Brady Corp (BRC) 2022 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Q1 2022 Brady Corporation Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Ms. Ann Thornton. Ma'am, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to the Brady Corporation fiscal 2022 first quarter earnings conference call. The slides for this morning's call are located on our website at www.bradycorp.com/investors. We will begin our prepared remarks on Slide #3.

Please note that during this call, we may make comments about forward-looking information. Words such as expect, will, may, believe, forecast and anticipate are just a few examples of words identifying a forward-looking statement. It's important to note that forward-looking information is subject to various risk factors and uncertainties, which could significantly impact expected results. Risk factors were noted in our news release this morning and in Brady's fiscal 2021 Form 10-K, which was filed with the SEC in September.

Also, please note that this teleconference is copyrighted by Brady Corporation and may not be rebroadcast without the consent of Brady. We will be recording this call and broadcasting it on the Internet. As such, your participation in the Q&A session will constitute your consent to being recorded.

I'll now turn the call over to Brady's President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Nauman. Michael?

Thank you, Ann. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. This morning, we released our fiscal 2022 first quarter financial results, which showed strong sales growth and profitability. Even in this challenging environment caused by the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 virus and the associated inflation and logistical challenges, the Brady team once again performed quite well. I'm proud of how the team was able to navigate this challenging economic environment and deliver for both our customers and our shareholders.

This quarter, we grew sales by a very healthy 16%, and we increased earnings per share by 4.7%. If you exclude the impact of amortization, then our EPS was up even more significantly at 9.1%. In addition to this solid revenue and earnings growth, we have a rock-solid balance sheet. This quarter, we returned more than $30 million to our shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, and we are still in a net cash position of more than $90 million.

In our WPS business, sales were down by 7.8%. The sales reduction was almost exclusively the result of very challenging comparables. Last year, our WPS team did an excellent job of providing COVID-related products to our customers. The sale of these products, which included social distance signage and personal protective equipment, has since waned, thus resulting in challenging comparables. The best way to look at our WPS business is to compare sales to the pre-COVID period of fiscal 2020, which would show that our current sales levels exceeded those historic pre-COVID levels.

In our identification solutions business, we continue to post excellent results with sales growth of 25.4% and segment profit growth of 21.2%. And if you exclude the impact of amortization expense, segment profit would have been up a robust 26.4%. Our identification solutions business is a very strong franchise and continues to perform extremely well.

As we look ahead, our priorities are to first drive organic sales growth and ensure we are serving our customers extremely well during this period of challenging logistics. Second, it is to take the necessary cost and pricing actions to offset the impacts of this inflationary environment and return to pre-pandemic gross margin levels. Third is to integrate our recent acquisitions. And finally, to deploy our capital to drive long-term shareholder value.

In our ID solutions business, we're embracing these priorities by increasing our investments in R&D, including the incremental R&D necessary to fully realize the benefits from our recent acquisitions. We are certainly seeing benefits from our historical R&D focus, as we're launching new products at an increasing rate, and we're continuing to distance ourselves from our competitors who neither have the scale nor financial wherewithal to invest this heavily in R&D. We're also improving our online presence by upgrading our websites and investing more in digital marketing talent, all while expanding our sales force and expanding geographically into underserved markets.

We're driving significant automation enhancements within our factories and distribution centers, which in a period marked by scarcity of labor and rising costs, this continuous push to drive automation is critical. Our strong new product lineup, investments to drive sales and our positive momentum in driving efficiencies give us confidence that our ID solutions business will continue to generate strong organic sales growth with very healthy margins in fiscal 2022 and beyond.

In our workplace safety business, we're capitalizing our common web platform by using our much stronger market intelligence to quickly adapt to changing market dynamics. We've increased our investments in new product development and the pace of new product launches in an effort to increase the percentage of proprietary high-value products sold to our customers, which will have a positive impact on our profit margins. And we're intentionally increasing our advertising spend and our headcount in certain businesses that have lagged in an effort to drive future revenues. These investments resulted in reduced segment profit this quarter, but will result in increased revenues as we progress throughout the fiscal year. Our workplace safety business is headed in the right direction, and I'm confident that the changes we've been implementing and the investments we've been making will help drive long-term sales and profit growth.

While we're investing in organic sales, we're also working to streamline our SG&A cost structure, so that we can fund our sales growth initiatives while still driving down SG&A expense, and we're focused on becoming a more efficient manufacturer by automating wherever we can. In addition to our focus on driving organic sales growth and becoming a more efficient organization, we're also actively integrating the 3 acquisitions that we completed in the fourth quarter last year, which includes building out our industrial track and trace solution set. Much of the increased R&D that you see relates to the investments necessary to build out a comprehensive solution that will help move us into faster-growing end markets and accelerate sales growth for years to come.

I'm confident we'll continue to see revenue growth in future quarters. However, we're seeing inflationary pressures across many different cost categories from wages to freight to raw materials, and we've had challenges securing supply of certain products, including chips, and selected products for our supply chain originates in Asia. In general, we've been overcoming these shortages, but it has resulted in increased freight charges as we've used airfreight more than we have in the past.

Even with these inflationary pressures, our gross profit margin was still an enviable 48.2%, which was right in line with the 48.2% experienced in the fourth quarter of last year. But our cost increases have neither been large enough nor fast enough to fully keep up with rising costs, resulting in our gross margins being down around 70 basis points on a year-over-year basis. As such, we're putting through additional price increases across many of our product lines to try to catch up with the rapidly increasing costs. We believe that these gross margin challenges are temporary and that in the near-term, we will return to our historical gross margin levels of closer to 50%.

Even with this challenging logistical environment, Brady is well positioned as we look through the rest of this fiscal year and beyond. I'm confident in our ability to deliver results to our customers, our employees and, of course, our shareholders.

I'll now turn the call over to Aaron to give a little more detail on our financial results, then I'll return to provide specific commentary about our identification solutions and workplace safety businesses. Aaron?

Thank you, Michael. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. I'll start the financial review on Slide #3. Sales in the first quarter were $321.5 million, which was an increase of 16% when compared to the same quarter last year, and GAAP pre-tax earnings increased 5.8% to $44.7 million. Impacting earnings this quarter was a significant increase in amortization expense from the acquisitions completed at the end of last year. If you exclude amortization expense from all periods presented, then our pre-tax earnings would have increased by 11.3% to $48.5 million.

GAAP diluted EPS was $0.67, which was an increase of 4.7% over last year's first quarter. And if you exclude amortization expense, then EPS would have increased by 9.1% to $0.72 this quarter compared to $0.66 in the first quarter of last year. So financially, Q1 was another strong quarter, even with the logistical challenges and the inflationary pressures that Michael just mentioned.

Moving to Slide #4, you'll find our quarterly sales trends. Our 16% sales increase consisted of organic sales growth of 7%, an increase from acquisitions of 8.3% and an increase from foreign currency translation of 0.7%. Organic sales growth in our ID solutions business was a robust 13.2% in Q1. Our workplace safety business benefited from strong COVID-related product sales in last year's first quarter, thus creating tough comparables. As a result of these tough comparables, we saw a decline in WPS organic sales of 8.6% this quarter.

If we compare our sales levels to the pre-pandemic period, which for us would be the first quarter of fiscal 2020, you'll see that our total sales are up a full 12% over pre-pandemic levels. And if you compare sales by division, you'll see that identification solutions is 15.6% above pre-pandemic levels and workplace safety is 1.2% above pre-pandemic levels. This strong performance, not only against last year, but also against the pre pandemic period is a direct result of the investments that we've been making and the strong sales momentum that we developed just before the pandemic hit.

Turning to Slide #5, you'll see our gross profit margin trending. Our gross profit margin was 48.2% this quarter, compared to 48.9% in the first quarter of last year. As Michael mentioned, we're seeing inflationary pressures, and we're finding it difficult to fill open manufacturing roles, but we're automating wherever we can. We're driving efficiencies at a strong pace, and we're putting through targeted price increases.

On Slide #6, you'll find our SG&A expense trending. SG&A was $96.7 million this quarter compared to $83 million in the first quarter of last year. SG&A was heavily impacted by a full quarter of expense from the 3 acquisitions completed near the end of last year, along with the increase in amortization expense that I just mentioned. Amortization expense was $1.4 million in the first quarter of last year and was $3.8 million in the first quarter of this year. And as a percent of sales, SG&A was 30.1% this quarter compared to 30.0% in the first quarter of last year. So effectively, right in line with the prior year. However, if you exclude amortization expense from both the current year and the prior year, then SG&A would have declined from 29.5% of sales last year to 28.9% of sales this year.

Slide #7 is the trending of our investments in research and development. This quarter, we invested $13.9 million in R&D. We're committed to increasing our R&D investments as we continue to see opportunities for incremental R&D within our core business and specifically in building out a comprehensive industrial track and trace platform that encompasses our printers, high-quality materials, RFID scanners and barcode scanners. These investments in R&D are critical to help propel Brady's long-term sales growth and protect our gross profit margins.

Slide #8 illustrates our pre-tax income trends. Pre-tax earnings increased 5.8% on a GAAP basis and increased 11.3% if you exclude amortization expense from all periods.

Slide #9 illustrates our after-tax income and EPS trends. As I mentioned, our GAAP EPS was $0.67 this quarter compared to $0.64 in last year's first quarter, an increase of 4.7%. And if you exclude the after-tax impact of amortization, our EPS would have increased by an even stronger 9.1%.

On Slide #10, you'll find a summary of our cash generation. We generated $27.5 million of cash flow from operating activities and free cash flow was $16.2 million this quarter. Our underlying cash flow was strong, but we intentionally invested in both inventories as well as capital expenditures. This quarter, we purchased 2 previously leased manufacturing facilities for a total cash outlay of $7.6 million. Both of these facility purchases were ROI positive and will help secure our long-term future. This quarter, we also continued to increase inventories as we've been intentionally prioritizing customer service and product availability over trying to optimize inventory levels and risk running out of critical materials. Over the last 6 months, we've increased our inventories by approximately $30 million.

Now if you'll turn to Slide 11, you can see the impact that Brady's historically strong cash generation has had on our balance sheet. Even after returning more than $30 million to our shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, having heightened CapEx and intentionally increasing inventory levels, on October 31, we were still in a net cash position of more than $90 million. Our strong balance sheet puts us in a fantastic position to execute additional value-enhancing activities, including investing in R&D, completing additional acquisitions and returning funds to our shareholders.

Our approach to capital allocation has not changed and has been serving us well. First, we use our cash to fully fund organic sales and efficiency opportunities throughout the economic cycle. This includes investing in new product development, sales-generating resources, IT improvements, capability-enhancing capital expenditures and CapEx to further automate our facilities. We will also -- sorry, we will absolutely keep funding these investments where it makes sense and where the investments are ROI positive. And second, we focus on returning cash to our shareholders in the form of dividends. We've now increased our annual dividend for 36 consecutive years, which puts us in a pretty elite group of companies. After fully funding organic investments and dividends, we then deploy our cash in a disciplined manner for either acquisitions, where we believe that we have strong synergistic opportunities or for buybacks when we see a disconnect in our view of intrinsic value versus Brady's trading price.

Slide #12 summarizes our guidance for the year ending July 31, 2022. Our full year diluted earnings per share guidance, excluding amortization, remains unchanged at a range of $3.12 per share to $3.32 per share. On a GAAP basis, our full year diluted EPS guidance also remains unchanged at a range of $2.90 per share to $3.10 per share. Included in our GAAP earnings per share guidance is an increase in after-tax amortization expense of approximately $6 million. After-tax amortization increases from about $5.5 million in fiscal 2021 to about $11.5 million in fiscal '22, which is a delta of about $0.12 per share.

As we look at phasing throughout the rest of this fiscal year, we anticipate our short-term gross profit margin challenges to persist throughout our fiscal second quarter. And history shows that our second quarter is seasonally our lowest quarter of the year and generally has earnings per share below that of Q1. As we move beyond the second quarter, we expect to see increased benefits from our pricing actions as well as increased benefits from our many efficiency and automation projects. As a result, we continue to expect that the majority of our earnings per share growth will come in the third and fourth quarters of this year.

We also expect total sales growth to exceed 12% for the full year ending July 31, 2022, which is inclusive of both organic sales growth as well as sales growth from the recently completed acquisitions. We'll continue to make the investments necessary to drive organic sales growth. We'll continue to search for acquisitions that advance our strategies and will continue to drive sustainable efficiency gains, while being tight on nonrevenue-generating expenses.

As for capital allocation, we'll keep investing in our organic business. We'll keep investing in our industrial track and trace initiatives. We'll continue to return funds to our shareholders through dividends and opportunistic buybacks. We did just buy back $18.9 million worth of shares last quarter, and we'll continue to look for acquisitions where the price is right and the strategic fit is clear. We have a strong balance sheet, and we'll use it as a tool to drive long-term shareholder value.

Potential risks to this guidance, among others, include the strengthening of the U.S. dollar versus other major currencies such as the euro or the British pound, worsening logistics that don't allow us to meet our commitments to our customers and further inflationary pressures that we cannot offset in a timely enough manner.

I'll now turn the call back to Michael to cover our divisional results and to provide some closing comments before the Q&A session. Michael?

Thank you, Aaron. Slide #13 outlines the first quarter financial results for our identification solutions business. IDS sales increased 25.4% to $248.6 million. This very robust sales growth is comprised of organic growth of 13.2%, acquisition growth of 11.6% and an increase of 0.6% from foreign currency translation. Organic sales in our IDS division were once again very strong, not only versus the first quarter of last year, but also against previous sequential quarters. And on the cost side, our strong focus on sustainable efficiency gains partially offset the input cost increases that we've been experiencing.

Segment profit as a percentage of sales was 19.6%, which was down from 20.3% last year. However, if you exclude the sizable increase in amortization that Aaron mentioned, then segment profit as a percentage of sales would have increased from 21% of sales to 21.1% of sales, so an increase of about 10 basis points compared to the first quarter of last year.

Regionally, organic sales in Asia were strong this quarter with growth of over 15% compared to the first quarter of last year. This is the fourth consecutive quarter of Asian organic sales growth in excess of 10%. Organic sales were also up more than 15% in EMEA, despite several lockdowns continuing throughout most of the first quarter. Our European team once again did an excellent job driving sales growth, while handling the period interruptions caused by the lockdowns. We also had organic sales growth of nearly 12% in the Americas. We saw growth in all product lines and geographies throughout the quarter, and we were especially pleased with the bounce back in our health care product lines, where organic sales growth increased approximately 11%. In general, the sales trends in IDS are very positive.

Our commitment to R&D remains a high priority. We've ratcheted up our investments to build a complete industrial track and trace solution. And although we're probably a full 2 years away from having our complete track and trace solution, we've already been experiencing very nice synergies from our recent acquisitions, and we expect these sales synergies to only increase from here on out due to the complementary nature of our product portfolios and the more complete product offerings at Code, Magicard and Nordic ID bring to Brady. These acquisitions are performing slightly better-than-expected and bring us valuable technologies that help us round out our product offerings and make Brady more valuable to our customers.

Clearly, we're devoting a significant amount of time and money to our track and trace product offerings, but we are not sacrificing R&D investments in other areas such as printers and materials. We continued our steady stream of new printer introductions by launching the J4300 Brady Jet Label Printer. This inkjet printer combines with Brady's high-efficiency proprietary materials to balance the safety and complexity of compliance labels with the demand of industrial environment. Our industrial inkjet printers save our customers' time by quickly and easily creating compliant, long-lasting photo quality labels, signs and tags that are needed to create a safer, more efficient workplace. It's a combination of our steady stream of best-in-class printers plus Brady's high-performance materials that sets Brady apart from our competition. From barcodes to extremely small text to perfect photo quality images, our customers' most important information needs to be visible and needs to stay put in any type of environment. Simply stated, Brady's printers and materials are all about high-performance in the harshest of environments.

Our R&D pipeline is strong, and we continue to launch innovative new solutions that help our customers solve problems and be more efficient and effective. I'm excited about what we're doing in our ID solutions business and how our acquisitions of Code, Nordic ID and Magicard will further accelerate our growth. We're improving our customer service, investing in our future and streamlining the rest of our cost structure. These positive revenue trends, combined with our strong cost discipline, will help offset inflationary pressures and paint a bright future for our IDS division.

Moving to Slide #14, you'll find a summary of workplace safety financial performance. WPS sales did decline 7.8%, which consisted of an organic sales decline of 8.6% and an increase from foreign currency of 0.8%. This sales decline was primarily driven by challenging comparables to last year's first quarter. Our WPS business performed extremely well and supplied our customers with a great deal of COVID-19-related products during the pandemic last year, and the demand for these types of products has declined substantially since then.

Our WPS sales were $72.9 million this quarter, which were above the pre-pandemic sales experienced in the first quarter of fiscal 2020. Even in these challenging times with periodic shutdowns, our European WPS team did an outstanding job of increasing its customer base. And for those customers who initially came to us to purchase COVID-related products, our team has done a nice job providing these same customers with our core safety and identification product as well.

Our Australian business performed similar to our European business. During the pandemic, our Australian business grew organic sales over 10% in last year's first quarter. Looking back the challenging comparables, we were pleased with this quarter's sales volumes as they were above pre-pandemic levels. Over the last several quarters, we've increased our Australian customer base, and we continue to find opportunities to enhance our digital marketing approach to ensure that we retain our new customers and turn them into long-term repeat customers.

The sale of COVID-related products declined in North America as well this quarter, and this decline was not fully offset by our non-COVID product offerings, thus leading to a decline in organic sales in the Americas. And as I alluded to earlier, we've made investments to improve certain of our lagging businesses in WPS, including our business in the U.S. that primarily serves micro businesses. We've incurred start-up costs to open a new facility in the U.S. We've invested in headcount, and we're also investing in additional advertising. All in, these incremental investments were approximately $2.5 million. These investments negatively impacted WPS' profitability this quarter, but we believe that these investments are critical to return our WPS business to sustainable long-term profitable growth.

In addition to these investments, our WPS business also experienced gross margin compression as a result of raw materials, freight and wage inflation, as I mentioned. Similar to our IDS business, we're taking actions to offset these cost increases. WPS' segment profit was $2.3 million this quarter compared to $8 million in last year's first quarter. This reduction in segment profit was directly related to the reduced sales volumes, the incremental investments that I just mentioned as well as significant cost pressures.

Our WPS team members are listening to their customers to identify what they need. They're modifying their marketing campaigns to reach entirely new customers in entirely new industries, and they're working hard to address underperforming businesses within the portfolio. Our workplace safety business has one more quarter of moderately difficult comparables ahead of it, but we're laying the foundation for a solid recovery. I'm proud of the role that Brady played and continues to play in this long, ever-changing fight against COVID-19.

Our identification solutions and workplace safety products help companies with social distancing, our products help schools reopen safely and safety and identification products were used by our frontline workers all around the globe. And now our products are helping our customers increase efficiency to help them meet their own set of customer demand. This pandemic is not over, and the financial impact stemming from the pandemic are certainly not over. Throughout the pandemic, we invested in growth and efficiencies, and it is a continual level of investment that will enable us to keep this strong positive momentum.

Brady is in an enviable financial position. We're coming off of record EPS here. Our earnings are up, and our balance sheet is very strong. We're in a net cash position even after making 3 acquisitions towards the end of last year and returning more than $30 million to our shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends this quarter. We will continue to invest in R&D, sales-generating resources and capacity-enhancing CapEx, all while being very tight on nonrevenue-generating expenses and aggressively working through global logistical issues and inflationary forces.

I'm very proud of how our team performed throughout this challenging period. Their ability to deal with uncertainty, think on their feet and solve problems quickly, all while never compromising the long-term has built a solid foundation for Brady's future.

With that, I'd like to now start the Q&A. Operator, would you please provide instructions to our listeners?

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Michael McGinn of Wells Fargo.

I wanted to go -- talk about workplace safety for a second. So you mentioned sales are kind of in line with those pre-COVID levels. And I'm wondering if holding the line on workplace -- the workplace safety business, those sales is the goal versus identification solutions. If you strip out the acquisitions, it's materially above pre-COVID levels. Is workplace safety core to shareholder value?

Great question, Michael. We are working hard to really change the profile of WPS in a significant and meaningful way. We are investing significantly in R&D. We're investing in in-sourcing key products. We're investing and getting closer to our customers. We believe that we have a value-add equation there that is unique in the marketplace, as we execute these changes. It is going to take time. We are already down that path. We're excited about what we see from that, but this is not a quick situation. And they've also been playing more significantly than IDS in that, a, a much larger percentage of their products are brought in; and b, a much larger percentage of their products come from Asia. So they have both logistical and cost pressures there.

So we absolutely see more short-term difficulties in that business, but we do believe that it is a business that, overall, we can continue to provide significant shareholder value over the long term. That said, I want to be clear on all of our businesses. We evaluate our portfolio. We have, in the past, looked at some businesses that didn't make since putting into our portfolio. We will continue to do that. We are very strongly cognizant of our critical need to make sure that we're always providing our shareholders with the most significant return for their investment.

And then switching gears to the gross margin conversation in the chips. You mentioned being able to kind of maybe hold the line of 50% gross margin last quarter, not a whole lot of noise from chips, and you mentioned being proactive. What changed quarter-to-quarter? And does this current situation alleviate? Or does it push you to make more of a 80-20 portfolio pruning approach to you need to sunset some legacy products here to kind of make way for the newer product suites?

Well, it's excellent. Things are changing rapidly. I'm sure you're hearing that across the board. We have very good connections throughout all industrial business base. And we know that what we're dealing with is certainly not unique, but the challenges of logistics, as I mentioned last quarter, I believe, hopefully, I did -- I'd have to go back and listen to the tape. We do think we will last for 18 to 24 months. That is not a guarantee of timing, but it is our latest belief and our continued latest belief on how this will impact things. What that means is product sets even in IDS that are more dependent, we have those on Asian imported products are dealing with much larger sourcing difficulties and also timing difficulties. We have made a lot of proactive steps. I know for a fact that in many ways, we're able to service our customers better than our competition today, and it is our goal to continue to do that.

But as far as pruning products, we look at that regularly throughout my tenure. At Brady, we've approved a number of products and continue to look at that cycle and make sure we're offering our customers the best and the brightest. As an example, with our printers years ago when I first got here, we would allow the products to really just run the life before developing new ones. We have an extremely strong pipeline, road map, and we make sure that we are always upgrading our products on a reliable basis, so we never experienced that. So we've created a very natural pruning process with all of our products that really look at life cycle capabilities. So for instance, things like software upgraded much more rapidly, firmware and then hardware. And we have a cadence, depending on the product sets and the markets to do that.

But to be unequivocal, yes, we are taking this opportunity to look at all of our products to make sure that it's a product that still makes sense in the long-term marketplace. As you come out of a downturn like a pandemic or any other downturn or you look at workplace changes that have come out of this, you have to be cognizant of the fact that our customers do have changing needs. And we believe a lot of our products are becoming more digital, more focused on interconnectivity, more system approach. And therefore, that does lead to pruning in the other direction as well.

Our next question comes from Steve Ferazani of Sidoti.

I did want to follow-up with a question about workplace safety. You mentioned the $2.5 million of investments in the quarter, but those sound like more like expected ongoing costs every quarter. So it sounds like to get your margin back to pre-COVID levels. You're going to have to get -- [doesn’t go up] substantially.

Steve, those are actually one-time costs. Those are absolutely one-time costs. We're careful. And as you know, through our history and your knowledge of our history, we are very careful not to bucketize costs that are not one-time as one-time. In this case, the majority of those expenses, the vast majority related to opening up a new facility that is already proving itself logistically to be tremendous help in us regrowing that business in particular. As you know, microbusinesses in the U.S. were dramatically disproportionately impacted.

But we're already seeing the green shoots that I spoke about 6, 9 months ago that we would see. We're already seeing them from new start-ups. The good news about having a lot of cash right now in society is that the entrepreneurial spirit in the U.S. is alive and well. And we are definitely seeing new businesses starting up that benefit from our product sets. And we've repositioned that business to be located in an area that is very advantageous to be much more successful even than we were in the past before the pandemic. So no, those are definitely one-time costs.

Okay. Fair enough. Thanks for clarifying. In terms of, clearly, logistics problems, and we've heard, obviously, going through the 3Q conference calls, we've heard this across the board. But they're clearly worse than they were 3 months ago. You're maintaining guidance. I'm just trying to figure out are you figuring out more workarounds? Are you just getting a sense that maybe you -- it sounds like you don't see an end to it. So I'm just trying to figure out why maintain guidance if logistics problems are getting at least worse in the near term?

Well, just to speak more specific about logistics, they vary by business, by percentage of imported products, by location. So let me give you an example in Australia, everything, not everything, but we certainly import from Europe, the U.S. and Asia, a significantly larger amount of products than we do from other locations, their logistics, their shipping costs, things like that are up incredibly. Even across country in Australia, the shipping costs are up large amounts. Historically, as I've told you in the past, I believe last quarter, I can count on 2% as the shipping cost number throughout most of my history in international businesses, and it is way up depending on the business above that.

So those are not going to go away. We definitely see those continuing to be impacted. Obviously, fuel rates, things like that will change things, but we are anticipating that our costs remain up for an extensive period of time. In addition, suppliers are having lots of different pressures from labor inflation to core material cost inflation that they are, in some cases, passing on more or less aggressively. And we are certainly very aggressive about making sure we have a cost-effective and significantly positive supply base, but we don't see that going away. And so, where we're pushing is on things like automation, we're excelling.

I think that you are aware, we've just introduced and literally are just almost fully completely functional on our inventory storage system in our major North American distribution center. This is both a way to rapidly increase our ability to be productive, but also to significantly reduce our costs. We're able to get products out to our customers quicker at a higher quality rate because of this, but also less dependent on labor that is difficult to find and the costs are increasing. So our automation efforts from that to our machinery equipment, they are all really -- many of them are coming to fruition that we're working on before the pandemic started. So I believe we're ahead of a lot of our competition, but we continue to invest in that area as well.

And then the last lever that is very significant is we look at the value of our products to our customers, the costs that we face, and we go to them understanding that they're facing challenges as well and make sure that our prices are aligned with what the value we provide is and are increasing those across the board, but relative to each product set. We're not a peanut butter type of company. We're not a peanut butter approach. We're looking at all the value statements we provide and driving our prices based on that.

So those levers, we are working on very hard. Our teams are very resourceful. Without getting into specifics, I literally heard a brilliant idea yesterday that will provide great product for our customer at the same price but greatly reduce our cost structure on it. So we've got a lot going on in that area. So we are confident that although we've told you, the second quarter is still going to be a challenge, but the third and fourth quarters we see a definite road map to our future, as we projected.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Keith Housum of Northcoast Research.

Michael, just kind of elaborating on the previous conversation here. Does it sound like this quarter or perhaps the second quarter will be like the low point of your margin pressures and you perhaps have a visibility or line of visibility into it creeping back up?

Keith, I think our biggest opportunity set is in regard to revenue. I really feel very good about our ability to continue to drive our revenue. I don't have a perfect crystal ball. I know I've used that analogy with you in years past. I don't have a perfect crystal ball, but what I do know is that we're pulling all the right levers to accomplish that goal. I'm not going to give you a perfect prognosis of, hey, our margins are going to be X, Y and Z by the third or fourth quarter. But I think in combination with revenue increases and really improving pricing and improving our cost structure and our logistic structure, I do feel confident that we'll be able to continue down the path that we're on for the guidance we've given.

Okay. And you referenced some challenges getting some products in the door as well as some challenges hiring the right amount of people. Is there a sense that you lost out on some revenue during the quarter because of those challenges? Or did you guys [find this] cost you more to get it done?

Yes and yes. It definitely costs a lot more. Without giving specific products, we've been air shipping products we never shipped before. I can also tell you some of those products are now on ships in addition to air shipping. So we're -- there were some key products we absolutely needed to get to our customers. Our first goal is to get them to our customers even though the cost may not be what we want, but we want to get them to our customers. And so, we did do that with a lot of air shipping. We currently do have some of those key products on ships again, thank goodness. But what that means is we were able to get ahead of the curve and produce enough extra that we could still keep shipping by air, but put a bunch on ships. So that is absolutely true in that regard. We definitely moved, the first and foremost.

Now did we ship everything we wanted to ship? No, we didn't. But I will tell you, I was personally amazed at the herculean effort at some of our factories to close out October, amazed. It was a tremendous effort. And it made me literally just proud of all our people of how hard they worked, how driven they were. We've got a very motivated team. And they have a lot of pride of getting to our customers what they need, and they don't want to let them down. And so, although we did leave some material on the shelf and some material in the system, we really closed the gap in a very significant way.

Okay. And then the final question for me. You referenced price increases going into effect. Can you provide a little bit of color in terms of the end markets, which those price increases will be going toward? You guys raised prices on a regular cycle. So I just want to confirm is this off-cycle and IDS, WPS and perhaps any color on the amount that you're being forced to raise prices?

Well, first of all, I don't say across the board because we don't peanut butter spread, but the truth is there's some level of price increase across the board. It just isn't -- we're not putting in place X, Y, Z percent across the board. And the timing does vary, Keith. We have contracts. We have agreements. We need to interact with our customers. We treat our customers with a lot of respect. We care about them tremendously. But at the same time, to your point, we have to pass on the value that we create in price increases to them as we're dealing with those pressures.

Timing. We do have off-cycle increases. We do have on-cycle increases. We are overall raising our prices more than we have in the historical past as our most industrial companies right now. So overall, I'd say this, yes, off-cycle increases, yes, on-cycle increases and larger increases. But it does absolutely vary by product set and the cost pressures that we're facing and the cost product set. You also mentioned regions. That's also true on regions. We're raising prices effectively in all regions, but those price increase timing and amounts do vary by region, by customer, by product set. So yes, this is a significant effort for Brady right now as I guarantee, and I talk to a lot of people, it is for almost all organizations.

Our next question comes from Michael McGinn of Wells Fargo.

I was wondering if you had a sense of how lean you think the distribution channel is, how much room there still is to restock and what kind of percentage of your total business that represents.

Well, I apologize, I may not have heard the question perfectly. I'm not sure if there was a lot of -- but I think what you're asking me, I will say this, we are not seeing significant stock-ups by the distribution channel. And that's good news. In that, I do eventually expect an economic boomerang from stocking up, but we're definitely not seeing it right now with our partners, our distributor partners, a little harder to tell with our end users. But if you look at society overall and what's happening, and I think we probably are seeing some of that, but it's a little harder to tell. But better that I know that it isn't definitely happening right now with our distributor partners. And I -- so therefore, I am optimistic that volumes will continue to go up in the near future. What happens at the end as things untangle from this is yet to be seen. But I would expect, not for us, but for general economic pullback as there is more inventory, and you know this from all the numbers in the system overall than there historically has been.

Great. Then switching gears to the geopolitical front. Trade talks have seemingly resumed, and we now have an infrastructure framework. Any overall commentary on where you see yourself benefiting in infrastructure? And then on the trade, any kind of benchmarks you -- that the percentage of total imports your business is?

Well, I'd tell you first about we love anything related to infrastructure. We believe we provide products that are critical for the world's infrastructure, not just the U.S.'s, but in your particular case, the question, the U.S.'s -- so yes, we do definitely see some very positive construction. We do very well in the construction industry. As a result of the safety needs, the identification needs of that industry, their need for high-quality, high durability, so we are excited about that. Obviously, that's going to take some time. And the whole construction industry is still tangled up right now.

So if you're -- I've been using analogy, which is probably missed, but Napoleon lost the war for a lack of a nail in a horseshoe in a horse on a canon in the battle. So -- of Waterloo. So that is what I believe the construction industry is facing right now. If you go through a lot of areas in that way, buildings aren't being finished because of literally 1 or 2 critical elements. And so, I do think that's going to take a little while to entangle. That will impact the rolling out of the infrastructure money as far as getting to us. But you know what, the great news -- because we're toward the end of that cycle typically, the great news is it will come. And when it does come, that will definitely help Brady.

Now let's talk about trade barriers and all of that. We -- it's interesting. Everything from automation to developing new products for the next-generation to in-sourcing to forward deploying our products, we've been working on for about 5 years now. Ahead of a lot of companies are just now realizing that's the direction the world is going. By the way, because of the pandemic, so I'm not going to say I foretold the pandemic, we absolutely did not. No idea. But we were -- we believe we were intelligently moving in the direction the world would have to eventually go. It just happened to be fortuitous. And I don't want to take advantage of our bad situation. But the reality is that we have been positioned proactively for that. And why am I saying that? Because we have forward deployed a lot of resources as close to our customers as possible as in company -- country as possible.

So let me give you an example that's not directly related to trade barriers in the very recent, but the Brexit issue. We have plans and capabilities all throughout the U.K. that are really going to and already benefiting from the need to in-source into the U.K. more products. And that can be said for France and Germany, the Benelux areas, the U.S., China, India, I mean, again and again, and we are adding resources that we've had in the works in facilities and people to new countries and new regions. So I believe our footprint of forward deploying as much as possible to be as reactive -- positively reactive to our customers as possible, is also going to benefit from this new barrier oriented mentality. We did it for our customers. We did it for responsiveness. We did it to make sure we always have the products where we need to win. But as a result, we fortuitously are going to benefit from this as well.

Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Michael Nauman for any closing results.

Thank you so much. I'd like to leave you with a few concluding comments this morning. The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly entered a new phase. In this phase, we're seeing stressed supply chain, increased input costs, labor shortages and overall increased inflation. We're working through this effectively, but we are experiencing some short-term margin compression. I don't know what the future holds for the global economy, but I do know that Brady is well positioned to thrive regardless of which direction the economy heads. We have a strong balance sheet. We're prioritizing investments for growth, and we have a never-ending focus on cash generation. As a result, we are seeing strong sales growth. And once our pricing and efficiency initiatives catch up to the cost inflation, our strong sales growth and improved gross profit margins will drive significant bottom line growth.

On a final note, I would like to wish a very special, happy birthday to our own Ann Thornton here at Brady. It is her birthday today. I'm not allowed to say which one, but happy birthday Ann from all of your friends at Brady. Please stay safe. Thank you for your time this morning. Have a great day.

Operator, you may disconnect the call.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. Thank you all participating. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.