Fastenal reported its February 2019 sales results on Thursday, showing a slight monthly acceleration in year-over-year sales growth.
The company — No. 5 on Industrial Distribution’s 2019 Big 50 List — reported February sales of $431.2 million, up 4.7 percent year-over-year (YoY), with organic sales up by that same amount. That gain outpaces January's YoY increase of 3.6 percent.
January and February's daily sales growth improved upon December 2019’s 1.0 percent growth, but follows it as the second and fourth-smallest YoY growth months the company has had since December 2016’s 3.2 percent. That was the company’s most recent low-water mark before sales consistently hovered between the high single digits and mid double-digits throughout most of 2017 and 2018 before the current industrial recession took hold around Q2 of 2019.
Below, see Fastenal’s year-over-year monthly daily sales gains since the start of 2019:
- January 2019 - 13.3%
- February 2019 - 10.5%
- March 2019 - 12.7%
- April 2019 - 7.4%
- May 2019- 9.5%
- June 2019 - 7.0%
- July 2019 - 6.1%
- August 2019 - 6.3%
- September 2019 - 5.8%
- October 2019 - 4.3%
- November 2019 - 5.7%
- December 2019 - 1.0%
- January 2020 - 3.6%
- February 2020 - 4.7%
In February 2020, Fastenal’s US daily sales grew 3.6 percent YoY in the US, grew 12.1 percent in Canada/Mexico and grew 8.3 percent elsewhere. Those figures compare with January's 3.1 percent growth in the US, 8.4 percent growth in Canada/Mexico and 0.2 percent decrease elsewhere.
Other notes from Fastenal’s February 2020:
- Daily sales to manufacturing customers grew 6.2 percent YoY (+4.3 percent in Jan.), while sales to non-residential construction customers grew 4.9 percent (+3.2 percent in Jan.).
- Daily sales of Fasteners grew 1.6 percent YoY (+1.3 percent in Jan.), while other sales grew 6.9 percent (+4.9 percent in Jan.).
- Fastenal ended January with an even 22,203 total personnel, up 0.7 percent YoY. Fastenal has 14,164 total selling personnel, up 0.5 percent YoY.
Fastenal's February results were posted one day after the release of Fastener Clearing House's February Fastener Distributor Index, which showed continued improvement after three straight months of decline into contraction territory to end 2019.
