LSI Industries Inc. (NASDAQ:LYTS) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Jim Clark: Yes, good morning George, and thanks for the question. I mean, listen, I think in general, I mean, if you look at the performance in the last quarter, Lighting had a strong quarter and kind of resisted a lot of kind of market trends, if you will, for Lighting. I think that we continue to execute well. We’ve got a product line and a strategy that is continuing to be rewarded. And we don’t — we’re able to kind of pivot more quickly in terms of customers that are impacted by some of these macro events and things a little bit easier for us. On the Display Solutions side, these are typically very project-oriented.

Jim Galeese: Large.

Jim Clark: A large project in anything that pauses them for any length of time has a disruption. It’s not really about any type of concentration. No one customer makes up more than 10%, the numbers actually likely far below that. It’s just that the things that when one thing pauses and it’s a program pause, it’s not a cancellation or anything, but it’s just kicks the things down the road and we’ve talked a lot about timing over the last year, maybe year and a half. What we initially started talking about was things like permitting and things like that, we still see a lot of project timing disruptions because of order trades. I mentioned electrical switch gear earlier, those type of things. We don’t see them as anything that’s going to be disruptive in a long-term, but we see them as things could be disruptive in a quarter or in a month or things like that, and we’re feeling that.

I think that it’s — what I said in my comments earlier, I think it’s really limited to grocery right now for obvious reasons. And it extends beyond just the two that are involved, it extends kind of through the industry to see what do we need to compete against? Who’s going to be our competitor in a certain segment? Is there an opportunity here? Does a competitor need to refresh their brand? So, there’s a lot of kind of extra thinking, if you will, going on in that segment. Automotive is probably pretty easy to understand. I think that even if you’re not — even if you’re with one of the competitors, the disruption in terms of supply chain and just having units available and what the used car market is going to do and how this is going to be impacted.

And right now, there is tentative agreements across how quickly will production resume, how about suppliers in that supply chain that maybe are affected. I think a lot of that is just causing a pause, you start to see a couple of these segments being paused. And they account for 2, 3, 5, whatever percent top line pressure that we have. And so, I think we’re just trying to make everybody aware, we don’t see anything that is a significant threat in terms of overall and long-term, but we do see some timing disruptions right now that we’re just trying to comment on.

George Gianarikas: I appreciate the transparency. And you have been talking about this for a little while as you referenced. And so, to the extent that there are timing issues, some of them are related to maybe macroeconomics, some of them are related to M&A, some of them are related to permitting and supply chain issues. And it feels like — is it right that they constitute or — in each one of those buckets separately?

Jim Clark: Yes. I mean, I think that it’s — like I was saying in kind of a cookie mix, right, there’s a lot of ingredients that go into it. And some of them are being impacted right now, so the recipe doesn’t look quite the same, but I would also say that not giving any forward-looking statements. But I would also say that if you think there’s still a little bit, there could be a huge opportunity on the back of this timing disruption. One that I underline, we’ll ready for and we think we can absorb and help our customer when they are — when they do get to that point. I would also say that a majority of our business still remains very stable. And I mentioned in my comments earlier, the quote activity. I mean, listen, I keep looking based on macroeconomic things and just impacts to the economy, looking at the ABI and AIA statistics and all of that.