Global Industrial Company Small-Cap Virtual Conference
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Transcript
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Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us at the Sidoti September 2026 Investor Conference. My name is Anthony Lebiedzinski. I am an equity research analyst here at Sidoti that covers Global Industrial Company, ticker symbol GIC. We are very pleased to have with us today Anesa Chaibi, the CEO of Global Industrial, along with Tex Clark, the CFO, and Mike Smargiassi from Investor Relations. The format for today will be a management presentation for the first 20 or so minutes, followed by Q&A. We will have a total of 30 minutes. For those of you in the audience who would like to ask a question, please type your question into the Q&A box at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and I will read the questions out loud. With no further delay, Anesa, the floor is yours.
Great. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. As Anthony mentioned, Mike Smargiassi and Tex Clark are both with me and will be available to answer questions at the end. As is customary, this page reminds everyone about the precautions to consider on any provided forward-looking statements that may be stated, so I will not read it to you. We will move on. To give you an overview of Global Industrial, we are a leading industrial distributor, and actually, Industrial Distribution just put out their rankings just earlier this week, and we are ranked number 18. That gives you context of our size and scale. During the last 12 months, we delivered $1.4 billion in revenue, and we are very pleased with the top-line momentum in the first half of 2026, with average daily sales up 8.4%.
We are headquartered in Port Washington, New York, which is 20 miles outside of Manhattan, and we have a rich 77-year history. We have roughly 2,000-plus employees in the U.S., Canada, India, China, et cetera. Global Industrial is truly expert in big and bulky, and with our core products requiring LTL delivery, just to give you a sense of the size and scale. We provide a broad product offering consisting of both national and proprietary brands. This year, we have begun specializing our customer interactions to provide products and solutions to our customers for their everyday needs. Our national footprint consists of seven distribution centers in the U.S. and Canada, and we are able to reach roughly 90% of our customers within two days. Lastly, we have a robust e-procurement and e-commerce platform, and the majority of our transactions are online and digital.
When we look and turn to this page, when I arrived 19 months ago, I refreshed the mission, vision, and values of how I envisioned Global Industrial operating. These core principles are what guide our behavior and actions on a day-to-day basis. Most importantly, it aligns the company to enable growth going forward. At its core now, we act as one team to enable customer success by delivering value. We are on this journey to become more customer-centric and deliver exceptional value while giving back to the communities where we live and work. A recent example of this type of engagement is last month, we partnered with Richard Childress Racing to help raise awareness for K9s For Warriors and their important work in supporting first responders and veterans. We featured K9s on the Global Industrial-branded NASCAR and drove media engagement to provide national exposure for K9s' mission.
It's a great example of finding synergies across our partnerships and engaging partners and associates for a terrific cause. Lastly, we reframed our values, anchoring on driving success for our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. What's new or different in our approach? This represents success in 2026 and beyond has been guided by transforming into a more customer-centric organization. It's the foundation of our growth as we go forward. We're focused and realigned our team to deliver value to the customer through repositioning ourselves to provide a unique, personalized experience through specialization, offering the right solutions and products through product expansion, and providing exceptional end-to-end customer experiences with enhanced services and solutions. These actions have positioned us to capture greater share of wallet along with product category expansion to generate operating leverage from our current operations and investments.
We are having success so far, and this strategy is gaining momentum and is reflected in the strong average daily sales growth of the last three quarters. Turning to this slide, we participate in a large, highly fragmented market with more than 4,000 distributors. As I stated earlier, we're currently ranked at number 18. We're becoming more specialized in each industry vertical where we have some concentration. As you see above, we serve industrial, commercial, retail, public sector, healthcare, hospitality, and multifamily. We're becoming more focused on understanding our customers' unique needs and tailoring the experience that we offer to them. We have a broad and diversified customer base, with no customer being more or greater than 2% of our sales overall.
We have a significant opportunity to expand the total addressable market we pursue by just naturally expanding into adjacencies, product adjacencies, and/or verticals. By further penetrating the verticals that we serve will allow us to further gain greater share of wallet and the ability to identify new opportunities with our customers. We have a robust offering that we provide. We're well-positioned with a wide product assortment to capture that share. Our core categories where we have a long and rich history include, you can see on the left at the top 10 categories, for example, storage and shelving, material handling, janitorial maintenance, safety and security, et cetera. These 10 categories generate the majority of our revenue, and yet we still have significant expansion opportunity as we go forward.
We're building out MRO and consumables that you see on the right-hand side, whether it's pack and ship or safety or tools and instruments and so forth, and it's really to expand our solutions and products beyond what we offer today in order to serve more of our customers' needs. Another key strength is our private label brands, which are made to exceed. We have a robust and longstanding experience with private label offerings. We started the private label business back in the 1980s and have more than 45 years of experience. We operate within a global supply chain, and these products represent 40% of sales with a margin premium. The products are designed to deliver differentiated value for our customers with the exceptional quality at an attractive price point. Overall, we consider this a core competency that provides strong point of differentiation along with the economics and profits overall.
A representative sample of some of these new recent product launches are shown here. As you can see, it ranges from, say, electric pallet jacks to recirculating water floor scrubbers, plastic guardrails, et cetera. We developed these products to enable customers to address their ongoing needs. We have a team of engineers, roughly 20-plus engineers, that are converting customer feedback and challenges into differentiated new products that we bring to market on an ongoing basis. We are always striving to innovate and further enhance our proprietary brand offerings through product development and have a long-established track record of doing so. As you can see, our recent performance is shown here. Since arriving at Global Industrial, we have focused on accelerating our top-line performance.
With the strategic changes and realigned go-to-market, we have achieved high single-digit average daily sales results for the last three quarters, driven by price, but more importantly, by volume, as well as where we have captured and gained share, which reflects the execution against the strategy, and the strategy that we are taking to market is working for us. Our gross margins have been very stable in the mid-30s, and we are focused on driving operating leverage. I have been pleased with the team's ability to maintain and manage the margin profile despite having to navigate and mitigate tariffs, transportation costs, fuel costs, and all the other macroeconomic and geopolitical disruptions. Now turning to the position in the market. The overall evolving industry trends play very well to our strengths. Despite the rapidly changing marketplace, we have managed this very well with strong margin performance.
Whether it was the 2025 tariffs, shipping inflation, our ability to react quickly, driven by pricing discipline and analytics, is something that now we are very steeped in. We continue to leverage our strong supplier relationships and sourcing diversification for multiple product lines. We are fortunate to have a strong balance sheet that enables us to manage disruption and these macroeconomic shocks. We are laser-focused on the acceleration of our e-commerce for business-to-business, specifically e-procurement. This plays directly to our strengths, with more than 60% of transactions being taken online. This shift to digital and an expected elevated B2B customer expectations that are evolving online plays to our customer focus and the capabilities that we already possess. We are also embracing AI and automation deployment where it makes sense, and we are actively piloting AI in specific segments and functions within Global Industrial. So how are we delivering growth?
Over the course of the past year and a half, we have been shifting to better understand our customers and their ongoing needs. We have a comprehensive approach to our customers' relationships, which drive retention and expand share of wallet. We want to become a true partner and an extension of their team to deliver a solutions-oriented approach to their everyday needs. We are currently striving to remove friction out of the experience. We have an enhanced customer engagement that we take to market through unified marketing, sales, and merchandising, and the deployment of our new CRM to drive stickier customer relationships. By better understanding our customers, we can scale the company and deliver profitable growth. So how do we intend to do this? We have a multi-pronged approach for our go-to market, and we are becoming more focused on the identification and targeting across all these channels.
e-commerce remains our leading and largest channel. We continuously make adjustments to our digital marketing to improve return on investment. We have 200-plus inside sales representatives providing a one-to-one experience for our customers. Our group purchasing organization and our efforts there, launched in 2022, now is poised to achieve over $100 million in revenue this year due to organic growth. We've built a team and expanded our GPO relationships in both private and public sector, which we are excited about the overall opportunity and the potential. It really helps elevate the relationships to a more senior decision maker that is important for our success going forward. In 2026, we launched a small outside sales team, which is identifying and uncovering new opportunities that were previously underserved by us.
With this go-to-market strategy that I've highlighted, our overarching new strategy that we're going to market with, it's a reflection of, on this slide, depicted here so that this is the refinement of the overall strategy. It really is, in January of 2026, I realigned the sales, marketing, and merchandising teams around key industry verticals, which strengthened our value proposition for both existing and new customers. This refined strategy has three primary areas of focus. Specialization, really identifying target customers and tailoring that approach. Our expansion is really looking at adjacent maintenance, repair, and operating product categories, expanding the assortment to be able to take those to market as well to further penetrate those accounts and capture greater share of wallet.
Services is taking what we already provide from an assembly perspective and installation perspective for project-based opportunities, and really reinforcing that value add and that differentiation. We have made significant progress advancing the strategy, and we've delivered high single-digit growth the last three quarters, along with strong strategic account growth during the first half of 2026. It is designed to deepen customer integration and support sustainable organic growth. Now turning to the financial reviews, what you see depicted here is really we are focused. I'm sorry, I jumped a slide. We are a very capital-light, strong, free cash flow business. We have excellent cash flow generation, free cash flow generation, and we have a debt-free balance sheet, which provides significant flexibility for us. With that said, our capital allocation prioritization is as follows. We reinvest back into the business, which we continue to do on an ongoing basis.
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