Scott Montross: Thanks, Ted.
Aaron Wilkins: Thanks, Ted.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question is coming from David Wright from Henry Investment Trust. Your line is not live.
David Wright: Hey, guys. Good morning.
Scott Montross: Hey, David.
Aaron Wilkins: Good morning, David.
David Wright: Hey. Congratulations. Great job on the stock buyback during the quarter. I think down here that’s a great thing to use your capital for and that’s a really great average price. Scott, you were talking about kind of having a lot of SPP business and getting loaded up, and highlighted a 54% increase in tons produced in Q1. How do you — Do you have to flex the labor force at all? I know in quarters and years past, you’ve been kind of lower capacity utilization. How does a ramp-up work from a staffing point of view?
Scott Montross: We — sometimes we have to do that, but generally when we’re adding people back, it’s not like a whole shift or a whole crew. We may be adding here four or five or seven or something like that. When the production levels on Steel Pressure Pipe get low, we will shed probably something similar. We can shed 10 or 12 at a time at certain ones of the plants. But we flex up and down pretty regularly with the changes in the market situation. But I think that right now we’re kind of in a position where we’re staffed, and the guys, I guess, we had a little bit of a foreshadowing that this was going to potentially be coming, because the way the bidding was that we’ve kind of staffed up for that already and we’re ready to kind of take on the rest of the year. Shouldn’t be much of an issue for the Steel Pressure Pipe side at all. So we regularly do that. Not a big deal.
David Wright: Any sense of kind of what capacity in the aggregate the facilities operated at in the first quarter?
Scott Montross: In the aggregate, what I would say, as a practical capacity for Steel Pressure Pipe, it was about 64%, 65%.
David Wright: Okay. So you still have some room.
Scott Montross: Oh! Yeah.
David Wright: That’s my only question. Great quarter and thanks very much.
Scott Montross: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. We reach the end of our question-and-answer session. I’d like to turn the floor back over to Scott for any further closing comments.
Scott Montross: Again, thank everybody for joining us today and just wanted to leave the call with a few comments. Obviously, we’ve seen significantly improved bidding in 2024 on the Steel Pressure Pipe side and we expect that this kind of environment is going to continue near-term, which is really a 2024 thing. But I think the most important thing is we expect this environment to really continue for the next three years or four years or so years, which should create a pretty interesting situation in Steel Pressure Pipe. And I think longer term, we’re well positioned to continue to absorb those business increases and produce them. And on the Precast side, the 2024, we anticipate we’re going to have a stronger 2024 than we did 2023, even with the macroeconomic pressures that we’re seeing and the elevated — from the elevated interest rates.
So I think we’re in a situation where we said this last call, with the consolidation that has happened in the Steel Pressure Pipe business and the entry into the Precast business and what that’s done and where it’s taken us to, it’s created a different level of resiliency for this company, and ultimately, we’re seeing that now. We had a relatively soft quarter in Precast and the quarter still came in at one of the biggest first quarters we’ve ever seen or the biggest first quarter we’ve ever seen in the company. So, if this would have been several years ago, it wouldn’t have been that way. So I think that’s an important thing to remember. So, and again, thank everybody for your time and attention today. We look forward to speaking with you again in August on our second quarter call.
So thank you very much.
Operator: Thank you. That does conclude today’s teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.
