I do believe that, yes, I can — I will confidently tell you we are taking share in the AMI space.Ryan Connors Yeah, seems to be. And then, my last question was just on sort of the visibility. I know that you don’t have perfect visibility on what kind of funding is driving every order, but is it your sense that this — a lot of the strength we’re seeing today is actually some of the federal money finally flowing through, or is this kind of organic local municipal funding coming through? I mean, any comments about the relative contribution of where the funding is coming from that’s driving the strength?Ken Bockhorst Yeah, thanks for asking that. Yeah, I mean, we’ve been pretty consistent throughout this entire period that with the fundamentals, the macroeconomic drivers that we have around AMI, whether it’s now water quality with the acquisition that we did there, that we didn’t need infrastructure money to grow.
And I will tell you that through these couple of years, since the bill was passed, we’ve seen little to no uplift from the infrastructure bill.Ryan Connors Got it. Okay…Ken Bockhorst So, it’s all organically driven [indiscernible]. Yeah. No, go ahead.Ryan Connors Just a quick housekeeping for Bob. In the flow instrumentation, you mentioned these water related markets. Can you just be specific, just call out a few of what those are? I am just curious what exactly you’re referring to there.Bob Wrocklage Yeah. So, following the strategy over the last few years, now that we’ve pivoted away from some more of the general industrial markets and focused on water-wastewater buildings sustainability HVAC. And so, when we talk about water-related markets, that’s where our focus is.
And in the quarter, we saw above-line average growth in those lines — or in those market focuses versus, say, the more general industrial, which were still up year-over-year, but just to a lesser extent. So, really we’re talking about building sustainability water-wastewater.Ken Bockhorst Yeah. And if I could remind you that even in those other markets, we’re still generally doing water related activities. It’s just the markets that we talk about when we call those out are the ones that are specifically water related markets.Ryan Connors Got it. Thanks for your time today.Ken Bockhorst Thank you.Operator Thank you. The next question comes from Rob Mason with Baird. Please proceed.Rob Mason Yes, good morning. The first quarter…Ken Bockhorst Good morning, Rob.Rob Mason Your first quarter revenue — good morning, Ken.
Your first quarter revenue was a pretty good size step up, high single digit step-up versus the second half and you already identified supply chain getting better. That’s probably a contributor. But you had previously spoken about some capacity expansions that would be ongoing. Are we starting to see the benefits from those? Is that’s flowing through? Or is that — those projects still kind of in progress?Ken Bockhorst Yeah. So, obviously, we did signal the capacity investment over the course of the last 2022. We would say that basically the revenue growth you saw in the first quarter was sans any benefit from those investments that are very early stage. So, while the CapEx is elevated in the quarter and there is some of that that’s oriented toward capacity expansion, it’s not bearing fruits in what you’re seeing in the first quarter.Rob Mason How did — maybe your historical pricing actions, how did those contribute to the first quarter maybe versus the fourth quarter?
And maybe what I’m trying to understand is how those actions that you’ve taken in ’22 are perhaps resident in the backlog, if that question is clear to you?Ken Bockhorst Yeah, well, let me take a shot at it, Rob. And then, I think, Bob will clean up anything that maybe I don’t hit. But if you think about our pricing model, what we started in 2020 when we went to a more value-based pricing model, it’s something that we do on an ongoing basis. It’s much more dynamic with the growth of AMI and some of the project-based nature of the backlog. We transitioned away from what used to be the annual list price increase and you’d see that come through in the beginning. So, I think it’s — in my view, Q1 versus Q4, there is not that huge much of a price step-up change.
But I don’t know, Bob, you…Bob Wrocklage Yeah. I mean, untangling price for us becomes a bit challenging, because when we talk about price impact, it’s not only the traditional list price increase that you’re referring to, Rob, but also certainly the average sell price evolution combined with this value-based pricing initiatives Ken described. So, there is an impact of price in the quarter, that’s a benefit to us. As Ryan had asked, we typically don’t parse that out percentage wise or attributing a portion of dollars to each element. What we would say, as Ken mentioned earlier, is the largest share of the increase in dollars and in percentage is unit volume driven. And while there is a price benefit certainly, it’s the minority of the year-over-year growth.Rob Mason If you look at your backlog as it stands today, is there a way to assess how mix should impact you this year?
Would it be more favorable, less favorable, the same versus ’22?Ken Bockhorst Yeah. So, when we talk about our confidence in our margin resiliency, again that always starts with the positive structural mix change that we have, which continues to be ongoing. We clearly keep a good view on the health of our backlog and that’s where — in our commentary or the press release, when we talk about we’re very confident in our ability to be margin resilient through any period, we do that through, obviously, having a lot of excitement around our product line and at the same time analytics that we have in the backlog.Bob Wrocklage Yeah. I think if you’re specifically trying to drive toward — if you’re specifically trying to drive toward gross margin, I guess, I would just reinforce our universal messaging of a normalized range of 38% to 40%.
Certainly, we continue to believe in the ability to leverage SEA as revenues grow. And so, op margin and EBITDA margin expansion is going to come through those two. I think the oversized impact in 2023 will be from — more from SEA leverage than it will be from gross margin contribution.Rob Mason Understood. Very helpful. Maybe just one last question quickly. Ken, you noted Syrinix. I know it’s early under your ownership, but I’m just curious if you have any initial impressions around how you think that product will slot into your channel maybe comparatively versus other products that you’ve added to the portfolio inorganically and need to work into the sales channel? Just how we should think about uptake there?Ken Bockhorst Yeah. So, keeping in mind that it’s starting from a very small base, but we’ve had extremely positive reaction from our channel partners.
