Good morning everyone and welcome back to Day Two of Oppenheimer's 20th Annual Industrial Growth Conference. We're delighted to welcome back to the conference the management team of Lennox, CEO Alok Maskara and CFO Michael Quenzer. Gentlemen, thank you both for being here. Looking forward to a great discussion today. Thanks for having me. Same here, Noah, thank you for having us. It's our pleasure. And you know, I think given some of the discussions that we've been having over the past week or so, I actually felt it was appropriate to start with a big picture question really around Lennox's transformation. If I go back to February, you talked about 2025 as a transition from recovery and investment into accelerating growth and you called out four key pillars, the digital customer experience, Samsung JV, increasing parts and accessories attachment rate, and growing emergency replacement in the commercial business. Maybe, Alok, can you level set where progress stands on those four initiatives, the KPIs you and we should be tracking, and where you'd like to be on all those by year end? Sure. Thanks, Noah. Glad we can talk about long term. Every other question that you're facing these days about tariffs and short terms, but if you go back beyond the tariffs, I think growth transition year is the right phase for us to describe 2025. Right. If you think about after the successful conversion to A2L which we got like, you know, higher share, higher loyalty because of our execution, we are seeing early signs of success in each of the four pillars that you mentioned. If I start with Samsung, the conversion from our legacy 410A ductless portfolio to the Lennox Powered by Samsung is actually going quite well. Feedback from our customers has been encouraging. We do have the opportunity to gain share and remember we are like low single digit share on this important product category which now is up to 10% of the market. Customers love our product design, our integrated controls with Samsung and the heat pump technology of the new portfolio. It is still early days but we are bullish on our Samsung joint venture and the impact it'll have on the second one. The emergency replacement pilots that we did were very successful. The learning was instrumental. We have now done a broader rollout. We are locked and loaded for the summer season and we saw early signs of share gain in Q1. Although the market was depressed, we just saw on a small base we got good growth and we are excited about the long term opportunity. Just as a reminder, this is $100 million for us over the next multiple years. Thirdly on the customer experience, digital customer experience, that's been an ongoing initiative and we closed in residential 2024 at a record market share and that was because of better fulfillment rate, better digital experience and we're continuing to make more investments, we're continuing to get additional growth benefits and I think by early next year we would have a new distribution network design which is going to be more efficient, we'll have higher fulfillment rate and hence better NPS and better share. Good progress but the best is yet to come in that as we start launching bigger initiatives with improved network in 2026. Lastly in parts and accessories, we actually had a slow start in 2024. It wasn't a great year for parts and accessories as we were dealing with a lot of supply chain, lot of changes. Growth has improved in Q1 and we did a test case on this on one of our business units and over three years we were able to double our parts and supplies. Now we are taking those learnings, applying it across all of Lennox and remain committed to doubling our parts and accessory sales over the next three to five years. Net net, you know all of these we are very optimistic, remain bullish on it, but it's going to take us a while, three to five years and we will share the metrics as we come further along and start talking about but each of these we are starting with such a small level. Noah, we're very optimistic about the future. Maybe on that last one, can you help us understand the role that the distribution network and even the digital investments might play in doubling the parts and accessories revenue from the current 20%? Can you maybe help us understand the margin delta between parts and systems and whether that differs between your two segments? Sure. The margin on our OEM parts is very good as you can imagine, right? I mean those are better than our equipment margins. The margins on some third party parts which are non Lennox branded is not so good. Blended together, it comes out the parts and accessories drop through at the same on the overall basis as the rest of Lennox. No big delta in that. On digital, I'll give you some examples, Noah. If you go to LennoxPros., which is where majority of our dealers buy products from, over 50% of orders come through that. Earlier, we did not have any tools that if they bought an air conditioning unit, there was no prompt. Now, using AI, they get a prompt saying, hey, you're buying this. Would you like to buy so and so product that could be a humidifier, that could be an accessory that we are using to install, that could simply be about some ducting that we have a special promotion on, or installation supplies. That is kind of a very simple example of a more sophisticated system that we are putting in place to make sure we have the right parts and accessories at different stores. Historically, Boston and Florida had the same parts. It does not work. They need very different type of accessories. We are putting that together. Going back to fulfillment rate, our fulfillment rate on equipment has gone up, but our fulfillment rate on parts and accessories has not improved yet. That is where some of the distribution investment works. The new warehouse management system we have implemented, that's going to help substantially in making that together and having a centralized place to store all our parts and accessories and fulfill the 250 stores with ABC categories. There is a lot of work still to be done there, Noah, but the potential is huge. Yeah, I'm thinking of the Amazon algorithm. I get where it shows, you bought this, customers also bought this. What you're saying, if I hear you right, is that you've kind of tailored that to be regionally appropriate, appropriate for the markets that you serve, which is quite a step forward. Go ahead, please. No, I'm saying Amazon did it 10 years ago. We are finally getting around to doing it right. I think that's the piece I keep telling my engineers, why is such a big deal? They've been doing it on Amazon for years. Interesting. On BCS, I think you're targeting, as you said, mid to high teens pr share versus the current low single digit. How do you get there? I think more broadly, how long should it take to get to full run rate on the revenue capacity additions you're able to fulfill now with the new Saltillo plant? Sure. I think the revenue capacity that we added right now is 20%. I think that's the one we look at it. Remember, we can add 20% more, 20% more, 20% more as our sales ramp up. I think that we have tons of capacity given our existing footprint. To get to that extra 20% capacity, I think it takes us about two to three years now. The industry is down this year, so it's hard for me to compare apples to apples. Emergency replacement, what we have done so far is first of all working back from our dealer base, done lots of segmentation and broken our customers into multiple categories. Loyal Lennox dealers, dealers who used to sell commercial from us and no longer do that, alliance dealers, and then finally looking at a new target. We pull all that together. They all want quotes back within two hours and they want product delivery the same day or next day. We are putting that capability first. We test marketed that in Chicago, got really good results. Now we have that in 14 other locations as we get ready for the summer season and we have deployed the right kind of resources. Every district has a specialist for emergency replacement who can go to customers and attract new customers. We have inside sales team putting together and then finally the products, our new products that we are targeting, they are all made in Saltillo, very high quality, much better efficiency. They are all A2L. They are able to get payback periods that are world class and with better performance that we have had. Putting it all together, this is something that we used to do. Low single digits or double digits is not going to happen soon enough, but I think three to five years we are very optimistic we're going to get there. One strategic question for you, but it is also about personnel. Gary Bedard retiring from the company after 26 years and we wish him well. Maybe can you give us an update on succession planning and how you're defining priorities for home comfort solutions as part of that planning process? By the way, Gary had the biggest smile recently when he had like 26 years at Lennox. It is probably much more in dog years but wish him well in the retirement. Sarah Martin has joined us as the new HCS President. She comes from Honeywell, has lots of experience in channel management. She comes with very digital. Her business used to do sensors. One of the great things about Sarah joining the company is she comes from a business that used to be much higher margins. Sometimes our legacy Lennox leaders, they feel guilty about making the margins. When we talk about manufacturers margin plus distributor margin and 20% they're like whoa, whoa, whoa. I think Sarah's business used to make high 20s and I think she's looking at this and oh, I'm coming to a low margin business, a different perspective. We are super excited about Sarah. Her background in sensors and digital was going to help us. Margin profile is very attractive. We have a very strong bench of leaders. This time we had to go outside just based on timing. As we look at Lennox, our leaders have done well. Many of them have been around for multiple years and are ready to go play with grandkids or whatever else they want to do. Imagine people who don't want to come to work for the rest of their lives. Just kidding. I mean from our perspective we're happy for those dealers like, you know, our employees and leaders who are moving on but we're happy to bring some new fresh blood in the company as well. Sure. I mean that, that's part of how you get satisfaction out of your work. Right. It's compensation, it's the people and culture you work with, and it's the opportunity for growth. So we get all of that. You guys will have an opportunity to meet Sarah at one of the conferences. I think you just really like her. Excellent. We look forward to it. I think that's a good segue into talking about demand and end markets, maybe starting with residential. Of course there have been so many different analysts who've tried to frame that longer term view of demand. You've obviously done so, including at your investor day back in 2022 when you talked about 4% to 6% CAGR in residential unit growth over the next decade. Does that framework still look right to you? I guess if we take out the pre buy distortions on 2024 and 2025 units, would it be fair to say your updated guide for mid single digit volume decline for 2025 would take us below the trend line of unit growth? Yes, it would. If you think about a 10 year time frame, it won't matter. I think over the 10 years, if you look at 2009 to 2019, you would see a 4% to 6% unit growth. I think if you take a 10 year view here, but it starts at 2025 or so, you'll see the same thing. Our mid single digits decline for 2025. Let me just address that. That is based on a scenario of significant economic slowdown in the U.S. and the consumer confidence continued plummeting. Currently we see consumer spending remains robust despite all the challenges. If that remains, then our guide would turn out to be conservative on the volume side, our pricing assumptions based on tariff. In the long term we remain very convinced that the residential market will continue growing 4% to 6% in unit terms. Now we haven't had a normal year for us since the tornado, for industry, since COVID, COVID, SEER change, now refrigerant change. If you took all that away, I think you see a very similar growth rate. The demand grows up because temperature extremes are getting more and more prevalent. There is just general increase in summer. Every summer seems to be the hottest in the past 10 years or 20 years that we are having. Population is moving south. A lot more air conditioning in Florida and Texas and other areas which need more air conditioning versus Minnesota and Wisconsin. Heat pumps, they last much less than air conditioning and much less than furnaces. You put all of that together and the fact that the repair costs are going up as much if not more than the replacement cost. I see no reason for the overall dynamics to change. We remain convinced that the industry is going to go four to six in unit terms plus pricing, which may not be as high as tariffs have caused it, but still we always recover inflation. I think this industry remains a very attractive industry. To unpack that a little further, I think new construction, call it 25% of the segment volume and it sounds like that's about a couple points of volume headwind this year in your updated guide, which means you would think it would be down at least 10% to 15%. To clarify, is that macro driven or at this point are you getting clear indications on that forecast from your builder customers? You know, from a builder customers we do get clear forecast and it's not that extreme. Right. I mean part of it is we expected new home construction to go up and now we don't expect it to go up because it was already depressed last year. If you think about new home construction in 2024, it was at a low level. We were just optimistic that it's going to go up because of lower interest rate. We took that optimism out and we kept the replacement kind of like going downward trend based on consumer confidence. No, it's not down that much. It's 20% to 25% of our business. At this stage I think it's going to be down maybe 5% ish, not 20% ish. Yeah, right. Relative to your prior guide, I think I was benchmarking. And just remind us, compared to the. Guide it's down much more. Compared to last year, not as much. Right, right. I'm with you. Maybe just further on that. Remind us on the cycle time and the visibility with those customers from when new units are being built to when you get the order to when you ship. Sure. If you take home starts, the indoor units typically go in about less than six months since the home start. The outdoor unit typically goes about 12 months. Rough numbers, we can put some error bars depending on the builders. If you're a good builder, they are faster and we do get decent visibility on that. Now keep in mind, it's also one of our lowest margin in the industry. I mean new home builders, they always buy the lowest merit SEER product and the margins are low. But we do have six months top visibility on the first unit. Okay. I think on the subject of near term signals during 1Q earnings, you talked about potential channel destocking as a headwind for 2Q. You know, peers also raised the subject of having some elevated inventories in the channel, but at the same time not necessarily seeing any slowdown in movement so far. Maybe talk through any difference in behavior you're seeing between your own distribution and the two step. If possible, can you kind of give us a sense of the delta between direct channel inventory versus what you've got in two step? Sure. In a direct channel we are essentially done with 410A and we have moved all to 454B and it's going well. There's been no air pocket. We don't expect any at this stage. On the two step, I think it's similar. In some cases there is maybe two to three weeks of extra inventory that they build up on 410A just to get some price advantage on that. I think that gets flushed out by end of May or early June. We all, I mean the entire industry, may have overestimated this destocking because of how badly we were wrong in this year change where we thought destocking would be less and it was more. The other thing to keep in mind, the distributors are more willing to hold inventory right now because some of them, with the tariff environment, they're expecting supply chain disruptions. It is not just a normal. Right. You got to think about distributor mindset, posterior change. Distributors were willing to cut it down. They had more confidence in supply chain and more confidence in manufacturers. Today they have less confidence in supply chain. Net net. We may not see this destocking and if you see it will be probably much less than any of us predicted. Very interesting. You announced two pricing actions related to tariffs already. What's been the retention on those price increases and how dynamically can you adjust price further as the tariff and cost inflation scenarios play out this year? We don't know what's going to happen, same as you. Just talk to us about the ability to change as the scenario changes. Yeah, I mean we remain flexible and our goal is to be fair to our customers while protecting our margins. The first price increase, we call it the pre Liberation Day price increase, that was about the impact of steel and aluminium and everything else that went in. I mean there was a spike up and we had to look at that and we implemented. The second price increase we did was post Liberation Day and that was more targeted. Remember Mexico, we are USMCA compliant 100%. That comes out. It is mostly on the other products. In some cases the second price increase went as a surcharge and multiple reasons for that. One is because in some cases we are contractually prohibited from doing two price increases a year, but you can do surcharge. We're just trying to push that through. Second, we were just trying to maintain some flexibility to see what the competitive reaction is and to see what kind of tariff changes might occur. Remember this was a time where you could wake up in the morning and you find that there was a new tweet and the tariffs have been withdrawn. It takes us from announcement to implementation is a 30- day cycle time for us. Right. We want to maintain that flexibility and credibility with the dealer. I would ignore the difference between a surcharge and a price increase and I would just look at what flexibility we have created, which I think is enormous for us to serve the customer fairly and recover any impact of tariffs. In reality, what's going to happen is we all going to mitigate the impact of tariff one way or the other. Lots of production shifting between China and Thailand, working with our vendors like the Mini Split vendor is able to do that within three months. A motor vendor, it might take them six months, but they all can move production from China to Vietnam. They're actually not moving production. All they're doing is U.S. customers are getting it from Vietnam, the rest of the world is now getting it from China. Just SKU moves versus actually new factors. Rerouting shipping. Yeah, rerouting shipping. I think once we do the mitigation, I do not think we have to give it all back in pricing. Right. That is where we like to continue to hold as much as we can so we can reinvest it back in digital, reinvest back in innovation to serve our customers better. It's an interesting point you just made about the flexibility there. Just to double click on it, when you announced, whether it's the surcharge or the price increase and we're not going to fixate on it, how quickly can we see the retention and any sort of related impacts on that? Just give us a sense of the cycle time. We started seeing retention numbers pretty quickly in terms of pushback from large accounts and all. The first one, I'd say retention was very high. The second one is still evolving, and in that case, it's also because the tariff environment is evolving. Every day we see some new changes and release. I think the first one, stick rate was very high. Pretty much every competition has followed the first one, and now every competition is following the second one as well. I think just going to amount of second one is going to vary, and we'll know more by the time Q2 ends. We are pleased with how the industry has behaved in pricing net net. I want to ask on the BCS side because obviously that was a headwind in 1Q, but I think you characterized it in fairness. So did we. I'm perhaps leading with my conclusion. We characterized that as somewhat transitory, really kind of tied to the refrigerant transition and the factory ramp. I think you also commented on your order rates picking up as you move through 1Q. Help us understand, were those dynamics more same store with national accounts? Did the orders growth you're seeing now have a broader dimension? Maybe comment on that? Sure. It is transitionary. The interesting thing, I went back and looked at what happened to us in Q1 after the search change. Pretty much the exact same thing in terms of our key accounts. When you go through these transitions they just wait. They do not want to schedule anything in the first month. They do not want to be the first. Lowe's do not want to be the first one to put new units up on their rooftop. They want Walmart or Home Depot to do it first. Right. There was a bit of that. Remember the factory startup that we did last year still had inefficiencies, and Q1 is the one when we went from 410B to 454B. We essentially had very low production in January as well. Putting that, and then we move lines from Stuttgart to Saltillo. That always creates lack of productivity or inefficiencies through the process. We'll work through the internal inefficiencies. I would expect a very normal second half. Q2 obviously would be transition between normal and how bad Q1 was. You can draw a straight line through that on volume. We saw improvement. We know key accounts that are back to normal now. The industry is down, industry is down double digits and we can control that. Net net we landed up Q1 with higher share and we gained share in Q1 as we closed it as now all the numbers have come out and we think that trend continues and our efficiencies get better and inefficiencies get left behind as we lap with the new factory and as we finish with the line moves. Yeah, we remain quite confident in the numbers we have given on the volume, and the last reminder on that, only half of BCS is unitary rooftops. Right. Some people applied the entire industry softness to BCS, and that is wrong. Services are resilient and growing. Heatcraft, which is refrigeration, is also doing quite well. The industry softness applies to only about half of our total revenue. Q1 was transitory from a price and tariff cost perspective as well. As you go to the balance of the year, you'll have a price cost benefit on that equation as well. Oh yeah, I forgot the famous LIFO. This is the first time I had to learn so much about LIFO and why that impacts us immediately. Yeah, you just had a high cost inventory and you weren't able to adjust price for it. Yeah, price cost will flip the balance of the year. Yep. Okay. I guess pulling back a picture on growth. Obviously there's a lot of near term macro uncertainty, but when I start to sketch out the setup for 2026, I think no pre buy headwind, no drag from the Saltillo transition, probably easy comps on new construction, mixed benefits from a full year of 454B and pricing rollover from these tariff actions. That's a lot of growth drivers. Perhaps there's some we're missing, maybe you can add to that. When you put it all together, what kind of growth could that imply for the company? First of all, I'm delighted that it's the 6th of May and we're talking about 2026. Right. We can't wait to put 2025 behind us. Thank you, Noah. I think it could be an attractive year. Right. What we don't know is where the macro is going to be heading, where the consumer things are heading. In addition to what you said, the other thing we are very confident on is in our share gain initiatives. That's when we are launching our new network design that I talked about which will lead to better efficiency and higher fulfillment rate. We would have had significant experience in our emergency replacement initiative. All the new additions would have had 12, 18 months of experience. They would be more productive. Of course the Stuttgart versus Saltillo balance, we would have got it right. There's a lot to be looking forward to in 2026. I think the macro would be probably our only concern at this stage and make sure we don't go in a deep recession or some new crisis every time I get optimistic about a year. I was pretty optimistic about 2025 before these tariff things came around. 454B mix which is coming through as we expected. The pricing is holding as we expected. Emergency replacement is as we expected. The transitioning headwinds are a little bit more, but the tariff uncertainty just clouded the whole picture. Let's just hope there's nothing new. Otherwise 2026 should be a good year. That's one reason going back to history, when we did Investor Day, we didn't want to give 2025 guidance. We were giving 2026 guidance even at that stage saying that 2025 is going to be messy so we are going to meet or beat our 2026 guidance. That's a great headline, Alok. I guess within that there's a framework around incrementals. 40% makes 100% on price, 30% on volume. Do you see incrementals generally holding steady? If we think about the year ahead, we'll be lapping some of the tariff cost impacts, of course. Michael, what do you think? Yeah, short answer is yes, those incrementals should still apply to 2026 and we're even more excited about 2027 and beyond. I think went through some of the macro end market drivers of industry units kind of 4% to 5%. You get a few percent share gain and then you have low single digit price increases. All that adds up to high single digit if not double digit revenue growth, which is really what we're focused on. Those incrementals should hold. Want to ask a couple of items related to supply chain and tariffs. Samsung JV, good foresight there. Maybe talk about the implications of tariff dynamics for your ability to gain share. How you're managing the 10% reciprocal maybe. How much opportunity do you see to take share from the Chinese competitors in the ductless market? I think it's significant in hindsight. This was a stroke of genius. I think we didn't do it because of China versus South Korea manufacturing, but I think this was a stroke of genius from our side. Remember, we are low single digits. The share opportunity was already huge, but in our estimate about 40% or more than 40% of those units are coming from China. The fact that us and the other beneficiary too, like Mitsubishi and Hitachi and Fujitsu, I think there's going to be a significant share shift there. Now I don't think we should take that for granted. I mean some of the Chinese companies like Midea, they're opening factories in Mexico which will be USMCA compliant. I think folks are going to fight back. We do have a short term opportunity to gain significant share here. I'll just add even on the ducted units there could be up to 5% ducted units in comfort as well. Yeah. If we think about the industry and the USMCA compliant goods exemption, you know, that's been a benefit so far. Hopefully it stays in place. Are you making any investments today to potentially de risk the loss of that exemption? This would of course affect the entire industry. But you do have significant Mexico exposure. We do. I think our view, 40% of the industry units have Mexico USMCA exposure. I think any investments we are making are in the design stages. Like you know, are we creating scenarios or what would we do? Yes. Are we putting any concrete in the ground or are we looking at any real investments? Not yet, but yeah, we're doing scenario planning. Remember we still have most of our factories in the U.S. and many of the units we used to make in the U.S. So yes, we do have scenario planning and we have done, but we haven't spent any real dollars behind it. In the short term. Obviously you have announced the price increases. Maybe just double click on the impact of the tariffs on price cost dynamics through the rest of the year. From a timing perspective, you know, you implemented these price increases relatively early in the quarter. So how balanced is sort of the price cost dynamics on a quarter to quarter basis as we move throughout the year? Michael, do you want to take that? Sure. Yeah. The first price increase that we announced is effective kind of April, so Alok mentioned, really good stick rates on those. We're just starting to go through that second price increase right now which is kind of beginning to take effect in May. Those will both ramp up over the balance of the year and kind of deliver that price cost positive that I mentioned. Our goal here was to protect our profit margins. That is related to tariff and tariff related inflation. There is cost out there that is not specific to tariff. We continue to monitor, we'll continue to mitigate our cost as well. Overall we should see that price cost positive for the rest of the year then. Michael, this may be another one for you. Just help us better understand the BCS margin step up as you see it moving through the year. You call out some of the drivers, but maybe we can think about it a bit more numerically. I think the big balance of the year question is going to be on the volume side. Right now we've assumed it's about a flat volume. Alok mentioned about 25% of that segment is service, 25% refrigeration. So those markets continue to progress well and we also expect to have some share gain within the emergency replacement in there. Offsetting some of that is this uncertainty on kind of where light commercial unitary is going to be. We have backlog visibility about one or two months right now. That seems good, but it's something we're definitely watching and we're definitely focused on cost productivity initiatives. We should start to have in the second half of the year. The lapping of some of those launch costs that we for the new factory in Mexico as well as new cost initiatives that we're taking in the organization as well. Finally, the last one is we'll start to see the full benefit of the mix. We saw a little bit of mix benefit in the first quarter, but that'll ramp up as we'll sell almost all 454B kind of exiting the second quarter. That's helpful. Thank you. Just want to close with a question or two around investment priorities. With the refrigerant transition and the Saltillo factory build behind the company, it does seem like the focus is for the time being shifting from manufacturing to distribution infrastructure. How do we think about payback times or ROIC as you see it for manufacturing versus distribution investments? I'll take that. I think the manufacturing investments, they typically have a longer payback compared to distribution for us and manufacturing also there's a lot of inefficiencies and ramp up versus distribution. Things are just faster. A lot of our distribution facilities are leased versus buy. Not that it makes a difference beyond the anecdotal, but some of the large distribution investments that we are making in Dallas, we are looking at less than two year payback. Often one year payback versus manufacturing is typically four. I think that's where we look at the total payback. We feel like in today's environment there are lots of opportunities we have. We'll continue focusing on internal improvements and internal growth investments. First, we'll continue doing polite dividend increases. We'll continue looking at M&A opportunities. Which market's currently frozen and then at this level, share buybacks. I think we've been sitting on a lot of firepower for that as well. We feel like from a capital we're in a very good spot. You mentioned M&A frozen. Maybe unpack that a little bit more. Where might it make sense to still buy versus build? Yeah, I mean market's frozen. I don't mean like we are frozen. Any discussions we've had just start getting put on ice because buyers and sellers can agree on a valuation and there's so much fluctuation and tariff noise in the market for us. We would really like to continue boosting up our services portfolio. We've done one acquisition that was in services. We like to do more in parts and accessories. There's just a lot of attachment. Think of it like, you know, six feet around our box-w hether it's in the basement or outside. We still have lots of opportunities in those areas. We would like to continue looking at more technology play as well. There's a lot of new IAQ (indoor air quality) controls and other technology that we can look at and those would be sort of defining our M&A priorities at this stage. The broad industry consolidation is out of the question on where we are, but we look at that and in each of those cases we do not have to do an acquisition. That is probably one reason we do not. We are very critical on ourselves when we look at acquisitions. We analyze it much more than others, probably. We are very disciplined because I think organic pathway has paid well for us over the course past multiple years. We look forward to seeing that continue. I think we're at time, but want to thank you all for the great discussion and thanks to everyone who listened in the webcast. More meetings to come, more discussions over the course of today and the next coming days. Alok, Michael, thank you very much for the time. Hope everyone has a great day. Thanks nor thank you.