HEICO Corporation (NYSE:HEI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

In addition, it saves us interest cost. And so we will, again, push to get it down below 2x and or 2x. Prior to this Wencor, we have never been even at 2x EBITDA. So, I’ll remind you of that. And we don’t like leverage, strong leverage, so we’re going to work towards that. But we — I think we still will be able to make acquisitions and do both.

Louis Raffetto: Great. Victor, just a quick one for you. I think, obviously, the defense growth was nice sequentially up 10%. I think you said it was still down maybe year-over-year. Do you have that number? I know last quarter, you said it was down 14%, but just curious this quarter.

Carlos Macau: Louis, this is Carlos. I actually have that number handy. Organically, defense was down in the high single digits, which that coming off the last, gosh, four, five, six quarters, that’s heading in the right direction. That’s why it was important to us when we saw that sequential growth in defense to highlight that because we’ve been waiting for that. That’s something we’ve known was going to come, we just didn’t know exactly when. So, that’s — one quarter doesn’t make a trend, but we’re optimistic, not only given that swing, but also some of the forecasts from our subs tend to support, the fact that we may be seeing a turn here in our defense electronics business.

Operator: There are no additional questions at this time.

Larry Mendelson: Okay. This is Larry Mendelson, and we have no more questions. If any of you do have questions, you know that Eric, Victor, Carlos and I are available, give us a call, we’ll try to help you out. And we thank you for participating in this call, and we look forward to speaking to you in the fourth quarter earnings call, which will be sometime towards the middle or end of December. So, thank you all and this is the end of the call.

Operator: Thank you. And this concludes today’s call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.