Insteel Industries, Inc. (NYSE:IIIN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

H. Woltz: I think that in the distributor market, which we estimate to be in the range of 15% of our volumes not a major driver. I think the destocking is certainly complete, and I don’t think there will be any restocking. Delivery horizons from producers such as in steel are short. And I think customers were sufficiently burned by higher prices and then falling prices so that they see no reason to take that risk. In the make-to-order segment of our business, I would say that, we have customers who had extremely high levels of finished goods inventory. Most of that inventory is sold, but different problems and different constraints in different regions have prevented them from shipping at the rates that they probably expected to ship, and we still have customers who have high levels of reinforcement inventories.

Unfortunately, there’s no good source of objective data for us to really get our arms around the extent of this problem, which would allow us to forecast when they work through these inventories. But I think clearly that’s a play in our markets.

Tyson Bauer: All right. Thank you gentlemen.

H. Woltz: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Julio Romero from Sidoti & Co. Please go ahead.

Julio Romero: Thanks. Hey, good morning, H and Scot.

H. Woltz: Good morning.

Julio Romero: Maybe thinking about your – good morning. Maybe thinking about your capital projects that are expected to be fully commissioned this quarter just any sense as to how we should think about the benefit or the accretion to earnings and kind of the same question for the remaining project that’s expected to come online in the first quarter of fiscal 2024?

H. Woltz: Well, Julio, I mean, I think the big picture answer to that is we wouldn’t have made any of these investments, if we didn’t think that they would return to greater than our cost of capital. So I think you can think of it like that, but we also need a market to sell into and you don’t get to pick your timing for starting these lines up. So we’ll start some of the lines up in an environment that is a little softer than we would like to see, but we’re not making these investments for this quarter or next quarter. These are long-term investments. And over time we will realize returns on the investments that exceed our cost of capital.

Julio Romero: Got it. No, that’s helpful. Maybe if you could speak to unit conversion costs and how those are trending sequentially?

Scot Jafroodi: Sequentially, unit conversion costs went down from Q2, but we’re still operating at lower than anticipated production levels. So they were not where we had forecasted them to be.

Julio Romero: Okay. Got it. And…

H. Woltz: Just Julio, one other thing affecting unit conversion cost is just a general inflationary environment that we have experienced and we’re — except for certain commodities that we purchase we’re not seeing that any of these prices are coming down. So I’ll tell you that, the industry has experienced a recent — and the cost profile of all of the various services and spare parts and you name it electricity, there’s been a definite reset in cost levels. And I’m not exactly sure that we’re through that yet. But none of these costs are coming back down to where they were pre-inflationary days.

Julio Romero: Understood. When I think about the comments you guys made about the shipments in July being up mid single-digit, I believe you said through this point in July. Have you seen any weather impact given the flooding we’ve seen across much of the Atlantic seaboard?

Scot Jafroodi: I don’t think so yet. We might see it, but we’ve not seen that yet.