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F500 2021-219-PPG Industries

With operations in nearly 70 countries around the world, PPG is a global supplier of paints, coatings, and specialty materials.

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F500-2020-209-PPG-Industires

The Pittsburgh-based company makes paint, protective and decorative coatings, glass, silica products, and other materials, and operates in nearly 70 countries. PPG saw profits and revenues dip last year, bumping it four spots lower on our ranking.

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Founded in 1883, PPG is the world’s second-largest coatings producer and a top player in nearly every end market it serves, including auto manufacturing, aerospace, and refinishing. It manufactures and distributes paints, coatings, and specialty materials through three segments: Global Architectural Coatings, Performance Coatings, and Industrial Coatings. It's divested several divisons in recent years, including its silicas products business and its U.S. and Canada architectural coatings business in 2024. After the divestments, the paints and coatings giant still operates in more than 70 countries.

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PPG Industries (PPG): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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PPG Industries

ppg industries

Good morning, my name is Carly and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the third quarter PPG Industries earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press STAR followed by one on your telephone keypad, and to remove yourself from the line of questioning, press STAR followed by two. To allow everyone an opportunity to ask a question, the company requests that each analyst only ask one question. Thank you. I'd like to turn the call over to our host, Alex Lopez, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Carly, and good morning everyone. This is Alex Lopez. We appreciate your continued interest in PPG Industries and welcome you to our third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Joining me today from PPG Industries are Tim Knavish, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Vince Morales, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Our comments relate to the financial information released after U.S. equity markets closed on Tuesday, October 28, 2025. We have posted detailed commentary and the accompanying presentation slides on the Investor Center of our website, ppg.com. Following management's perspective on the Company's results, we will move to the Q&A session. Both the prepared commentary and discussion during this call may contain forward-looking statements reflecting the Company's current view of future events and their potential effect on PPG Industries' operating and financial performance. These statements involve uncertainties and risks which may cause actual results to differ.

The Company is under no obligation to provide subsequent updates to these forward-looking statements. The presentation also contains certain non-GAAP financial measures the Company has provided in the appendix of the presentation materials, which are available on our website. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is also provided. For additional information, please refer to PPG Industries' filings with the SEC. Now let me introduce PPG Industries Chairman and CEO, Tim Knavish.

Thank you, Alex, and good morning everybody. I'll start by providing a few highlights on Q3 2025 and then move to our outlook. I'm very proud of the PPG team's performance for the quarter in Q3. In a very challenging world, the team delivered organic growth, which included both volume growth and price growth, and delivered a record high Q3 EPS. Our results for the quarter reflect the accelerating momentum in PPG's organic sales growth with an increase of 2%, including our third consecutive quarter of sales volume growth. Despite a challenging macroeconomic environment, these results reflect the benefits of PPG's global breadth and our strong commercial execution, which is driving share gains in many of our businesses. In addition, sales volumes in our industrial coatings segments once again outpaced industry demand, reflecting benefits from share gains in both packaging coatings and automotive OEM coatings.

Several of our businesses in the performance coatings segment delivered outstanding results, including double-digit organic sales growth in both aerospace coatings and protective and marine coatings. Although this was offset by lower sales volumes in automotive refinish as our volumes were heavily weighted to the first half of 2025 due to distributor order patterns. From a regional perspective, the macroeconomic environment was choppy. Despite this, PPG organic sales grew a low single-digit percentage in the U.S. and Canada, representing the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year increases in this region. Organic sales also increased in Latin America and Asia Pacific and were flat in Europe. Solid sales improvement combined with our aggressive cost management and consistent cash deployment drove an adjusted EPS increase of 5% year over year, establishing a third quarter record of $2.13.

Looking at each of our segments, in the global architectural coatings segment, positive selling prices in both regions and volume growth in Latin America were offset by lower volumes in Europe and the impact of divestitures in architectural coatings. EMEA organic sales growth in Eastern Europe was more than offset by lower demand in Western Europe, while volumes remained lower in the quarter. This business has now delivered price growth consistently every quarter over the last nine years, demonstrating the value the customers place on our leading brands and products that we provide in architectural coatings, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. We delivered mid single digit organic sales growth in Mexico, aided by solid retail sales. Project related spending remained lower year over year but improved sequentially versus the second quarter.

We expect sales growth to strengthen in Mexico in the fourth quarter, including stronger year over year consumer sales and modest improvement in project related work segment. EBITDA margin increased as strong pricing and operational excellence, including our cost control actions, outpaced the impact of lower sales volumes and business divestitures. The performance coatings segment delivered record net sales with a 2% increase in organic sales. Within the segment, aerospace delivered double digit % organic sales growth with record quarterly sales and earnings. Customer order backlogs increased to $310 million, even as growth related investments improved manufacturing output during the quarter. In automotive refinish, organic sales decreased by a double digit % versus the prior year, driven by lower sales volumes in the U.S.

As we communicated on our second quarter earnings call, our distributor order patterns were heavily weighted to the first half of the year on a year to date basis. PPG's automotive refinish coatings organic sales are outperforming industry demand, which has declined due to lower U.S. industry collision claims. In the third quarter, the company grew the number of refinish LINQ subscriptions as well as MoonWalk hardware installations, which now total more than 3,000. Further supporting customer productivity and related share gains, we continue to add tools to our portfolio in order to expand our industry leading productivity offering and to further strengthen our differentiation and market position. One such product is our newest clear coat, which is Deltron Premium Glamour Speed Clear Coat. With this product, we have broken a paradigm as it is the first of its kind to be fully designed with AI technology.

Using proprietary PPG data results in a refinish product and application that combines high quality appearance with increasing speed of application. This also redefines our innovation process, and applying AI to the design phase allows us to bring market leading solutions to our customers faster. Protective and marine coatings delivered the 10th consecutive quarter of year over year volume growth with double digit % organic growth in the quarter. Given this strong and consistent performance and further opportunities in various end markets including marine, aftermarket, and in certain energy markets, we are channeling additional growth-related investments into this business. Traffic Solutions delivered mid single-digit % organic growth in the quarter driven by share gains.

Given the strength of our industry-leading value proposition, segment EBITDA margin decreased, driven by lower automotive refinish coatings sales volumes and the higher growth-related investment spending in aerospace coatings and protective and marine coatings, partially offset by higher selling prices. Our performance coatings segment is an important growth engine for the company, and I want to take a moment to talk about the increasing scale and strength of our aerospace business in this segment. Aerospace has grown at a mid single-digit CAGR over the past 10 years and now represents a third of the segment and a significant part of the overall PPG portfolio. Based on the momentum in the industry and the demand for our highly specialized and qualified products, we expect sales growth CAGR of a mid to high single-digit % over the next three years for PPG.

This is a business that is equally weighted to OEM and aftermarket with margins that are accretive to the overall reporting segment. We've experienced significant OEM growth, and customers have recently increased their builds forecast for the next several years based on the nature of this industry. This OEM growth will then translate into additional aftermarket growth in the succeeding years. Given the significant growth dynamics we're experiencing today and expect into the future, we are increasing our investments in this business. This includes near-term OpEx investments in 2025 and into 2026. To further debottleneck our facilities, we also announced an investment in a new manufacturing facility which will be commissioned in 2027, and we will likely have additional investments in the future. These investments represent more than $0.5 billion and are being completed in order to capitalize on the significant multi-year growth opportunity we have in this business.

All of these investments will deliver very strong financial returns for our company. We have a strong and unique growing position across commercial, general aviation, and military, and we are excited that this will accelerate profitable growth for PPG and our shareholders for the foreseeable future. Now moving to the industrial coatings segment, third quarter sales volumes increased 4%, outpacing industry demand as we realized the run rate benefit of share gains with strength in automotive OEM coatings and packaging coatings. From a business unit perspective, our automotive OEM business delivered an 8% increase in net sales with growth above market in all regions. The global light vehicle industry production growth was 4%, which we clearly outpaced. We expect to outgrow the market again in the fourth quarter and throughout 2026.

Industrial coatings sales volumes declined a low single digit percentage as growth in Asia Pacific and share gains were offset by lower demand in the U.S. and Europe. Packaging coatings organic sales increased by a double digit percentage year over year, growing significantly above industry rates. These results again reflect the positive momentum in share gain in all regions. Segment EBITDA was up 12% year over year, reflecting the leverage from organic sales growth along with our manufacturing productivity and strong cost control actions. Now let me talk about our balance sheet and cash. During the quarter, we completed approximately $150 million in share repurchases and paid $160 million in dividends, which combined totals $1.2 billion delivered to shareholders year to date. Our balance sheet is strong, which continues to provide us with financial flexibility, and we remain committed to driving shareholder value.

Looking ahead, we're committed to driving consistent organic sales and earnings growth even in this highly dynamic macroeconomic environment. As a result of the tariffs enacted, we are expecting low single digit inflation for the year, and we are actively working with our suppliers to balance volume and price, with most suppliers favoring volume. When looking at our guidance, let me quickly recap some of the elements that we expect in the fourth quarter. We see structural strength in our performance coatings segment driven by our technology advantage products in aerospace and protective and marine coatings, which will be offset by lower automotive refinish sales. Based on customer order patterns, we expect a year-over-year decline in organic sales similar to that in the third quarter, as distributors have been managing their inventories heading into year-end in our architectural coatings segment.

While European volume trends are anticipated to remain tepid in the upcoming quarter, we expect strong retail sales and modest recovery of project-related spending in Mexico. In the industrial coatings segment, the share gains in automotive OEM, packaging, and industrial coatings are yielding benefits, and we expect to outperform the market again in the fourth quarter. Finally, during the fourth quarter, we expect growing benefits from operational excellence programs, including reducing our costs. This, combined with the leverage from the acceleration in volume growth, is expected to drive earnings and margin expansion, and in our global architectural coatings and industrial coatings segments, this will be offset by lower earnings in our performance coatings segment due to the business mix. Altogether, we have updated our full-year guidance of adjusted earnings per diluted share to a range of $7.60-$7.70.

In closing, I'm excited about the increasing momentum we have demonstrated in organic growth in a macroeconomic environment where industry demand remains subdued. We are benefiting from our sharpened portfolio with technology-differentiated products and customer productivity solutions, which is delivering positive sales price and volumes in 2025 and above industry levels. Additionally, the focus we have put on operational excellence, investing in innovation, and driving share gains, combined with our disciplined capital allocation and strong balance sheet, supports our strategy to deliver sustainable top-line and bottom-line growth in the midterm. Thank you to our PPG team around the world who make it happen and deliver on our purpose every day. We appreciate your continued confidence in PPG, and this concludes our prepared remarks. Now, would you please open the line for questions.

Thank you very much. We'd like to open the lines for the Q&A section of today's call. As a reminder, if you'd like to raise a question, please signal now by pressing STAR followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. To remove yourself from the queue, press STAR followed by 2. We would also like to remind people that if they can limit themselves to one question, that will be preferred by the company. Our first question comes from John McNulty from BMO. John, your line's now open.

Yeah, good morning. Thanks for taking my question, Tim. You posted some pretty solid growth across the bulk of the platforms. I think six of the nine businesses were mid single digits or better, so I guess one does stand out, which is the refinish business, which really seemed to be a trouble spot. Seemed like it was kind of mid to high teens decline. I guess can you speak to why that hit is maybe quite as hard as it was, how you're thinking about the potential for that business to recover, and the timing for that. Thanks. Yeah, sure, John. Look, let me talk about refinish, right? First of all, I'm confident in our best-in-class productivity solution that will continue to drive share gain, and that becomes important as I explain kind of what's happening here.

We do have market share momentum in this business as we continue to introduce new productivity tools for our customer. This is and will be a marquee business for PPG Industries despite a transitory slump in collision claims. The other thing I'll add is this kind of challenging environment in refinish for the next whatever number of quarters, which I'll talk about in a few minutes, plays to the strength of the stronger players, plays to the strength of those that bring the best productivity solutions. It's not just the coatings manufacturers that are seeing a slump in demand, it's the body shops, and the body shops need productivity to survive the journey. We have a bit of a slump right now. I also remind you on a full year basis our performance is outperforming the industry because of those productivity solutions that I just mentioned.

To direct your question, here's what happened. We highlighted in July that we expected some destocking in the industry, not just PPG Industries. The industry expected normalization of claims as we moved through the year, and the normalization of claims did not happen as early as expected. That's driven destocking further than what we expected as we move through the rest of the year. What's happening out there, miles driven are still climbing. Accident rates are okay. It's translating those accident rates into collision claims that has been depressed for some number of quarters now, and that's largely driven by the insurance dynamic. Affordability, availability of insurance has kept some people from submitting claims for fear of losing their insurance or dramatic rate increases. If you look at the insurance rates from like 2022-2024, they were growing at about a 16% CAGR per year, right?

16% per year average. Now we have started to see that moderate in 2025 to about a 3% growth CAGR, which is normal, normal to be expected with inflation. We are expecting that normalization of the insurance situation to drive normalization of collision claims going forward. We are expecting a couple more quarters of this normalization through the whole supply chain and collision network to flow through. From an industry standpoint, we are expecting that more normalization to be seen, you know, in the middle of 2026. For us, we also have some destocking that will occur because of how our inventory, or I'm sorry, how our distributors bought last year, but that's our expectation is normalization of the industry in middle of 2026. Normalization, I'll remind everybody, normalization is collision claims down low single digits. That's been the case for more than a decade.

In normal state situation, even with collision claims down low single digits, you know, our refinish industry or our refinish business delivers record year after record year after record year of sales growth and earnings growth. That plays to our productivity value proposition as we normalize, you know, and right now we're having a lot of discussions with several large potential customers that find our productivity value proposition even more attractive in these difficult times because it resonates, it resonates with what they need to be successful in these, in these challenging times, but also as the market normalizes. Tough market conditions play to our strength. Industry normalization happens in the middle of 2026. We are well positioned for that. Once industry normalization happens, we'll return to sales and earnings growth.

Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Chris Parkinson from Wolfe Research. Chris, your line is now open.

Hey Tim, hope all's well. When I take a step back and look at your business, I mean the.

Strategy is ultimately paying off. At the same time, suffice to say we're still in a.

Very challenging macro, you know, as the sell on the buy side kind of look out till 2026. I look at your three new.

Focusing on, in terms of volume growth, sub segment market outperformance.

Your end markets, new products, margin opportunities.

Story evolving if and when the macro I'd say eventually gets better over the next hopefully 12-24 months. Thank you.

Hey Chris, good to hear from you. Thanks. I'll make, you know, 26. As you know, we normally give our guide in January and we'll give numbers in January. I'll make some high level comments on how we're thinking about it right now to try and answer your question. If I miss anything, I'm sure Vince will fill it in. 2026 as always, there'll be a lot of puts and takes, but I'll compare how we're viewing it today versus how we viewed it three to six months ago. Some key factors, the macro. We're frankly not expecting much improvement in the macro, with an exception. I'll talk about that in a minute.

The macro means choppy and it certainly has not recovered or gotten momentum that we or anyone else had expected to see at this point. It includes continued uncertainty with global trade tempering somewhat how businesses spend their money. Of course, as you know, we're tied closely to how our customers invest and spend on growth. Now, specific to PPG Industries, we see signs of several markets stabilizing in the middle of next year later than what we previously thought. You already heard me talk about refinish. We do expect some carryover refinish volume challenges through the first half as that normalization in the industry doesn't really happen to the middle of 2026. In addition, remind everybody that we had a very strong first half of refinish sales in 1H25 as our distributor order patterns were very favorable as they were stocking up on inventory.

We do have that double effect of industry normalization happening in the middle of the year plus the comp issue related to 2025 patterns. A pretty muted industrial environment is our outlook for 2026 right now, Chris, with first half in particular being difficult. We're partly offsetting these headwinds with, you mentioned, our increasing momentum in several of our businesses regarding organic growth, continuing our self help cost reductions, aggressive discretionary cost management. We do expect the raw material supply chain to continue to be very long supportive of coatings companies as we move through 2026 because of the benign macro that I just described. Of course, we'll continue to have cash, cash deployment. If I were to summarize, we got several of our end markets that are in challenging market conditions.

They're transitory, but they look worse and more extended than we thought as recently as a few months ago. On the bright side, we continue to control everything we can control. To your point earlier, we're winning, we have momentum, we're organically growing, we're taking share, we're getting cost out. All in, 2026 looks softer in the first half than what we envisioned earlier this year.

Thank you very much. Our next question comes from David Begleiter from Deutsche Bank. David, your line is open.

Thank you. Good morning, Tim. Just on 2025, can you talk to what drove the change in your full year guidance and resulted in implied Q4 guidance coming in below consensus expectations?

Sure. Hi, Dave. Frankly, it's all refinish as I just described. I think it was in John's question. We were expecting industry normalization earlier, and then we had the double whammy of destocking as our distributors were also expecting industry normalization earlier. When that didn't happen, now they're focused on running their inventories down for year end. A little bit of a double whammy from refinish is really what caused us to lower our Q4 guide.

Yeah, Dave, this is Vince Morales and if you look at more externally and we look at the claims data which we get each month from the insurance industry, claims in the beginning of the year were down high single digits, some cases low double digits. Our latest claims data was down mid single digits. We do see that starting to improve, but still negative.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Michael Sison from Wells Fargo. Michael, your line is now open.

Hey, good morning guys. Nice quarter. Just curious, you know, maybe I'll pick at one of the other red arrows, architectural EMI. What do you think needs to happen for that business to sort of turn around, you know, maybe sometime next year, so you know, maybe remind us the regions that is most important for you and how that business gets back to growth.

Yeah. Hey Mike, thanks. A question. I thought you were going to ask me about the Brown Steelers this year, but we'll defer that for another day. Look, ACMA, first of all, I'll answer the last part of your question first. Our biggest markets are France, the Netherlands, UK, and Poland. Now beyond those kind of big four, we're number one in a total of like 12-15 countries over there, but those are the ones that would move the needle the most.

What's happening? We continue to see soft demand. I just got back from Europe and it's consumer confidence driven. It's inflation, it's interest rates, it's the wars, there's just a lot of things. It's the energy situation in Europe. There are a lot of things holding back consumer confidence from a construction and remodel standpoint. We got great brands, we got great products, we're getting price. You heard my quote earlier, nine straight years, 36 straight quarters of increased pricing. We're doing everything we can to control the controllables. We're not waiting for things to recover over there. We are taking aggressive structural cost actions with the anticipation that flat, which we're getting close. We're very close to being flat year over year now. Flat demand will be a really good situation for our business because of all the cost out and all the price in.

We'll get really, really good leverage as that thing, I'm not going to say recovers. As that thing stabilizes and we are beginning to see those signs of stabilization. Flat will be great. We're not waiting now. We are seeing more recovery in the east right now and again on that side of the continent. We're number one in Poland, we're number one in Hungary, we're number one in Romania, we're number one in all of the Baltics. We're number one across Scandinavia. We're well positioned there as those start to recover. As soon as we see some stabilization in France, UK, Netherlands, then you'll start to see that great leverage that we're expecting.

Thank you very much. As a reminder, if you would like to raise a question, please signal now by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. As a further reminder, to allow everyone to ask a question today, the company requests each analyst ask only one question. Our next question comes from John Roberts from Mizuho. John, your line's now open.

Thank you, Tim. I think BYD recently had its first down sales month in two years. How are you viewing the overall Chinese OEM vehicle outlook and do you think anti involution actions there are going to have any impact on the coatings industry?

Hey John. Yeah. BYD did put up a quarter that for them was a bit disappointing. The overall auto growth in China has been pretty strong all year and we expect that to continue and we're growing in China. China Auto, despite the challenges there. I do think I don't have insight into BYD's books obviously, but I do think it is extremely competitive over there and perhaps that's driven a lot of their recent challenge. They continue to be the biggest winner we are working with and frankly selling to a lot of the other Chinese domestics and you know, it's win with the winners.

As Alisha, who runs that business for us, always says, picking the winners and making sure we're spread out nicely across a number of winners in the marketplace. We don't expect the double digit kind of growth rates of China Auto that we saw in the past, but we do expect low to mid single digit growth there pretty consistently for the industry and for us.

John, this is Vince. I'll just add on, just to mention this in the opening comments, we outgrew the industry in China, and we outgrew the industry in every other region as well. Regarding anti-involution, we don't see that as an issue, certainly in the short term or midterm. We think the chemical industry there remains long, and we think they'll continue to provide significant output to our industry even as other industries slow down.

Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Kevin McCarthy from VRP. Kevin, your line is now open.

Tim, if I look at your performance coatings.

Results, your sales actually grew year over year notwithstanding the refinish pressure that you articulated. Yet the operating income declined on a year over year basis, notwithstanding what looks like a 4% contribution from price. Can you talk through that? Is that all to do with mix issues related to refinish or are there other items that you might call out that would explain that dynamic?

Hey Kevin, thanks. Hope you're well. Definitely part of it is mix. Refinish is an above segment, let's say a nicely above segment average business. When we take a pause in refinish earnings growth and go to earnings reduction, that drives some deleveraging from an EBITDA standpoint for the segment.

We are spending well above normal from both OpEx and CapEx in two businesses in that segment, Aerospace and Protective and Marine, because those two businesses have been consistently growing at double digit and we see a long runway for consistent growth capture. While that may hurt us in the short term, Kevin, I'm confident that it helps the company and our shareholders for the long term as we invest more to capture that growth.

Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Duffy Fischer from Goldman Sachs. Duffy, your line's not open.

Protective and marine, you're trying to grow that business. What are their margins like today? Obviously, they're lower than this segment because refinish is so high.

Average Aerospace and Protective and Marine, where do their margins sit? What do their incremental margins look like, let's say, over the next two to three years? How much longer do you need to have kind of this plus up spending before you get to kind of a cruising altitude?

Hey, Duffy. Let me try to, as you know, we don't give specific business margins. Let me frame it for you. First of all, performance coatings segment, clearly our highest margin segment, that's public. We share that with you every quarter within that segment. I've already said refinish is nicely above segment average, and I've already said aerospace is nicely above segment average. That leaves two other businesses which must be below segment average, with one of them being PMC. That answers part of your question. I'll answer some more, and I'm sure Vince captured a few things.

How much longer do we need to spend more there? I think honestly aerospace, it's a couple years more because there's just such tremendous profitable growth to be captured there, where I'd say PMC probably a little shorter. The investments are more incremental in PMC. The larger investments are in aerospace.

Yeah, Duffy. Vince, I would just accentuate one of the things Tim said that this growth for our shareholders is important, but both of these businesses are mid to long cycle businesses. We do feel these investments, which are on the front end of this growth curve, will provide us benefits certainly in 2026 and 2027. Some of the investments in aerospace, as Tim articulated earlier, are capital. Some of them are OpEx. The OpEx we're going to continue to spend in 2026. The capital will be longer, as Tim just mentioned. We are trying to make sure we are well positioned on the front end of this growth curve that will benefit us for multiple years given the nature of these industries.

Every one of these investments, I can assure you, has IRRs significantly above our risk-adjusted WACC. These are good investments for our long-term future and shareholders.

Thank you very much. As a further reminder, if you would like to raise a question, please signal now by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. A further reminder to limit yourself to just one question today. Our next question comes from Ghansham Panjabi from Baird. Ghansham, your line is now open.

Yeah, thank you, operator. Good morning, everybody. Tim, can you just give us a bit more color on the operating environment in Mexico? I know for you it's been sort of bifurcated between the retail component versus project activity. I'm just curious as to how you think about how that will evolve as we cycle into 2026.

Yeah. Hey, Ghansham, good to hear from you. Mexico, really important country as you know. We're very pleased that we are seeing recovery there. Going by memory here a bit, but you know that's been a consistent growth engine for us for 10 years, 11 years, and we took, I think, a dip.

We were negative in Q2 or Q1, I mean, because even though Liberation Day wasn't until the beginning of Q2, the Mexico-Canada tariffs were actually announced in February, and literally overnight we saw a dramatic reduction in spending by consumers and project. We were negative in Q1 in organic growth, which almost never happens for us in Mexico. We returned to positivity in Q2, low single digits, Q3, mid single digits. We feel good about Q4 as we see continued sequential recovery. Retail in particular has already come back and come back strong. Now, on top of that, we're beginning to see some sequential improvement in the project spending because remember a lot of these projects were already in flight and so they've got to be completed. If you believe that a deal will be reached with Mexico, that's a huge accelerator to that project spending.

We do feel good that we're seeing recovery, and based on all of our networking in Mexico, we feel good that that will return to what we all have come to expect from PPG Comex.

Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Jeff Zekauskas from J.P. Morgan. Jeff, your line is now open.

Thanks very much. When I look at your aerospace capital expenditures going up more than $500 million, is the conclusion that should be drawn that your annual capital expenditures are going to stay around $700 million or $650 million over the next couple of years? I know you don't forecast yet, but just order of magnitude. For Vince, it's a little hard to read some of the working capital changes that you've had, but it looks like cash flows from operations are around $1.6 billion this year. Should they step up to closer to $2 billion in the out years because there isn't the same working capital drag, or should it just move with the change in your EBITDA?

Yeah. Hey Jeff, good to hear from you. Aerospace CapEx will, let's say, peak this year, 2026 and 2027. Overall CapEx, our mission is to get back to 3% of sales.

I think this year will be the peak of our CapEx spending. 2025 will go down a bit, in 2026 a bit further, in 2027 on a glide path to get back to that 3%. This is really a temporary spike. Honestly, Jeff, it's one of the reasons I called, because previous to that you were just seeing our total CapEx number and everybody's like, why are you spending more? We're spending more because one of our most profitable businesses has a tremendous multi-year, possibly decade, growth trajectory that I believe it's in our company's best interest to invest and capture that growth. I called that out so you see it, but it doesn't change our long-term objective of about 3% of sales. We do believe this is the peak and will start to trend down towards that.

On working capital, I know that's Vince's favorite subject, so I'll let him cover it. One piece of it is, with all the tariff uncertainty at first, we did pre-buy a bunch of raw materials to capture it at a good price. That bought us time to work through other tariff mitigation actions so that we can control our inflation to that LSD number as we move through the year. We fully expect that inventory piece of it will normalize by year end. Vince, you can answer that.

Yeah. Jeff, good to hear from you again. Just to echo what Tim said, we've had a step up year over year. This year in working capital, you look at it as a % of sales or the IO or whatever metric you want to use. That's a transitory step up. We would expect in the out years to get more leverage as most companies would on inventory. Inventory would be fairly stationary if our volumes grow. We don't need to have excess inventory storage at our plants as our volumes as we return to growth here. I would expect our operating cash flow to grow at a faster clip than EBITDA in future years.

Great, thank you very much. Excuse me. Next question comes from Aziza Gazieva from Fermium Research. Aziza, your line is now open.

Hi guys. Good morning. You know you recently highlighted that epoxy resins had been inflating slightly. I was wondering if you could provide any outlook on that and maybe some of the puts and takes for the expectations for low single digit inflation on raws. Thank you.

Yeah. Hi Aziza. I was going to ask Frank about how he's feeling about the fields for Roger Swap that led to the jet success. Maybe you can pass that question on for me. Epoxies were actually impacted prior to Trump. Last year there were some anti-dumping and some tariffs put on under the Biden administration. We already had that built into our contributors to the low single digits inflation. In fact, that's a differentiator between us and maybe companies that are more weighted towards architectural coatings because architectural coatings don't use epoxy. Things like automotive, packaging, PMC, industrial do use epoxy.

It's actually one of the key contributors. It's not a huge impact for us. It's all built into our low single digit guide for the year. Even as we look to next year, the supply demand calculus is still very much in favor of us. Our purchasing team is finding that our upstream suppliers in many spaces, including epoxy, are looking to do volume deals more than price increases.

Yeah, I'll just add on here, working with our procurement team. One of the angles that we're working is if you recall during the supply chain crisis, most companies, including PPG, we expanded our supplier base to make sure we had sure supply of many raw materials. Now that the supply chain crisis has passed, we are now in the process of contracting our supply base back to our prior weightings, so we're able to share more volume with fewer suppliers, which we also think will contribute next year to the raw material environment we're seeing today.

Thank you very much. Our next question comes from James Hooper from Bernstein Société Générale. James, your line is now open.

Morning and thank you very much for taking my question. My question's about kind of a bigger picture question. It seems that a lot of the coatings players and your peers are all seeming calling out share gains and this seems to be an increasingly competitive volume environment. For example, if we take refinish, your competitor reported yesterday, they gained share and grew mid single digit. Are you seeing a more competitive volume environment or are you expecting more pressure across your businesses going forward in 2026?

Yeah. Hi James. I don't see any what I would call fundamental changes in the competitive structure within our businesses with one caveat, and that's China. China has more competitors. That's not a change, and it's a more competitive environment.

Specific to your point about refinish, I've said many times, there are two companies that kind of lead the pack with productivity solutions and we fight each other every day and we win and sometimes lose to each other every day. The bigger picture is that the companies that don't have as much of those productivity solutions are the net losers over time. That becomes even more accentuated when the industry times are tough because the body shops really need those industry players that have the productivity solutions. Am I surprised that that one particular competitor gained share, announced gain share yesterday? Absolutely not. We are absolutely gaining share as well and quite confident. We just introduced a couple of new, you know, we've been supplying digital as well as chemistry productivity solutions to our portfolio of refinish to win even more share.

We just announced a couple of new ones this quarter. As we continue to boost that value proposition, I'm confident that we'll continue to gain share. As I mentioned in my remarks, I think it maybe it was to John's question, the first one. We're actively getting interest from some potential customers now that are fairly sizable and that we weren't previously because of the challenges in the industry and the value of our productivity solutions. Fundamentally, are we seeing some fundamental change in the competitive dynamic out there? Not really, but we are seeing increased pull for our value proposition.

James, this is Vince. Let me just add a comment here. I think we always measure the litmus test of the value proposition as you're gaining share, that is higher volume plus you have positive price. That shows you have a true value proposition. I think when you look at our results, you'll see that across many of our businesses.

Plus we get paid for those digital solutions in addition to the coatings that we sell.

Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Patrick Cunningham from Citigroup. Patrick, the line's now open.

Maybe a related question on share gains. You've previously quantified some of the industrial share gains at $100 million. Is that still tracking to plan? How would you characterize your ability to price and the margin profile of some of this new automotive OEM business or some of this new packaging business, or is that not relevant?

Patrick, let me start here. I think what we've been talking about, and I know we've talked over the last couple years, is volume plus volume leverage. You can see that clearly in our industrial segment results where we've had some volume growth but significant leverage on the bottom line. Our biggest earnings lever off that volume is that leverage we're getting on our fixed cost base.

Yeah. To your question on the $100 million, I think we quoted that $100 million a year ago and all of that $100 million is starting to flow through now because most of those were launched or are being launched here in the second half of the year. None of that went away. In addition to that, Patrick, we've been winning business throughout the year and on these longer launch businesses that still typically the case in industrial segment and packaging and automotive and industrial. You'll see more and more of those wins above and beyond the $100 million start to flow through. Again, it won't, unfortunately, and particularly in the first half of 2026, it won't be enough to offset some of those macro things I talked about earlier. It won't be enough to offset that refinish comp issue on distributor buying patterns. Those are transitory items.

PPG Industries (PPG) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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