Q1 of fiscal 2025 was another “so so” three months for industrial supplies and metal working distributor MSC Industrial Supply Co., but the company continues to press on with building out its enterprise plans for ecommerce sales and digital transformation.

For its fiscal Q1 2025, which ended Nov. 30, MSC Industrial posted net sales of $928.5 million. That’s a 2.7% decrease from the previous year of net sales of $954.0 million. Net income was $46.62 million. That compares with net income of $69.35 million in the first quarter of its fiscal 2024.

Conditions remain “soft” on companies placing orders, CEO Erik Gershwind told analysts on a recent earnings call.

“While it was a good start to the year, we’re mindful that the near-term environment remains soft and our company remains in a transition period during fiscal 2025,” he said.

MSC Industrial ecommerce sales in Q1

MSC Industrial does about 60% of its total sales of metalworking and maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) products through ecommerce. Additionally, MSCDirect.com accounts for about half of MSC Industrial’s more than $2 billion in annual ecommerce revenue.

In Q1, MSC Industrial continued to revamp its ecommerce platform.

“During the fiscal quarter, we made further progress on improving overall site performance, the shopping experience, navigation, and product discovery,” Gershwind told analysts. “We provided customers with digital versions of MSC’s marketing suite of materials, including our well-known Big Book on our website, we improved search relevance, and streamlined the number of clicks in navigation.”

MSC Industrial said it is also pushing operational and supply chain upgrades that the company expects to improve customer experience and increase revenue and gross profits.

Martina McIsaac, president and chief operating officer, noted several of these improvement plans, including:

• Streamlining the supply chain for MSC’s original equipment manufacturer (OEM) fasteners and other product categories.
• Upgrading use of technology and system-wide inventory planning and allocation.

“First is to streamline the supply chain of our OEM fastener and C-part categories by consolidating demand planning and procurement,” McIsaac said. “Second, we’re upgrading our use of technology in our system-wide inventory planning and allocation function to ensure that we have the right inventory as close to the customer as possible. And lastly, we’re optimizing our management of inbound and outbound freight to reduce split shipments and lower reliance on higher cost air freight.”

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