Good afternoon. I'm Tim Weiss. I cover building products here at Baird, and we're delighted to have Stanley Black & Decker join us again at our Global Industrial Conference this year. Stanley is one of the largest tools companies globally, and they own several brands, including Dewalt, Craftsman, and Stanley, among others. So from the company, we have Pat Hallinan, who's CFO here, and we have Dennis Lange, who's the VP of IR. We're going to start with a few prepared remarks from Pat, and then we'll go into Q&A. So I will turn the floor to you.
Tim was joking before our microphones were on how much time we've been spending on tariffs. So we decided to at least start off with tariffs. Myself, our CEO, Don Allan, and Chris Nelson, our President of our tools business, will be out quite a bit between now and the early parts of December. So we wanted to be consistent in what we were saying. And also, we have an Investor Day at the New York Stock Exchange next week. And so we wanted to be consistent in what we were saying. Obviously, tariffs are something that could affect our industry, or for that matter, any durables manufacturer with a good portion of their business in the U.S. And so we wanted to put something out there that gave people a framework for how to think about tariffs and how they might affect our business.
We certainly don't know if something will happen, or for that matter, if something were to happen, what would happen. But we at least wanted to share what's been running through our minds. So tariffs were put in place starting in 2017, and the waves of tariffs that went from like 2017 to 2019 affected our business back then to the tune of about $300 million annualized. And over that period, and in the subsequent years, we mitigated those tariffs down to about $100 million, a little bit less than that, that course through our income statement today. And so one scenario that seems possible to be coming at us, and as a business, we wanted to be in a proactive set from a planning and mindset stage is, what if the tariffs that are already in place get raised?
Right now, you have Section 301 tariffs that go through Lists 1 through 3 and 4A that are at 25% today. Those are the ones that are costing us just shy of $100 million today. If those went up to 60%, which is where some of the rhetoric has been, that move from 25 points to 60 points would add $200 million of annualized tariff expense. Again, we don't know if that will happen or won't happen. It is certainly one of the quickest things that could happen because it could kind of happen with the stroke of a pen as opposed to a whole new framework needing to be put in place. Our teams are already planning in case this does happen.
So planning on what would be some of the supply chain moves that we would take, what might be some of the pricing moves that we would make, and then how would we continue ongoing government relations. And we'll keep all of those things in play. I don't know that we'll take any firm actions before something actually does occur. Though I would say reducing the U.S. market's reliance on China was always part of our longer-term supply chain strategy. So some of this swims towards our longer-term supply chain strategy to diversify the U.S. market away from China more. And while it certainly could give us something to manage in the near and medium term, our leadership team remains very confident in our ability to get the business back to the gross margin that we think it deserves and had prior to COVID at 35-plus%.
And we're making a big pivot towards growth. We've had some really nice growth from our DeWalt brand, and we fully intend to accentuate that. And while tariffs might pose a time wrinkle and all of that, we are very confident we get through them and we start to mitigate them like we did in the prior wave of tariffs. But we at least wanted to open up with that and put forward our U.S. COGS base, which you see on the slide. We have about $6 billion of U.S. COGS broken out at least where the product ultimately comes from to 45%-50% U.S., which I think people lose track of. We're still pretty heavily U.S.-based by our heritage. And then the rest of the world, about 25%-30% in China, 20%-25%.
Just so if people want to run their own scenarios, they can run their own scenarios. We're trying to avoid a lot of speculation on this topic, but we didn't want to avoid it altogether.
Yeah. No, I appreciate that. I guess maybe one question on that, and then we can go to some other things. But if I remember last time when this happened, 2017, 2018, there were some intra-industry kind of differences too where you guys might have had some tariffs and other players in the industry might not have had the same. So I guess, A, is that true? And at least if this time around, it would kind of be a little bit more uniformly applied, and it could potentially not be quite as big of a competitive disadvantage than it was.
Yeah. I think we believe that to be the case. So I don't know. None of us knows what will happen. I think a big dynamic that Tim's referring to is components versus finished goods. I think all of us have as much as we can. And our percentage out of China used to be like 40%-45%. So you see it's down to 20%-25%. And all of us have kind of diversified as much assembly as we can out of China. But a lot of the guts in power tools, ultimately, whether it's us, whether it's TTI, Makita, Bosch, and others, we're all pretty similarly exposed in that regard. And so yes, we feel like strategically, probably a bit more level playing field, but we'll kind of see where it goes from here.
Okay. Okay, great, so you mentioned you're going to have an analyst day next week. I don't want to spoil all your fun, but I don't know if there's any sort of kind of high-level topics of kind of what you plan to kind of present to investors at the day next week.
Yeah. I don't know if I'm going to spill all the beans, Tim, but I would say we obviously knew this could be a noisy time to have an investor day, both politically and macroeconomically, and it certainly is that. But we have a relatively new leadership team, and we're at an important part of our journey. For those of you who haven't followed our whole story, we certainly put ourselves on a much-needed turnaround late 2023 or late 2022, early 2023. But those goals only went through 2025. So what we plan to talk about next week is how do you think of the earning potential of the business and the financial targets that we'll have beyond 2025? More specifically, how are we pivoting towards growth and going deep on our three big brands of DeWalt, Stanley, and Craftsman?
In some of the key parts of our industrial fastening business around auto, aero, and general industrial. Then finally, get to meet the new leadership team. Where do we go from 2025? How do we pivot to growth and meet the new leadership team? Those will be the focal points of the Investor Day.
Okay. Okay, great. I guess as you think about next year and just kind of the swing factors, we talked about tariffs. We don't have to talk more about that. But I guess aside from that, how are you thinking about the swing factors on the sales side? You've got transformation savings that'll kind of run through the P&L. What are some of the kind of big bucket kind of puts and takes as you think about next year?
Yeah. I think I would start with the top line. I think while we don't yet see in the tools and outdoor space broad-based growth yet, we do feel like the marketing is starting to show some green shoots and turning. It hasn't sustained positive POS. I mean, those who saw Depot's POS today, it wasn't positive yet, but better than expected. And I think that's a pivot point for next year. I think the fact that inventories are relatively low across the channels is a potential pivot point. And hopefully in our industrials business and the auto sector, the auto sector kind of corrects its production schedule by the latter part of this year, early part of next year. And that at least cleans the deck for an uptick.
And then I think where the 10-year goes is going to be where the 10-year and the actual effects of immigration are going to be the unlocks for kind of growth off of what I think could be a pretty clean slate as we head into the year.
Okay. I mean, on the DIY side, do you think it's just rates at this point? Or do you think there are ways to stimulate demand outside of just the 10-year going down 100 basis points?
I think when you're talking particular DIY, I think always innovation can play a role, but I think a bigger role would be housing churn and therefore rates. I do feel like that's the key. I do feel that there's still enough going around in the pro space where innovation is a key unlock there. You don't need only rates there, so.
Yeah. So really more on the consumer side is kind of the rate piece.
Yeah.
Okay. Okay. And then I guess on the transformation, just what are the things internally? So I mean, historically, you guys have made acquisitions as a way to expand brands, expand product categories, those types of things. And now it sounds like you're really coalescing around three brands and kind of taking you always had organic growth, but I mean, maybe taking a little bit more of an organic approach internally. So what do you need to change within the organization to kind of get everybody kind of swimming on that kind of more organic?
Yeah. I do think you're hearing and witnessing a real pivot towards a bias more towards organic. It's not that we won't ever do M&A again. I don't know that in the medium term or the near term, it's going to be a major contributor to our growth. And in fact, I think I speak for the whole leadership team that we're going to make sure we have a really good organic platform before we start piling acquisitions on top of it. So we are going to be focused in our tools and outdoor business on those three big brands, DeWalt, Stanley, and Craftsman. And Chris Nelson, the leader of that business, has really made a very significant pivot in that he's completely retooled the leadership team. We have a new brand leader. We have a new sales leader, and we have a new Chief Technology Officer.
And he has the strategy being brand-led much more than sales-led and a very focused effort on how to grow organically within each of the major trades categories. So a very focused brand-building initiative, a very tailored new product initiative, and all the engineering resources in the new product initiative being run through one chief technology officer to accelerate pace of new product introduction. So I think those are big levers to drive organic growth, and that's what he'll be talking about a lot next week.
Okay. Okay. Can you just give us a flavor of we've talked about kind of complexity reduction a lot over the last, I'd say, two to three quarters, and I think that's a big part of your savings this year. Just, I guess, how complex is some of these operating platforms in terms of different smaller brands, bigger brands? I mean, what are you kind of doing differently to kind of leverage that complexity reduction effort?
Yeah. I think the complexity angle has had three different roles in our transformation. The initial wave that got a lot of airtime was around pure SKU reduction, right? And a lot of those SKUs were either low-volume SKUs that probably weren't generating enough contribution relative to the holding costs and complexity they brought, or where we had a lot of abundant substitutes where we could streamline things. And the teams ran through that very quickly. I mean, we're fully through those dynamics. That's complexity reduction allowed us to move footprints around and to have fewer roofs. And then when we have fewer roofs, to have centers of excellence under each roof. And that's the part of complexity reduction that is ongoing. So for a long time, Stanley had acquired a bunch of companies.
We had done some back office integration and route-to-market integration, but we had largely left the value chains distinct. And we needed to get value chains across brands and product lines shared to a much greater extent and creating centers of excellence for whether we're talking about cutting tools or whatnot under one roof. And then we're just now starting platforming. And platforming will be a third wave of complexity reduction that runs through the transformation. And so all of these things are going on. They all have an overlap. The first wave was really to reduce the clutter so we could move the plants around. Now that we're moving the plants around, how do we get better platforming so we get better procurement scale and are more able to introduce automation into processes?
And was it just like as you built some of the brands or just wound up being silos so that you just didn't have certain components in this brand that should overlap with that? And so you're bringing a lot of that together.
We also had never until Chris reorganized his business had a single point of engineering so that every product leader could start an engineering initiative virtually from scratch and wasn't compelled to standardize across whether we're talking motors or circuit boards or any part of the componentry, which didn't mean we were always bespoke, but it certainly didn't prevent a lot of unique things from happening.
Okay. Okay. I guess you have this 35% plus kind of gross margin target that's out there. It doesn't sound, correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't sound that that's not achievable in your mind anymore. It's just the environment is slower. I mean, we haven't had volume growth in eight quarters. And so there is a natural kind of volume leverage that you need to kind of get back to that. So it could push that out into 2026. Is that kind of how you were trying to frame that on the call a couple of weeks ago?
Yeah. And Tim's referring to our third quarter earnings call. There were some questions around, "Hey, are you going to get to 35% gross margin by the fourth quarter of 2025?" which has been one of the targets out there since we started this transformation. And I would say we still haven't given up on that. It still could happen. And if you put tariffs aside for a second, there has been mounting volume headwinds, long-standing in the tools and outdoor space, but I think somewhat recently in the automotive space in our fasteners business. And there's been a measure of ground freight inflation that hasn't been tied to petrol prices, which have actually been pretty reasonable. It's been more tied to labor and the cost of trucks. And so those headwinds have been mounting now for two or three years.
And they probably raise the challenge to that fourth quarter 35%. But you're correct. We don't believe it's out of reach. In fact, we believe we get to 35% and beyond. Platforming probably allows us to go meaningfully beyond 35%. And that's something we'll talk about next week. But I do think whether it happens in the fourth quarter of 2025 or sometime in the midst of 2026 is going to be determined a little bit by the volume, a little bit by the inflation or deflation dynamics in the market. But I'm heading to Baltimore tomorrow to work with a team to see how do we make sure we're getting there as quickly as we can. So we're constantly scrubbing the options in front of us to do that.
Okay. Any questions from the audience? Maybe just kind of focusing on tools just a little bit. I mean, maybe just with the three brands that you have today or that you're going to focus on, Craftsman, DeWalt, and Stanley, I guess what is the health of those brands just in general? I mean, I think DeWalt's been growing a little bit. Craftsman's maybe been a little bit more challenged because of DIY. But just maybe level set everybody on where those brands are kind of currently performing.
So we have brands beyond that that are also being actively managed, but most of our attention and resource allocation is on those three brands, DeWalt, Stanley, and Craftsman. I'd say DeWalt is still in a healthy spot. It's grown the last six quarters in a row in a down market and continues to resonate very strongly with users around the globe and with channel partners around the globe. I do think you're going to see much more intentional new product development in that space, meaning rounding out specific opportunities we see by trade and much more in the way of post-launch activation in the market, whether that's with end users or with channel partners to drive demand. And that's a brand that could be healthier, but it starts from a good spot in that it's growing in a down market.
Stanley is a brand a bit of a mixed story globally, right? Stanley is truly a global brand. It's probably every bit as big, if not bigger, outside the U.S. or kind of roughly equal parts of the business. But outside the U.S., it has a sizable power tools component, sizable pro and DIY component, whereas most of us here in the States know Stanley as kind of a hand tools brand in the States. We haven't done everything with that brand. We probably could have and should have. It's a brand that could benefit a lot from some innovation, but also some industrial design and packaging refreshing and some additional brand building. And so all of that will be going on, not just in the U.S., but globally. And we intend to get that brand back to the health that it once had.
And then many of you know Craftsman is a brand we bought from Sears some years ago. We've had it heavily focused on the DIY space and in particular in Lowe's and Ace. And that's a brand where we stretched it very quickly when there was maybe a bit less going on at Lowe's and made some hay there. We still see it as a very high-quality DIY brand. And we're going to be a bit like DeWalt, focusing the innovation there on some of its traditional core places like in the garage, outdoor, hand tools, and being very intentional where we take that brand. But we think both Stanley and Craftsman, while the health isn't where it could and should be, we still feel like there's a big opportunity in front of us to get that where it needs to be.
Okay. And I guess when you look at the outdoor power part of the business, I mean, there's a couple other brands there. I mean, are you kind of using DeWalt as.