LSI Industries Inc. (NASDAQ:LYTS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

George Gianarikas: That’s a great segue to my last question. With regard to the M&A environment, how much does earnings accretion matter to you when you look at targets?

Jim Clark: Well, I will tell you that, I mean I think we have a demonstrated management team with the ability to kind of work with something that is dilutive and create value, but we would also certainly like to kind of focus on things that are accretive right from the beginning. I think that it would be anything that we would do that we would consider that might be initially dilutive. You can be assured, we have a plan that will make it accretive at some point and not take too long. If we did something accretive, we want to make sure we are not paying too much of a premium that washes away that accretion. So, what I would tell you is we are disciplined investors, we are choosy. And I just mentioned it with Aaron’s question, we don’t look just at the financial metrics, we look at how it fits into our strategy.

There is no sense having orphans to our strategy. And then lastly or maybe not lastly, but just as importantly, we look at culture. We don’t want to kind of take a square peg, no matter what its performance is and try to force it into our round hole, if you will. So, all of those factors help make our decisions, but I would just underline with saying we are disciplined and – but I am encouraged by the environment right now. I think there is more in front of us, maybe based on our results, maybe based on the general market or maybe based on a combination of all of those things.

George Gianarikas: Thanks. Appreciate it.

Jim Clark: Yes. George, thank you for the questions.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Sameer Joshi with H.C. Wainwright. Please proceed with your question.

Sameer Joshi: Hey guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple on the orders. The EV battery manufacturing facility order, have you disclosed the scope in dollar terms of that opportunity going forward?

Jim Clark: We haven’t, what I would like to say is it’s a single digit, it doesn’t represent any double-digit improvement in our quarter or anything. We are excited about it, and we wanted to share that news. But these type of projects, we roll-in and roll-out of on a constant basis. I think that I know that there has been a number of questions over the last year or so, like projects like our large digital menu board order, it’s a $100 million project that hits you all at once. Well, while we were executing against the delivery of that project, we are also executing around backfilling that. And so when you have a big spike like that, like a big order like that, our attention outside of delivering on that immediately turns to, okay, how do we maintain this elevated level.

The EV project, that EV project doesn’t rise to that same level. But it was a project we wanted to make note of, not only because of the composition of the project, but because it’s within what we consider our Ohio region, we like this whole concept of Ohio for Ohio, buying locally. But that buying locally, by the way, also extends to Texas and extends to Utah and the West Coast, wherever we have a facility, we are trying to make sure we are visible in the community and we want to participate in a way that allows our employees to see their work in a local facility, but also for those customers to see the pride of the people that are in that area. So, that’s why we highlighted it. We were excited about it. It’s a sizable project. And to be completely frank, we are working on Phase 2 of that right now.

So, maybe there will be something else we have. But it doesn’t rise to the level where created any big anomaly in the quarter or anything. It’s just another one of those larger projects we get.