand for new residential homes remains robust as the country's housing market continues its recovery from a multi-year recession. We expect housing demand and fundamentals, including record low interest rates and significant pent-up demand, to remain supportive, and we expect demand for our products to remain strong throughout the remainder of the year.
Please turn to page 14. While we've experienced extraordinary global headwinds in the past two years, we remain acutely focused on the aspects of the business that are under our control. We are well positioned to capitalize on favorable housing market trends by realizing internal productivity improvements from our initiative, offsetting inflationary impacts through price realization, and launching new innovative growth products that are margin accretive. As we look ahead, the work we have done over the past few quarters has positioned JELD-WEN to be successful in any market environment, and we remain committed to our outlook for the year. We are confident that our efforts to provide a differentiated customer experience and industry-leading capabilities will drive long-term value for all of our stakeholders. Thank you for joining us today. David and I will now be happy to take your questions.
Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from Matthew Bouley from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the questions. I think, Gary, you said it sounded like Q1 would have come in at the high end of your expectations, but for the additional step up in inflation. Just understanding that the fiscal year guide is unchanged, can you just kind of elaborate a little on how the cadence of that margin recovery now looks, you know, relative to the prior guide and if there are any changes to the segment outlooks? Thank you.
Thanks, Matt. Yeah, we, you know, as you know, we guide for the full year and we are committed to our guidance for the full year. On an internal basis, our first quarter missed slightly on our internal expectations, again, due to the uncertainty that we saw in the first quarter from inflation and a little bit of volume decline, based on, you know, what's going on in Europe. We saw sequential improvement in growth through the quarter. We'll expect that to continue, you know, through this quarter and into the rest of the year. You know, as we talked about earlier, you know, on the last call, we've got, some, you know, we have good pricing. We've had to take some more pricing actions.
We're pulling some other levers on cost and just making sure that we're set up correctly, you know, reestablishing or not reestablishing, but reaffirming what we're working on our rationalization, modernization programs in JEM. We have the unique growth drivers that we talked about earlier in the year that are specifically kicking in, you know, late second quarter into the rest of the year. Feel pretty good about the year. You know, a little bit of inflation. Primarily the difference for us was on energy. Energy related and some metals. Anything related to energy, including freight and utilities, you know, we saw acceleration there. We've got price, you know, price in place we believe to become a tailwind for the full year.
Gotcha. Thank you for that color. Then, secondly, I think last quarter you said that in terms of the organic growth guidance, that more than half of that growth was price. Obviously this quarter, I think volume mix was down across segments. Are you finding that? I don't know if customers are reducing volume purchases as a result of all this price, and has that kind of mix of price versus volume changed in the guidance expectation for the year?
Yeah, I don't think that we've seen the volume necessarily decline because of price, with the exception of maybe a little bit of the uncertainty that we saw in Europe, for a short period of time there. You know, in Sydney or in Australia, we saw the flooding, you know, in Sydney and those areas that slowed us down a little bit, made it hard for contractors to pull through. That's behind us. For the most part, a lot of the growth drivers that we've been talking about, new products like Auraline or VPI expansion, you know, the exterior door growth and new capacity coming online, that's just starting to hit us.
As we looked at the quarter, you know, stepping through the quarter, we saw sequential improvement, sequential growth, particularly in North America, and we would expect that to flow through for the rest of the year. That pricing that we've got, well, we've taken some additional levers, and we expect that to push through and offset some of this new inflation, you know, in this quarter and beyond.
Very good luck.
Great. Thanks, Matt.
Your next question comes from Mike Reinhart from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Doug Weidner on for Mike. I was wondering if you guys could give a little bit more color on how sales trend have varied by channel. I know you mentioned it briefly earlier, but I was wondering if you could kind of give more insight into that.
Yeah. We've seen some favorable mix in channels. In North America in particular, our traditional channel is doing very, very well. You know, anything related to residential new construction has been going pretty strong. We see good demand there. Not to say that R&R is not good. It is. We've just seen a bigger growth in residential new construction and in our traditional channels in North America. In Europe, the mix shift has been a little bit less commercial in the northern portions of Europe where we tend to be a little bit more commercially focused, geared more towards residential and R&R type business. Again, that's you know, mostly just due to pushing out of projects.
No straight cancellations, but we did see some destocking there related to the war. High demand on RNC and R&R in Australia or in Australasia, mostly just a supply and a pull-through piece there as contractors couldn't work with all the flooding events that happened there in the quarter. Those are behind us, we believe, and that demand will start to pull through as crews get back to work and we're able to ship the product.
Great. Thanks. I guess going off that, in terms of describing kind of channel inventory levels, would you say they're moving back towards normal, or can you give a little bit more color on that?
Yeah, I would say so. We're seeing a little bit more normal cycle in retail. You know, typically first quarter tends to be a slower quarter, but one where we build up inventories and are ready to supply for the season. We're, you know, clearly watching that as we go back. Probably the first normal season or normal looking season we've seen in a while. You know, we're cautious about it. But yeah, we're seeing inventories certainly in retail about normal. There's nothing really to call out in our traditional channels. You know, we have some decent lead times on most of our product lines. You know, we continue to have commercially beneficial lead times, even though some are still extended beyond pandemic levels.
I would say that there's nothing really to call out in terms of stocking anywhere other than I feel like the retail patterns are becoming a little bit more kind of pre-pandemic normal.
Awesome. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Deepa Raghavan from Wells Fargo Securities. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, everyone. As we stand today, can you talk about the dollar value of productivity savings that is yet to be realized? You've been talking about some newer initiatives, and just curious, what's the timeline for realization?
We, you know, we've been talking about the initial commitment that we made around our rationalization modernization programs around $100 million. The majority of that is either in our numbers or is in action and about to be realized within the year, you know, for that first $100 million. What I would tell you is that was the first three-year program. We continue to stay on that same pace, and we've got additional items that we're initiating now or are actually executing on now that we'll start to see benefit even in the second quarter, third quarter and beyond. As we continue down that program, we haven't stopped at the original $100 million.
I would say that we would continue our rationalization programs at about the same pace that we've been on for the last several years.
Okay, that's fair. Apart from the incremental inflation, there's also this FX headwinds that appear worse than anticipated at the time of guide. Are there any positive aspects offsets that you expect sometime? You know, just trying to see how that may or may not impact the high end of guide.
Deepa, I'm sorry. Did you say FX or?
Yeah, Forex. Yeah, currency.
Okay. Well, what I'd say is, it's a little difficult right now in order to speak kind of directly to the FX headwinds. As we see the dollar beginning to strengthen, obviously that'll have a little bit of an impact. I would say that we wouldn't expect anything too terribly meaningful from a FX impact over the balance of the year.
Got it. If I can squeeze one more in. Can you talk about how the CFO search is progressing and any thoughts on timeline at this time? Thank you.
Sure. David's right here. He's been.
What's the matter, Deepa? You don't like me?
We're continuing our search. It's underway. We would expect to complete that within the quarter.
Got it. Thanks. I was gonna ask you if you're also looking externally, but David, yeah, no. Thank you so much.
Trust me, we're all on the same page here.
All right. Thanks so much. Good luck.
Your next question comes from John Lovallo from UBS. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one, I guess, is just going back to Matt's question on the quarterly cadence and understanding that you guys don't wanna give real specific quarterly outlooks. But is it fair to assume that the second quarter margin could be down by a similar magnitude year-over-year as the first quarter? And if so, I mean, that would seem to imply a fairly significant ramp in the back half. I'm just curious, you know, what level of incremental inflation you're expecting in the back half?
You know, I would say that we'll continue to see some of the inflationary pressure that we saw in Q1 in Q2. We'll start to see pricing accelerate over the course of Q2, and I do expect to see an improvement in margins over the course of Q2. The real tailwind will occur as we get full deployment of our pricing as we head into the back half of the year.
Okay, got it. Then, you know, with some of these accelerated process transformations that you guys are putting in place, it sounds like it's a really good opportunity there. I'm just curious what the incremental cost is associated with those actions.
What I would tell you is it's, you know, it's similar to what we've seen in the past. There's really nothing to call out that is significantly bigger. The paybacks are fairly quick, and they're built into our guide. I would tell you that we see, you know, we typically look at them from the rate of return, and some of these are a result of the work that we've done in JEM in improving our capacity in a number of facilities. That gives us the ability to bring capacity in from, you know, smaller, you know, less important plants that we're able to close, take cost out, and continue to grow our capacity.
Very similar to the same programs that we've been talking about for the last, you know, three years really, where, you know, the investment kind of, you know, it's almost become a virtuous cycle at this point, where, you know, we lean out facilities, you know, kind of making room for taking on additional capacity, and we take the latent capacity offline, and we continue to lean.
Okay, thank you, guys.
Your next question comes from Truman Patterson from Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys. Just wanted to follow up on John and Matt's question for clarity. Is the reiteration of 2022 EBITDA guidance I take it it's based on kind of the current inflation as of April, but then incremental price capture from the recent announcements as we move through the year. Is that a fair way to think about it?
That's fair. Although we do continue to anticipate and our model continues to anticipate fairly significant inflation throughout the year. The balance gets better, though, as we get into the back half. In addition, remember, we talked about some unique growth drivers that we had through the year, which we'll continue to hit. Those, you know, will benefit us as we continue through the year as we've launched our Auraline product. We're able to ship, you know, the new capacity out of our VPI facility and out of our exterior plant. You put on top of that, you know, the levers that we're pulling and continue to pull on our restructuring programs, on our rationalization and modernization programs.
It looks like, you know, during the quarter, pricing offset material and freight inflation. I'm trying to understand what level of labor inflation you all saw during the quarter and how that looks like it's trending for the full year 2022.
We saw, you know, additional labor inflation certainly in the quarter. The beginning of the quarter, mostly related to some of the early Omicron COVID, but not meaningful for the remainder of the quarter. It was really a couple of weeks, but that, you know, certainly had a little bit of effect. The bigger effect was on anything energy related, you know, particularly in utilities in Europe and anything related to freight and transportation.
Okay. Okay, thanks for that. Final one for me on capital allocation. You all repurchased 40 million shares during the quarter. Trying to understand, is this a level that you feel comfortable with moving forward, you know, continuing to turn into a consistent share repurchaser? Or just, you know, given some of the macro uncertainties, do you know, put more toward debt reduction or shoring up cash?
I think we're in a pretty solid position from a balance sheet standpoint, and cash generation standpoint. We feel pretty good about where we are. You know, obviously, we have some great internal programs that are high returning that we'll continue to invest in. We will continue to buy our shares opportunistically as we have in the past. You know, at current levels, it makes a lot of sense. We believe in our guide, we believe in our for the full year as well as for our long-range, the long-range plan that we put out at our Investor Day last year. We're pretty confident in those.
We're looking at M&A, as always, as a potential opportunity for us to accelerate our strategy and to continue to grow the company.
All right. Thank you, and good luck in the coming year.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Mike Dahl from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Gary, sorry to keep harping on the cadence here, but you know, just to follow up one more time on it. I mean, you're acknowledging 1Q, you know, given some of the puts and takes was a little below internal plans, some of the near-term realities around the cost inflation and maybe some disruptions. You know, those are real. It does imply that you know, something incremental is expected relative to prior guide to be better than original plan as you go through the year, and you've talked about Auraline and some of the new other capacity coming on.
You know, can you go into a little more detail around kind of what incremental positives are really assumed to help you bridge from kind of the first half shortfall?
Yeah, Mike, I would say that, you know, first of all, you got to look at when we, you know, we made our guide for the full year, we really don't give guidance quarter to quarter. So, you know, our internal, you know, we did miss that slightly in the first quarter, but not by something insurmountable. Additional price has been initiated already, based on, you know, the inflationary pressures that we saw in the first quarter. You add on top of that, you know, our operations are running really well. We've been talking about that for quite some time. Our ability to, you know, and demand and the underlying markets are really strong in what we're seeing.
We have the ability to execute fairly well against that. The addition of price, you know, obviously the acceleration of some of our programs around rationalization, modernization that we've had underway will continue to help and continue to drive that. We're also very excited about the kind of JELD-WEN specific growth drivers that we've been talking about, which we'll start seeing here in season and for the remainder of the year. Those are margin accretive and big growth drivers. We feel very good about those.
Got it. Okay. Thank you. My second question, I understand that you may be a little bit limited on what you can or want to talk about on Towanda, and the timing's uncertain, but you know, given the timeline that you see in terms of what's been recommended by the special master, the DOJ now kind of taking a look at that, you know, is there any sense of timeline for how we should be thinking about ultimate resolution? And I guess as part of that, you know, when will those results actually be separated out? Would that be on an ultimate decision around what happens with the bid and divestiture, or is that on a finalization or closing of divestiture?
I would tell you that, you know, we're, you know, it's an interesting process. It's the first of its kind. It's being controlled by the pace of the court. At this point, you know, we're waiting, you know, certain decisions of the court and the court's waiting on that opinion from the Justice Department. We're probably several weeks away from the court having that and continuing to move the process forward. I would say that as far as the results go, you know, we're, to a certain extent, at the mercy of the court, you know, to use that phrase, in terms of the timing of the process itself.
As far as the results of the business, you know, when we would separate out, we would do that at the appropriate time based on, you know, on the position of where a deal is and what our advisors recommend, you know, from that standpoint. For the time being, they're in our results, and will remain there.
Okay. Thanks, Gary.
Your next question comes from Susan Maklari from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My first question is looking at the volume cadence or the volume mix cadence in North America. You know, considering your commentary, Gary, around the backlog there and, you know, the sort of cadence that you're seeing or you saw through March. Does that suggest that you could see a positive shift in terms of the volume mix as we go through the next several quarters, that can be sustained, and especially when you think about some of the comps that you face in the second quarter and then in the back half?
Yeah, Susan, thanks a lot for that. We have seen the North American you know business sequentially improving even through first quarter. That mix piece towards our traditional business in RNC continues to move favorably as well, as does in the retail segment you know the mix of more specials versus stock. You know, kind of favorable. We would expect a favorable progression in North America on volume mix through the year. Good demand good fundamentals for the market on you know related to building. So we feel pretty good about that mix progression.
Okay, that's helpful. I guess, you know, following up on that, about what's going on on the ground in terms of housing and, you know, builder's efforts to focus on affordability there. Is there anything that's changing in terms of your conversations with some of your customers, especially on that wholesale distribution side? You know, anything in terms of some of the mix that's coming through in order for you to help them to get to some of those targets that they're trying to achieve on the ground?
Yeah, it's interesting. It's something I mentioned as well in the prepared comments. Working with builders and with our traditional channel partners, we've been able to focus on you know, some quick ship programs and some kind of just-in-time or just-as-they-need-it type programs where we've been able to utilize our SKU rationalization program to pick, you know, kind of the on-trend but most popular on-trend type of SKUs and really focus the efforts on that. So customers still get what they want, but easier for us to plan the manufacturing and to forecast around, easier for our channel partners to be able to move them through their system and easier for builders to select.
That's really been an advantage here for builders as well as the channel partners. That's one example of some of the things that we're doing there. I think we've talked in the past about our exterior door systems, for example, as being a real winner, where you know, we've been able to do more of the work. Think of pre-hang for exterior doors, taking that entire entryway door system, put it into a system that's easier to install, allows a different type of labor to put that in, which makes it easier to select, easier to transport, and easier to install. Those are some of the things that we're working on as we're working with our channel partners and customers to solve their problems.
You know, it adds value, which is a great thing for us as well.
Okay, that's very helpful. Thank you and good luck.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Philip Ng from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Given the uncertainty in Europe and affordability concerns in the U.S., Gary, you kind of alluded to maybe potential risk of a temporary lull in the backlog. How do you see your volumes kind of holding up in that backdrop, just given how your backlogs are fairly extended? Have you started seeing orders from some of those customers in Europe normalize again?
I just unpack that question a little bit. What we see is, we've seen a little bit of it. The uncertainty in Europe, I'll take that first. We've seen that primarily in our commercial businesses in certain regions of Europe, where there's been some uncertainty and slowdown, mostly pushing orders out, or pushing projects out and a little bit of destocking in some of those areas. I think that's gonna continue a little bit here into the second quarter. You know, just really based on, you know, kind of the news and the things that we see going on, we'll be watching that very closely. But we are still seeing some robust activity in other parts of Europe.
In North America, we've seen sequential growth through the quarter, and we expect that to continue through the year with more favorable mix. Right now we're sitting on, you know, some pretty good backlog. Demand continues to be fairly strong. While we'll see some of the, call it inflationary pressures, you know, as price continues to take on particularly this new set of energy costs or freight, we would expect that to sequentially improve as we exit the second quarter into the second half. A lot of those growth initiatives really, you know, start kicking in here, you know, kind of end of this quarter as we start shipping.
We've announced, you know, that we're starting to ship Auraline, our new composite product, this quarter. You know, the VPI expansion is going really well. You know, we continue to see that exterior products business going well. We would expect all of that to kick in and just be natural levers for growth in the second half as we talked about.
Gotcha. From a supply chain labor bottleneck standpoint, it's kind of been a drag on your volumes the last few quarters. Is that largely behind you at this point? Should we expect volumes to actually inflect year-over-year in Q2? Any color on any impact from the whole Russia, Ukraine and China lockdowns situation from a supply chain and material availability standpoint as well?
Yeah, I'll start with the material availability piece. We've on a general basis across the entire enterprise, while we've had at any time in history, you always have some material or some issue that maybe even a little bit exacerbated over the last 12 months or so. Really right now, I can't report to you any direct outage that is causing us not to be able to meet customer demand. You know, is there some agita? Are the feet of the duck moving really quickly underwater? Yeah, absolutely. We have not missed any shipments or delays.
There are a couple of commodities, a couple of products that you know we wish we could get faster and we're working on that through resourcing, insourcing, you know, VAVE, all kinds of things, right? I would say there's nothing there that's causing us to delay customer shipments. On the side of labor availability, you know, our big issue around associates was really you know kind of the third quarter of last year, and we really addressed that for the most part. We saw sequential improvements in our throughput all the way through the end of the year, even into the beginning of this year.
We had a short period at the beginning of this year with the Omicron, kind of couple of weeks there where you know we saw some accelerated absenteeism. I would say that's really behind us. We've you know either been able to work through and solve some problems or you know we've gotten kind of used to what we need to do in order to address it. Our JEM programs and the work that we've been doing on improving throughput have seen us sequentially improve, which is why you know the output of that is the lead times that our customers are seeing on our products. For the most part, certainly on the door side, you know, we're seeing pre-pandemic lead times certainly on interior doors.
Darn near close on that on exterior, and our window products continue to have industry-leading lead times as well. I feel like we're kinda demonstrating that for the customer, and it's a result of all the work that we've done on throughput improvement and ensuring that we're staffed correctly.
Given the progress you guys have made, Gary, should we expect that inflection in it materializing 2Q from a volume standpoint or is it more back-half loaded?
I would say that what you're gonna see is some of the inflationary pressures, you know, continue to show up in the second quarter as pricing, you know, and perfecting that backlog reduction happens in the second quarter. I would say that you will definitely see that in this back half of the year as we're able to leverage, you know, the other growth initiatives on top of it as well.
Okay. Super. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Dan Oppenheim from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks very much. I think most of the questions have been answered. Just based in terms of the margin and pricing where you talked about that sort of coming through in the second half of the year. For North America, you're talking about the growth that you're seeing, but then also mentioned that potential for the sort of affordability-driven lull in the second half. Just to confirm, that's more of an acknowledgement of the risk but not in the expectation to this point, but you're assuming that this growth continues through the second half, correct?
Yeah. Yeah, you know, we're obviously watching you know, RNC and what's going on in those markets. I would tell you right now, we you know we see the fundamentals of that continuing to be strong based on the order loads that we're getting and the backlogs that we continue to have. I would tell you that, you know, what's driving our growth are some JELD-WEN specific things. We're adding a bunch of new products that are, you know, that layer on top of anything else that we're doing. That's built into our forecast for the full year as well.
We continue to see, based on, you know, the presale of some of those products, you know, that's gonna propel us and drive us in that second half.
Got it. Okay, thanks very much.
Your next question comes from Josh Chan from Baird. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, Gary and David. Thanks for taking my questions. In North America, is there any color that you can give in terms of, you know, the difference in performance between doors and windows from like growth or margin perspective this quarter?
If I heard the question correctly, it's trying to understand differentiation in margin and growth in doors and windows?
Correct, yes.
Yeah, I would say that, you know, we, you know, both are moving in the right direction. We've been equally working on doors and windows. We don't see any fundamental reason why both can't continue to grow from a margin expansion standpoint. We've been working on windows from an operational standpoint. You know, as you know, a number of years ago, we had some issues there. We don't see any appreciable difference between the two. You know, it comes down to mix of what we're selling and the channel. I mean, that's way more important than any fundamental issue that we see in the product lines themselves.
When you think about where we've got some good growth initiatives, you know, the two notable ones, particularly Auraline, which is an accretive window product for us, will help propel margins in that arena. The more that we sell, you know, the mix of exterior and interior doors, helps as well. We've got kinda focused on both, and there's no structural reason why both can't propel and continue to grow.
All right. Yeah, thanks for the color there. My second question, in Europe, I think, Gary, you mentioned that, you know, Central Europe was pretty resilient. Could you just kinda ballpark for us, you know, how much of your Europe business is part of the more, I guess, resilient type of end markets now, and how much of the Europe business kinda goes into areas that are seeing a little bit more of reservation in terms of volumes currently? Thank you.
I'll take that 'cause I was looking after Europe for a period of time. What I would say is that we're seeing resilience across kind of the broader portion of Europe. We do have some pockets where we're, you know, where there's some impacts and there's some uncertainty. Typically in Northern Europe is where we're seeing a little bit more impact. In Central Europe and in the UK is where we're anticipating some more growth. I'm not sure that helps you a whole lot, but I think that's pretty much what we said.
All right. Thanks for the color and thanks for the guidance.
This is all the time that we have for today. I will turn the call back over to Gary for closing remarks.
Well, thank you all for joining us today. Just to reiterate, you know, our operations are strong. We feel good about the housing fundamentals in our markets. We feel good about our forecast for the full year and reiterate our guidance for the full year based on our ability to overcome some inflation with pricing as well as our JELD-WEN specific growth initiatives that we've been talking about. We'll look forward to sharing with you the results of our growth initiatives, our continuing work with JEM and rationalization/modernization programs in the coming quarters. Thank you again for your interest.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.