Thank you, Operator Sonny, and welcome, Nick. Thanks for joining us for the fire. Sure, Chris. Chat today, and hope your one-on-ones are going well. I thought I would just kick off, I think, a little frame up if you could provide a little overview of the three operating segments, and in particular, how you think about market shares and the relative long-term growth targets.
Okay. Look, let's start with vehicle repair, and everybody wants to talk about the tools group. It's 40% of our business. This is the business where we sell through franchised vans, which call on the actual technicians to twirl the wrench, and they see them every week. This business seems to be doing okay. It is benefiting, I think, from a couple of things. I think one is there's kind of the long-term, long-wave activity of the changing of the vehicles, the complexity, the ongoing move to drive by wire, the rise of autonomy, and the, in some ways, starting to benefit, maybe not that particular sector, but will benefit from the changes in the powertrain going forward. You see that.
Generally, in our history, the last 20 years, even though you would think that hand tools would diminish over an increase in fly-by-wire, we have almost a one, I think it's 0.88 correlation between the number of electronic codes and the rise of our hand tools sales because the cars get more complex. They are benefiting from, I think, a very good and resilient business. We say car repair occurs all the time, everywhere, almost no matter what happens, and our experience has been through a lot of different turbulitions. That has worked. The task for us is, one, to keep new products rolling outwards and matching the complexity, enabling the technician to do that, and enabling our franchised drivers to be able to sell those complex vehicles in a reasonable time.
Business grew, was encouraging, grew 6.3% organically in the quarter, and margins were 24.5%, up 180 basis points against 80 basis points of negative currency. You have the business that stands right next to it, which is about 28% of our business, RSNI, Repair Systems & Information. They sell to the repair shop owner and manager, not the technician. Basically, a semi-capital investment, things like lifts and aligners and balancers and software for the shop and repair information software and collision equipment. That business is, you're starting to see the effect of electric vehicles because one portion of that business is a business that does the projects commissioned by OEMs for new models.
When they design the model, they usually find out that there are certain idiosyncrasies in the physicality of the vehicle or the electronics of the vehicle that need special repair tools that need to be put in the hands of the dealerships. We've seen that business grow nicely. It was up strong double digits in a quarter because of the need to accommodate things like new lifts for electric vehicles because electric vehicles can't be dealt with in terms of the old lifts. Those kinds of things. That business grew, I think, in the quarter, 13.9% organically. Margins were 23.4%, up 40 basis points. That was a nice contributor. That is the vehicle repair business.
There is the other business that we say rolls the Snap-on brand out of the garage into critical industries where the need for repair and repeatability require a Snap-on level product where the penalty for failure is high, into places like auto repair and the military and aviation and oil and gas and wind and mining and education. That business generally has a variety of products, but one of the characteristics is we tend to be evolving into a business which provides kits. If you have the F-35, we provide a kit for the F-35 repair and for manufacturing. That kit may have 200, 300 tools in it in a toolbox like the one behind me. That had been lagging the recovery of the COVID because of the turbulence associated with the supply chain. All those kits needed to be shipped complete.
Tough to get all 300 tools at the same time in the kit. It did some attenuation of viscosity. That started to clear up in the quarter, and the military business started to come back. That business grew at 11.1% organically, and the margins a little bit lower because it is all over the world, 15.3%, but it was up 170 basis points, 190 basis points, sorry, 190 basis points in a quarter, and that was against negative currency. That is kind of a view. In the commercial and CNI business, we sell through direct sales and through distributors, and also in the RSNI business, we sell through direct and through distributors. That is sort of my summary.
Great. I think the next one is something that a lot of people talk about, the rise of the EVs. In your opening pitch there, you mentioned eventually powertrain change will be a driver for SOT. I think you see it a little sooner at RSNI, but can you talk how you expect that to emerge as a demand driver over the next handful of years?
Yeah. I mean, I think, look, what happens in these things is generally what we see is as cars change, there is a demand for new and different tools. A simple thing in electric vehicles would be you need insulating tools because you do not want to fry yourself. A simple thing would be in the diagnostic units, you have got to be able to more aggressively manage the cooling system so that the batteries do not overheat and therefore go dysfunctional. Little things like that, but you are going to see all of those things come on. If you look at the repair that is happening today, about 80% of the repairs on a car today is already not on the powertrain. You are going to change that 20%. It is going to be nice for us, but that 80% continues.
When you see the changing in the powertrain, they're going to need new tools. You are going to see electric vehicles roll out. You are going to see, I believe, the rise of plug-in hybrids already. If you look at the China numbers last year, China added almost as many plug-in hybrids as they did electric vehicles in their explosion. You see it growing in Europe. It is probably going to come to the United States if you think those cars. You have electric vehicles. You have got plug-in hybrids. You are probably going to out of Japan. If you read the press in Japan, you are going to see an alternate type of hybrid. The interesting thing about new technologies is they hardly ever proceed to the market in standard applications.
What I would say is when we look at from a repair point of view, an electric vehicle is not an electric vehicle; it's not an electric vehicle; they're all different. These things are going to drive substantial expansion. You already see it. There's an article in The New York Times today talking about Norway saying it's okay to get 80% of their sales in electric vehicles, but repair shops keep humming. You are going to see that. Here, I do not think it's going to happen as fast as 80% of the sales. You will see a continuation on top of all those. The aging of the internal combustion part will drive new tools as well. Because what happens in a car, the life of a car for repair comes out. The OEM says, "Geez, we need these things.
We need special tools to get this wiring harness out or to deal with this certain overheating problem or a certain physicality or a certain software problem. We provide those. What happens at the dealership, the dealership starts to see the new cars come in, and there is a demonstration of what has happened in the initial driving of the vehicle. Frankly, the derinkling, the wrinkling out of all the maybe shortfalls in the car. We have Dealer-FX that provides our newly acquired software business that has repair shop software, repair shop management software that sees those things and gives us a warning about what is happening and allows us to have tools for that. They roll into when they get off of warranty into independent repair shops. We have another software business, Mitchell 1 , that surveils those through repair shop management systems.
You get to see that. As the cars, even after warranty, start to go from 50,000 miles to 100,000 miles to 200,000 miles, they encounter different problems. Each of those drives different needs. You see that play out across the range of even a tremendously more complex range of individual models for powertrains and for the autonomy that is being impressed on the cars now.
Sounds like a lot of vectors intertwine there. Skipping over to CNI for a second.
Sure.
On the recent earnings call, you sort of indicated that the segment's starting to really hit the stride with respect to kind of your long-term or organic growth aspirations for that segment. Independent of kitting getting a little bit better, could you elaborate on that comment about starting to hit stride, if I'm quoting you correctly?
Yeah. Look, I think this. I think you're seeing a couple of factors here. The direct critical industry business, which provides the kits and other things, was up deep into double, it was up more than 11.1%. That is because of the sort of like two factors. One is heretofore, when it had been growing, it had a couple of quarters of up 7%, and I think in the fourth quarter, it was only up 1.5%. Generally, there was an underrepresentation of military. Every time a new administration comes in, it does not matter if it is Democrat or Republican, there is a new sheriff in town, and they come in and they say, "We got new rules for procurement." The rules create, I use the word again, tremendous viscosity in the ordering. Generally, that works for a while. It takes down the military sales.
What happens is the war fighters say, "Hey, buddy, you better do something because I need these products." That is what is starting to happen in the military. We had the military boosting it, and we had the kitting business, which is a pretty big portion of the business and a high-margin portion of the business, because they started to have a little bit of daylight, a little bit of daylight. They have more to go in terms of their deliveries. You had Europe. CNI is all over the world, and Asia kind of held its own. It was about the same. Europe was a little better, a little better this quarter for them. They did not get hammered. They did not get hammered like we thought.
I would say the CNI growth in the quarter says, "Hey, kind of a leap forward," not a leap forward, but movement forward in the United States and with the kitting business. Europe holding its own against a difficult situation and not being pummeled, and Asia kind of holding its own against some difficult situation. It all turned out to good growth and a nice step forward in terms of margin, principally driven by the higher kitting volume, which is good margin business.
Great. At SOT, that's been really interesting the past couple of years. It had been bandwidth constrained for several years prior and just into the pandemic. Could you describe some of the key breakthroughs and wiggle room you were able to open up?
Sure. I think one thing I would say that one thing that was maybe underappreciated, it is not quite an answer to your question, but I will answer your question. One thing that was underappreciated is we kept investing in product through the downturn, and we kept making sure our product was available so the guys kept going. Because we kept investing in product, we have more and more strong product that can match the complexities. We did not fall behind on that. That is one thing. We feel good about our product line. Secondly, what has happened there is the pacing element is, one, the product, two, the ability of the franchisee to sell because he only has there are only 24 hours in a day, seven days a week. He is out there. He is calling on people.
What we did to enhance him in the COVID is we did a few things. One is we were able to be much more effective through shorter burst video presentations that allowed them to translate and learn about products before they went to the actual point of sale. That worked pretty well for them in terms of I think we had a pretty good breakthrough in terms of training, much more effective ways to be able they did not have to go back and look up things or look at a longer video, and the video is more effective. It is hard to summarize all a bunch of little steps in that way, but I think the best way you can think about it is we just got better at producing those distanced and not iterative training programs.
That allowed the franchisee to, just before he goes into the garage, look at two minutes of a video and learn something. That helped them. Secondly, we have much sharpened our social media activity where we were able to interact with our franchisee, who was able to interact directly with his customers and brief them on social media about the next new tool or the next promotion. Therefore, when the franchisee goes into the garage, he does not have to spend precious minutes of the seven minutes he has with each technician to give him what we would call in business school, I suppose, case facts. They knew it already. Therefore, he could spend time closing the deal. This tremendously helped them.
We expanded some in our, what I would call, our shop equipment, sort of a version of our techno van. We kind of expanded and adjusted our shop equipment van network that helped them in terms of having specific events in the field with customers. That worked. During the COVID, we spent a lot of time just working on what I would call more physical things. We came up with this activity where one or two weeks every quarter, we rolled out and we mobilized office personnel and field personnel to go on the field and actually not worry about administrative tasks, but help sell product. That worked too. We call it rally weeks. That seemed to work for us.
You put those together, it greatly expanded, greatly expanded, I guess you could say, because they're up 32% over pre-pandemic levels, greatly expanded their capacity to sell. We're going to keep driving those kinds of things because that is one of the product and capacity to sell are the pacing elements. There's something else that came up in this period that for the future is I could sell every toolbox that I could make now. I think given the increase, we've bumped up against capacity in some of our factories, and we're expanding. I think we're expanding four factories in the tools group, one of which we've already done in Alabama, and then we've got the other three, we're expanding the capacity of those things. Those are the things for the future because we believe there's a lot more opportunity to mine as we go forward.
Okay. I am wondering if there are any learnings on that kind of throughput expansion that can carry over to CNI. I know the channels are very different, but what is in play in terms of sharing best practices across to CNI in terms of sustained commercial excellence and organic compounding?
I think in CNI, we have learned the translatable portion is the video training for a distributed Salesforce. I mean, CNI, one of the big Salesforce, a lot of the Salesforce is direct sales. The characteristics of direct sales are not that much different than franchisees. They are fundamentally a distributed Salesforce. If you are able to deal with them on these bursts, you are able to help them be more effective in selling. We have learned that as an ability to enable CNI. The big thing in CNI these days, though, I think, for short-term is we want to deliver. We want to deliver. We want to deliver. We want to get that kitting business moving forward faster than it even did the last quarter. That is the principle because there is business there that we have not been able to fulfill.
We want to take bigger advantage of that. That is the principal bottleneck. Coming out of the tools group, the learning principally was that video. Of course, social media works, but not quite in the same sense because the direct salesmen have a little more time to deal with their interlocutory at the various customers. It is not quite as a hurry-up business as it might be in franchising. I think those are the two big things that are going to play through in that. CNI, we are pretty optimistic about it. It seems like the business is in, particularly the kits, are in great demand. We were also encouraged about Europe that they held their own. We were worried about it a little bit. It seems to have absorbed the problem and not been a big hole for us.
Great. What do you attribute that Europe resilience to?
I don't know. I guess I think we have good product. I think that we're fulfilling a point that we kept introducing. Remember, I come back to the idea that during the COVID, we kept investing on both sides of the Atlantic in products, in brands, and our people. We didn't let people off. We were fully loaded to come out of this. I think other people might have had to do some catch-up, and we weren't in that situation. I think I have that. Plus, I think we did pretty well in certain markets. I think like Germany, and we made some progress in Germany and so on. I think those are the principal situations, just that we were kind of still strong. We came out of the COVID stronger physically than when we entered.
Okay. Given that CNI has had some of the most impact from supply challenges and now getting better, this question can apply across the portfolio too, but is there a tailwind emerging from capitalized costs and inventory versus what's been passing through the last few quarters?
Sure. The thing is, is that's a double-edged sword. If you got capitalized costs, you may have some of the older and higher costs and spot buys still in inventory rolling through. It does not come out as quickly. That stuff does not wrinkle out as quickly in terms of cost. I do not think you are seeing in CNI in the quarter that effect so much. You see it more in the tools group. Tools group is on LIFO. They are in a completely different situation. In general, you are going to see it going forward. The time constants associated with that are not so clear to me. Generally, I think what happened in CNI was mostly the fact that they are able to deliver. Of course, they get their price for their costs in that situation. Eventually, it will work through, and you will get back to the lower cost levels.
Okay. Great. How are you calculating the capacity ads for storage at?
The what?
The capacity f or storage. You want to keep a little suspense out there maybe, but you also want to fulfill. And then you got to carry capacity, and maybe you have a couple-year wave of this, and then storage might settle back. I think you.
It might. I do not know. Look, I cannot. Yeah. Here is what I think. We like to capture ground. You know what I mean? We are not somebody who says, "Okay, if we can sell, we are not going to try to fulfill." We believe we want to fulfill if we can because we think the auto—here is my view. You mentioned tool storage. My view, Chris, is this. I believe, I think I have said this on the calls, I believe we are kind of on the golden age of auto repair. We think the auto repair business on a sort of like trailing several-year level is going to go up and up and up because of the factors I just described. We want to be available to serve it in terms of factory capacity and our selling capacity and have the products that are going to do this.
We are unrelenting in dealing with that. Now, you could say that, "Okay, if things go down, we could be hit." I think if you look at our numbers, sometimes when things go down, we do get hit, but we do not really get in trouble at all. We come right out of it. I mean, in the COVID, we had, I think, two quarters of downturn. We came out of the V because we did not back down. I do believe that this is our strategy where we go forward. We just keep saying, "Hey, this is going to be the business is going to keep better and better. We have 100% confidence in that." Therefore, we will keep adding capacity and filling it up and adding capacity and filling it up. We do not worry about having it stranded. That is not our anticipation.
If it gets stranded, let me put it this way. If it gets stranded, it may be some big economic thing, but we get through that very easily. Or we screwed up and we did not expand our selling capacity. That is it. It probably is not going to be the market.
Okay. As I continue, I just wanted to mention to the crowd and the audience that if there's a question, it can be submitted through the portal, and I will see it and work it in. Nick, I wanted to hear you talk about the software business, the size and scope, and how you view standalone versus embedded in the long-term strategic position, how you view the software.
Yeah. Look, I think we see those things embedded and standalone as horns on the same goat. They're big advantages for us. For example, Mitchell 1 or Dealer-FX, but let's take Mitchell 1 . Mitchell 1 in terms of providing repair information software, things like interactive wiring diagrams, which no one else has, able to roll through, enabling the technician to deal with the fly-by-wire system seamlessly and saving tremendous amounts of time for both light vehicles and medium and heavy-duty trucks. We just introduced it for heavy-duty trucks at the show, I think, in Orlando last year. Everybody looked at it and said, "Wow, this is a great thing for heavy-duty." We see expansion in that kind of thing. We keep expanding our product line. As we expand our product line, there's a lot of demand for that.
We also see that beginning on the Dealer-FX, on the dealership side with Dealer-FX. We do not have in that side, it is restricted to repair management. On the independent side, we have both repair management, but also the repair information product as well. You see those expanding, and we will keep nurturing those, and we will take advantage of them. In fact, we have Mitchell 1 expanding into collision shops, which has never been, has not been as effective before. When you are in a collision shop, if you think about it, you can use systems, but the things you are working on, like you need body data, you need electronics data, you need sensor data, you need calibration data. These tend to be all over the product catalog or all over the repair catalog. Mitchell 1 will bring them all together for a repair shop.
They have a repair collision shop. They have it for the collision repair shop, a collision suite that will basically put together a catalog for that particular repair. It's a great saver. We keep innovating in that product line and expanding that business. That was up with single digits in a quarter, and it's very profitable. You look at the embedded software, and it depends on what you mean. For example, our aligners are terrific and have a great range of products and models that it will handle. You have the calibration of the sensors, our two-point product, which will allow you to calibrate virtually any model's sensor array. They're all different. The targets are different, and the approaches are different. You have that side.
You have things like our handheld diagnostic units, which have embedded in them a software which learns all the time. Basically, the traditional diagnostics, when you plug it in or match with the wireless lead to the car, it will give you the signature of what the car is saying about its difficult or its problem. It will tell you what the car is telling you. Even with tens of thousands of repair codes, it is still not definitive. Generally, you have to go to another database and get a guide. You go through a number of physical steps to determine what the repair is, what is really wrong. With our software, based on 2.8 billion actual repair events, actual work orders, it will tell you if it is an Audi with 100,000 miles and it is a 1985.
70% of the time it's a mass airflow sensor. Just go right to that. It will cut down the time tremendously. We have another database with 300 billion records that will do that for the especially unusual problems. Those things keep getting updated, kind of like an AI thing. They keep getting updated based on the experience we see in the field. That software is very exciting because it basically enables the technicians in ways that they never had before. That is important when the cars keep changing because the technicians themselves are going to need help in dealing with that complexity. We are ready to help.
Great. At RS&I, the OEM and the undercar have had, they've been on fire for many quarters, double digits. I think we understand the drivers. You talked about a lot of that. What might afford continued runway over the next few years? Noting there might be differences between the two, but just kind of wondering.
Yeah. Look, I think it's this way, Chris. I think you're talking about two businesses there that are, one is driven a lot by the introduction of new models. I think you're going to see, given the number of different technologies, particularly around powertrain, and also the options that are going to be imposed on embedded in a car associated with autonomy, then you're going to see a drive of programs. That's a lumpy business though, as you know. I think in this interlude, you're probably going to see that while we don't give guidance, you would think over time there's still going to be a drive of model introductions.
On the equipment side, that is driven mostly by the autonomy and the idea, the rise of the autonomy in the car, and somewhat by the rise of the different powertrains, which require different types of products. The lift is a great example. You need a new lift because you can't put the lifting lift points underneath the battery. Otherwise, you can't drop the battery, and you really can't operate on an electric vehicle. Those are the kinds of things. I think primarily autonomy is going to drive the undercar equipment business, and different powertrains and the new models will drive what I would call the project business. I do think that continues for a while. Maybe not at the same, as you say, on-fire rates. I don't know. It seems like I kind of like our opportunities in those businesses going forward.
Okay. That sounds good. How would you describe the acquisition pipeline, Nick? And is there a broad range of sizes or tiny bolt-ons really kind of the sweet spot?
We have some targets on our list that could be pretty expensive. I do not know what a guy like you, probably a billion dollars is nothing. You know what I mean? I think we could see things like that, or we could see things that are bolt-ons. That is no different than it has been in the past. I think we have on our list today a fairly typical thing. The big targets are usually the RS&I area because you are really looking to get something more to sell. The CNI area is because you are both trying to get a position, a greater position in the individual critical industries, or you are trying to expand yourself in certain areas where you might not be, like portions of Europe or Asia. We see those things.
It's a little harder to acquire to help the tools group because you can't do this. Now, I would say that our, as you said, in response to your numbers, we have some small ones. We have some big ones in our list. One of the things you can be sure of is, though, we will only acquire something which is coherent, that is along the lines of our runways for growth, that will let us enhance the band channel, expand repair shop owners and managers, extend the critical industries, or build in emerging markets. They always have to be in the orb of criticality. We don't want something that isn't critical. What we know is to supply enabled people to solve critical tasks. What that means is we're not really looking for a low-cost solution. We're looking for a repeatable and quality solution. This is how we work. You'll see that we're not going to acquire something that's going to transform Snap-on. That's for sure.
Right. Okay. Let's see. I think we're close to the end here. Is anything notable about your pricing strategy? It seems like it's as needed, but not used as a lever to grow or anything like that.
No, no. Normally, we do not grow via pricing. Certainly, your margins do not grow. Our pricing is trying to, at least in this era, you are trying to price for steel costs or something like that. That actually reduces your margin. So it is actually a headwind to your margin. We are already at the high end, not that we cannot price, but we see ourselves as a long-term activity. In general, when we said we would grow at 4% to 6% in ordinary times, that would only be 30, 40, 50 basis points of pricing in that. We do not see pricing as an element of growth for us. We see the element of growth associated with capturing new customers and people paying more for more effective products.
Sounds great.
Our margins get driven, of course, by RCI and the rapid continuous improvement, trying to do things more effectively. That has been the formula that has worked for us. It is a formula that authored what? What do we have in the quarter? 22% OI margin, 170 basis points up.
Those were good. SOT margins were terrific. Keep up.
4.5%, up 180 basis points.
Keep the pedal to the metal, as they say. Nick, thanks for.