Quanex Building Products Corporation (NYSE:NX) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call September 1, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Scott Zuehlke - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer

George Wilson - President and Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Steven Ramsey - Thompson Research Group

Julio Romero - Sidoti and Company

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q3 2023 Quanex Building Products Corporation Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to Scott Zuehlke; SVP, CFO and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Scott Zuehlke

Thanks for joining the call this morning. On the call with me today is George Wilson, our President and CEO. This conference call will contain forward-looking statements and some discussion of non-GAAP measures.

Forward-looking statements and guidance discussed on this call and in our earnings release are based on current expectations. Actual results or events may differ materially from such statements and guidance and Quanex undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement to reflect new information or events.

For a more detailed description of our forward-looking statement disclaimer and a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please see our earnings release issued yesterday and posted to our website.

I'll now turn the call over to George for his prepared remarks.

George Wilson

Thanks, Scott, and good morning to everyone joining the call. Let me first say how proud I am of our team this quarter as our strong execution delivered a record quarter from an earnings and a margin perspective, and all of our operating segments realized margin expansion. I'm especially proud of these results because they came in a quarter when our top-line results were somewhat challenged as compared to last year.

Looking back, and as a reminder, 2022 was a year driven by record demand, elevated surcharge pricing across all operating segments and increased material index pricing in North America. Year-to-date in 2023, our top-line results have been impacted by softer market volume and our pricing started to decline year-over-year during the third quarter, mostly in North America as raw material costs have come down.

However, as we stated in our previous two quarterly earnings calls, our shipments cadence this year has indicated that we are returning to more normal seasonality versus what was experienced during the last two years. That shipment trend continued through our third quarter. And as a result, our volumes were up versus the first half of this year.