Q1 2025 Middleby Corp Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Timothy Fitzgerald; Chief Executive Officer; Middleby Corp

Bryan Mittelman; Chief Financial Officer; Middleby Corp

Steven Spittle; Chief Commercial Officer; Middleby Corp

Walt Liptak; Analyst; Seaport Global Securities LLC

Jeff Hammond; Analyst; KeyBanc Capital Markets

Mig Dobre; Analyst; Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated

Tim Thein; Analyst; Raymond James

Tami Zakaria; Analyst; JP Morgan

Brian McNamara; Analyst; Canaccord Genuity

Presentation

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Middleby Corporation first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please note this event has been recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Timothy FitzGerald, CEO. Please go ahead.

Timothy Fitzgerald

Thank you for joining today's call. I'd like to begin by highlighting several key developments that underscore our commitment to driving shareholder value. As announced this morning, we've authorized an additional 7.5 million shares under our accelerated buyback program.
We plan to deploy the vast majority of our free cash flow towards repurchasing shares, reflecting our confidence in the business. We believe our share -- our current share price does not fully capture the strength of our business.
By prioritizing share repurchases, we aim to bridge that gap and deliver superior returns to shareholders while maintaining our strategic growth investments. This decision follows our February 2025 announcement to separate the food processing business into a stand-alone public company. A strategic move designed to unlock value and sharpen our focus.
Middleby's consistent operational excellence, strong cash flow generation and disciplined capital allocation provides a sound foundation for this enhanced buyback initiative. The total authorized shares for repurchase represent 21% of our outstanding equity.
Now as it relates to the separation of our food processing group, we remain on track to complete the spin-off in early 2026. We are confident that creating a stand-alone food processing company will unlock significant shareholder value by enabling focused growth strategies and operational agility.
As outlined in our February call, the creation of two market-leading but separate businesses will ensure greater strategic and operational focus at each stand-alone entity, allowing each business to implement and optimize capital structure and capital allocation policy to best support growth opportunities and enabling Middleby food processing with its best-in-class growth and margin profile, to be valued in line with key food processing and industrial peers.
We are excited about the prospects of food processing as this business is poised for long-term growth as we continue to execute on our strategy to be the supplier of choice with our full-line solutions enhancing the value delivered to our customers. And we see market expansion opportunities as we extend into attractive adjacent markets such as poultry, pet and snack foods, leveraging existing competencies.
In the coming quarters, we will provide more information on stand-alone financials, the leadership team and cost structures. We also plan to have a dedicated shareholder day in the fourth quarter to present further details on the strategic road map and growth outlook for the food processing business as an independent entity.
Now turning to tariffs. We are actively working to mitigate the cost impact of tariffs through targeted operational actions and pricing adjustments. Preliminary estimate of tariff-related costs is expected to increase our annual expenses by approximately $150 million to $200 million.
We are highly confident in our ability to navigate this new challenge. And while we see the negative impact in the next several quarters, we anticipate our ongoing actions will offset these cost impacts by end of the year.
While we address the cost side of the tariff equation, we are heavily focused on leveraging the strength of our manufacturing footprint. The strength we believe, provides us competitive advantage and unique opportunity to gain market share in a number of key product categories. We fully expect to not only manage the current market dynamics but emerge stronger.
Before I turn it to Brian, I would also like to reemphasize the strategic investments we have outlined and invested in over the past several years to drive sustainable long-term growth. We have been consistent and intentional through market disruptions to execute against our stated key priorities to accelerate the development of market-leading innovations and to transform our go-to-market sales strategies.
We put these two strategic priorities in place several years ago, and we've been building an engine to drive sustainable long-term organic growth. Market conditions may be challenged, but we are better positioned than ever. Middleby is the established leader for the future trends of automation, ventless cooking, electrification, digital technologies and IoT connectivity in the kitchen.
This is the result of our execution of this strategy. And we have been strategic in our approach to identify and enter new complementary and attractive markets, including ice and beverage which has broadened our addressable market, providing an expanded runway for growth.
We're excited about the many new game-changing innovations we have delivered, which James has discussed with enthusiasm on many of our past calls. We are proud that many of these products have been recognized with recent industry awards. We see these innovations gaining traction with customers and interest broadening in the marketplace.
While the pipeline takes time to develop, the future is bright. Along with our acceleration of innovation, we have made major steps in transforming our go-to-market capabilities from investments in innovation centers, establishment of leading culinary teams, launch of unique digital sales tools and the creation of a dedicated sales team focused on marketing our industry-leading solutions we have made strategic and incremental investments to recreate how we do business. This is all providing our customers a better experience from Middleby.
We are at early stages of realizing benefits from these long-term growth strategies with recent wins and with more on the horizon. We're confident Middleby is better positioned than ever, and we are extending this leading position is the reason we're confident it'll be is a great investment.
Bryan, I'll turn it over to you now for further comments on the quarter and outlook.