Home Depot Sticks to ‘Current Pricing Levels’ Despite Tariffs

Home Depot’s finance chief says customers shouldn’t expect tariff-driven price increases.

“Because of our scale, the great partnerships we have with our suppliers and productivity that we continue to drive in our business, we intend to generally maintain our current pricing levels across our portfolio,” Chief Financial Officer Richard McPhail said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday (May 20).

He said more than half the company’s products come from within the U.S., adding that Home Depot and its suppliers have been trying to diversify the source of their imports in recent years, including products from China.

By this time next year, no single country outside the U.S. will account for more than 10% of the home improvement retailer’s purchases, McPhail said.

McPhail’s comments to the news outlet came the same day the company released its first-quarter earnings, showing total sales of $39.9 billion, up 9.4% year over year. Comparable sales were down 0.2%, a trend the company attributed to foreign exchange rates.

The CNBC report notes that Home Depot’s approach to pricing diverges from that of Walmart, which said recently it would soon be forced to raise prices to offset the cost of tariffs.

“The operating environment is highly fluid,” Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said last week on the company’s earnings call. He said the “magnitude” of tariff-driven swings, “given the level of additional costs that could be applied to the inventory that we’re purchasing right now, are unprecedented in our business and could result in swings in margin and earnings by quarter.”

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this week, inflationary pressures, interest rate volatility and geopolitical instability are driving a shift in how finance leaders deal with things like cash positioning, supplier payments and payroll distribution.

“Today’s finance teams are tackling both sides of the money mobility equation, which has emerged as a dual-pronged strategic imperative,” that report said.

“On the inbound side, they are accelerating receivables, integrating real-time transaction visibility and reducing reconciliation friction. On the outbound side, they are providing suppliers with more payment options and greater predictability to help ensure supply chain stability.”

At the center of both sides of that dynamic, PYMNTS added, is the use of new technologies, with advances like real-time payments, virtual cards, open banking APIs and stablecoins moving into the mainstream.