Heating, Air-conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) released its monthly TRENDS report, which showed average sales performance by HARDI distributors increased 26.7% during March.

The average annual sales growth for the 12 months through March 2022 is 25.3%.

“The extraordinary sales growth during the first three months of the year was helped by easy prior year comparisons and the extraordinary price increases that have been passed through,” said HARDI Market Research & Benchmarking Analyst Brian Loftus. “The first quarter is the low season of the year. It will be interesting to see if the annual sales growth will still have a 20-handle at the end of the seasonally important Q2.”

The Days Sales Outstanding, a measure of how quickly customers pay their bills, was 42 days at the end of March.

“The March 2022 DSO is comparable to March 2021,” Loftus said. “This rate is considerably better than the pre-pandemic norm for March in the 48-day area.”

He added, “The TRENDS performance during the past year has tracked the rapid economic recovery. We expect economic growth to be cooling this year. Consumer Sentiment is down, inflation and mortgage rates are up. The sales growth at Building Materials and Supply retailers is slowing and our TRENDS annual sales growth has a strong tendency to follow the performance of that group.”