Digi International Inc. (NASDAQ:DGII) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott Searle: Got you. And as a follow-up, just looking out into the December quarter and for the guidance for fiscal 2024, I am wondering if you could kind of take through some of the different product lines in terms of where you are seeing some weakness and the broad-based expectations for fiscal 2024? You commented already on the Out-of-Band and Opengear in datacenter. But I am wondering if you could kind of highlight some of the other areas of where you are seeing relative strength and how the channel is performing right now? Thanks.

Ron Konezny: Yeah. Yeah. Scott, good question. Yeah. We really think it’s primarily isolated to that subset of customers within console server. If they were ordering product as they have done previously, you would be seeing growth in the period year-over-year. So that alone really does explain a lot of the difference. As I mentioned earlier, we do expect them to digest and get back on track with the traditional ordering patterns. But it will take a quarter or two for that to normalize. That’s really what’s baked into that assumption as we see that recovery throughout 2024.

Scott Searle: Great. Thank you.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Robert Aguanno with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Robert Aguanno: Hey, guys. Thank you for taking the question. Robert Aguanno on for Harsh Kumar here. More of a strategic question. How are you guys balancing the weakness in the near-term coming from your large customers that you had mentioned, as well as the inventory buildups? Can you compare that versus maybe how you are thinking about further penetration of your products into potentially other geographies or within the markets that you guys are playing already? Thank you.

Ron Konezny: Yeah. Thanks for the question, Robert. While we got this this near-term dip, we are absolutely confident in the long-term growth rates of our end markets and of Digi. We think we are outperforming the market when we look at other public companies, as well as private companies that we think are down significantly double digits. So we think we are doing better than most and we don’t want to let up the gas pedal on the investments, whether they be capital or labor resources. So we are in a very offensive posture because we think the long-term trend is there even if we have got a short-term dip. There are just so many opportunities to connect remote assets, to connect people to their remote assets and the ROI is compelling. The ROI is compelling in good times and even in times of more stressed macroeconomic concerns like we potentially have today.

Robert Aguanno: Awesome. And as my follow-up, just on that hardware to software transition, how are your legacy hardware customers responding, maybe the large customers specifically on — if you put the software in front of them and maybe they only want to stick with the hardware. Are you keeping that business or without getting too specific, how are you reacting to that situation?

Ron Konezny: Yeah. It’s a good question, Robert. We are very, very sensitive to existing relationships. They have relied on us for, in some cases, decades and we want to sell them the value. We want to convince them, we don’t want to threaten them, we don’t want to hold them hostage, if you will, to new models. We want to work over time to understand what opportunities there are to transition them to solutions and earn that business rather than forcing it. Starting with new opportunities, it’s a much different story. New opportunities were much more convicted and courageous on positioning ourselves as solution provider with — part — provider, which both quite frankly allows us to avoid opportunities that don’t have a good match, as well as pursuing those that do have a good match.

As many of you know, we are not alone in this trading, there are other companies that are going down. So it’s hardly an unfamiliar story. But the key for us is to translating our solutions strength and matching that very closely with the customer’s need.