BlueLinx Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call - BLUELINX HOLDINGS INC

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the BlueLynx Holdings Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and today's call is being recorded. We will begin with opening remarks and introductions. At this point, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Investor Relations Officer Tom Morabito. Please go ahead. Thank you, Operator, and welcome to the Blue Link's third quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me on today's call is Sham Reddy, our Chief Executive Officer, and Kelly Wall, our Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. At the end of today's prepared remarks, we will take questions. Our third quarter news release informed 10Q were issued yesterday after the close of the market, along with our webcast presentation, and these items are available in the investor section of our website. We encourage you to follow along with the detailed information on the slides during our webcast. Today's discussion contains forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ significantly from those forward- looking statements due to various risks and uncertainties, including the risks described in our most recent SEC filings. Today s presentation includes certain non-GAAP and adjusted financial measures that we believe provide helpful context for investors evaluating our business. Reconciliations to the closest GAAP financial measure can to be found in the appendix of our presentation. Now I'll turn it over to Shannon. Thanks, Tom, and good morning, everyone. Our third quarter results demonstrate our continued ability to execute successfully in a challenging market with strategic volume growth and margin strength top priorities. Despite ongoing pressure from elevated interest rates, affordability concerns, inflation, and cautious customer spending, we once again generated volume growth in key areas of the business, while effectively managing the company through waves of escalating costs. During the quarter, net sales were up 8.5% year-over-year, driven by continued momentum in our strategic customer channels, contributions from DeStero, and the ongoing expansion of our supplier relationships. We also benefited from favorable pricing and solid volumes in structural products. Specialty gross margin was 18.7% and structural gross margin with 10.7%, both of which reflect the strength of our customer value proposition and effective inventory management. The specialty gross margin includes the impact of an import duty item and an inventory provision tied to a strategic vendor realignment and outdoor living products, both of which Kelly will discuss in a moment. Our specialty product strategy remains a key element of our growth engine, representing approximately 70% of net sales and 80% of gross profit during the quarter. Our channel strategy continues to serve as a powerful commercial engine for our supplier partners. The combination of our multifamily focus, builder pull-through programs, and national accounts business is helping us drive branded product adoption across multiple end markets to create value through the distribution chain for all customers. These initiatives are helping us identify opportunities earlier in the project lifecycle, convert additional business to strategic brands and deepen customer relationships. In turn, they are strengthening our position as a preferred growth partner for suppliers seeking to drive demand, expand their reach, and accelerate product adoption across our entire customer base. The value of our model is being recognized by manufacturers looking for innovative and disruptive distribution partners capable of creating demand and supporting growth across multiple geographies and customer segments. Our differentiated channel focus, scale, broad geographic footprint, local market expertise, and value-add services allow us to provide a level of commercialization support that few distributors can match. We continue to build on that advantage through expanded supplier partnerships, additional product introductions, and broader geographic coverage of key brands. Recent momentum with strategic suppliers has accelerated, reflecting the success of these efforts and further validating our commercial strategy. Examples include the addition of eight locations to our RDI railing distribution network, bringing the total footprint to 21 locations, Broadening our partnership with Westlake Royal Building Products to now distribute their clear PVC trim products in 27 locations, as well as to expand the availability of their true exterior siding and trim products from 12 to 17 locations. Expanding our relationship with LP to offer their SmartSide trim and siding products in 20 attractive locations. Expanding our relationship with Fiberon to include decking in 34 locations and railing in 15 locations. Our rollout of TREX products is on track and proceeding as planned. The 11-location TREx footprint touching three of our five regions has inventory, and each one is delivering products to its customers. All of these examples clearly demonstrate our commitment to focusing on our higher-margin specialty products business in a manner that's strategic, not just expansion of specialty products for the sake of expansion, but rather growing and deepening key vendor relationships in ways that fuel our channel growth strategy. Capitalizing on branded expansion opportunities in outdoor living, siding and trim products, all of which are some of the most attractive categories in residential construction and repair and remodel work, touching two-step distribution, densifies the specialty product foundation to create long-term, durable relationships with our customers. Operationally, we remain highly disciplined. Our teams continue to actively manage inventory levels, respond quickly to changing market conditions, and maintain a strong focus on working capital efficiency, no matter the market backdrop. These capabilities have contributed to our performance through the trough of the cycle, while positioning us well for above-market growth as conditions improve. We are also advancing our AI and digital transformation initiatives with our latest round of investments focused on commercial growth insights, customer self-service and digital engagement, streamlined quoting and ordering, and inventory optimization. These efforts are intended to drive profitable sales growth and stronger returns on working capital, enhance decision-making, and strengthen our ability to support customers and suppliers more effectively than the competition. Finally, our balance sheet remains strong. We ended the quarter with $689 million of available liquidity, providing us with continued flexibility to invest in the business, pursue strategic growth opportunities, and continue allocating capital in a disciplined manner. While market conditions remain uncertain, our strategic priorities have not changed, nor will they. we remain focused on growing specialty products, expanding supplier relationships in terms of geographic scope and SKUs, increasing penetration and key customer channels, and growing our multifamily sales, all while investing in tech-enabled solutions and executing with efficiency and discipline in mind. Now, let me provide a few additional highlights from our third quarter performance. We generated net sales of $813 million and adjusted EBITDA of $32 million for a 3.9% adjusted EBITA margin, a significant improvement on a year-over-year basis. DeStero, which we acquired in Q4 2025, contributed over $25 million in net sales and $2.5 million in adjusted EBita. Adjusted net income was $5.5 million or 68 cents per diluted share. Our results continue to demonstrate the benefits of our strategic initiatives that we've discussed throughout the year, which are delivering growth against another quarter of housing start declines in soft repair and remodel activity. Specifically, multifamily volumes increased low double digits, national accounts volumes increased slightly, and our builder pull-through program supported growth across several strategic product categories. We're especially proud of our solid gross margin and EBITDA margin performance, despite cost inflation, freight challenges, and the competitive pricing environment. Our teams did so by managing inventory effectively, maintaining pricing discipline, providing differentiated value-add services, better leveraging our new transportation management system, and successfully navigating ongoing cost pressures. For example, diesel fuel costs and flatbed freight rates are up 64% and 44% on a year-over-year basis, respectively. We've also dealt with approximately 80 cost increases from suppliers through Q3 2026 compared to around 30 through Q3 2025. We've done our best to recover as much of these cost increases through disciplined pricing and fuel surcharges. With the challenging market as a backdrop, our scale, geographic reach, and broad customer base provide us with strategic areas of diversification that enable us to participate in areas of relative strength while maintaining a disciplined approach to managing the business efficiently. Despite another successful quarter of growing volumes in key areas of focus, we believe that maintaining that momentum at the same rate will remain challenging. Housing starts have declined for two consecutive quarters, with Q3 showing a meaningful acceleration of declining housing starts since Q2. We also believe fuel costs and freight rates will remain high. That combined with the lowest builder sentiment since 2012, a 14-year low, sovereignly high inflation, and housing affordability issues portend a challenging backdrop for the foreseeable future. Regardless, we are convinced that our ability to outperform and outcompete will remain strong because we are focused on our profitable sales growth strategy and controlling what we can to drive efficiency. We are also investing selectively in the business and maintaining the financial flexibility necessary to pursue future opportunities that accelerate our growth objectives. To wrap up, I'd like to thank all of our associates for their ongoing dedication to our customers, suppliers, one another, and the communities we serve. Now I'll turn it over to Kelly, who will provide additional details on our financial results and our capital structure. Thanks, Sham, and good morning, everyone. Let's first go through the consolidated highlights for the quarter. Overall, both specialty products and structural products delivered solid sales growth and gross margins in what continues to be a challenging new home construction and repair and remodel market. Net sales for the third quarter of 2026 were $813 million, up 8.5% year-over-year. total gross profit was 131 million dollars and gross margin was 16.1 percent up from 14.4 percent in the prior year period as sham mentioned two unusual items impacted both consolidated gross margins and specially gross margins during the quarter first we recognize a 2.2 million dollar benefit related to expense recognized in prior periods for import duty items second we also reported a one-time inventory provision of 2.9 million dollars resulting from a strategic brand and vendor change within one of our key product lines excluding the impact of these items gross margin was 16.2 percent in the quarter versus 14.7 percent last year sgna was 106 million dollars up 17 million dollars from last year's third quarter this increase was mainly due to the acquisition of the sterile in q4 last year higher fuel and third-party freight expenses as well as higher employee compensation related expenses given the challenging demand environment and continued pressure on operating costs consistent with prior quarters we remain focused on disciplined expense management and identifying additional opportunities to improve efficiency Net loss for the quarter was $600,000, or $0.07 per basic and diluted share. Adjusted net income was $5.5 million, or 68 cents per diluted chair, up approximately 50%. Our effective income tax rate for the corner was not meaningful, largely given the impact of non-deductible items. Adjusted EBITDA was $31.7 million, up 42% from the third quarter of 2025 due to increased sales, including distrero, improved gross margins in both specialty and structural products, continued disciplined expense management, and the benefit of the duty-related items. Turning now to the third-quarter results for specialty products. Net sales for specialty products were $550 million in the third quarter, up nearly 5% year-over-year. This increase was driven by the sterile sales and increased pricing in nearly all product types, partially offset by lower volumes. Gross profit from specialty product sales was $103 million, up 18% year over year. The specialty gross margin was 18.7%, up from last year's 16.6%. Adjusted for duty-related items and the inventory-related item I mentioned before, gross margin for specialty products increased to 18.8% from 17% last year. In the current fourth quarter, we expect specialty product gross margin to be in the range of 17.5 to 18.5 percent, with daily sales volumes slightly lower than the third quarter of 2026 and the fourth quarter of 2025. Now moving on to structural products. Structural products had another very strong quarter. Net sales were $263 million for the third corner, up nearly 18 percent compared to the prior year period. This increase was primarily due to higher pricing and volumes for both lumber and panels when compared to last year. Gross profit for structural products was $28 million, an increase of 36% year over year, and structural gross margin was 10.7%, up from 9.3% in the same period last year, we expect Q4 structural product gross margin to be in the range of 9 to 10%, with daily volumes to be slightly lower than the third quarter of 2026 and the fourth quarter of 2025. Now turning to our balance sheet, our liquidity continues to be very strong. At the end of the quarter, cash and cash equivalents were $350 million, $32 million higher than Q2 2026. When considering our cash on hand and undrawn revolver capacity of $339 million, available liquidity was approximately $689 million at the end of the quarter. Total debt, excluding our real property financing leases, was $371 million and net debt was $21 million. Our net leverage ratio was 0.2 times trailing four-quarter adjusted EBITDA and we have no material outstanding debt maturities until 2029. Additionally, given the strength of our balance sheet and continued strong liquidity, we remain well positioned to support our strategic initiatives these strategic initiatives include continued growth with our large national customers and in the multi-family channel for the focus on benefiting our traditional local customers product demand pull through efforts to drive strategic sales that benefit our customers with respect to large national and regional builders continued specialty product expansion with key suppliers including the recent announcements that sham highlighted earlier our business and digital transformation efforts and other organic and inorganic growth initiatives now moving on to working capital and free cash flow during the third quarter we had operating cash flow of 45 million dollars in free cashflow of 40 million dollars both strong results but down from the third corner of 2025 primarily due to net changes in inventory and timing of payments for accounts payable turning now the capital allocation during the quarter we incurred five million dollars of capex primarily related to investments in our fleet facility and technology improvements for the remainder of 2026 our capital expenditures will include facility maintenance and improvements as well as investments that support our channel and product strategies and our business and digital transformation initiatives during the third quarter we did not repurchase any common shares and at quarter end we continue to have a total of 54 million dollars remaining under our share repurchase authorizations our guiding principles for capital allocation remain consistent with prior quarters we intend to maintain a strong balance sheet which enables us to invest in our business through economic cycles expand our geographic footprint strategic suppliers pursue a disciplined inorganic growth strategy as demonstrated by our acquisition of the sterile and opportunistically return capital to shareholders through share repurchases. We also expect to maintain a long-term net leverage ratio of two times or less. Overall, we are pleased with our strong third quarter results, especially given the challenging market backdrop. We were particularly pleased to see an increase in net sales, gross margins, and adjusted EBITDA year over year. That said, we remain measured in our expectations for the fourth quarter 2026 and 2027 as housing conditions are expected to remain soft. Operator, we will now take questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality if you are muted locally please remember to unmute your device please stand by while we compile the q a roster your first question comes from the line of reuben garner with stonex your line is open please go ahead thank you good morning everyone um good morning maybe we could maybe we can start with um the gross margin performance uh really encouraging uh in the environment especially what's going on with fuel and whatnot can you can you talk about that how what actions you guys have used to kind of offset the cost pressures you've faced and maybe kind of tie into that what the competitive dynamic is like uh within two-step right now Yeah, Ruben, it's Shelly. So, go ahead, Shannon. No, no, no. You first. Okay. So Ruben we've talked a bit about this through the earlier quarters in the year. Pricing has been and margin kind of affected this have been a big focus of ours this year, On the structural side, we have benefited from the increase in commodity pricing that we had seen through the first half of the year and into kind of the first part of Q3. And then on the specialty side, you know, we've seen price increases from our vendors, and we have been successfully passing that through. I think a big part of that is one of our key business transformation initiatives this year has been centralizing and building capabilities around pricing management. And as we continue to kind of grow nationally with certain vendors, right, and then also the focus on our channel growth strategy, this has been a great tool and discipline for us, right? we've been able to kind of manage these changes in pricing more quickly right and more effectively and consistently across our branches and we're seeing that in the results your next question comes from the line of jeffrey stevenson with loop capital your line is open please go ahead it hi thanks for taking my questions today so you've recently announced several new and expanded partnerships with leading exterior building product manufacturers uh including trex lp and fiber on which you detailed in your opening remarks sham i just wanted to be good talk about the long-term share gain opportunities in exterior and outdoor living given the perceived improvement in product offering with well-known respective brands Yeah, thanks, Jeff. Appreciate the question. Yeah, obviously, the strength of these brands provide us with significant share gain opportunities, not with our traditional customer base across the country, while also providing us with enhanced opportunities to accelerate our multifamily and national accounts growth, which are two primary elements of the channel growth strategy. And when you think about the builder pull-through side of our channel growth strategy, we have a much stronger mix to drive bundled product offerings, which when paired with our business excellence initiatives, I think put us in a position to quite frankly outperform at the local market level and drive share gains. So we're really excited about the developments that we have. Another point I'd like to make, too, is in many of these cases, we got expansion in top-tier markets where you're seeing significant demographic growth trends, for example, in Texas and the Southeast Sunbelt region, while also in strong repair and remodel markets like the Northeast, where you don't necessarily have big track builders, the outdoor living assortment that we have is very friendly to those markets, and in particular with those customers that have long-term brand loyalty, for example, with respect to Fiberon and RDI. So, we're really pleased with how our long- term efforts have led to this evolution of brand assortments. no that's great to hear sham and um i wanted to shift to your fourth quarter average daily sales expectations which is expected to be down slightly both on a year-over-year and sequential basis is the slowdown you know largely in line with normal seasonality or are you baking in you know sequential softening and residential demand fundamentals as well yeah so clearly seasonality is is part of it but honestly as i think through the seasonality and cyclicality of this business the best way to overcome the slowdown whether it's tied to the market conditions or even on the seasonability front is to continue leveraging our channel strategy i.e multifamily the national accounts and builder pull through side of the coin to drive share gains and to minimize any market-related impacts that are kind of affecting all of us in an equal opportunity way in this area of the distribution chain, but also to take advantage of our business excellence initiatives to outperform at the local level to drive those share gains in a profitable way as well. And if you look back and see how we have managed our working capital, how we're executing on our pricing and cost pass-through efforts in order to ensure that we're getting paid appropriately for the value-add services and investments we're making. I think we're well-positioned to manage through those kind of the general market conditions, whether it's seasonality or big picture market declines on housing starts and multifamily softness. Got it. Got it. That's really helpful. And then I guess lastly, you know, if we, you see another year of, you know single family start declines and softness and underlying R and R could you walk me through which product categories and both your specialty and structural product segments would be kind of most at risk for incremental price deflation? um you know it's a so when you think about the specialty side of the business and you look at uh you know public reporting and even as we think about our conversations with suppliers they're obviously facing significant inflationary cost and inflationary impacts which they are definitely passing down to their two-step distribution partners you know as i mentioned we've had over 80 price increases this year, which we have successfully passed through into the marketplace, which has been accepted, right? So, from that perspective, those pass-throughs are pretty much happening. So, to the extent there's any risk, it would honestly be on the demand destruction side. And for us, we're leveraging our value-add services and the investments we're making to, quite frankly, mitigate against that risk. And as we've shown over the course of the year, we've been actually driving year-over-year volume growth. Now, on the structural side, the fact is we've had a good year on a year-ever-year basis, although pricing has come down in the back, you know, in the last few months and, you know, heading through throughout Q3, heading into Q4. But as you well know, in the commodity space, manufacturers and mills, they do curtailments, they take out capacity, which we've seen publicly announced over the last a few weeks. So there generally is a right sizing relative to market demand that calibrates pricing fairly quickly. So I think, you know, I guess the upshot is with specialty, the manufacturers, and we, given the business excellence of investments we've made, are doing a really good job of making sure that pricing is stabilized. Obviously, there are certain aspects. You know, earlier in the year, we talked about how EWP was very competitive given some foreign engineer wood products coming into the market. But given inflation on the fuel front and marine freight rates, I think that's quickly ending. If not, it will be ending in the not-too-distant future. But for the most part, I don't see as much of a risk there. And then on the commodity, it's just managed through the general means by which mill capacity is managed. And, of course, and I'll end on this point, we've always done – we've got strategic supplier relationships. We do a pretty good job managing between consignment and cash positions in order to navigate market conditions so that we drive profitable sales growth. Perfect. Thanks, Shem. Your next question comes from the line of Ruben Garner with StoneX. Your line is open. Please go ahead. thanks guys i just had a follow-up i don't know what happened before i got cut off for some reasons so sorry about that um we uh so the the structural versus specialty growth in the quarter i was wondering if you could speak to the organic volume differences it's a couple quarters in a row that i think that the structural side is outperforming and i was wandering if is that a leading indicator of what could come on the specialty side? Are you using structural to get some new business in multifamily and with the national accounts and in time hope to kind of expand on that or what's kind of driving the delta and should we expect that to continue going forward? So clearly our multifamily focus is driving structural volume growth to some degree, But also, given some of the local market and regional market, whether it's build or pull through or national accounts business, those are kind of new areas of focus for us over the last couple years. So, that's obviously contributing to structural volume growth. Again, it's transactional. It's bid-asked, whereas a lot of the other specialty products, there is transactional business. but we obviously have programs in place with strategic customers around the country that keeps that a little bit more normalized. In terms of the gap, you know, one thing we always talk about is growing the business up and to the right, which means driving specialty mix shift. So we're growing both structural and specialty products. But ideally, you want to grow your specialty products at a faster rate than you're growing structural product sales. However, the channel strategy is also driving how we think about our go-to-market strategy. Understood. Thanks for the detail, guys, and good luck for the remainder of the year. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. Your next question comes from the line of Curt Yinger with DA Davidson. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Curt Yingor, DA Davidson, Great, thanks, and good morning, guys. I wanted to go back to some of the new supplier dynamics, I guess, can you just maybe level set us kind of back half of 26 first half 27 like how you're thinking about kind of putting inventory on the ground relative to where you'd like to be you know as you kind of go to market with within some of these product categories specifically decking and siding and then I guess separately like as we think about the sales progression of that is it something where you know it's a little bit of a slow trickle here in the winter months and then kind of the spigot turns on come spring and summer or just talk about the development of that a little bit if you could yeah yeah that's it yeah let me i'll take the first part of that so so so yes in term just strategically the answer is you know we're investing in inventory now in order to prepare ourselves for the uptick late in at the beginning of the year although we are we've got inventory on the ground, especially with Trex. Inventory with respect to the other suppliers is flowing through a little bit later because those deals were cut later than we had with TreX. Now, the expenses associated with it, the working capital bills are obviously all happening now through the end of the year. So we won't really, to the extent we see the sales pick up and the gross profit pick up, that will be more minimal this year relative to next year. But the idea is to make critical strategic investments now so we're well prepared for the beginning of the year. And Kelly can spend more time talking about the working capital build and how we're thinking about inventory management. Yeah, and Kurt there, I mean, obviously we're bringing the inventory in as we speak. And so our inventory levels will be elevated a bit before those sales start to come in really early next year. So just to put the numbers around it, I'd expect this inventory investment on the front end to be kind of an additional $15 to $20 million net across all the brands that we're talking about here. And then, yeah, the timing of the sales, we'll see some this year, not much for the reasons that you mentioned, and then we'll say it ramped into Q1 and Q2 next year. Got it. And just on the sales side, just maybe so we can understand better, like, is that, hey, some of these guys are going to be new customers, you got to establish new programs and seasonality? Or is there a component of kind of that sales ramp where, you know, you just have a lot of different distribution partners that you're competing against, you Know, as these transitions occur? Yeah, the transition is definitely very commercial in the sense of you've got to, you know, big picture, you've got to convert customers who are buying that product from other distributors, and we want to convert them over to us. Then you're also facing head-to-head competition with respect to competing brands. Like in the case of Trex, you're obviously competing against the decorators brands and you're competing against the timber tech brands and so on. And so it's, it's a multifaceted conversion approach that requires, you know, head to head work, you knows, at the ground level with, in collaboration with your, your supplier partners. And, and so that's happening in all the markets that we, that we have. And then, and then, you Know, it include whether it be the Northeast, the Southeast Sunbelt region that's why it takes time in order for for all this to shake out and not just for us but for everybody and that's where i feel like our business excellence initiatives for example the value-add services on top of the channel strategy and the focus we have put us in a better position to compete at the at the ground level yeah and concurrent i would add right we are in the middle of our kind of program season with our largest kind of largest accounts and you know we're you know from a program perspective you know these are brands that we're talking about this year right that we didn't have last year so that's that factors into the equation as well as we as we map out what those programs look like with some of our existing and new customers okay okay that's helpful and then um maybe kind of irrespective of the brand transitions i mean what are you kind of seeing and hearing from the dealers i mean it seems like an environment where you know they might look to tighten inventory days on hand go kind of risk off mode which you know is probably good for two-step distribution but i'm just curious your sense on you know whether we're going to see inventory levels continue to decline whether that's a little bit different than maybe you what you would have thought a couple months ago? I think the market is very two-step distribution friendly. First of all, we're going to manage our inventory levels tightly like we always do. We have a very good approach that involves Kelly and folks at the highest level here in Atlanta with working collaboratively with our branches to ensure that we're managing our working capital investments very strategically and we're matching market demand, which quite frankly, as we think about our customers, they're in a position where the market is generally tight and soft, where they want to buy less more often. And when you think about products that have longer term days, in particular things like outdoor living products and siding and so on, that actually works well, you know, works in our favor, especially when you factor in the value-add services that go on top of those products, whether it be building a complex order, you know, piece picking, putting together job packs, et cetera. So I think we're heading into a year where we become even more valuable, and then you take our channel strategy and our business excellence initiatives to basically put us in a position to out-compete at the local market level. But I do think the key is going to be taking advantage of how well we manage our inventory and then supporting our customers in an environment where they don't want to build big inventory positions and where they would prefer to buy less more often. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. And then just lastly on specialty kind of organic volume, in the quarter i know you touched on um some of the strategic kind of growth drivers but from from a product category perspective can you just walk through kind of the the puts and takes and maybe areas of pressure in q3 on the specialty side yeah i've heard so um in qq3 right on the speciality side you know we had a really strong pricing execution right um you know uh success pushing through kind of price increases not only related to um what we what we saw from our vendors but also just uh you know kind of covering our general and overall increase in operating costs um you know on the on the quarter year over year especially really across all the categories volumes were down but again we more than made up for that on on the price side and i'd say that um you know the the you know in terms of which minor categories right millwork was the one that was down kind of the most and then uh all the other products were down uh you know kind of roughly low single digit percentages great all right appreciate the color guys thank you you you're welcome there are no further questions at this time i will now turn the call back to tom morabito for closing remarks thanks warren thank you again for joining us today and we look forward to speaking with you in late february as we share our fourth quarter and full year 2026 results this concludes today's call thank you for attending you may now disconnect