Okay, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our second day here at the Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference. It's my pleasure to introduce Lowe's and have with us Marvin Ellison, Chairman and President and Chief Executive Officer. Thank you for joining us today.
Good morning.
We probably could spend most of the time speaking about the macro, although I know there's a lot of other things to talk about, but I wondered if we could start there. I guess the question that I have is, in the state of the world we are right now with regards to the housing environment, is there a scenario in which you could see better growth than kind of the flat to up Lowe's single digits that you've seen for the last year or so?
No, Kate, it's a good question. I would say for us, we really expect the second half of the year to look a lot like the first half of the year. Again, that's not based on our view that things will get better or things will get worse. We just believe that the year is going to look a lot similar, both front and second half. Having said that, we still believe that we can grow in any macro environment. I'm really pleased by the fact that in spite of the fact that over 60%, 60%, of our sales is driven by the DIY consumer, we've delivered five consecutive quarters of positive comps. In addition to that, we've seen really strong growth in our digital channels. For two consecutive quarters, we've had growth over 15%.
Even in what you could debate and argue is one of the toughest housing macros we have seen in a very long time, we are finding ways to grow, we are finding ways to take share, but we think the broader macro is going to look similar front and second half, but we think we can grow irrespective of that.
I think it has come up in a couple of articles I have read that you are seeing, or the home improvement space is seeing maybe what maybe I would deem as like piecemeal renovation. If you are not seeing necessarily the full kitchen renovation or the full bath renovation, you are seeing a vanity replaced or something like that. Is that something you are seeing, and what would a scenario like that kind of look like over time in terms of incremental dollars and growth?
Yeah. Specifically to that point, we are seeing homeowners take what we will call smaller, more deliberate projects versus these larger discretionary projects. Let me take a step back and provide some context to that. If you take a look at our consumer, meaning the Lowe's consumer, it is a homeowner with an average household income north of $100,000 a year, average equity of roughly $400,000 of personal disposable income growth, wage growth, and someone who has a really good personal balance sheet. The caveat to that is that consumer is a bit cautious based on all the things you talked about, elevated interest rates, and also some of the geopolitical uncertainty that they are seeing that is causing them to just be cautious relative to discretionary larger ticket spend. One of the largest discretionary tickets you can spend is a kitchen renovation, to your point.
Because we have done a really nice job in our Total Home Strategy of making capital investments in our physical infrastructure in our stores, meaning kitchen showrooms, bath showrooms, appliance showrooms, flooring showrooms. We are able to get that customer to come in to buy countertops and cabinets, but on certain occasions, we are also seeing the customers come in and do kitchen renovations, but not on the same degree that we had seen in past before this really difficult housing cycle. But we are really, really optimistic that our pro customers are incredibly resilient, and our core pro customer in the store is a small to medium pro, and because they are resilient, they are finding ways to keep their book of business open, and if they cannot do a full kitchen, then they will do countertops. If they cannot do a full kitchen, then they will do cabinets.
We are seeing a resilient consumer, we are seeing a resilient customer. Overall, we feel like that we can manage in any environment.
Great. I think you mentioned with regards to market share. I think overall the category or some of your competitors are down double digits, but you are not. Can you maybe talk a little bit about the change you have seen in the competitive landscape with some of the smaller players, and just where do you think you are gaining some of this market share?
Yeah. I will go back again to our Total Home Strategy, which for us is not only a business strategy but an investment thesis on how we run our business. We are investing in the small to medium pro. We are investing in our digital channels. We are investing in loyalty. We are investing in key categories like appliances. As we look at the broader total addressable market for home improvement, there is a large belief that we operate in a duopoly. But as you know, this is a really large total addressable market. If you look at our view, of it is roughly $1 trillion. If you combine Lowe's and our largest competitor, we are roughly a $250 billion of the total addressable market. When we think about competitors, it is more than just one company, it is a broader spectrum. Many of those competitors are small regional players.
As we think about where we have been able to take share, we have been able to take share in categories like appliances. We remain the only retailer in the U.S. that can deliver and install a major appliance same day and next day in virtually every zip code in the U.S. No one else can do that, and that is the result of a very deliberate action to build a big and bulky fulfillment network that does not exist anywhere in the marketplace. Because of that, we have the ability to really grow share in a really important category for us. Specifically, if you think about appliances, the number one area of appliances that is growing is what we call the duress category. In other words, if your refrigerator breaks, it needs to be replaced.
We are in a position that when a customer has an emergency need, our fulfillment network gives us a great opportunity to take share because we can deliver same- day and next- day. When you are a smaller player in the space, you don't have the ability to invest capital in a network like we did. We're incredibly blessed to have a strong balance sheet. We're incredibly blessed to have a disciplined approach to how we're thinking about the business, not just quarter-by-quarter , but we're thinking about what we will look like when the housing recovery happens because it will have to recover. Right now, in many estimations, we're at 1 million homes short of current demand. There's credible data that shows by the next decade, you're going to need as many as 14 million new homes.
We know that this market is going to recover. It may recover gradually, but we have built a strategy that we can compete aggressively real time, but we also believe we've built a strategy that when the market recovers, we're going to be in a great position to grow disproportionately.
The pricing environment, I think, has been harder to navigate lately.
Yeah.
You've had this multi-year inflationary backdrop, which was accentuated by tariffs last year. Then companies began to see tariff refunds, and especially in Q2, we heard a lot across all of retail about promotions, price investments, flash sales. Could we maybe take a step back and walk through how you've approached the pricing environment as a whole and how you think about the role of tariff refunds and its impact on pricing in the short term and home improvement?
Yeah. Obviously, pricing is really the foundation of any retail strategy, and we've invested significant capital in just back-end systems and processes. I remember going back in time when I arrived here in 2018 at Lowe's, we had literally no pricing system architecture at all. It was all done manual spreadsheets, and for a company our size, it's hard to believe that's where we were. Fast-forward to today, I would argue we have some of the most sophisticated pricing systems of any retailer in the world, and that's been a very methodical, very deliberate investment strategy to do that. For us, Kate, number one, we're always focused on value. That's the foundation.
We're very pleased that we're the only home improvement retailer that has two distinct loyalty programs, one for our DIY customers and one for our pro customers, because those customers shop very different and they have different value propositions. Because we have these two distinctly different loyalty platforms, we can offer member-only value promotions events without making it a broad promotional strategy. So it gives us a distinct advantage, and it gives us differentiation because that data and what we learn from the customers' shopping behaviors is incredibly valuable. As we think about the tariff environment and tariff refund environment, what you saw in the second quarter was probably more price reductions and promotional activity in this space than I've seen in my 25 years in the home improvement business. But we believe it's transitory.
We believe it's simply the result of companies receiving tariff refunds and trying to find ways to drive business value and give some of those refunds back to the consumer. So we don't see that as a new normal in home improvement. For us, we're going to remain disciplined, we're going to remain focused on providing value. We're going to remain focused on ensuring that whatever we do is going to be first based on serving our customers well, but also based on having fiscal discipline around how we drive profitability and understanding that whatever we do today, we have to comp against that next year. So making good short and long-term decisions. Again, we think this second quarter pricing environment was more transitory.
We think we'll get back to more of a normal set for the balance of the year, but we're going to be focused always on taking care of the customers from a value perspective.
I think that's obviously a very core tenet that you've been very focused on, is value. I know job lock quantities and being in stock has been a core tenet as well. One thing I wanted to ask you about today was the emerging need of speed in the business with same-day delivery and everything that the consumer is now expecting from all of retail. Could you talk a little bit about the supply chain, where you are in the supply chain in terms of, again, how you feel about the speed of delivery, and if there's any room that needs to be made for investments to continue to pursue that?
No, absolutely. For us in the home improvement space, we're fortunate because of our 1,750 some odd stores in the U.S., those stores are not only destinations for the conventional, traditional customer that comes in and shops, but they're also fulfillment nodes for us for our online and digital platform. Specifically, if you look at our online business, roughly anywhere between 60%-80% of our fulfillment comes out of the stores. That just depends on the category and depends on the time of the year. Our stores are essential to our ability to provide speed. A lot of that is buy online pickup in store, whether you do it at our pickup desk, with our lockers, or whether we do it from a same-day standpoint.
Speed is essential, and what I will tell you is there is no retail CEO in the world satisfied with their current delivery speed. We're working every day to get faster, to make sure that we are having a market competitive advantage by giving the customers what they want and being able to get the customers what they need within the time they need it. I'll go back to what I said earlier. We have a distinct advantage in big and bulky because the fulfillment network that we built out primarily for appliances, that gives us the ability to do same- day and next- day in every zip code. We can use that same network, and we are using it for other big and bulky categories. Think riding lawnmowers, think grills, think patio furniture.
What we envision is let's build this for appliances because it's our largest merchandising category. We also understood that those same rails that we built for appliances could also work for other big and bulky categories. We're doing some really innovative things. We'll speak more specifically about some of the innovative ideas we have coming at our December investor conference, because we have some initiatives that I'm really excited about that we've yet to talk about publicly that we will share in December. To answer your question, big and bulky speed, we're best in class, and we'll continue to build on that best-in-class perspective. From an investment standpoint, we're investing significant capital not only in the physical infrastructure of our supply chain, but also in warehouse management systems, leveraging AI from a product assortment allocation standpoint.
We're pleased with where we are, but we have a long roadmap to continue to get better, and that's something that's going to be a commitment from us.
Great. I think one area that's changed over the last couple of years is just your focus on increasing the TAM. With your recent acquisitions of ADG and FBM, you've significantly expanded the addressable market for Lowe's. Maybe could you walk through just where you see that going longer term? I know the business itself is under a little bit of pressure right now due to residential construction demand. Maybe we could start with just your longer-term vision and how we should think about that.
No, and really, Kate, if you're looking at this to your point from just a real-time perspective, it's hard to understand the value of those two acquisitions. As I said earlier, we're thinking about this from a medium to long-term perspective for the company and for our shareholders. If you again come to the realization that we're a million homes short of demand today, we're estimating 14 million homes needed within the next decade. New home construction is going to have to come back in some shape, form, or fashion. Historically, Lowe's generated virtually no revenue from single-family, multi-family construction. We felt with the demand that we knew was going to be in the near term, that this was a unique opportunity for us to invest in two really good assets. ADG primarily focus on flooring, countertops, cabinets, in a very simplistic way.
FBM primary focus is drywall, ceiling systems, insulation. Two different businesses, but our vision in the acquisition and our vision today is if you could take FBM's competencies, ADG's competencies, and combine it with Lowe's competencies, you create what we call an interior solutions platform. That is a fancy way of saying we can give a builder virtually everything they need on the interior of the structure. We can give them flooring, cabinets, countertops, drywall, ceiling insulation, and then on the Lowe's side, we can give them appliances, we can give them faucets and fixtures. We're already in the process of running pilots where we're being able to go to a builder, and we can take all three of the competencies of Lowe's, ADG, and FBM and provide this for a builder.
For a builder, the key metric that you want is, can I build a structure faster? Can I get to closing sooner? Because the sooner you get to closing is the sooner you get paid. If we can create a value proposition that we can help you reduce your closing time, your construction time, then that's something that is really interesting to a lot of builders. We're building that competency, and we think that's going to give us pure differentiation, and it's going to give us a way to participate in this market recovery that again, the only way it doesn't happen is that the way of life in America will change because we will have to increase the ability to build new homes because the need is simply there. We feel great about the future possibilities.
To your point, short term, we're feeling pressure because with elevated mortgage rates, you're seeing tons of macro pressure on single- home and multi-family construction. Having said that, FBM is in a really unique position because roughly 55% of their revenue comes from the commercial construction side. What's being built on the commercial side? Data centers, sports venues, hotels, a lot of universities are doing lots of capital investments. FBM is getting pieces of all those businesses. As a matter of fact, one of their largest segments for them right now is the build-out of data centers. We're participating in a lot of the commercial side, and that's really good for them because it's kind of helping to balance out the pressure they're feeling on the residential side. But still, they're not immune to the pressure. We're managing it really well.
We're adapting to them some of the disciplines we have around perpetual productivity improvement, being very fiscally focused on driving costs. We're managing that in this really challenging environment. But we feel great about the acquisitions. We feel great about what it's going to do for Lowe's in the future, and we think our shareholders are going to greatly benefit from it.
Do you think there are any other acquisitions you need to make to complement what you have so far? You said you pretty much have the interior of the home. Is there anything maybe on your wish list that would be additive to what you're offering?
The short answer is we're going to remain opportunistic. We're going to focus on tuck-in acquisitions, to your point, that supplements this current strategy. We're trying to be disciplined because when you have a great balance sheet, when you have access to capital, you can reach and you can expand too much, and you can create a network of businesses that becomes virtually impossible to manage and impossible to integrate. We're being very disciplined, focusing on the interior structure. Will we look outside of that? Sure, if the right opportunity presents itself, but for now, we're being opportunistic. As we think about our capital allocation strategy, we're going to focus first on bringing value to the business and looking for growth both organically and inorganically.
As we think about growth, we're going to continue to focus on paying down debt, as we've committed to that 2.75 x leverage ratio, and we think we'll be there at the midpoint next year. We're going to always take care of our investors with dividend payments. We're very pleased that we're one of the few retailers that has the distinction of being a Dividend Aristocrats, and we're committed to that. We're hoping as we get back to our leverage ratio next year, that we will revisit share repurchases and get back into that market as well. That is our capital allocation philosophy, and that includes, again, growing the business and investing in the business, which will allow us to look opportunistically at tuck-ins.
Great. Maybe just to close the loop on this part of your business, when it comes to competition and market share opportunity, how do you feel about the setup for that?
We feel great. We feel great about it both on the complex commercial pro side with FBM and ADG, and we feel great about it just on the omni-channel home improvement retail side with our core stores. As you mentioned earlier, this total addressable market that FBM and ADG gives us is roughly $250 billion of market opportunity that we had no ability to participate in before these acquisitions. We think that we can compete really well in both spaces. We're being very disciplined and deliberate on building out the infrastructures, getting the operating systems in these companies correct.
We believe that when you're in a tough macro environment, leveraging your balance sheet is a great competitive advantage because we can make investments in these businesses in spite the fact that they're feeling some economic pressure, knowing that when this market recovers, we want to be in a great position. We believe that Lowe's will be in one of the most advantageous positions of any retailer in this space when the market recovers because we've invested significant capital in our DIY customers, in our loyalty platform, in the interior of our store. If you walk in our store versus any competitor and you look at some of these big-ticket discretionary areas, flooring, kitchens and countertops, bath, appliances, our environment is significantly better than any environment out there.
That's not by accident because we know at some point when this market recovers, that customer's coming back, and we want to be top of mind. Not only have we invested in the physical environment, we've invested significant capital in the IT infrastructure, just the back-end processes, where we've created a more seamless, frictionless process for our customers. In addition to that, we've invested a lot of technology to help our associates with product knowledge service. We're positioning ourselves to perform well in the current state, and we've done that with five consecutive quarters of positive growth, but we're also positioning ourself for the future because when this market recovers, we want to be at the forefront of being able to get a disproportionate share of that market when it comes back.
Great. Thank you. Maybe if we could just jump back, digital was an area that you highlighted as being a strength, just over the last few quarters, but certainly in Q2, where it grew about 16%. Can you maybe talk about some of the initiatives, with regards to digital, why you think you're seeing outsized growth there, and what we should expect maybe for the back half of the year?
Yeah. Kate, we're pleased. For two consecutive quarters, we've grown over 15%, and so we're really pleased with that. We're pleased because we know that we can even get better because we're just now in the early stages of investing in our marketplace. We're the only U.S. home improvement retailer with a true digital marketplace, and it's early days, but everything we're seeing, we're really excited by because it's allowing us to serve customers in a much more broad way. The marketplace gives us the ability to serve a value-oriented customer that's just looking for lower-priced items, but it also gives us the ability to serve a luxury customer, a customer that will spend significant amounts of money for a chandelier or luxury appliances or something that's more on the high end that we don't carry in our core assortment.
For us, online gives us the most unique opportunity to service this whole K-shaped economy, and we can serve customers for value, we can serve customers with luxury, and we're seeing both occur. Marketplace, again, is the best way to do it because we don't have to own that inventory, we just have to find the sellers that represent customers in these different categories. We're really pleased by that. Our mobile app has been voted and reviewed as one of the best in retail. We're pleased with that, and we're going to continue to invest in that. Our fulfillment capabilities are much improved. Our ability to deliver same-day, unlocked lots of growth for us online. Then our member-only benefits relative to what you gain from a fulfillment and delivery standpoint is also something that's unique in our space.
Overall, we feel great about the fact that we've grown online as aggressively as we have. We feel great about the connection in the store and our ability to fulfill from the store, and it's something that we're going to continue to invest in. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our AI agent, Mylow, online, where we received over 25 million questions from customers and associates. For customers that use this AI assistant online, their conversion is 3x greater than customers that don't. That's informing us that when you develop a true agentic connection with customers, then you can see tangible benefits, not theoretical benefits. Any time conversion is 3x better, that's a tangible benefit that we can connect directly to the fact that this AI assistant is giving customers some information that they need.
When you go to the store, our associates have the same access to that for product knowledge, and we're seeing 200 basis points improvement in customer satisfaction when our associates use the tool. AI, both online and in the store, is really helping us, and we think that's going to be a foundational piece of how we continue to grow our online business.
Great. I wanted to make sure we asked a question around margins and PPI. On the "good guys" side, you have your PPI, which is always, I know, a company discipline. You have the marketplace, you have the media, and one day you'll have more leverage to grow those margins. On the other hand, I do believe ADG and FBM are slightly dilutive from a margin standpoint. Can you maybe set the stage shorter term and longer term, how we should be thinking about all of those items with regards to where you see operating margins?
Well, I would say I'd start out by saying that we will always be a very disciplined company relative to managing expense and profitability. It's one of the hallmarks of what we've been able to accomplish. Irrespective of the macro environment, irrespective of the top-line pressure that we received over past quarters and years, we've always been focused and disciplined on managing the business with a sharp pencil on expenses and driving profitability. Having said that, we're not immune to some of the pressures that's occurring in the macro, specifically transportation costs.
Lowe's, just like any other major retailer, is dealing with those increased costs that we're going to see in the second half of the year, and we're working to do all we can to blunt that with really, really intense focus on our perpetual productivity improvement initiatives, or PPI, as well as other initiatives to try to make sure that we are being really focused on profitability and expenses. But the commitment that we have is that we're going to continue to operate effectively in trying to deliver profitability for our consumers. We're going to talk more specifically in December about how we view our profit algorithm relative to top-line growth based on kind of the dynamics in the marketplace.
As it stands right now, as we demonstrated in the first and the second quarter of this year, we're going to always be focused on being committed to operational discipline and profitability, and we're going to do all we can to blunt some of the headwinds we're facing in this macro environment.
Okay. Great. In our last few minutes, we do ask four questions of every company that we talk to on stage here. We have addressed most of them. The health of the consumer, I think we pretty much talked about, so I think we can skip that one. Pricing, though, do you expect prices to be higher, lower, or the same in the second half of this year versus what you saw in the first half?
Look, we anticipate them to be virtually the same. Speaking specifically to Lowe's, again, as I stated earlier, we are going to always be disciplined around pricing. We are going to be focused on value, but we are not going to put ourselves in a position where we are going to be overly promotional. So I think what you will see in the second half will be very consistent with what you have seen in the first half and what you have seen in previous years.
Okay. Margins, we just talked about, so we can skip that one, too. But maybe if we could spend a few minutes. You mentioned Mylow before, and so we do have an AI question.
This is more on the efficiency side, though, than the revenue side. Do you expect a significant increase in efficiency as a result of AI in 2027 versus 2026, and what part of your business will change the most?
I do not know that "significant" is the adjective I would use.
I would say we expect productivity improvement for sure, because as we continue to have maturity around some of the AI-related initiatives, we believe that we will continue to see benefits from our information technology team. We will continue to see benefits in planning and allocation. We will continue to see benefits in our payroll management and payroll allocation. We will continue to see benefits in how we leverage these agentic tools to help take friction out for customers, give our associates product knowledge. One of the largest expenses we have as a retailer is associate training because, as you know, we have a very technical business. It is one thing to work for a traditional mass merchandiser. It is another thing working for a home improvement retailer, where a customer comes in, and they may have a very specific question about something in electrical, something in plumbing, something in flooring.
These agentic tools give our associates real-time information that they can ask any question of any technical specificity, and they get an immediate response. We think as we continue to leverage this, it is going to bring our training costs down, and that is going to be meaningful. But again, we will see that as a gradual productivity gain, but we are committed to making that happen.
Okay. Well, that is all I have. Thank you so much for joining us.
Great. Kate, good to be here.
Yeah. Thank you.