Heating, Air-conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) released its monthly TRENDS report, showing the average sales performance by HARDI distributors increased 35.3% percent during January 2022.

The average annual sales growth for the 12 months ending in January is 25%, HARDI said.

“The sales growth during January was helped by an extra billing day and passing through the extraordinary price increases of the past year,” said HARDI Market Research & Benchmarking Analyst Brian Loftus. “There is no denying that demand has been extraordinary also. During the past ten years there have five months when average monthly sales growth exceeded 30% and all five were during the past year.”

The Days Sales Outstanding, a measure of how quickly customers pay their bills, was 43.5 days at the end of January 2022.

“The monthly DSO is now two days faster than last year at this time,” Loftus said. “This rate is considerably better than the pre-pandemic norm for January in the 49-day area.”

He added, “TRENDS sales growth remains impressive despite collapsing consumer confidence, but this pace is not the new normal. Retail sales at building material and supply dealers has slowed to 13.8% through December. Since that has been leading our TRENDS annual sales growth by six months since 2013, we can expect the annual pace of TRENDS to be considerably lower this summer. What goes up, must slow down.”