FGI Industries Ltd. (NASDAQ:FGI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Gregory Gibas : Got it. Makes sense. And then curious like if you’re seeing any movement on pricing or margin pressure? I mean, it looks like gross margins are still holding up pretty well. And just a little surprised that as a result of the lower inventory levels or basically destocking reducing demand levels. Just a little surprised that we didn’t really see much movement on margins as a result.

David Bruce : Yes. Well, we’ve been pretty strategic about that. And we have made adjustments where necessary in regards to price. But most of that focus, I hate to go back to this constantly, but a lot of that focus has been on our bath furniture side. That bath furniture assortment that we’ve had in the market is probably the most broad product category that we have from a SKU perspective and a collection perspective. And our partners, our retail partners and wholesale partners are really trying to rightsize that business. There were so many offerings out in the marketplace. And then when inventory became an issue within price. At a certain point, I think Perry mentioned, most of our assortments have been focused on the higher end.

Again, we ran the gamut from good, better, best, but it was mostly focused on the best. So we’re rightsizing a lot of those programs. I think I mentioned one of our big retail customers just — we’ve won a big award there to add new collections going in the next year. That’s part of that strategy, right? So while that’s happened, we’ve been expanding the higher-margin businesses. The shower business, the kitchens, like I said, are starting to scale to a size where it’s having more impact to our overall margin and our assortments. And that’s going to continue. We absolutely expect that to continue as we enter next year. So that’s part of the reason why the margins have held up well. I think our teams have done a fantastic job helping our customers [Technical Difficulty]

Operator: And ladies and gentlemen, once again, we have a little bit of an audio loss there. Mr. Bruce, we just lost you. I think we’re back now. Please proceed.

David Bruce : Greg, I apologize.

Gregory Gibas : Dave, no problem. I think we’ve kind of got the full answer out. I think you’re just kind of summarizing at the end, but very helpful and then makes total sense. Lastly, curious, I know it’s still early, but if you could discuss the opportunity in India. Great to see that you initiated your first distributor partnership there. How should we think about maybe the rollout in that market and how you’re thinking about expanding into it?

David Bruce : Yes. So our initial foray into India is going to be focused primarily on our sanitaryware business. There’s a large opportunity. You could only imagine. I mean, obviously, it’s one of the largest markets in the world. Sanitaryware is a growing category there with a lot of expansion. There’s some local municipal and national government incentive similar to what the United States have done with low flow toilets, for example, when there were rebates given to convert from higher flow. So that’s our main focus. And we’re looking at it right now as sort of a two-pronged fork. We’re partnering, as we mentioned, with a very formidable distributor that will take our products into the market into showrooms and local — I’ll call it, local building opportunities and some hospitality opportunities.

And at the same time, we’re aligning ourselves with, at least initially so far, larger construction company that is specking our product and has approved our product for spec to expand into larger commercial projects such as airports, new apartment buildings, larger hotels, national programs. So there’s a lot of leg work still to do. But we’ve made those initial — we’ve broken down those initial barriers, so to speak. And we have upcoming meetings in Q4 with our distributor to set the plans in place to execute this program as we enter next year. So we’re excited about it.