Concrete Pumping Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:BBCP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Bruce Young: What we’re seeing — and thanks for the question, Tim (sic) (Sam). It’s more in the lighter commercial projects that are a lot more sensitive to that sort of thing. The large projects — anything that comes — chip manufacturing plants, electric vehicle plants, anything at large scale like that, we’re not really seeing much pullback or concern about the interest rates, but it’s more of the smaller projects where it really affects the returns.

Sam Kusswurm: Great. And then if you could maybe talk further about demand trends that relates to the Government Infrastructure Act. Are you seeing — are you starting to see some projects related to those initiatives break ground, or are we still broadly more in the funding, allocation and bidding process?

Bruce Young: We actually have seen some of those bids led here recently, some fairly large projects. Nothing that we’ve gotten to the bid stage for us to secure that work, but we’re encouraged by that. And so we do see into 2024 that being a much better opportunity than it was this year.

Sam Kusswurm: Great. And then if I could just squeeze in one more here. Obviously, I know you won’t provide formal guidance for 2024 and so your fourth quarter. But just maybe as we look towards next year, are there any broader themes that we should keep in mind as it relates to your growth and margins?

Iain Humphries: Yes. I mean, again, it really comes back for us as we recalibrate rates based on the supply and demand on project side. As Bruce mentioned in his comments, the inflation impact, certainly around labor, has been more protected this year. So we would expect that to start ease as we recalibrate rates. And then from a margin perspective, obviously, we’ve seen some quite stellar performance on the Eco-Pan and the UK side, and we expect that to continue to help improvement in margin.

Bruce Young: What I would add to that is in 2022, we did a really good job of getting rates out up ahead of inflation or at least with inflation. It was much harder in 2023. It’s a much more competitive environment. The work that’s out there isn’t as great as it was in 2020. So, it made it much more competitive, and it was more of battling for market share and harder to get rates. We see the markets improving into ’24 and so the margin should improve with rates.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Andy Wittmann with Baird.

Andy Wittmann: I guess, I wanted to just zoom in here on the residential portion of your business. Obviously, the rising rates here had been a factor off and on, but the confidence or the uptick that you saw sequentially in demand there was maybe a little surprising to some. So — and it sounds like you’ve got a fairly decent outlook as you look forward as well. So, I was just wondering, like if you could put a little bit more detail on the comments that you made, Bruce, around residential as to why you believe that that has shored up and may remain so.

Bruce Young: Thanks for the question, Andy. So, as we look at the residential markets we’re in and it’s largely in the Mountain states. Idaho, Utah, Arizona and Texas is where we do most of our residential work, and the demand is still quite high in those markets. We’ve seen a lot of the large homebuilders have brought down interest rates, have built houses on smaller lots, maybe not as many features to keep them more affordable. And honestly, we’ve been really impressed with what they’ve been able to do to keep that flow going, and we see that continuing.

Andy Wittmann: I see. Okay. And then maybe one for Iain. We just noticed there is a $12.8 million non-recurrent liability that popped on the balance sheet this quarter. I was just wondering what that is? Is that like an earn-out or something, or maybe can you just talk about what that is?