Apogee Enterprises Inc. (NASDAQ:APOG) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call April 7, 2022 9:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Ty Silberhorn – Chief Executive Officer
Nisheet Gupta – Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Jeff Huebschen – Vice President, Investor Relations
Conference Call Participants
Chris Moore – CJS Securities
Eric Stine – Craig Hallum
Julio Romero – Sidoti
John Braatz – Kansas City Capital
Zane Karimi – DA Davidson
Operator
Good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Apogee fiscal year 2022 fourth quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you need to press star, one on your telephone.
I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Jeff Huebschen. Please go ahead.
Jeff Huebschen
Thank you Catherine. Good morning everyone and welcome to Apogee Enterprises’ fiscal 2022 fourth quarter earnings call. With me today are Ty Silberhorn, Apogee’s Chief Executive Officer, and Nisheet Gupta, Chief Financial Officer.
I’d like to remind everyone that there are slides to accompany today’s remarks. These are available in the Investor Relations section of Apogee’s website.
During this call, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures. Definitions of these measures and a reconciliation to the nearest GAAP measures are provided in the earnings release we issued this morning.
As a reminder, unless otherwise mentioned, architectural framing systems segment results include the Sotawall business unit, consistent with prior quarters. Beginning with the first quarter of fiscal 2023, the Sotawall business unit will be included in the architectural services segment.
I’d like to remind everyone that our call will contain forward-looking statements. These reflect management’s expectations based on currently available information. Actual results may differ materially. More information about factors that could affect Apogee’s business and financial results can be found in today’s press release and in our SEC filings.
With that, I’ll turn the call over to you, Ty.
Ty Silberhorn
Thank you Jeff, and thanks everyone for joining us this morning.
We continued to build momentum in the fourth quarter, delivering solid results to wrap up our fiscal year. I’m proud of what our team accomplished this year and I’m very excited to update you on our progress and how that work is shaping our fiscal ’23 outlook.
This morning, I will touch on how we are advancing our new strategy, review some highlights from the quarter and the full year, and comment on our solid outlook for fiscal ’23, then Nisheet will provide more details on the quarter and our full year outlook. After that, we’ll take your questions.
Entering fiscal ’22, we expected this would be a challenging year. We were embarking on a new strategic direction while managing through the pandemic and dealing with a downturn in non-residential construction. As the year progressed, cost inflation and supply chain issues were added to our list of challenges, but our team rose to face those head on. I want to thank the entire Apogee team for their tremendous efforts. We navigated through a difficult but in the end a very meaningful and productive year. Through our team’s work, we have set the company on a path for significant long term improvements while also delivering near term results that were above last year.
In the fourth quarter, we continued to execute our new strategy. As a reminder, our strategy has three pillars, which are outlined on Page 4 of our deck. First, we are working to become the economic leader in our target markets. This means growing differentiated product and service offerings while also building competitive cost structure and more efficient operations. Our goal is to become a top margin generator in our target markets.
Second, we will be an active portfolio manager. We plan to grow our best performing businesses, address the under-performers, and invest to add more differentiated offerings. Our overall goal is to improve our return on invested capital.
Third, we will strengthen our core capabilities. We are building an operating model, processes and systems that better support our businesses, enable greater efficiency and lower costs, and provides more scalability as we look to grow and acquire in the future. These shifts will allow us to create peak value for all stakeholders.
During the year, we drove progress across all three of these pillars. Some of the highlights are listed on Page 6 of our presentation, and I will comment on a few.
We completed the realignment of framing systems, creating a more integrated business that better leverages our scale and capabilities with more clarity in how we go to market and serve customers. In architectural glass, we completed the sale of our Statesboro, Georgia facility, we exited the Velocity business, and we transitioned all remaining production to our flagship plant in Minnesota. These actions position us to pursue our strategy of focusing on premium offerings where we can differentiate and deliver higher value for customers.
During the year, we also took steps to strengthen our core capabilities. We drove progress on several projects that will improve back office operations. We also added key talent across the organization. This included establishing our new transformation management office to drive stronger execution of key initiatives. We brought in a new segment president for glass with strong operations skill set and relevant business experience, and we added new leadership for our lean continuous improvement program.
Our revitalized lean efforts are already having a positive impact. The initial focus was our glass segment, where we are driving productivity improvements that are now beginning to show in the P&L, and we are expanding lean to other parts of the organization with an emphasis on the framing segment this year. As we move into fiscal ’23, we will continue to execute our strategy through the priorities listed on Slide 7 of the presentation.
From a broader economic perspective, external challenges we faced in fiscal ’22 are likely to persist through much of our fiscal ’23. We expect continued inflation and tight markets for some raw materials, freight and other categories. With that in mind, pricing and cost management will remain key focus areas. Additionally, our business units and procurement teams are working to ensure the supply of key raw materials. This will allow us to maintain or offer better than market service levels for our customers.
Despite these headwinds, we do expect to drive meaningful margin expansion primarily in the framing and glass segments. We will do this by securing the benefits of the restructuring and cost reduction actions we completed this year along with continued productivity improvements through our lean efforts.
Turning to active portfolio management, during our investor day we highlighted that acquisitions would be a key part of our growth strategy. To support this, we plan to strengthen our M&A capability, adding key talent and improving our processes for identifying, evaluating and integrating acquisitions. We’ve started the work to rebuild our M&A pipeline and will continue to evaluate potential acquisitions as we move forward.
For us, portfolio management is more than just buying and selling businesses. As part of managing the existing portfolio, we conducted a thorough review of the Sotawall business as we staged its move from framing to the services segment. In recent years, Sotawall has underperformed its potential and it generated a loss in fiscal ’22. As we previously announced, Sotawall will move into architectural services during the first quarter of fiscal ’23. We plan to fully integrated Sotawall with our Harmon business within architectural services. They will have a single leadership team operating with a proven business model. We expect this transition will drive significant operational improvements in the coming years and will add scale and capabilities to position architectural services for long term growth while maintaining its position as an economic leader.
We are also working to improve the sales mix in our existing businesses, increasing the portion of revenue that comes from differentiated higher margin offerings. We have had great success with this in large scale optical, where we have consistently offered and shifted sales towards higher value products. We aim to make similar progress in architectural glass with our shift toward the premium segment of the market. In framing systems, our new alignment enables more focus on the parts of the market where we have the strongest competitive advantages. We expect to accelerate this shift through our selling and bidding activities in both segments, which will position us for additional margin expansion in fiscal ’24.
Our third priority is continuing to strengthen our core capabilities. We will expand our lean program and begin to build out other elements of our Apogee management system, and we’ll continue to advance our enterprise transformation projects to optimize and simplify back office processes. In support of this, we plan to make further investments to add capabilities and improve productivity. Through all these efforts, we expect to make further progress toward our financial goals: improving margins, increasing return on invested capital, and positioning the company for above market growth. This should translate into significant earnings growth in fiscal ’23 and beyond.
Let me close by once again thanking the Apogee team for their contributions this year. I am confident we have the right strategy, that we are executing it well, and are positioned for continued success as we move forward.
With that, let me turn it over to Nisheet to provide more details on our results and the outlook. Nisheet?
Nisheet Gupta
Thank you Ty, and good morning everyone.
The fourth quarter was a strong close to our fiscal year. We achieved top and bottom line growth. Our pricing and cost actions offset the impact of inflation and we generated solid cash flow, allowing us to return cash to shareholders.
Let me provide some more details, starting with fourth quarter results on Page 8 of our presentation.
Fourth quarter revenue grew 6%. This was led by over 20% growth in both architectural services and LSO segments, along with 9% growth in framing systems. The quarter included several items that we excluded from our adjusted results. First, we took an impairment charge related to Sotawall. As Ty mentioned and previously announced, we plan to fully integrate Sotawall into the architectural services segment starting in Q1 of fiscal ’23. During the fourth quarter, we continued to evaluate the optimal strategic approach to integrate Sotawall into architectural services and finalize our integration plans. As part of this, we evaluated the Sotawall assets and determined that certain assets, mainly intangible assets were impaired. We expect to see improved performance in the future for the combined business under the leadership of the services segment.
During the quarter, we continued to execute the restructuring actions we announced last summer. In the fourth quarter, we had $6.3 million of restructuring costs. As part of the restructuring, we sold our glass facility in Statesboro, Georgia. This has led to a $19.5 million gain in the quarter. We are pleased with how our teams have executed the restructuring. Everything has proceeded on schedule and is largely complete, and we are beginning to achieve the targeted cost savings. Overall, during the year we incurred $30.5 million of restructuring costs. Of this, $9 million was cash expense. When we include the proceeds from the Statesboro sale, the overall restructuring program was significantly cash positive for the fiscal year.
Excluding the impairment, restructuring and gain on sale of assets, adjusted operating income was $27.7 million and adjusted operating margin improved to 8.4%. This was 130 basis points better than last year’s fourth quarter. The primary driver was the impact of our pricing actions, especially in framing systems. Improved pricing fully offset the impact of inflation in the quarter. Margins also benefited from our restructuring and cost savings efforts.
Adjusted earnings were $0.91 per diluted share. This was 44% higher than last year’s fourth quarter. I would like to highlight that adjusted margins and earnings improved sequentially each quarter during the fiscal year. This demonstrates the positive momentum we have established in the business.
Full year results are shown on Slide 9. Full year revenue grew 7%, led by architectural services which achieved record full year revenue of $349 million. Large scale optical fully recovered from last year’s COVID-related shutdowns and saw renewed growth in its core markets and exceeded $100 million of annual sales for the first time.
Full year operating income and margins were down from last year. This mainly reflects the impact of inflation. Adjusted earnings grew to $2.48 per share. This was driven by top line growth and a lower share count. Finally, our key performance metric of ROIC improved by 40 basis points. We have included a new reconciliation table in our earnings presentation that shows our ROIC calculation. Going forward, we will continue to share ROIC performance on an annual basis.
Let’s turn to segment results on Slide 10. Starting with architectural framing systems, fourth quarter revenue grew 9%. This was primarily driven by pricing actions taken to offset inflation. Volumes were lower than last year. Adjusted operating margin was 3.8% – that is 110 basis points better than last year, but well below the segment’s long term [indiscernible]. Going forward, we expect to see improved margin performance in framing as we achieve the benefits from our restructuring and cost reduction efforts.
Moving to architectural glass, revenue was down 12%. As expected, this was mainly driven by lower volumes. We had fewer new project awards over the past year while non-residential construction has been in a downturn. We are also strategically shifting away from some low margin sales.
Adjusted operating margin was 6.4%. This was 200 basis points better than last year and 340 basis points higher than third quarter. We are beginning to achieve cost savings from our restructuring along with productivity gains from our lean program.
Moving to architectural services, revenue grew 21% to a record $99 million. Operating income of $11.8 million was also a record high. This was driven by strong project execution and leverage from increased volume. Services backlog declined to $518 million. This was driven by strong revenue conversion in the quarter along with lower new order volumes. As a reminder, services orders can be uneven from quarter to quarter. We are encouraged by increasing bidding activity in the recent months, which should lead to a rebound in orders over the next few quarters.
Turning to large scale optical, revenue of $27 million grew 23% compared to last year’s fourth quarter. This was mainly driven by increased sales of high value products, and margins were strong at 23.7%. Finally, fourth quarter corporate costs were lower than last year and below the run rate we have seen in the past several quarters. This was mainly driven by favorable insurance costs.
Turning to Page 11, our cash flow and balance sheet remain very strong. Full year cash flow from operations was $100 million. This was followed by last year’s record cash flow of $142 million. We also brought in $31 million of cash from sale of assets.
Our capital spending remains lower than normal this year as we slowed some investments while we completed our strategic review. Our net leverage remains less than one times adjusted EBITDA. This is well below our target of 1.5 times EBITDA. We have no near term debt maturities and our revolving credit facility is undrawn.
With our strong cash flow, low leverage, and limited capital spending, we are building cash on our balance sheet. In the fourth quarter, we decided to put some of this cash to work buying back stock. During the quarter, we purchased 1.5 million shares for $71 million. For the full year, we purchased $100 million of stock. Going forward, we’ll continue to deploy cash [indiscernible] value for shareholders. The capital allocation strategy we shared on our investor day is on Page 12 of today’s presentation.
Our first priority is investing to drive profitable growth. This will include both organic investments and M&A. Our second priority is returning capital to shareholders. We intend to increase our dividend and will continue to evaluate opportunistic share buybacks. We will also work to maintain a strong balance sheet.
Let me wrap up by discussing our outlook, which is on Page 13.
We are providing initial guidance for fiscal ’23 of adjusted EPS in a range of $2.90 to $3.30 per share. At the midpoint, this would be 25% year-over-year growth. We expect total company revenue will grow in fiscal ’23. This will be mainly driven by pricing and framing systems. We expect revenue in the other three segments to relatively flat given that services backlog declined during the bottom of the pandemic and glass is focused on value, not volume. We also expect to drive significant margin expansion during the year. This will be mainly in framing systems and glass as we achieve the benefits from our restructuring and continue to drive operational improvements.
While we are not providing quarterly guidance, we expect the flow of earnings next year will be similar to what we saw in fiscal ’22. As we mentioned, we plan to move Sotawall into architectural services in the first quarter of fiscal ’23. To help with year-over-year comparisons, we included tables with pro forma segment results in the appendix of our earnings presentation. Also on Page 14 of today’s presentation, we are updating the long term margin guidance we presented during our investor day to reflect the move of Sotawall into architectural services.
To close, I would like to thank the Apogee team for all their work over the past year. We have delivered strong results despite many challenges during the year. We delivered EPS growth, we have strengthened our core by investing in standard processes and deployed new systems. We have begun to execute on a new strategy and we are well positioned for even stronger results in our next fiscal year.
With that, I’ll turn it back over to Ty for some concluding remarks.
Ty Silberhorn
Thanks Nisheet.
Apogee’s significant strategic shift is well underway. We’ve taken steps to align and simplify our business. We are building a more competitive cost structure. We are establishing a new operating model grounded in our lean program, and we are advancing our enterprise transformation initiatives.
Our progress is beginning to show in our financial results with adjusted margins and earnings improving sequentially each quarter during the year. In fiscal ’23, we will continue to execute our new strategy. We expect to deliver significant earnings growth this year even without meaningful volume growth, as put in place spend is projected to only be marginally positive. We do see a long runway for further improvements in the years ahead as our core markets recover, the economy stabilizes, and we shift our mix to higher value offerings.
With that, we’re ready to take your questions.
Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
[Operator instructions]
Our first question comes from Chris Moore with CJS Securities. Your line is open.
Chris Moore
Hey, good morning guys. Thanks for taking a couple questions.
Ty Silberhorn
Good morning.
Chris Moore
Good morning. So pricing fully offset inflation in Q4. Is that assumption built into the fiscal ’23 guide?
Nisheet Gupta
Chris, good morning. First of all, we were very pleased with the work that our teams have done over the last quarter. This is the first quarter where they have been able to offset all of the inflationary impact across our businesses, so that trend is–that new muscle that we have built on offsetting inflation is going to continue throughout fiscal ’23. We do have a lot of volatility in the market right now, as you can see on the commodity prices of aluminum, energy prices most recently, and therefore we are cautiously optimistic that our teams will continue to offset inflation throughout fiscal ’23, and that has been built into our guidance.
Chris Moore
Got it, thanks. On the investor day, you guys talked about revenue growth targeted at 1.2 times non-residential construction growth. The last–I think it’s the SMI index that you guys focus on really, the last number I saw there, I believe was 3% for calendar ’22. Given the lag of some of your business lines, if that 3% is accurate for ’22, is that a better baseline for Apogee in calendar ’23?
Ty Silberhorn
Yes, thanks Chris – this is Ty. As you look at SMI, the reason we chose that and used it at investor day is we felt it was closer to matching up with our current year. It’s not perfect, but it’s directionally correct, where Dodge and ADI kind of give more of an 18 to 24-month view of how that would hit our revenue, so that number has recently been revised down to 1% but that was in current dollars, so there’s likely to be some price inflation even in that number, but that is a good guide.
You know, I made the comment as my wrap-up here that we do see marginally positive growth. That 1% to 3% is what we were looking at and factoring that into our assumptions.
Chris Moore
Got it, that’s very helpful. Last one from me is on the revenue growth. It looks like you’ll get some growth out of framing. Glass services, LSO, you’re talking about roughly flat. Which one out of those three has the highest likelihood of surprising in either direction?
Ty Silberhorn
Well, I’d say framing has the shorter cycle time. A larger percent of their revenues have shorter cycle, so we tend to see that respond faster. If there is a pick-up in demand, whether that’s driven by projects on the ground or even people trying to get ahead from a supply standpoint, we’re likely to see that in framing. That’s where we’ve seen pricing take hold. We’re also doing some work, of course, to offset costs because we have to stay competitive in the marketplace from a customer perspective, but when we look at kind of where we expect the drivers to come from, it’s likely going to be led by framing, pricing being a large part of that.
Chris Moore
Got it. I’ll leave it there. Appreciate it, guys.
Ty Silberhorn
Thank you Chris.
Nisheet Gupta
Thanks Chris.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Eric Stine with Craig Hallum. Your line is open.
Eric Stine
Good morning everyone.
Ty Silberhorn
Good morning.
Nisheet Gupta
Good morning.
Eric Stine
Maybe just to stick with framing, just kind of dig in there a little bit and take your temperature. On one hand, a lot of your commentary certainly in the release kind of feels like your thought is that you’ve turned the corner there, but yet it also seems like your expectation is that there’s much more improvement to go, so maybe just expand on that a little bit, where you think that business is. I know you’ve got the changes going on with Sotawall and that that will be exiting, but maybe just some thoughts expanded on framing.
Ty Silberhorn
Sure, appreciate the question, Eric. As we look at framing, the one area you have to pay attention to is that Sotawall shift, so we’ve got in our appendix that pro forma view. When we look at framing performance, Sotawall was a drag in that fourth quarter. Sota did post a loss for the year and the bulk of that loss did come in that fourth quarter. Setting that aside, framing actually sequentially was relatively flat from a margin perspective. We do expect them to do better. What we saw as we closed out the quarter in terms of both pricing and cost, we saw improvements there, so we do expect that momentum to carry forward here in fiscal ’23, staying ahead on the price and inflationary side, and then also taking advantage of the cost structure efforts that they did last year, and frankly there’s some upside there because we’re really just reinvigorating the lean efforts in framing. We started off with glass, we shifted that to framing, so there’s even some upside there from a margin perspective for framing as we move through the year.
Eric Stine
Okay. That’s helpful.
Maybe just turning to services then, I know this is a business that’s late cycle. The outlook or the question that you’ve had and been upfront about is will you be able to fill in the backlog there so that there is not a dip as you work through projects, so maybe just some thoughts on that, where you see services. I know you’ve guided to for fiscal ’23 flat year-over-year, but just more kind of a high level view as you think multi-year view.
Ty Silberhorn
Yes, and you hit it right on there – that is our longer cycle business. That downturn the last 18 months, the valley of that downturn, if you will, in terms of jobs awarded, that is now flowing through our services business, so for them to end up relatively flat would once again point to that they’ve outperformed the market with respect to that. As we look at the year, I think that’s a good guide if there may be a little bit of upside, but their work now is focused on building that backlog, which is still strong, it’s over $500 million. That continues to be well above historical levels, so that bodes well as we look at fiscal ’24 and beyond as well.
The team, just as they did last year, they kind of were able to fill in some of the gap that they potentially were looking at for fiscal ’23. Now, they’ve turned their attention not just to executing on the job flow but working on starting to build up fiscal ’24.
Eric Stine
Okay, that’s great. Clearly the trends there have been good in light of everything going on.
Maybe last one from me, I know there are so many moving parts here, but I would just love your thoughts on some of the headwinds that are in the market right now. I know you’ve factored these into your guidance to a large degree, or at least to some degree, but whether it’s labor or supply chain, potentially higher interest rates, how that impacts the projects that you are going after. Would just love your high level thoughts on all of those.
Ty Silberhorn
Sure. I would say material–raw material inflation is still the biggest concern and that we’re monitoring and watching that. We’re working from a customer perspective. We’re trying to balance what we need to do on price but also taking costs out where we can to offset some of that and stay competitive, so a lot of the challenges we saw last year, I think carry through most of this calendar year, which is the bulk of our fiscal ’23, so pricing on raw materials and just general supply of raw materials.
We continue to lean heavily on a very strong procurement organization, that’s not only within our business units but we’ve built up some additional muscle and support at the corporate level, so their focus will be not only to help manage costs but probably most importantly ensuring that we continue to get the right level of supply to service those customers.
From a broader market perspective, we are keeping an eye on that just in terms of how does that potential impact projects that might be greenlighted or not as they reassess costs associated with doing those projects. We haven’t seen a negative trend in that area. We continue to see, just as the market reports have shown, an expansionary number, so growth. We see a pick-up in some bidding activity. It’s bumpy just given the backdrop of the economy, but right now that’s another piece we’re looking at long term, as at what point do interest rates or higher material costs at a minimum start to cause some folks to re-think size of projects or timing of projects.
Eric Stine
Okay, that’s helpful. Thanks.
Ty Silberhorn
All right.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Julio Romero with Sidoti. Your line is open.
Julio Romero
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions.
Ty Silberhorn
Good morning.
Nisheet Gupta
Good morning.
Julio Romero
On the glass segment, you saw a really nice sequential jump in the margin there on flattish sequential sales. Could you just talk about what’s driving the margin there, and does that strength continue into the first quarter?
Ty Silberhorn
Yes, I would say that the work we touched on before around productivity improvements, as well as really capturing the benefits of the restructuring, that started to really show in the fourth quarter. We do expect that to continue, so glass, even if it’s flat on volume, we expect them to continue to see margin improvement. Year-over-year from a total year perspective on a margin as a percent of revenue, that’s the business that will probably see the biggest step up of improvement on that. It has to do with that work that they are doing from a productivity standpoint as well, not just capturing the restructuring side.
Nisheet Gupta
And Julio, just to add there, if you think about the two sites that we have shut down as part of that restructuring that Ty mentioned, we have shut down the Velocity business that was not making money for us and also we had the Statesboro site that we have shut down, so we have really improved the productivity with Statesboro and those losses are not there anymore in the fourth quarter.
Julio Romero
Okay, great. That’s really helpful there.
Could you maybe just speak a little bit on volumes in the framing segment? I know you had volumes down year-over-year, and I think the orders in the quarter were down sequentially but off of a high base, so can you just talk about your expectations for volumes in the framing segment?
Ty Silberhorn
I think when we look at revenue for framing, it was led by price, so there was a negative volume. As we look at fiscal ’23, I think we’ll still see–we’re going to see revenue growth and we’ll still see that primarily led by price, but some of the indicators are that we will see positive volume starting to come through on that business as well.
Nisheet Gupta
We’ve definitely seen some increase in the bidding activity in the framing segment also and we are monitoring it very carefully. As you know, the story on framing gain for this year is not much about the volume but it’s about improving our profitability, and we are well on track to achieve that.
Julio Romero
Yes, understood. Maybe last one from me is just on the corporate cost line. You mentioned there was some favorable insurance costs that drove that a little bit lower than normal. Can you just remind us what’s a good run rate for corporate as we head into fiscal ’23?
Nisheet Gupta
Yes, so corporate’s got a lot of ins and outs that go into it. If you think about quarter three, we had $7 million in corporate, we had $1.9 million last year and we have half a million in this year, so I would expect about $3 million to $5 million of corporate costs that will go in a normal quarter. It depends on many things. In corporate, we true up, true down insurance costs and medical costs. Last year, medical costs were a significant headwind for us, so we expect that those true-ups and true-downs will normalize during the course of this year, and a $5 million [indiscernible] charge would be a normal run rate.
Julio Romero
Very helpful, thanks very much.
Ty Silberhorn
Thanks Julio.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Jon Braatz with Kansas City Capital. Your line is open.
Jon Braatz
Good morning everyone. Ty, I had a question. In the third quarter call, you mentioned that unrecovered raw material costs amounted to about $28 million through the first nine months. Where do you stand now given that aluminum costs have gone up significantly? Are we worse today than where we were at the end of the third quarter?
Ty Silberhorn
I would say we’re slightly better, Jon. As we commented, in the fourth quarter we saw price versus inflation offset price slightly positive, and so if you look at the full year, that number has not gotten worse, it’s probably gotten a little bit better. As we go forward, we’re working to balance those things out to stay competitive in the market and we’ll continue to drive, make sure we can stay whole from a pricing standpoint, but also continue to work on cost so that we’re adding value for our customers at the same time.
Jon Braatz
So as we look ahead towards next year on balance, or fiscal 2023, you expect that to continue to come down a little bit and you begin to recover more of those costs?
Nisheet Gupta
Yes, so just to clarify, as we think about quarter four, this is the first quarter in which our teams have been able to offset all the inflation with price increases and productivity, so that’s the first good data point and news we had for quarter four. As we move into the next year, our teams have built that muscle that all of the material inflation that will come through will be offset with price increases unless there is a significant volatility that can impact the short lead time businesses.
So to answer your question, we are well positioned not to have a very big headwind on inflation in fiscal ’23 unless there’s a lot of volatility in the market.
Jon Braatz
Okay, yes. Absolutely, understood. Okay.
Then secondly, as you transition Sotawall to services, do you envision any restructuring costs or assimilation costs or integration costs this year?
Ty Silberhorn
At this point, the team has built into their plan whatever costs they’ll have with doing that integration. Sotawall was a business unit that had been operated much like most of the acquisitions historically, so standalone business unit, so getting them on same systems, same platforms, there’s some expense related to that. That’s built into our guidance, and services has built that into their budget and plan for the year.
Nisheet Gupta
We are not expecting any large restructuring charge happening for the Sotawall integration in fiscal ’23.
Jon Braatz
Okay, thank you.
Ty Silberhorn
Thank you Jon.
Operator
Thank you. We have a question from Zane Karimi with DA Davidson. Your line is open.
Zane Karimi
Hey, good morning gentlemen, and I appreciate the color so far.
Ty Silberhorn
Good morning Zane.
Zane Karimi
First off here, when we’re looking at the outlook for fiscal ’23, the backlog has improved some in framing, but I’m just trying to understand, between the self-help initiatives and segment growth expectations, which of the two will really drive the material increase in earnings over this year that you’re implying within guidance?
Nisheet Gupta
If you think about the earnings guidance, we landed at $2.48 for this year and we are looking at a midpoint of $3.10, right, so a couple of things are happening there. First, the share repurchases that we did in all of fiscal ’22, a majority of that in the fourth quarter, will have a big impact to the EPS for next year. That’s the first big driver.
The second is all of the restructuring actions we are taking, all those actions will have a full year impact coming into next year. That will be the second big driver of our EPS gain year-over-year, and third is in fiscal ’22, we had a lot of net inflation negative impact. In the first three quarters, we had negative impact and we were only able to offset that in the fourth quarter. That is not going to be the story for next year, and that’s the third big driver that will not have a negative impact year-over-year.
Those are the three big tickets items that we think and we believe our guidance of $3.10 midpoint is well within the range of our teams achieving.
Zane Karimi
Great, I appreciate that. Then maybe a little bit more about what’s the thought process today on acquisitions after you conclude the restructuring actions over the next quarter or so?
Ty Silberhorn
Yes Zane, I’ll talk to that point. As we said at investor day, acquisitions will be a lever that we intend to pull as part of our growth strategy, so we’re going to take a disciplined approach in how we do that. As I commented in my remarks, that’s an area of focus as we strengthen our capabilities there and strengthen the process associated with that, so we started rebuilding that M&A pipeline, if you will, over the past few months, and that work will continue as we go forward, and it will be an area that we’ll look to action at some point in the future.
Zane Karimi
Okay, I appreciate it.
Operator
Thank you, and there are no other questions in the queue. I’d like to turn the call back to Ty Silberhorn for any closing comments.
Ty Silberhorn
All right, well thank you. Let me end the call today by once again thanking and congratulating our employees. We have accomplished a great deal in what was a turbulent year and we positioned the company for greater success in fiscal ’23, as well as the years ahead.
For those on the call, thanks for joining us today as well, and we look forward to updating you on our first quarter results in a couple of months. Have a great day.
Operator
This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day.
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