Fastenal Company (NASDAQ:FAST) Q4 2023 Results Conference Call January 18, 2024 10:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Taylor Ranta - Financial Reporting & Regulatory Compliance Manager
Dan Florness - President and Chief Executive Officer
Holden Lewis - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Michael Hoffman - Stifel
David Manthey - Baird
Chris Dankert - Loop Capital Markets
Ken Newman - KeyBanc Capital Markets
Nigel Coe - Wolfe Research
Ryan Merkel - William Blair
Operator
Hello, and welcome to the Fastenal 2023 Annual and Q4 Earnings Results Conference Call [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Taylor Ranta of the Fastenal Company. Please go ahead, Taylor.
Taylor Ranta
Welcome to the Fastenal Company 2023 annual and fourth quarter earnings conference call. This call will be hosted by Dan Florness, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Holden Lewis, our Chief Financial Officer. The call will last for up to one hour and will start with a general overview of our quarterly results and operations with the remainder of the time being open for questions and answers.
Today's conference call is a proprietary Fastenal presentation and is being recorded by Fastenal. No recording, reproduction, transmission or distribution of today's call is permitted without Fastenal's consent. This call is being audio simulcast on the Internet via the Fastenal Investor Relations homepage, investor.fastenal.com. A replay of the webcast will be available on the Web site until March 1, 2024, at midnight Central Time.
As a reminder, today's conference call may include statements regarding the company's future plans and prospects. These statements are based on our current expectations and we undertake no duty to update them. It is important to note that the company's actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Factors that could cause actual results to differ from anticipated results are contained in the company's latest earnings release and periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and we encourage you to review those factors carefully.
I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Dan Florness.
Dan Florness
Thank you, Taylor, and good morning, everybody. And welcome to the Q4 Fastenal earnings call. I'm going to go right to the foot book, and on Page 3, we have a handful of slides here. So 2023 has seen two struggles in our organization. One, since November of 2022, so for 14 consecutive months, we've seen a sub-50 PMI that when you operate very heavily in the industrial space, that's a big deal for you. And there's many benefits to have Holden as part of our organization. One is his career before joining Fastenal, he has access to -- he's forgotten things about stuff that I don't even know. And so I asked him. I said, hey, how often does a period like this happen? And he said, well, back to 1970, it's happened 6 times that it's been sub-50 for an extended period of time, most recent being the Great Recession in the '08-'09 timeframe. But it's a pretty tough period, nice. Okay. And so it's been pretty tough and you could look at that. But the second item, the second struggle is we've executed better. And in 2022 -- and we put up good numbers, inflation helped some, the rebounding economy from COVID helped some. The fact that we're pretty good at supply chain and we were able to find stuff and keep people supplied helped, because if you can't get it anywhere else, you come and get it from us. But there was some stuff under the hood that we weren't executing as well as we'd like to see. And we made some leadership changes earlier in the year. And I think we're poised really well as we go into 2024, but those are a couple of things that challenged the year.