Perimeter Solutions, SA (NYSE:PRM) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Edward Goldberg: Yeah, so first of all, I can say that you can look at on the Fire Service website and see nothing’s really changed in the last quarter. I will repeat what I’ve said before, barely a day has gone by in the last 20 years that I’ve been running this business that I haven’t — there hasn’t been somebody trying to get into it. Some companies are noisier than others. I think there’s quite a bit of noise in the system right now. But we feel very good about our market position going forward.

Connor Lynagh: Alright, I’ll turn it back. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian De Rubio from Baird. Please go ahead.

Brian DiRubbio : Good morning, just a few questions for me. I’d like to just drill down on Specialty Products for a second. May have missed this but can you just give us maybe just generically, what were the drivers? It was — are you seeing better volumes of that business or is it price? Just love to know what the various drivers have been there?

Edward Goldberg: Yeah, so as I mentioned previously, we are working hard to improve the business across all of our value drivers that includes driving price to value, it includes taking costs out of the system and looking for profitable new business. We’ve made good progress over the last year, in all — across all three value drivers. You can see that in the results. And we think that we’ll continue to make improvements going forward across all aspects of that business.

Brian DiRubbio : Maybe that’s another way, you know in that business, what’s sort of the capacity? What’s the operating rate today? And you do have the ability to drive more volumes or is this going to be more of a price driven story going forward?

Edward Goldberg: We believe we have the ability to take on profitable new business that we’re working on, we feel good about that.

Brian DiRubbio : Okay. Wanted to touch on a non-cash item but you know, as it relates to your M&A activity, both this quarter and last quarter, you guys took actually non-cash gains on the contingent earn-outs. Last quarter was $9.4 million, this quarter was, I think like $3.6 million. Obviously, when that happens, that means one of your M&A targets has not performed as well as you thought. So we’d love to get maybe a little bit more details on what exactly happened there, and how are you thinking about M&A sort of today?

Chuck Kropp : Yeah, good morning. This is Chuck. Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, in terms of the historical M&A, really, that’s just as simple as shift of product from earn-out eligible product to not earn-out eligible, so the decrease in the liability there.

Edward Goldberg: And, Brian, going forward, our view on M&A is completely unchanged. We’re very focused on it. We’d love to get very high quality transactions done. When we do it, we create significant shareholder value as we find the long-term free cash flow per share. On the one hand, it’s a very good M&A environment with less competition, restricted access to capital and we’re in a great cash situation both on the balance sheet and forward expectations of cash generation. On the other hand, it’s just more challenging to get things done and price things loose in this environment, and we’re working, we’re working super hard at it and stay tuned.

Brian DiRubbio : Got it. Just one final question for me and I have been know the answer. But the ticker symbol of your bonds changed in the last couple of months. Is there any reason for that?

Edward Goldberg: That’s above our take rate.

Brian DiRubbio : Okay, just confused everybody. They were looking for , they got locked to HLD. Everybody’s calling me up, was like, what’s this new bond I own? So, but okay.