Brady Corp (BRC) 2022 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Q4 2022 Brady Corporation Earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ann Thornton. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to the Brady Corporation Fiscal '22 fourth 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 and in Brady's fiscal '22 Form 10-K, which was filed with the SEC this morning.

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, Russell Shaller. Russell?

Thank you, Ann. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. This morning, we released our fiscal 2022 fourth quarter financial results, which was another quarter of strong organic sales growth and record earnings per share. I'm proud of how the entire Brady team worked through this challenging macro environment, all the while delivering for both our customers and our shareholders. Organic sales grew 9% this quarter. We increased GAAP earnings per share by 53%, and we increased non-GAAP earnings per share by 16%. This quarter was a great end to an outstanding year. Our full year GAAP EPS of $2.90 was an all-time record high, and our non-GAAP EPS of $3.15 was also an all-time record high. For the full year, we grew organic sales by 9.4%, which was our highest organic growth rate in more than 2 decades.

We performed well in our ID Solutions business and made nice progress moving a portion of our portfolio into faster-growing end markets with cyclical tailwinds. We also finished the year with positive momentum in our WPS business, where segment profit increased to 13.2% of sales in Q4. This is a great improvement over the first half of our fiscal year. And we returned more than $155 million to our shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks, and we still finished the year in a net cash position.

We're proud of what we've accomplished at Brady. We've had strong organic sales growth over the last several years, and we now have businesses that are growing in excess of GDP. With innovative new products and a highly engaged professionals that should enable us to continue to grow in excess of GDP for years to come. As we look ahead, our priorities remain clear. First and foremost is to continue our evolution into a faster-growing company. We are definitely on track to achieve this goal. Second is to improve our capabilities to enable our customers' automation initiatives, where we believe there will be a tailwind for years to come.

Third is to take necessary pricing and efficiency actions to offset the impact of this inflationary environment, all while ensuring that we have the products available to meet customer demand and that we're providing the best possible customer service. And finally, to effectively deploy our capital in order to drive long-term shareholder value, which would include organic investments, acquisitions and returning funds to our shareholders.

We demonstrated our commitment to returning funds to our shareholders this year as we repurchased more than 4.4% of our total diluted share count. And yesterday, we announced an increase to our dividend, which represents the 37th consecutive year of dividend increases. As you can see from our guidance, we expect fiscal 2023 to be another all-time record earnings per share year for Brady, and we're confident that we have the positive momentum to make this happen. Of course, what we can't control is the global economy.

Much like many of you, we also have concerns about headwinds from energy prices in Europe, to the highest U.S. inflation in 40 years, we are definitely living in challenging times. Although I can't tell you where the economy is headed, I can assure you that Brady is well positioned to adapt to economic uncertainties.

I'll now turn the call over to Aaron to provide more details on our financial results. Then I'll return to provide specific commentary about our Identification Solutions and Workplace Safety businesses. Aaron?

Thank you, Russell, and good morning, everyone. This quarter, we once again had very strong sales growth. We also increased our gross profit margins while reducing our SG&A expense as a percent of sales to post strong earnings growth and GAAP EPS of $0.81. Non-GAAP EPS, which is calculated as our GAAP EPS less the after-tax impact of amortization expense was $0.87. Each of our 2 divisions performed very well. IDS grew segment profit by 18.4%, while WPS increased segment profit by more than 65% this quarter.

And as Russell mentioned, we took advantage of the market pullback last quarter and repurchased another 535,000 shares, bringing our total shares purchased in fiscal 2022 to more than $2.3 million. So the key financial takeaways this quarter are strong revenue growth, record EPS, strong performance in each of our 2 divisions and a continued commitment to returning funds to our shareholders. Let's move to Slide #4 for our quarterly sales trends. Our 5.8% sales increase consisted of growth from acquisitions of 2.5% and organic growth of 9%. Organic sales grew in each of our 2 segments, but with the recent strengthening of the U.S. dollar, especially against the euro, foreign currency translation reduced total company sales by 5.7%. The impact of foreign currency reduced IDS sales by 4.5% and reduced WPS sales by 9%.

The reason for the outsized foreign currency impact on WPS is because more than half of WPS sales are in Western Europe. Even with the significant foreign currency challenge, our WPS business still performed quite well this quarter. Please turn to Slide #5 for our gross profit margin trending. Our gross profit margin increased 220 basis points to 50.4% compared to 48.2% in the fourth quarter of last year. This improvement over the prior year was a direct result of increased sales volumes, pricing actions, a reduction in the use of air freight and the many efficiency actions that we've been driving throughout our manufacturing facilities.

However, we continue to experience scarce labor in certain geographies, including the U.S., and we're seeing inflationary pressures continue across many different cost categories from shipping costs to raw material costs and everything in between. And the supply chain continues to be challenged, especially for critical components from Asia, although we're using less air freight, at this point, we've seen few tangible signs of reduced inflation. Price increases partially offset this inflation and helped us improve our gross profit margins. This quarter, we realized approximately 5.1% sales growth from pricing.

On Slide #6, you'll find our SG&A expense trending. SG&A was $94.5 million this quarter compared to $93.7 million in the fourth quarter of last year. As a percent of sales, SG&A was 29.2% compared to 30.6% in the fourth quarter of last year. If you exclude amortization expense and last year's acquisition-related charges, then SG&A would have declined from 28.6% of sales in Q4 of last year to 28.0% of sales this quarter. Overall, we're making nice progress, as we reduced our SG&A expense from over 36% of sales just a half dozen years ago to 29% today. However, we've been increasing selling resources, and we're certainly feeling inflationary pressures in SG&A as well. Going forward, we'll continue to identify efficiency opportunities throughout SG&A.

Slide #7 is the trending of our investments in research and development. This quarter, we invested $15.8 million in R&D, which equates to about 4.9% of sales. We believe that the investments with the best ROI are almost always organic investments, such as those we're making in research and development to drive new product launches. As such, we remain committed to new product development as we continue to see opportunities across our businesses, including building out a comprehensive industrial track and trace platform that encompasses our printers, high-quality materials, RFID scanners and barcode scanners.

Slide #8 illustrates our pretax income trends. Pretax earnings increased 29.7% on a GAAP basis. In order to compare against Q4 of last year, we need to adjust for the one-off items in the prior year. First off, there was a large increase in amortization expense from the 3 acquisitions completed last year. Plus, in Q4 of last year, we incurred a number of onetime charges to complete these acquisitions. If you exclude these prior year charges and exclude amortization expense from both the current year and the prior year, then our non-GAAP pretax earnings would have increased by 19.2%, increasing from $48.4 million in Q4 of F '21 to $57.7 million this quarter.

Slide #9 illustrates earnings and EPS on an after-tax basis. GAAP diluted EPS increased by 52.8% this quarter. And if you exclude the after-tax impacts of last year's one-off items and amortization expense, then our EPS would have increased by 16% this quarter.

On Slide #10, you'll find a summary of our cash generation. This quarter, we continued to increase our inventory levels, both to support our increased sales volumes as well as to ensure that we can support our customers in the event of further supply chain challenges. Cash flow from operating activities was $53.2 million this quarter. We also incurred higher-than-normal CapEx as we spent nearly $18 million on 2 new facilities, 8 million in Belgium, where we're constructing a new facility and the remaining $10 million on the purchase of a strategic manufacturing facility in Southeast Asia.

Looking to next year, we expect to accelerate the timing of our annual employee bonus payments, effectively moving the payments from Q2 to Q1. As such, we expect our first quarter cash generation to appear weaker than normal and our second quarter cash generation to be stronger than you would normally expect to see, all due to this timing item.

Now if you turn to Slide #11, you can see the impact that Brady's historically strong cash generation has had on our balance sheet, even after stepping up our share buybacks and building up inventories to ensure that we're poised to meet future customer demand. On July 31, we were still in a net cash position of $19.1 million. Our approach to capital allocation is to first and foremost, use our cash to fully fund organic sales and efficiency opportunities. This includes investing in new product development, sales generating resources, capability-enhancing capital expenditures and automation-focused CapEx. We will absolutely keep funding these investments where it makes sense and where the investments are ROI positive.

And second, we focus on consistently increasing our dividends. We've increased our dividend every year since going public. After fully funding organic investments and dividends, we then deploy our cash in a disciplined manner for either acquisitions, where we have strong synergistic opportunities or for buybacks in a highly opportunistic manner when we see a disconnect between intrinsic value and Brady's trading price. Our strong balance sheet positions us well to execute additional value-enhancing activities, including investing in R&D, completing additional acquisitions and returning funds to our shareholders.

Slide #12 provides an overview of our financial results for the full year ended July 31, 2022. Overall, sales increased 13.7%, and organic sales grew 9.4%. This strong organic sales growth was a result of the recovery coming out of the pandemic, combined with the benefits from the investments we've been making in innovation and a 3.7% annual impact from pricing. We finished fiscal 2022 with all-time high GAAP and non-GAAP EPS, and these strong earnings were after we increased the R&D spend by 31.4% this year. So fiscal 2022 was a record EPS year and our fourth quarter was the strongest quarter of the year.

As we look to the future, we're confident that the actions we've taken set us up for success, which takes us to our guidance for next year on Slide #13. We're forecasting diluted earnings per share, excluding amortization to range from $3.30 to $3.60 per share, which equates to a GAAP EPS range of $3.13 to $3.43 per share for the fiscal year ending July 31, 2023. This implies that we expect GAAP EPS to improve somewhere in the range of 7.9% to 18.3%, and we expect non-GAAP EPS to improve between 4.8% and 14.3% in fiscal 2023.

We also anticipate organic sales growth in the mid- to high single-digit percentages for the year ending July 31, 2023. And based on foreign currency exchange rates as of July 31, we expect the strengthening of the U.S. dollar to reduce fiscal '23 sales by approximately 3.5%. And we also expect foreign currency to reduce F '23 EPS by between $0.15 and $0.18 per share. Other elements of our guidance include an income tax rate of approximately 20%, depreciation and amortization expense of approximately $32 million to $34 million and capital expenditures of approximately $32 million, which is inclusive of facility construction costs of approximately $10 million. This guidance range is a bit wider than we would typically announce, which is a result of the many macro uncertainties that we're facing today.

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 we'll continue to drive sustainable efficiency gains while being tight on non-revenue-generating expenses. As for capital allocation, we don't foresee any major changes in our capital allocation strategy. We'll keep investing in our business. We just mentioned our dividend increase for fiscal '23, and we'll be opportunistic with buybacks while looking 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 further strengthening of the U.S. dollar, worsening logistics that don't allow us to meet our commitments to our customers, inflationary pressures that we can't offset in a timely enough manner through price increases or an overall slowdown in economic activity.

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

Thank you, Aaron. Slide 14 outlines the fourth quarter financial results for our Identification Solutions business. IDS sales increased 9.6% to $253.2 million. Organic sales in our IDS division were once again very strong, up 10.8% versus the fourth quarter of last year. And on the cost side, our focus on efficiency and pricing led to an 140 basis point increase in segment profit as a percent of sales, when compared to the fourth quarter of last year.

We're definitely experiencing ongoing inflationary pressures. However, we're driving automation inefficiencies and increasing prices where feasible to offset as much of this inflation as we can. Segment profit as a percentage of sales was 19.8%, which was up from 18.4% last year. If you exclude amortization expense and the nonroutine charges from Q4 of F '21, then segment profit as a percentage of sales would have been 21.3% this quarter compared to 20.8% in last year's fourth quarter. Regionally, sales in Asia were strong despite periodic lockdowns in China. Asia organic growth was approximately 10% this quarter.

In Europe, our organic sales were also up approximately 10%. Our European team did a very nice job driving sales growth while managing their cost structure. And the Americas performed well with organic growth in the upper single digits this quarter. We've been working hard to secure the critical parts we need to manufacture our goods and meet customer demands. However, there are still components that we've been unable to obtain in the desired quantities, which have delayed some of our initiatives. For instance, sales at our recent acquisition, Code Corp, were effectively in line with our initial acquisition business case, but we were forced to slow down some of our expansion plans due to a limited supply of certain chips.

We are starting to see improvement in component availability and of course, the team is committed to continue to work through these supply chain challenges while providing outstanding customer service to our core markets and customers. Our commitment to R&D remains a top priority to drive future growth. We're making solid progress on enhanced software package for our track and trace product suite and in developing more rugged versions of our code and Nordic ID scanners to meet the exact new demands of our industrial customers.

Earlier in fiscal '22, we launched the M211 printer which continues our steady stream of upgraded industrial printers. This new printer is the size of a large tape measure can be clipped to your belt and allows you to design preview and print labels all from your phone. This tough printer supports both Android and Apple mobile operating systems to deliver customized print solutions based on an embedded base of over 14,000 symbols and 22 barcode QR code types. Plus this compact labeler allows you to print over 300 labels on a single charge and still weighs only 1.2 pounds. These are the types of products that continue to set Brady apart from our competitors.

We're innovating throughout Brady and bringing solutions that our customers want and need. These products demonstrate Brady's ability to engineer high-performance printers and materials for a wide range of applications. Our expanded new product line-up, investments to drive sales and our expansion into faster-growing industrial segment, gives us confidence that we'll continue to generate strong organic sales with healthy margins for years to come. Moving to Slide 15, you'll find a summary of our Workplace Safety financial performance. WPS declined 5.7% this quarter, solely due to significant appreciation of the U.S. dollar versus the euro and the pound.

If you strip out foreign currency, our WPS business had organic sales growth of 3.3% this quarter. Profitability also increased nicely, growing from $5.6 million in Q4 of last year to $9.3 million in the current quarter. Looking at our WPS business geographically, -- we saw continued strong organic growth in Europe with organic sales increasing in the mid-single-digit percentages and continued strong profitability as the business shifted back into more sales of core workplace safety products and fewer COVID-related products. Our business in the U.S. is where we've historically struggled. However, these are also businesses where our team has been making the most progress.

We've been focused on a three-pronged approach. First, we're simplifying the business through SKU optimization with a focus on identifying SKUs that provide the most value to our customers. Second, we are ensuring that our pricing reflects market dynamics and customer expectations. And lastly, we're driving efficiency and reducing overhead costs, including personnel and catalogue distribution costs. While we've been able to control costs and nicely improve segment profit in the U.S., our growth rate continues to trail industrial distributor peer companies. With our new focus, the foundation of our WPS business is improving with a number of key brands and several businesses that have been performing quite well. And our internally produced custom solutions provides significantly more value to our customers than the simple buy and resell items.

Looking ahead, we'll continue to drive profit improvements and we'll look critically at our product portfolio even if it means walking away from unprofitable or marginally profitable SKUs and product offerings. The WPS team did a nice job this quarter and finished the year strong. We're confident that we're on the right track, as you can see from our significant increase in profitability, but we still have more work ahead of us. Brady performed well this quarter, and we clearly have positive momentum building across the entire organization.

Brady is in an enviable financial position. Fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022 were both record EPS years and were once again guiding to another record year in 2023. With our ability to generate strong cash flows even during the pandemic, we have the ability to continue to invest in research and development, geographic expansion and improve in our capabilities while shifting a portion of our portfolio deeper into improving our customers' automation journey. With these initiatives, we expect to have a tailwind for years to come as companies work to shorten their supply chains, increase automation and drive efficiencies.

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

(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from George Staphos from Bank of America.

This is actually Cashen Keeler on for George this morning. So first off, I guess, now that we're only 1 month into the quarter here, can you just give us an update on how things are trending thus far?

Yes. August is really with Europe. And I would say people on vacation, it really is too short of a month to provide much commentary or trending. So we usually feel like we don't know how the economy is headed until late September or October.

Okay. Fair enough. And then I guess you had a nice pickup in gross margin this quarter, and it sounds like you had a positive price/cost dynamic. So just looking out to fiscal '23, do you expect to remain positive on price cost? Or just what's embedded in guidance on that front?

Yes. We're -- obviously, we provided the guidance as looking forward. We had, I think, a fantastic Q4. But if you look at Brady's performance over several quarters even pre-COVID, there is a fair amount of variability in our gross profit margin. I think 50.4% is pretty much a high watermark for us. And it was -- we had a very favorable mix in product conditions. I wouldn't expect continued growth over that type of figure.

Okay. Understood. And then, I guess, on R&D, again, there's been pickup there, obviously, a function of acquisitions and building out the track and trace. But I guess is there any kind of normalized level or range we can expect moving forward on that front?

Directionally, we feel around 5% of our sales is a comfortable and manageable R&D. So R&D will continue to grow along with the corporation's growth. So it's not stabilizing at a certain dollar figure. I think it's more a percentage of our revenue.

And our next question comes from Keith Housum from Northcoast Research.

Russell, looking at the WPS document products, the 13% and change is the best that I can remember in several years. In your viewpoint, how sustainable is that? Is there an opportunity to grow from there? Or should we expect some volatility?

I think what we really need to be focused on, on WPS is the combination of growth and profitability, we feel pretty comfortable that we can ratchet up the profitability. But if you look at the figures in the U.S., the growth definitely lagged peers -- so we're still looking at what's the right balance of reinvestment advertising versus overall margins. So the 13%, I think, given the industry therein puts them peer competitive if we need to squeeze out some growth with that same profitability.

Got it. I appreciate that. And in terms of the pricing action, in general you guys have taken, how far along have you -- would you say you guys are along the process? Because if I remember correctly, you were thinking that was your price increases were going to lag the raw material increase you guys have been seeing. Have you guys caught up to that? Or is still some more catching up to go?

Yes we've -- obviously, there's a few outliers in our raw materials. But for the bulk of the products, we've definitely caught up. There's still some, I would say, unusual pricing in the semiconductor market, where you're seeing some vast purchase variances to be able to acquire some scarce chips. Obviously, our pricing hasn't fully captured that nor is it likely to because we think some of those premiums are going to be short-lived. And most companies, I think, that are acquiring semiconductors have chosen to absorb those temporary costs into their portfolio.

Okay. Appreciate it. And a follow-up question for me on gross margins. I guess the gross margin recovery from pre-pandemic levels is probably a little bit quicker than I anticipated. And I noticed you said product mix was definitely one of those components. Do you expect gross margins to be roughly in the same area going forward?

Again, if you go back over the quarters, there is a decent amount of variability in our gross margin. So I'm not going to hang my hat on another $50.4 million. I do think we had, again, a favorable mix and a favorable set of conditions. So I'm going to say that certainly, our guidance is a little bit lower than that type of figure. With the understanding that given we have some very high gross margin products and some very low gross margin products depending on what the mix is, you can see 100 basis points of variability.

Great. And then maybe I can sneak one more in here. I know in years past, some of your smaller businesses in terms of the OSHA posters and things of that nature kind of trailed off during the pandemic. Have you seen any of that type of business recover here?

Yes, it is definitely much better than it was 1.5 years ago for obvious reasons. It caters -- that particular business caters to small businesses, which were most affected by the shutdowns. Has it fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels? Absolutely not. There's still -- in the small business segment, there's still a lot of pain and recovery that needs to happen.

And our next question comes from Steve Ferazani from Sidoti.

I do want to dig back into that 13% operating margin in Workplace Safety to us. That was quite a surprise. I mean I'm going back 8 years, and I think you've only up 13% in that margin, maybe (inaudible) in 8 years. So clearly, there's more going on here. And I would have thought it would be shrink to grow. But even at that, you were growing top line minus FX. I mean can you give us a little bit more detail how you're getting to that number that quickly?

Yes. So that business is very reliant on advertising and traditionally print catalogues. So one of the things that we can change pretty quickly in did was to shift more emphasis to digital, which is less expensive, all things being equal than catalogues. That was part of it. Part of it was also that they took cost out of that business, operating costs, which improved the profitability. And lastly, we've moved to a more, I'd say, market based pricing. And so some of the things that we've done have helped us. So I wouldn't point to any one of them as the major drivers. The 3 of them put together helped to do the improvement. But again, what we really need to see is, yes, they did grow, but not as fast as we would like to see. So we -- the recipe for us is those kind of profits, but industry growth at the same time.

But how are you -- I mean there's 2 elements here, right, which is if you're trying to move away from the resale model, right? I mean you're trying to grow, but you're also trying to cut some stuff out, right?

Correct. Correct. So when I mean grow there may be an additional sales decline. I'm not going to project one way or another. But it's really the recipe of how we can best resonate with our customers in this particular channel. And like I said, I think the team has done a tremendous job, particularly in Europe in really focusing and making sure they're in tune to the dynamics of both end market and their customers. But with that said, I think there is still room for improvement, and we're looking at ways where we can improve the overall relevancy of this channel.

Fair enough. And if I can turn to ID Solutions. Obviously, you're finishing up a really, really strong year. Having said that, even if I back out the FX, it looks like there was a little bit of a sequential pullback there. Are there certain areas where you're seeing a little bit of slowing or is there some seasonality?

A teeny bit of it's seasonality. Traditionally, Q3 is really, really strong, and you start to see some tail off in our Q4 as people start to head into vacations and what have you. I think we're still very concerned about European energy prices and whether that will be a constraint -- so far, the U.S. market seems to be holding up very well. And we just have our fingers crossed that we'll continue to see these trends going through into the coming year.

Okay. And then if I can get one in on cash flow. And Aaron, I may not have heard this right. It sounded like you said Q1 would be lower than traditional -- there's some timing element and then Q2 stronger. Can you just give a little color on that because I might have missed it.

No, you absolutely heard it correctly. The timing of our annual bonus payments is shifting from what it was historically the second quarter of the year into the first quarter. So you'll see a slightly weaker Q1 and a slightly stronger Q2, all as a result of the timing of the bonus payments.

Okay. And a couple more on that. One is for obvious reasons, you want every other company if you had to build up your inventory given the supply chain constraints and component shortages, any thoughts on when that might start reversing? Because you had -- I mean there has been a pretty substantial inventory build, which has affected cash flow.

Yes. So all things being equal, we're carrying, I'm going to say, nominally $40 million to $50 million more inventory than we would historically like. That's proven to be with supply chain issues a great investment. The carrying cost of something like that are a few million dollars, but it's enabled us to make sure that we don't stock out and we've been able to sell throughout the last several quarters. We are and continue to look at how we can draw that down as freight becomes more predictable. And our supply chain becomes more predictable, that will definitely come down.

One of the ironies in it, though, is last year, we were shipping air, which is something we really prefer not to do. That's a very expensive way to ship our products. As we convert from air to sea, it actually drives down our costs substantially. But you wind up now, you pick up nominally 6 to 8 weeks in transit for inventory. So that pushes your inventory numbers back up. So it's from an operating perspective and operating margin being able to move from to -- or excuse me, from air to sea is absolutely the right thing to do, but at the same time, you are going to see an uplift in inventory very specifically due to that. I know this is a long-winded answer. I'd love to say we were going to peel off $10 million in the next quarter, but we're not quite there yet.

Fair enough. And then last one is on the share repurchase, how far along you are in the current authorization and whether there's any share repurchases built into that guidance?

We have very little share repurchases built into our guidance. We had a $100 million authorization back in May of that $100 million of purchases. We have $85 million remaining today.

Okay. In terms of how you're thinking about capital allocation next year, anything you can offer?

We have basically the same philosophies that we've had and continue to have, which is, first and foremost, continue to invest in our organic growth engine. So think R&D, sales, geographic expansion, et cetera. At the same time, continue to increase our dividend. Russell mentioned, our dividend increase this year as well, 37th consecutive year. And then we still look at buybacks and acquisitions the same way that we always have. Acquisitions must have strong synergies they need to make sense. We typically don't look at just straight direct competitors.

We look for acquisitions that bring some form of technology to the table that will drive Brady forward. And then, of course, buybacks, we look at it in an opportunistic manner. We have an awesome balance sheet today, $19 million of net cash at July 31. So a very enviable position to be in. So we clearly have dry powder. And when we look at the buybacks, it's -- the price needs to be right. And that's comparing what we're trading at to intrinsic value. So pretty similar philosophies that we've had in the past and a great balance sheet to execute it.

And I am showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Russell Sala, CEO, for closing remarks.

Perfect. Thank you. Thank you all very much for your time today and for your thoughtful questions. We live in a highly uncertain world, but Brady is a business that is well positioned to thrive regardless of which direction the economy has. We're changing our portfolio to faster than GDP growing company with an increasing foothold in faster-growing end markets. Our pricing and efficiency actions are improving our gross margins. Our IDS division continues to perform extremely well, and the actions we've taken to improve our Workplace Safety business are also working.

We're aggressively investing in R&D to ensure our products exceed our customers' expectations. And finally, we have a strong balance sheet, which enables us to keep investing in both organic and inorganic growth while also returning funds to our shareholders. Our balance sheet and strong cash generation make Brady a safe port from future market turbulence. Even though the future of the macro economy is uncertain, I'm optimistic about our future. Thank you for your time this morning. You may now disconnect the call.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.