RF Industries, Ltd. (NASDAQ:RFIL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Rob Dawson: Yes. Hey, Hal. Thanks for the question. So we have multiple things that we’re going to be launching. I think the good news here is, from our last couple of acquisitions we’ve added some solid engineering talent and some product roadmap capabilities. So we have small cell and thermal cooling offers, we have Microlab products that are on the docket and we’ve kind of always got new versions of hybrid fiber that are coming out as well. Historically, there’s not a lot of product launches from us, because we weren’t very product road map centric, we were more looking at market opportunities or responding to customer needs and then coming to market with something. This is a more proactive approach. The majority of the things that we plan to launch and announce already have customer trials, either completed or ongoing and we expect there to be in most cases revenue during fiscal 2023 to coincide with those launches.

I’m not much of a send out a press release because we have something that we think is cool kind of guy. I prefer to send out something when we think it’s cool, customers think it’s cool and we can actually quantify some dollars around it. So you can expect that when we do launch something, our expectation is that there’s a revenue stream tied to it that we can also speak about at that time.

Hal Granger: Okay, great. Thank you. And another — I think my final question was kind of a broader question, regarding mergers acquisitions. Two part question. One is, your past acquisitions and most recently Microlab, have you completed the sufficient amount of integration that you’re now actively looking for new acquisitions. And with respect to potential new acquisitions, the environment has changed a lot over the past year, right, with higher interest rates. There’s a potential recession people are talking about, funding availability has changed a bit, I suppose. And there may be greater willingness on the part of potential targets to enter into discussions with you. Can you talk about that?

Rob Dawson: Sure. Yes. So the first piece, so Microlab is, I’ll say, generally integrated, if not fully integrated. The only thing remaining there is getting into a new facility for them from where they’re located currently. So just moving down the street, but I need a little bit of additional space to do some other things in there. But other than that move, which really didn’t have anything to do with the integration of the business, our systems implemented there, our teams have been integrated almost since day one. So we’re largely complete on that, which in a normal environment would then free us up to be actively looking at deal flow and acknowledging deals. It’s not that we’re not doing that, we are looking and the pipeline continues to sort of build and evolve.

But we’re pretty cautious about doing M&A in an environment like this, making sure that we’ve got the right acquisition target, the right size and scale. As always, I think as everyone’s learned, I care a lot about what price we pay for it and try to be conservative on that and make sure that we’re allocating capital wisely. So there’s nothing imminent. I’m not rushing into any deals and whether that — whether that continues to be the case this full year or not, we’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t think it’s a very — while people are interested in talking about M&A, it’s a little bit of a funky environment to be going out to find capital. We’ve done a great job of using cash and low interest debt in the past. Where our stock sits today, I’m not terribly interested in using that equity as — using that paper to do an acquisition either.