On behalf of Raymond James, we'd like to welcome you to the Whirlpool Corporation presentation for this morning. With us today from the company, Jim Peters, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, also Roxanne Warner, Investor Relations Finance Manager. Jim, I think your prepared remarks are about 20 minutes or so, I think you mentioned, which should give us a good five, 10 minutes for questions from the room. With that, Jim, welcome.
Great. Thank you, Sam, good morning, everybody, welcome, and thank you for joining us today. I'm gonna kinda walk you through a high-level view of Whirlpool, and then I'll talk a little bit more about some of the strategic moves we've made recently. I also will talk about some things more in the near term, such as 2023, and how we, you know, feel the year is going to play out. That's kind of the gist of where I'll go. Get to my first slide. Oh. Just to tell you a little bit about Whirlpool and our business. What you can see there is right now we are a company with approximately $20 billion in sales. You can see the split by region.
We recently have announced, and I'm gonna talk about this a little bit further into the presentation. We recently have announced a different strategic path for our EMEA business in which we'll remain only a partial owner, but I'll get into a little bit of that in a minute. You can see in our current state, North America makes up about 60% of our appliance business on a global basis.
Our sales by categories, you can see, are split relatively even across the major kitchen categories, with dish still being a little bit of the smallest, but that's only because on a global basis, dishwashers have the least penetration around the globe. Laundry also, as we look around the globe, we make about 25%-26% of our business is laundry.
You can see also there a product, you know, in that picture. I just wanna highlight that one because, you know, we talk about this one a lot recently. You may have heard it on some of our retailers' conference calls. That's the Maytag Pet Pro Washer. You know, when we talk about innovation and things like that as a company, listen, the washing machine, the size of the box doesn't change anymore. The refrigeration, it's hard to change I mean, everything fits in a cutout or fits in a space anywhere. Now it's about the innovation you can do on performance within your product. It's about how you maximize the capability and the use.
This product, which is geared at extracting pet hair out of your laundry, has actually been one of the things we've launched recently to just show how we're relooking at and thinking about innovation and how you do it in an environment where traditionally you were changing the setup, the size, or whatever. Now it's about the function and the performance of appliances.
Our leading position, you know, if you look around the globe, we've got leading scale in many key countries. You know, now, as I mentioned, as we go through a strategic review of our business, and we do divest of majority ownership of our EMEA business, a lot of the scale still remains for us because a lot of the scale is actually based on a regional geography type of perspective. Many of your suppliers are regional.
Our manufacturing facilities are typically regional, if not locally located. You see there, or you see that we have, you know, a large number of factories on the previous slide that I had up, over 50 factories globally. Those are very close to where we actually sell those products. If you look at today in the U.S., we still make approximately 80% of the products we sell in the U.S., we make within the U.S. It just gives you a feel for, you know, where our scale and size is.
If you look at our brand portfolio there, again, we have numerous brands that we use around the globe, which allows us to segment those brands appropriately, allows us to use KitchenAid and JennAir at premium levels, allows us to use Maytag and Whirlpool and some of the other brands listed up there at the mass levels, then brands such as Amana we can use in the value segment, which allows us to position our products differently without having our brands spilling over into different price categories.
I already talked about some of the innovation. You can see at the bottom there, you know, some examples of where we came from producing one product for one customer, Sears, to today, obviously producing many products across the globe for, you know, multiple countries.
Then best cost position, and I'll talk a little bit more about this as we go. On a typical year, excluding raw material inflation, we look to take out half a percent to a percent of our cost. Obviously, in this time period, and, you know, I'll talk a little bit about it, we have seen some significant inflation, both in raw materials, that's starting to recede, but we've also seen inflation in a lot of other costs, such as logistics and labor and all that.
We are beginning to see logistics costs coming down also. I think labor is one cost that most companies would tell you, "Listen, it only goes one direction." You know, what we've seen is at least a slowdown in the inflation rate in that space.
When you look at us as a company, and obviously with the type of products we make, with our attachment to the housing and construction industry, and with our locations globally, we've been affected over many, you know, many years by a lot of different things. Could be geopolitical, could be commodity cost, could be drops in demand, recessionary environments.
What I will tell you is we've been able, as a 111-year-old company, to persevere through a lot of those times, also to continue to expand our margins. You do see, you know, a spike there that came during the COVID period, but then right now we're back on a track of where we were coming into it in terms of looking at how our margins will expand over a period of time.
Additionally, you see that we've delivered significant EPS growth, and, you know, some of that has come based on better earnings. Some of it has come as we've returned cash to shareholders. Prior to a large acquisition we did recently, we did buy back a significant amount of shares over a few years. Then our ability to convert that to cash.
We are able to convert that to cash, which we then use to reinvest in our business, or that, as I've said, we've returned to shareholders in recent times, or now we've started investing in other businesses. A portfolio transformation, and we came out and talked about this a while ago, and maybe if I kind of step back, for, you know, a minute here and talk about how we got to this place.
As we looked at our business globally, one, as I mentioned, we really realized that with all the global scale we've built, we were getting benefits off of our global engineering centers. We were getting benefits from our global procurement organization, but the rest of our business still remained very regionally focused. As we looked at how we compete, the companies we compete with, the retailers we deal with, whatever, we really realized that this was done more on a local and regional basis.
we stepped back and said, "You know, as we look towards the future, what would that mean from a portfolio perspective?" as we see the world almost becoming a little bit less global at times, we said it probably makes sense for us to look through specific parts of our portfolio and in particular, our EMEA business and understand, you know, what do we see for the future of that, and are we the best owner of it?
you can see leading up to that, we did multiple divestitures, including our South Africa business. At one point in time, our Embraco compressor business. was not part of our core business. we divested of our interest in both China and Turkey. then you can see there Russia was obvious why we had to do it.
It was something that was rushed just due to the war going on there. We did sell that to Arçelik, who we will now partner with for the rest of our EMEA business. In the, in the meantime, we bought Elica in India, which is a hoods and cooktop manufacturer, and then we bought InSinkErator recently, which makes food waste disposers, and they're the leading, you know, leading global manufacturer and seller of that, and it's the leading brand on a global basis.
Now, that's still primarily a U.S.-driven business, but we see it expanding more and more globally as we look forward. It is also similar to ours, a replacement-driven business. You know, one of the things I should have highlighted in the beginning is our business is about 50%-55% replacement.
It's about another, let's just say 30% of that can come from discretionary purchases, remodels, upgrades, whatever, and about 15% comes from new housing. You think about the business that we purchased in InSinkErator, it is closer to our existing MDA business, but it has significantly higher margins than the rest of our business, and that's really where we saw the value in it, the ability to grow with those high margins in a space that we already know very well in the home.
You look at the different pillars as we go forward and really how we want to position our businesses. With the KitchenAid countertop brand, we have one of the strongest premium countertop appliance brands in the industry. The stand mixer is iconic, but we have a lot of other products that go with it.
We really wanna grow that and continue to invest in there and look at opportunities there. Major Appliances I just talked about with our different parts of the world and how we're gonna focus that a little bit more, but then purchasing InSinkErator as part of that. Commercial Appliances is an area where we continue to look also.
We do have a commercial laundry business under the Maytag brand, but now we look to expand, you know, whether it's more into cooking or further into to laundry as we go forward. One of the things we didn't have on there, because it was just before that, we had bought American Dryer Corporation at one point, and they do large capacity dryers, and we've actually now launched a large capacity washer, multi-load washer, through that, the facility that we got from them.
You see at the very bottom the benefits, and really it's gonna help our EBIT margins, but it will significantly help our free cash flow over the next few years. The EMEA business typically was a user of cash, especially with all the restructuring that needed to be done, and the InSinkErator business is already a very strong cash-generating business.
Yep. Yeah. There we go.
If you look at why, and I already talked a little bit about the whys on here. As you can see is that, you know, we really saw a decoupling of the global economies, as I said. You can see the different things that have, you know. The one thing I didn't mention there is trade barriers.
We're seeing more and more around the globe trade barriers, whether it be in, you know, Brazil that have existed, in the U.S. that have come up in recent years, in India as they begin to drive to manufacture more within India. We've seen that as an impact, you know, on our business. You know, additionally, as you see there, is we really wanna focus on where we see the growth and the higher margins over the longer period of time. I've laid out on the slide where it just talks about our goals are still the same as a company, is we wanna see 5%-6% organic revenue growth. We wanna get to the 11%-12% EBIT margin range.
You know, additionally, with that, we do believe we can generate every year 7%-8% of sales and free cash flow. I said, you know, I'd quickly come back and kinda touch on, you know, our EMEA business and all that. If you look at, you know, the form of this transaction, what happened is we entered into a partnership with Arçelik. We will retain a 25% interest in the business. We will continue to share certain technology and other things as part of this, and then they will take over and begin running that by adding in their European business, which already is significantly profitable.
If you look at today in a European environment, you know, going back to 2022, Arçelik was one of the more profitable businesses, more profitable appliance makers within the European market. You know, we do have a lot of confidence in them. You can see what we divested of there, but you can see that, you know, over time, this business had been break even to slightly making money to losing money in some years and continued to be a very difficult business to operate within.
Over the long-term period of time, without making some sort of move To get more production in lower cost areas and to get more leverage and scale within EMEA, we just didn't see a way to make a step change in those margins without significant further investment.
We really saw this as a better option, in terms of then over time, we will have an ability, if we would like to cash out of this. Additionally, we'll have a stream of royalties that they will pay us on the Whirlpool brand, that will be a consistent stream of cash flow over the next, you know, 20, 40 years. You know, there also are some benefits that start to come from day 1 from a cash perspective. You know, 2023, you know, when we look at 2023 and what's ahead of us, we see the H1 of the year being very similar to the back half of 2022. It's still going to be a difficult environment from a demand perspective.
We still see in many countries a environment that either is in a recession or is very close. What we are seeing on some of the positive sides there is we are seeing material costs begin to come down. We are seeing relief in some of the areas such as, you know, transportation and logistics, as I mentioned earlier.
However, labor and other things are still in front of us as an inflationary factor. Now as we get to the back half of the year, we begin to feel a little bit more comfortable that the demand, at least on a year-over-year basis, will start to stabilize. Because the back half of 2022, we did see some pretty strong headwinds. Additionally, we saw the cost environment peak in the back half of 2022.
As we begin to see this come down early 2023, we do anticipate as you get further into the year, we'll see more and more benefits there. Again, right now we feel good. I'm gonna talk a minute here about why we feel good over the longer run with the housing industry within the U.S. There we go. You know, what you see here, and we've talked about this numerous times, but the appliance industry in the U.S. really hit after the financial crisis, hit a bottom around 2011, is where you saw it bottom out finally. Sales or number of units sold had dropped significantly, and you got to a point where there it just stabilized.
If you look at the years go forward, from 2012, 13 onward to really 2019, 18 or 19, we saw strong growth in the industry. What that means for a replacement-driven business that has about a 10-year life cycle is you go back to where that build began in 2012, and you would expect now to begin to see many of those appliances being replaced.
You think about on a go-forward basis over the next five years, we are going to be with a 55% replacement business, having consumers in the market looking to replace appliances that they bought during a period when you were seeing growth in demand, which should then help the underlying demand within the U.S.
Additionally, we've always talked about the U.S. housing market is undersupplied right now, and we continue to see that happening, but do expect at some time you'll begin to see that start to grow. The additional thing, you know, that we highlight on here is with all of our connected appliances and cooking appliances, we can actually now see how consumers use their appliances, when they use, and how much they use, at least for a subset.
It's telling us that over recent years, as more and more consumers have focused in the home, they're doubling their amount of usage of many of the products within their kitchen, the cooking products. For 2023, our operational priorities.
As I said, 2022 was obviously a very difficult year with the demand fluctuations, with commodities peaking late in the year, which was a very unique cycle, where you see demand dropping and commodity costs peaking at the same time, and not something we've ever historically seen.
You know, additionally, we had some supply chain issues of our own, and as we talked about in the Q4, ones that were within our control that unfortunately occurred. If you look at our priorities for this year is, one, to make sure we have flawless execution in our supply chain. Some of that means we're gonna have to get more aggressive on dual sourcing in terms of our purchasing environment.
As we look at it over time, with our scale still that we have, it does allow us to still get many of the benefits while dual sourcing to at least help also guarantee the stability within our supply chains, because many of our suppliers have dealt with the same issues we have over recent years. Also, we really look at it as we need to reduce complexity in our business.
Part of that is, as we divest of EMEA, that will help with that because obviously there's numerous product platforms that we had to support that were specific for that market. Also within our own portfolio, and I'll use the example of our dishwasher platform today. We used to have multiple dishwasher platforms.
Today, we now move closer and closer to having one global dishwasher platform, at least for a big part of the dishwashers we sell. Even we can do them in all sorts of different sizes, but offer the same platform with a similar wash system. I think that's the type of things we're looking at, is how do you take some of that complexity out of your system? How do you reduce the number of parts you use? How do you reduce the number of SKUs you have, but still offer the same or similar number of choices to consumers out there?
You can see on the, you know, other side of the chart there is really we talk about the cost takeout for this year and how we see it beginning in Q1 to be relatively flat as we still have some costs within our portfolio and in our inventory and all that were at higher rates from last year. We look go forward, and we expect as the year goes on to see Europe, significant year-over-year cost benefits.
Now you get to our investment thesis here. You know, really, if I kind of walk quickly through this, You know, I've already talked about the profitable growth, and, you know, we are positioning ourselves in terms of the businesses within our portfolio and where we're investing to drive profitable growth over time.
We also are really looking to continue to grow our online sales and accelerate our direct-to-consumer business. In certain parts of the world, it's probably bigger than in others, but we do believe as we continue to invest in capabilities such as home delivery and our IT systems, it will position us better and better to capture a part of that market. Margin expansion. You know, as I mentioned, you really saw the historical time period. This year, as we come out of, you know, a period of instability, we really see, you know, another half point plus of margin expansion within this year.
As we look go forward, and we've trimmed our portfolio down a little bit, you'll see a natural progression in that could be up to another 200 basis points that just comes from the different, the change in our portfolio. You know, you look at free cash flow conversion, as I mentioned, we have traditionally been able to convert our earnings to free cash flow.
As we go forward, we think that'll be very strong because now that we do not have EMEA within our portfolio, that is where we spent a significant amount of cash on restructuring over the years. You know, as we look at that was probably the biggest, you know, non-recurring type of cash expense that we dealt with or non-regular type of cash expense that we dealt with.
That will help us significantly. We continue to fund our business. We continue to invest about 6% of our revenue in engineering and CapEx every year. We continue to invest in new product platforms. I talked about the Maytag Pet Pro. We have one where you can remove the agitator, which is the column that stands up within a washing machine. Some consumers like to have the agitator, some like to have the impeller that's in the bottom that you'll see in more newer versions of washing machine.
We've created a machine that the consumer can have whatever they want, and they can change back and forth. You know, and then as I mentioned, you know, also we continue to return cash to shareholders. You've seen over, you know, an extended period of time, multiple decades, that we've paid a dividend.
We've, you know, continued to increase that or keep it stable. Right now, this year, we announced the other day at least, you know, we announce every quarter that we were holding our dividend stable despite the environment out there, and that we truly believe in the long-term performance, and we do believe that our earnings will continue to catch up with that dividend level.
You know, that's why we said, right now we'll hold it flat, but we look at it every quarter to make a decision on what's the appropriate amount based on where our earnings are. then, you know, we have put on hold some of our share buybacks temporarily, just as we digest the acquisition we did of InSinkErator, and we directed more cash there.
As we go forward, we will continue to execute what we call a balanced capital allocation strategy that looks at all of those as potential investments. With that, I think I wrapped it up right around 20 minutes there. We can kind of go ahead and do some questions.
Terrific. That's, that's exactly right. We have about 10 minutes or so for questions. Anyone here in the, in the room? I'll start. Cold-rolled sheet steel prices, I guess since the beginning of the year, have gone higher, maybe call it 30% or so. You do lock in the majority of your steel, but at what point or is there a threat to your collars or contractual setups with your suppliers from a steel perspective.
Here's what I would say is right now, we gave a range of raw material deflation for the year of $300 million-$400 million. Still feel very comfortable with that range. As Sam highlighted, we do in many of our key commodities, especially such as steel, we do lock in with contracts of varying degrees. It used to be more annual. Now we have many that may run quarterly, semi-annually, and annually, not just in steel, in a lot of our different categories. When we look at our whole portfolio, where we are, you know, where our contracts are, I would still say we feel very comfortable where we are within that range today.
Additionally, you know, as we look at the demand out there and the level of demand right now, as I said, demand hadn't caught up to steel and commodity prices yet. You know, we did expect some temporary fluctuations this year, outside of steel, we're still seeing all the other costs trending in the direction that we thought they would. With steel, it's still within the range that we expected for the year.
Question here.
The, the question for those of you on the webcast is kind of what was the impact of EMEA on our overall profitability and free cash flow and things. What I would say is that, obviously, with the numbers we reported externally, it typically was around breakeven, sometimes slightly worse. You know, as you look forward, you could have up to 150, 200 basis points of improvement in our overall margins that just come by removing that, and that's just the simple math of removing that out.
Two, it was a user of cash, as we had to do significant restructuring because we still had many legacy plants that were located in higher cost countries, which are very difficult to restructure and very costly to restructure.
Three, the investments or the assets that it used as we looked, and I talked about the 6% R&D and CapEx. You know, with a business like that, as you're trying to improvement, you're still investing at least at those levels in it. As we look, you know, now in the future, we would say we can take many of those resources and redirect them to more profitable businesses we have within our portfolio.
But as I mentioned, keeping the 25% stake, we get to participate in any upside that comes from the business. It was a combination of financial resources, people resources, you know, and things like that, and then just the performance that will all help us out, you know, or at least in the long run, help us to lift up the broader business.
Question here. Yes.
Yeah. So the question was, you know, what is the, you know, how do we see the market environment out there and pricing and promotions and all that? Because in our business, obviously, there's, you know, it's how we price to the retailers, and the retailers control the price. There's promotional periods that we as manufacturers may support, may not support. Right now, as we've said, for 2023, we do see the promotional environment being stronger than 2022 and 2021 and 2020 that were naturally suppressed, especially during the COVID period, due to a lack of appliances, but not yet reaching the pre-pandemic levels.
I think, you know, if you're in any retailer today, you can see that now some of those holiday periods, they're at least they are running promotions similar to what you might have seen before the pandemic. That's the biggest effect on pricing and all that right now. Now obviously, I can't say a whole lot about pricing go forward. You know, we continue to monitor the situation, look at costs, our input cost and all that 'cause many of our price increases historically have been cost-based.
We look at the promotional environment. We look at where our market share is. We look at the new products we're launching. There's a lot of factors that go into how we make decisions around pricing and where we position ourselves and where we wanna position ourselves in the marketplace.
I would just say that the promotional environment has picked up some.
Other questions here in the room? You called out the supplier issue in the Q4. Is that now behind you? On top of that, you were mentioning in your prepared remarks, Jim, that you're looking to do more dual sourcing. Where's the low-hanging fruit there, and how long does that process take?
Yeah. That's a good question. First off, I would say we do have that behind us, the issue that we had in Q4. We are in a much more stable position. We've put in place some very good management systems around a subset of our suppliers that we really monitor on a daily basis in terms of what their production is, what their expected production is, what we should expect from them. We've kinda identified suppliers that would be similar to the ones that we had trouble with in the Q4. We're using some new processes and things to really stay on top of those.
The second thing that, and Sam mentioned it, is that, you know, as we look to dual source more and more, and in some categories or in some areas of our parts, it's not that difficult. You can take things such as plastic-injected parts, metal stamping, wiring harnesses. A lot of that stuff is used in so many different products around the globe, not just appliances, but, you know, electronic, consumer electronics, automobiles, whatever.
The ability to find suppliers who can do it, is relatively don't wanna say easy finding the supplier, then you have to get a supplier qualified. That's probably where the process takes the longest. We do see, and we are actually executing on a lot of great options today.
We do think that in terms of a global supply base as well as local supply bases, there are a lot of good alternatives. We had historically focused on trying to be what I would say is the most efficient in terms of getting as much scale as we could out of a supplier. When you look back on some of this, you say, "Is it worth the one or two pennies per part you might save to lose some of the stability, and what are the additional costs of that?" Now we really look at it from a total cost of what's a supplier, what's it gonna cost if they have a service issue or a, you know, a downtime in one of their factories.
A question here. Yes.
How's competition today? Are we seeing any changes, North America and worldwide? Yeah. The question is: Are we seeing any changes in the competition, either in North America or globally? What I would say is we see the same competitive set in many parts of the world that has been us, it has been LG, it has been Samsung.
It has been, in the U.S., typically GE, who is now owned by Haier. Electrolux is probably pretty similar to what we've seen in the past. We do see in many locations, you'll see maybe more local suppliers every now and then. What they do is you may see them at the lower end as they come into some of the value segments. They may produce for private label brands or other things.
In terms of the large competitors, I would probably say that they're very similar in terms of the set, very similar in terms of the behavior, very similar in terms of the products that they offer. You know, of all those that I highlighted, the one that probably has grown more inorganically has been Haier, as they've done some acquisitions around the globe also, but the rest being relatively stable.
The obvious follow-on to that, your domestic market share took a hit during and immediately following COVID because of supply chain issues and differences in lead times. Your sequential market share has improved over the course of last year. At what point should we expect or do you expect year-on-year market share gains, tangible market share gains that we could more accurately measure?
Yeah. I would expect within 2023, you'll see year-over-year. As Marc kinda talked about on our call, is really our target is to see a progression every quarter as we look at it from, you know, sequential quarters and see a progression of, you know, up to a 0.5 point at least of market share every quarter as we go forward to get back to some of those historical levels.
You know, as I mentioned, part of that's gonna come via the new products that we launch. Part of it's gonna come as we look at where we're investing in our business and where are the areas that we really want to grow. Some of it will come as we focus more resources into some of those under-penetrated areas or higher margin areas, and we'll see growth in those. We really think those are the things we need to do to get that market share back to a healthy level. We're already beginning to see the progression now.
We're out of time. We'll continue this in the breakout session. Thank you, Jim.
Thank you.