Jugal Vijayvargiya: Yes. Well, I mean, there’s a number of things I would say that have contributed and I expect them to continue. For example the space activity that we have talked about, I just indicated to, Phil, that we used to be just a small player in the space market mostly government, some of the larger projects. And here we are talking about a $90 million of new business orders, for example, on space in the ’23 calendar year. That’s an incredible level of growth that we’ve been able to drive. Now, when you look at, for example, the semi market, we have a number of things going on, ALD being one of them. So we do look for ALD as those materials are adopted more and more, as more and more advanced chips come out, as more and more AI applications happen, we would expect that to grow.
When I look at LIDAR autonomous vehicles or there are different levels of autonomous vehicles, but as we see more and more autonomous vehicles come out that have LIDAR technology, we would expect that business to continue — to then grow. So I think, we are excited about the mega trends that are out there. And I think our alignment to those mega trends with our portfolio and as you know, we love talking about that in these calls and other venues.
Dave Storms: That’s perfect. Thank you. And then just one more for me if I could. Shelly, I know you just mentioned that you’re very focused on organic growth. Just curious as to how you see this in relation to any M&A activity that you think about on your horizon?
Shelly Chadwick: Yes, sure. So, organic has been our focus, as you know since we did our last acquisition at the end of ’21, which Jugal just referred to, the main tantalum business. We are always open for business, if you will, looking at opportunities to expand our portfolio, expand our geographic footprint, but the opportunities that we have that are more near term and certain have been coming up to be organic. So we love the returns on organic projects. We’re continuing to focus there, but we’re not closed off to the idea of M&A should the right thing come along.
Dave Storms: That’s very helpful. Thank you both and congrats on the strong 2023.
Shelly Chadwick: Thank you.
Jugal Vijayvargiya: Hey, thanks.
Operator: Thank you. And the next question is a follow-up coming from David Silver from CL King. David, your line is live.
David Silver: Okay. Thank you for that. Just one more question and I’ll stipulate this might be a little unfair, but I had a question maybe about your view of the industrial economy. So you know, it is a meaningful end market and other than electronics related to end markets, it was kind of the weakest in 2023. And then I’ll just say, like over the last 24 hours I guess both Japan which might be a proxy for Asia, Japan, their economy contracted in the fourth quarter and this morning, the UK announced their economy contracted in the fourth quarter as well, so maybe a sign for continued weakness in Europe. But from your perspective, I mean, what are you hearing from your industrial customers in terms of end market demand and maybe are things still declining there or are there some signs of stabilization?
And then more to the point in your fiscal year, 2024, full year guidance, what kind of improvement or what kind of change in the industrial end markets you serve is kind of built in there? Thank you.
Jugal Vijayvargiya: Yes. David, great question. That is a large market for us and one that as you can imagine, we’re very focused on. If you look at just the general industrial market and one metric that we look at, for example, is PMI. The last time PMI was north of 50 was September of ’22. So long time ago. And since then it’s below it’s below 50, which implies that you know, there’s contraction. When you look at our slide 10 and kind of what we have indicated for our industrial market, we believe the industrial market will continue to be a challenge market in the ’24 timeframe. And that’s why we sort of indicate that it’s less than 0%. Now in our case, as I indicated earlier, we have a specific product that also is impacted and that’s related to non-residential construction with our Beryllium nickel product.
But setting that aside, which is a really a one-time specific item, we expect industrial market to continue to be challenged throughout the ’24. What’s great about, I think our company is, we’re very well diversified. So clearly industrial, we expect to be a challenge market, but we’ve got, if you look at that chart 10, we’ve got all of our markets showing positive and except automotive and industrial. So — and that’s why we’re able to, I think, say that we would have about a mid single digit year-over-year growth led by semi, led by aerospace, commercial space, defense and some of the other things that we have going on as well. So I think we’re kind of excited about where we’re headed despite the fact that we have these headwinds for industrial PMI index being below 50 for a long time, and not sure when that’s going to turn and kind of cross 50 again.
The organic growth projects that we can turn to drive, we highlighted a number of them on our slide six and we’ll continue to make sure that we’re staying above market on all the areas that we’re playing in.
David Silver: Okay. And I’m just going to just finish with an observation. So this was a record year for your company. I want to say Kyle, I think that a record this quarter with the most pages in the quarterly earnings slide deck. So there’s a lot to go through here. Maybe send it out a little earlier. My brain doesn’t work that fast in the morning, but anyway, a lot good information here, but another record, another record set, another record setting element to the quarter. All right. Thanks very much. I appreciate that.
