Mueller Water Products, Inc. (NYSE:MWA) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

John Hall: Yes. I mean we’re still thinking about it the same way. I think that the committee is off and running with the 2 new Board members but I don’t want anybody to be misled in. We don’t speak to the activist. I mean, they got independents that were associated with the company. Part of our agreement with them was that we would have new Board members. And I think that the integration has gone well but we’re not in contact with Ancora any more than we are with any other shareholder. And certainly, we don’t comment about our discussions with shareholders. So I think the committee, though, is we’ve had our inaugural meetings and we’ve had our discussions about capital allocations, about operational improvements. And I think we have alignment in what the priorities for the business are.

And those priorities are, as I’ve been talked about them from the large CapEx projects. So I feel good about it. Well, I think we’re at the top of the hour, operator. And I just want to thank everybody to staying with us and sitting through the call and joining us this morning. Look, final thing, though, I want to remain focused on our customers while delivering and the benefits from our capital investments, we will continue to outsource not to preserve our to preserve our customers and keep our place with them because I think share is terribly important in these times of uncertainty. I’d like to thank our teams for their continued dedication, especially as they deal with the ongoing uncertainty in the external markets. I think the transformation that Mueller is going through and the water industry is going through at this time is going to be a remarkable and exciting time to be at Mueller and to be invest in Mueller.

I think we are well positioned to continue to grow net sales and get those margins back to pre-pandemic margins in 2025. And I expect this improvement to be driven by the ability to get priced more than the — in the inflation cycle, our increased volumes, primarily from growth in mini repair and replacement, improved manufacturing performance and the realization of the benefits from the large capital projects. And so I don’t want to be pollyannish and rosy that it’s nothing but blue skies from here because there’s certainly a lot of work left to be done. But I want to thank you for your interest and I want to thank you for your continued support here at you. With that, operator, we’ll end the call.

Operator: This concludes today’s call. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at this time.