Luna Innovations Incorporated (NASDAQ:LUNA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Alexander Henderson: One more clarification. So the growth rate in the fourth quarter, I believe that was partially organic, partially inorganic. Can you give us either a pro forma growth rate, what the growth rate would’ve been had you €“ had the same assets in the year-ago? Or a split and/or a split between organic and inorganic growth, please? Thanks.

Scott Graeff: I’d have to look that up, Alex. I don’t €“ I’d have to look to see what, say Lios did in Q4 of 2021. I don’t particularly know that offhand.

Alexander Henderson: You can get back to me on it?

Scott Graeff: Yes. I will get back to you on that and we can look at what that is.

Alexander Henderson: So one last question then I’ll leave the floor. So can you talk a little bit about how the pipeline has developed over the course of the year? I know that when we talked to you guys out at OFC, it sounded like things are in pretty good shape. Have you seen any changes in that with the turbulence we’ve been seeing here in 1Q with the pipeline strength?

Gene Nestro: Yes. We have not. Pipeline continues to build at about that same rate. Book-to-bill throughout the course of 2022 ran between 1.1 and 1.2. Product book-to-bill, if you take our small contract revenues out was close to 1.2 for the year. So that’s historically pretty strong for Luna. Not really driven by supply chain pre-buying or anything like that, it was just strong growth. And Q1 on the order book sides, off to a good start, so continuing along that trajectory.

Alexander Henderson: Great. Thank you so much.

Scott Graeff: Thanks, Alex.

Operator: And the next question is from Paul Essi from William Woodruff & Company. Please go ahead.

Paul Essi: Thank you for taking my questions. You may have touched on it a little bit. But I want to talk a little bit about the sales and marketing. I guess with Lios, you had mentioned that you’re trying to beef up that the marketing effort there. If you could talk a little bit about that? And I know it’s a long lead time, if you’re seeing any fruits of the labor there, also, your cross-selling strategy and where the monitoring aspect of this would fit in as well as are you going after some of your install base in that monitoring area? And had a follow-up after that.

Scott Graeff: Yes. I’ll take a stab and then I’ll let Brian kind of add to that, Paul. The sales and marketing is in these last two acquisitions that we’ve done, it is something that we’re focused on. Keep in mind, the OptaSense acquisition was part of a much, much larger organization in kinetic, and the same with Lios being owned by NKT. So a lot of those assets, if you will, those people resided up at the parent. So it is an aggressive push that we have to do to get additional sales and particularly marketing in Europe. So we are pushing hard on that and growing that. So that is a focus of what we are working on.

Brian Soller: Yes. Hey, Paul, this is Brian. That is bearing fruit. On the sales side of the equation, if you look at that project business and the integration we’ve done between the last two acquisitions, the book-to-bill in quarter four was over 1.6. So the bookings €“ so we really are seeing the fruit of those labors. The additions we’ve made and the integration we’ve done and it’s showing up in the bookings. But as we’ve discussed in the past, those orders will be scheduled out over in some cases 18 months. So we didn’t see as much of the fruit of that from a revenue perspective in quarter four here in the first half of this year. But that’s all being laid in and it’s a part of that growth curve that we see. And as Scott discussed, part of the reason, we’ll see a little bit lower growth in the first half and more in the second revenue wise.