Andrew Kaplowitz: And then, Bill, just final quick follow up. I just want to go back to your comment that if you talked about spring and summer activity in the electrical space, if it doesn’t pan out, pricing could be impacted, I guess. Why did you say that? Are you seeing something on the volume or pricing side that concerns you at this point?
Bill Waltz: Yes, I’ll start. But if David went, no, I think right now things are playing out as expected, it’s just so there’s no foreshadowing. But on the flip side here, one of the things I know David always references, it’s tougher for us, is I’d love to be that corporation that has a year of backlog and it’s just when do I ship it? Versus we are a company with two weeks of backlog or less. So, trying to project out five months from now on how dynamics. But right now, things are exactly playing out as we expected, whether both at the HDPE and bringing up Hobart and or to the point, David, I think in our prepared remarks, or Andy, sorry. Is the whole thing of, hey, if it wasn’t for the $80 million of HDPE in solar, we’d be on our estimates and or above our estimates, including kind of the price spreads.
We have products that are gaining price year-over-year as we speak. So, things are moving basically as we projected a couple, quite frankly, two years ago when we originally gave estimates.
David Johnson: Yes Andy, I would just add to those comments regarding, we have the two weeks visibility, but also typically by now you would start to see more construction activity. I just think that that’s a little bit slower than what we had expected. But when you step back and you look at the fact that, construction, employment and non res is still up over 3% year-over-year. So, I think that’s a positive. And the fact that contractors still have backlog, that’s over eight months. So again, those typical indicators we use are positive. It’s just we need to start seeing the, the actual activity, pickup going into the building season.
Andrew Kaplowitz: Appreciate the color, guys.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Deane Dray, RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Deane Dray: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Hey, can we circle back on Hobart? And Bill you gave some good specifics about some of the ramp challenges. Can you give us kind of a bigger picture in terms of what the volume or the output at the plant was in the quarter versus your expectations. So, I don’t know if you do it by linear feet. I don’t know if you do it by pounds. But just kind of, hey, we expected to have ramped this much and our output was actually this. So just kind of frame that for us.
Bill Waltz: No, the only thing, Dean, we don’t give that. I prefer not to just cause then you get into every quarter by factories saying what’s our production? And even for our competitors. What I would tell you is Hobart is a very large facility. I mean, I think there’s pictures in our earnings stack that we can share that would significantly increase our metal tons for all of Atkore. And while it’s not hitting our production levels, if you go back to one of the pages where we bridge I’m trying to see which one page 6, mechanical tube overall is still up double digits year-over-year. So again, it’s a large mover. But again, if we estimated whether it’s bringing that evening shift on, whether it’s taking the machines down for four days unplanned for preventive maintenance to make sure we keep the tolerances, a couple of things like that.
Just even the four days when you look and say, hey, in a 60-day work week and a quarter, slightly more than that. That’s a big needle mover here for us. But again, Dean, as I mentioned earlier, things like that, we have poka-yoke the process and plan to continue to see the output increase. It’s just a question. Is it playing out more for FY ’25 than we estimated in FY ’24?
Deane Dray: Okay, that’s helpful. And if we just think a bigger picture regarding pricing being better than we had expected or not down as much versus expectation, but a volume shortfall, was there any bias this quarter to hold on price at the expense of volume? I know it’s hard to aggregate across the products, but was there any bias there?
Bill Waltz: I don’t know about that, but I think we’re all a couple of things, Dean. We’re always conscious of that as a market leader to go, hey, can we go out with almost any customer that would probably prefer us for lots of reasons and gain volume and we don’t want to do that. Flip side is we at least, I think we did a good job for this specific quarter. And I think in our prepared remarks mentioned, if you go back to the January call, they’re going, hey, this first quarter, our fiscal first quarter was strong because we did have two customers pull in orders to hit rebates that we allowed in January. I hope I never talk about the weather again. Was light. So, us lining up 6% year-to-date, I would bet for our market segments, that is commercial, industrial and things like that, I’m pretty confident it’s much quicker or higher than what the market’s growing, the business plans work and we’re still locked on the $18 EPS.
We’re driving ahead and we just have these two short term things that quite frankly are short term. So, I’m in a good spot right now in my mind.
Deane Dray: All right, that’s good to hear. Just last one from me. Since we get this question a lot recently, can you comment on the significance of any imports of conduit? We know that just the product physical dynamics do not lend itself to economical cargo shipments, but there still seems to be a very small presence of imports. Can you just comment on that where and how it plays out?
Bill Waltz: Yes, so great question. Without getting product by product, it does vary. But to give you like things, it goes from 0% with some products to 3%. And then, by the way, do you add Canada in there? You’re talking non candidate in US, those type of things, but goes from 0% to 3% to the highest, I’m aware was around 20%. And then it just gets to preference. We can obviously, I say obviously, but have a price premium both for our reputation, our quality, our ability to ship. And then we’re also seeing in some cases, some products coming in that don’t meet every product specification. So that’s starting to go. Yep, you saw it and now you’re not seeing it nearly as much. So again, Dean, I think. Good question. But we keep back to our earnings guide, what we expected. We’re running our game plan and quite frankly, I think it’s going well.
