W. W. Grainger (GWW) Q2 2026 earnings call transcript

It is now my pleasure to introduce Kyle Bland, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin. Good morning. Welcome to Granger's second quarter 2026 earnings call. With me are D. J. McPherson, Chairman and CEO, and Dean Merriweather, Senior Vice President and CFO. As a reminder, some of our comments today may include forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties.

Additional information regarding factors that could cause actual results to differ materially is included in the company's most recent form, AK, and other peer act reports filed with the SEC. This morning's call includes non-GAAP financial measures, which reflect certain adjustments in previous periods, as noted in the presentation. There were no adjusting items in the second quarter, 2026 period.

We have also included organic revenue adjustments in the presentation, which normalized sales growth to reflect our exit from the UK market, including the Cromwell divestiture and the closure of Zora UK, both of which were completed in the fourth quarter, 2025. Definitions and full reconciliations over non-GAAP financial measures with their corresponding GAAP measures are found in the tables at the end of this presentation and in our earnings release, both of which are available on our IR website.

We will also share results related to Monotaro. Please remember that Monotaro is a public company and follows Japanese GAAP, which differs from U. S. GAAP and is reported in our results one month in arrears. As a result, the numbers discussed will differ from Monotaro's public statements.

Now I'll turn it over to DG.

Thanks, Kyle. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining today. Building on our momentum from the start of the year, we delivered strong performance in the second quarter by executing well and delivering exceptional service to customers. Despite ongoing uncertainty, sales remain strong in both the high-touch and endless assortment segments, and core operating profitability is in line with expectations. While the external landscape remains fluid, we're confident in our ability to manage the impact or remain committed to our pricing tenets.

We also saw a continued strength in the demand environment during the period, with most end markets showing acceleration. As I spend time with customers, I can see this playing out in the way we serve them on site and inside their operations. Recently, I've visited several manufacturing customers where our teams are closely connected to the day-to-day work. We're helping them manage inventory in ways that fit their specific needs, and that is contributing to strong year-over-year growth of these locations.

More and more customers are asking us to help them run their operations more efficiently and solve specific challenges, including areas like safety. One customer, Safety Expertise, was the catalyst for accelerating that partnership.

We're also seeing solid growth from our national accounts in both the U. S. and Canada. On Canada specifically, we have seen tremendous improvement over the past several years as a team to stay focused on two things, serving customers well and building a stronger, more profitable business. They've made great progress improving service, resetting their sales force, and revamping their website, while also diversifying their customer in markets and product offering. These efforts have driven strong sales growth and operating margin recovery to the highest levels we have seen in nearly a decade.

Now, turning to our second quarter results. We delivered another quarter of strong growth and profitability. Results benefited from ongoing operational execution across both segments and an improving market, which helped accelerate volume growth in the period. We are pleased with what we are seeing from our high-touch growth engine and from our efforts within the EA segment to continue propelling the flywheel.

Solo company reported sales for the quarter were up 10.3%, or 13.7% on a daily organic constant currency basis. Operating margin was strong at 16.1%, and diluted EPS finished the quarter up over 20%, inclusive of the impact of IEPA tariff refunds recognized in the period.

Operating cash flow came in at $444 million, which allowed us to return a total of $341 million to Granger shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. Lastly, we are excited to announce that our new Northwest Distribution Center in Oregon began outbound operations in July. This new technology-enabled building gives us another way to get more of the products customers need closer to where and when they need them.

Overall, we're encouraged by the progress we've made across the business, and after our strong first-to-app performance and continued momentum, we are increasing our outlook for the year. With that, I'll turn it over to Dee for a closer look at our financials in the quarter.

Thanks, Dee Dee. Turning to slide 7, you can see the high-level results we had in the second quarter, with total company sales of 10.3% or 13.7% on a daily organic constant currency basis, which included strong growth across high-tech solutions and endless assortment.

Growth margin for the quarter was healthy at 39.5%, up 100 basis points versus the prior year period, as we saw expansion in both segments and recognized a 90 basis point tailwind from IEPA tariff refunds refunds on products directly imported by Grainger. Operating margin was 16.1 percent, up 120 basis points year over year, as gross margin flow through and leverage in endless assortment contributed to results. Both gross margin and operating margin benefited from our exit of the UK market. If you were to normalize for the tariff refund benefit realized in the operating margins were in line with our verbal guide, aided by better-than-expected top-line leverage. Overall, results were strong for the quarter, and we delivered diluted EPS of $12.01, which was up over 20% versus the prior year period.

Moving to segment-level results, the high-touch solution segment delivered sales growth of 11.9% 7.9% on a reported basis or 11.7% on a daily constant currency basis. Results were driven by strong volume growth and healthy price contribution to revenue and also benefited from some project-based spend.

From an in-market perspective, MRO market demand continued to improve in the period. For Granger specifically, we saw broad-based acceleration across nearly all customer groups with strong contributions from manufacturing and government sectors.

This was alongside outsized growth in our contractor and retail end markets, which are both benefiting from data center activities as new facilities are stood up. On profitability, gross profit margin finished the quarter at 41.8% of 80 basis points versus the prior year. Results were driven by the benefit from IEPA tariff refunds and slightly positive mix, although mix came in less favorable than expected on a higher volume of lower margin products and project-related spend. These impacts were partially offset by private label cost headwinds and unfavorable freight as we absorbed the higher cost in the period. Price cost was roughly neutral during the quarter.

On SG&A, we delivered slightly year over year as strong sales and productivity were offset by continued marketing investment and higher payroll and benefits expense, including higher incentive-based compensation, given our strong top-line results. Taking all of this together, operating margin for this segment finished at 17.3% up 70 basis points versus the prior year quarter. All told, we are pleased with the continued strength across the high-tut segment as we move into the second half of the year.

Now focusing on endless assortment segments. Sales increased 13.5% on a reported basis or 20.6% on a daily organic constant currency basis, which normalizes for the closure of our Zoro UK business and adjusts for the impact of the depreciated Japanese yen.

Zoro US was up 18.4% on a daily basis, while Monotaro achieved 24% growth in local days and local constant currency. At a business level, Zorro saw strong growth from its core B2B customers along with higher customer retention rates as our marketing program, both targeted and efficiency, continued to improve. The team remains focused on delivering our core foundational capabilities to improve the assortment, search experience, pricing, and delivery. At Monotaro, Silver Strong will continue growth from enterprise customers coupled with solid acquisition and repeat purchase rates with small and mid-sized businesses.

Additionally, Monotaro benefited from customer pre-buying of certain petroleum-related products ahead of anticipated shortages due to the conflict in the Middle East. This behavior has fully subsided, and our updated guide reflects slower growth in the back half of the year as this benefit moderates.

On profitability, operating margins increased by 160 basis points to 11.5%, with favorability across the segment. Monetary margins were strong at 14% of 80 basis points, and Zorro margins improved to 7.6% of 180 basis points, with both businesses benefiting from healthy top line leverage Overall another great quarter for the endless assortment team As we look to the back half of the year I want to share a brief update on the inflationary environment. We continue to manage the business with the goal of maintaining price cost neutrality over time. With ongoing shifts in the tariff environment, we've had to remain nimble. With With this, in the second quarter, we adjusted prices to reflect the changing tariff landscape, including the rollback of IEFA tariff pricing and offsetting Section 122 tariff impacts.

While we made several changes across our assortment, our May pricing actions were net neutral in total. Also in the quarter, we recognized refunds from the federal government for previously paid IEPA tariffs where Granger was the importer of record.

The majority of this benefit was recognized during the second quarter as a reduction to our cost of goods sold, with a small remainder expected to flow through over the next couple of quarters.

When considering these refunds, it's important to remember that they relate only to tariff paid directly by Granger and represent only a small portion of the many tariff costs that we faced over the last year and a half.

Importantly, these refund proceeds and the price pass on these SKUs only partially offset the costs we absorbed in 2025 related to IEBA.

Separately, we continue to face inflationary pressures from rising freight and product costs due to the conflict in the Middle East. As these pressures persist, we expect to take additional pricing actions in September to help mitigate this impact.

Our September pricing actions will also reflect adjustments related to the recent Section 232 tariff modifications, in addition to new Section 301 tariffs, though we anticipate that these tariff-related changes will be minimal. Following our September pricing actions, the majority of known cost increases will have been addressed. And although the situation remains highly fluid, our team continues to stay focused on adhering to our two core pricing tenets, to maintain market-relevant pricing and to achieve price-cost neutrality over time.

Now turning to our guide. We are raising our guidance to reflect a strong sales momentum along with the impact of tariff refunds. On the top line, this translates to expected daily organic constant currency sales growth between 11.5% and 13%, reflecting our second quarter performance and expectations for continued solid MRO market demand in the second half. Our updated operating margin range has increased versus the prior guide to 15.8% to 16.2%. This includes the tariff refund benefit, most of which was recognized in the second quarter, and improved sales leverage, but is partially offset by anticipated mixed hit wins and cost timing pressures as inflation builds ahead of our September pricing round.

Lastly, rounding out our guide, you can see EPS is expected to be between $45.50 and $47.25, or up over 17% year-over-year at the midpoint.

This represents an improvement of over $1 at the midpoint versus the prior guidance range. We've also updated our supplemental guidance in the appendix, which includes a slight increase in total company operating cash flow at the midpoint compared to the prior guide. We've continued our strong momentum into the third quarter with preliminary July sales up north of 13% on a daily organic constant currency basis.

This start supports our expectation for third quarter sales north of $5 billion or up over 12% on a daily organic constant currency basis, which is 380 basis points lower on a reported basis when normalizing for the U. K. market exit and currency headwinds.

We expect operating margins will be down sequentially in the third quarter compared to the second quarter, largely driven by the lap of tariff refunds. With this, we anticipate third quarter operating margins will be in the mid-15% range for the total company. I'll now hand it back over to DG for his closing remarks.

Thanks, Dee. To wrap things up, we feel good about how the business is operating, and we're confident in our strategy. I'm encouraged by our ability to continue growing profitably in this ever-evolving environment while staying focused on creating value over the long term.

Before I turn it over to Q&A, I want to take a minute to acknowledge the news we shared yesterday that Dee Merriweather has made the personal decision to step down to pursue another opportunity, effective September 4, 2026. On behalf of the company, I want to thank Dee for her many contributions to Granger. Dee has been a trusted advisor guiding us with deep knowledge and sound judgment during her tenure.

With this transition, Lori Thompson, VP controller and principal accounting officer, has been appointed interim CFO, effective September 5. She will also maintain her existing controllership responsibilities. Lori brings strong financial expertise and guidance, and I'm confident in her leadership. The transition has no impact on our day-to-day operations, and D and Lori will partner in a smooth transition over the next couple of weeks. We will begin a search process for the next CFO immediately. We wish to you all the best in the future, and I look forward to working with Lori in the interim.

And with that, we'll open it up for Q&A.

Yeah, again, the vast majority, as we noted, would be – have been a group for and are received. And so in the back half, you know, we think it's going to be fairly immaterial based upon that. and it was very hard to estimate from a quarterly perspective. So we focused mostly on what we could estimate and what we felt was probable at this time, and that's what we booked in Q2.

Okay, and then thinking about the guidance relative to what you reported this quarter and the benefit from the refund, could you just talk about – you mentioned a few of these things. I know we're splitting atoms here, but could you talk about the offsetting factors that caused you to raise full-year gross margin by less than the benefit that you got from the second quarter refunds alone?

You're talking about kind of decomposing the guide a little bit, right, as it relates to gross margins?

And so, yeah, so if you kind of really just start with, you know, where we're at, we noted that the impact in the quarter was about 90 basis points. But if you look at it on a full-year basis, the tariff refunds account for, you know, call it 23 basis points on the year. That was offset by what you hear us talk about higher volume on lower gross margin products or project-based sales that we're incurring with some of our new large customers as we ramp.

You know, that offsets that. So that nets to about 15 basis points. And then we see some continued net headwinds as we go through the year, mostly related to fuel and freight, related to the crisis. And then secondly, we do expect to have less of a mixed benefit in the second half. So we expect that to have some headwinds.

And so that nets that benefit down that we're receiving from the tariff refunds.

I would just add that I think the mixed benefits oftentimes we see, If you look historically, when we are in really hot market times, big projects come through. We've seen quite a bit of that, actually, from customers. And so those tend to be at lower gross margin. They're strong contribution margin. So we expect that's a big part of the change, actually, that we're talking about, and a bit of a drag on gross margin, but not on profitability overall.

And then the freight. If you thought about how we managed tariffs last year, we didn't increase price immediately. We were patient with customers. We started raising them in September substantially, and we got sort of price-cost neutral by January. We're actually price-cost neutral in the quarter this time, but that same pattern will play out in September.

Thank you.

Yeah, so you talked about the push and takes of May, and we basically had zero price change overall for May. We had some ups and downs.

You know, what we're doing in September, we'll add about a point annually, so less than that, obviously, for the balance of the year, maybe 40 basis points or something like that. and for the whole year will be around 4%. We originally said 3% to 4%. We're going to get the high end of that given those increases.

Yeah, so let me start with it shows up in maybe strange places. If you look at our comps, retail will include data centers because some of those companies actually have retail operations, even though the data centers aren't very retail-esque. Our exposure to direct data centers directly is probably less than a percent. We're seeing, obviously, strong growth there. But it's having a bigger impact on the ecosystem. I think for everybody it's probably having a bigger impact. And we see it in construction, different types of construction.

We maybe see it a little bit in the general strength of manufacturing. Hard to quantify, though. So the direct exposure is pretty small, but the exposure overall is probably bigger than that as far as we can tell.

Yeah, I'd say it's more mix, actually, than freight, but it's a little bit of both. So both of those were the complete driver of that. You know, the other thing is, you know, arguably we knew the tariff refunds were coming in. You know, we did not want to get aggressive with freight increases because that doesn't make sense competitively. So we're holding that purposely, and we'll make that up as we go through the bounce of the year. But mix is the bigger part of it, actually, with really big projects and product sales.

Yeah. So any year when we get the forecast incorrect and the market's stronger than we expect or we perform better than we expect, we have headwinds in both management bonus and commissions. We also spent more on marketing in the quarter. We're seeing good returns on that. So those are the three SG&A elements that were higher than we would have expected to start the year. None of them are concerning, to be frank. in the back of the year, we expect some moderation in the outsized cost there, and we expect to be more in line.

That's a lot, Dee. Thank you.

Yeah, as it relates to gross margin specifically, you know, we saw normal seasonality from a gross margin perspective related to, you know, price running off. But as we kind of talked about, we've had some leakage related to fuel cost, so that also, you know, was a factor from Q1 gross margin to Q2, as well as additional private label inventory costs.

You know, we've had, as DG kind of articulated and as we talked about on the call, a lot of moving pieces as it relates to that. So that was also a negative impact. As you noted, you know, the tariff refunds were not known, you know, at the time. And so, you know, that was a benefit. But then that was offset by mix. And so that gets us down, you know, about 50 basis points, Q1 to Q2.

Yeah, you know, as we talked last time, We expect the U-shape to continue with our gross margins. And don't forget, we won't have the tariff impact in Q3 that we have now. And then we'll pick up and have stronger supplier rebates as we end the year.

Thank you.

Yeah, so, you know, it'll still be a headwind. It won't be much different than it was in the first quarter, first half of the year. You know, the issue is, of course, you know, to some degree, private brand has been hit by tariffs, but it's also compressed some of the cost. I would say we've launched the Grainger brand, and that has shown good growth.

And so we're excited by what we're seeing in terms of private brand going forward with many of our products converting to Grainger branded items.

Yeah, it's probably more of an incremental growth play, to be fair. But we had 14 brands previously that were sort of historical, built over decades and decades and decades, I guess. Some of them didn't have customer appeal or didn't even know that they were Grainger-related. And so brands like Dayton will certainly remain, but a lot of the other categories will shift to Grainger and will probably end up with four or five brands at the end of this process. But we're well into that shift at this point.

Yeah, I mean, those are consistent, and we'll start to get an idea about what the price requests are for next year now. So that is coming in, so we'll start to have a little more visibility. We won't talk about that until February, but there hasn't been huge changes. There's been certain categories where we've seen significant increases that are kind of Middle East-centric in terms of where the raw materials come from.

But generally, it's been pretty stable the last couple of months.

Thanks. Thank you.

And did you see any pre elsewhere you know let say in the U Yeah No we did not see any pre in the U We did not see any pre for Zorro It all Monoparo Given their reliance on the Middle East there was a run on mostly PPU, natural glow-up type products. It's roughly 45 million U. S. That was the total magnitude. You never know at the pre-buy how much of that actually plays out going forward. People can continue to buy even after pre-buy. You just never know. but that's sort of the raw magnitude.

But were you able to size it? 45 million. 45.

Yeah. So the way it typically plays out is if there's a customer that we have a relationship and we're actually providing to Amaro and they have a product project, they will ask for help. And sometimes we provide that help. So like I mentioned, in times when there's a lot of activity in the market like there is right now, demand's strong, and particularly around data centers, we've seen significant projects and project business come through. And so it's been a tailwind on revenue. It's been a headwind on gross margin.

That typically doesn't sustain at these levels. I would not say we are going to shift to be a project-focused company, but we do serve customers in a lot of different ways, and we're always doing projects for customers. This year it's just a bit more given some of the market dynamics.

No, yeah, you got it right. They're diluted to gross margin, but they're not diluted to operating margin. You know, part of the reason we're raising revenue, and I think maybe a lot of people are raising revenue right now, is because of the project spend and just the race to get a lot of data centers up and get the electrical infrastructure built.

And so we are certainly seeing a part of that. Like I said, it's not really our focus, but we do support our customers in those efforts. It will be a tailwind from revenue for the remainder of this year, and I would argue maybe further than that given the cycle that this is going to take.

I would say there's two things that we feel really comfortable with the guide, one of which you noted. The other one is, if you recall, we also had some slowdown in government business last year, and so we don't expect that because of the shutdown. We don't expect that to happen again this year or have no view of that in our guide, and so that will also help us from a leverage perspective.

Yeah. So a lot of the skew pruning was around items that just never sold and weren't going to sell and that were not really core to what we're trying to do. We are in a constant pruning period now. We're growing skew count not nearly as fast as we have at times in the past, but we expect it to continue to grow for the next couple of years, but just more modestly.

They're mostly going to be normal course discussions, price increases with our customers. It's not going to be a force majeure.

Yeah. I mean, we think that we've gotten benefit on the top line from pricing, from the market demand and from share gain, and we think all of those have been reasonably strong year-to-date. We would expect that to continue through the balance of the year. The market has turned from negative for several years to clearly positive and maybe low single digits, but maybe not so low single digits now.

It's almost like you're trying to figure out where the puck's moving, but certainly it has gotten stronger as the year has gone along.

No, no. We think that that was more just a point to make the point that the overall tariff increases were much larger than that that we've taken. So it's a small portion of the total that we took, but we don't think there's going to be a lot more results.

Yeah, I mean, we think the project spend this year has been increased our growth rate about 90 basis points.

And high touch, not for the company, but for high touch. We don't see projects spend really at Zorro. So, yeah, that's the sizing of it at this point. And like I said, we always look at overall profitability on those projects. We want to make sure that it's profitable, so that's sort of looking at a net margin perspective, and they generally are.

Thank you. All right. Thank you. I appreciate everybody being on the call. I'll just reiterate, you know, we think that we are taking the right actions and making the right moves to continue to grow, gain share, grow profitably.

There's always puts and takes in the external environment, but generally we try to focus on the long term. We continue to invest in creating better solutions for customers, and that's going to be our focus. And I'd like to thank Dee once again for her time and wish her luck. And I hope everybody has a great rest of the summer.