Neil Hunn: And as a general matter, we’re not the only ones that. But supply chain is generally, as Jason just said, improving and there’s essentially the chip shortage and chip issues. There’s more of a globally is just — but we’re not — you’re not just hearing that from us. We do think this — the supply chain issues abate over ’23.
Rob Mason: Sure, sure. Neil, you’ve made several references to Neptune through the call and share gains and the strength in your backlog. And that tends to be a business where share doesn’t move around that dramatically. I’m just — could you expound a little bit just on how what’s going on there? What you’ve done, whether it relates to ultrasonic adoption or the introduction of cellular? Or is this a broader effort at Neptune that’s driving that?
Neil Hunn: Neptune has been just a steady and consistent share gainer made the whole time I’ve been here, right? I mean, for a decade. And the reasons for that are manifold, but they have a product orientation that starts with, they never want to strand their existing customers with technology. So for instance, this goes back to the prior iteration of communication software, but the proprietary protocols between mobile and fixed point, Neptune has a solution where if you’re a municipality and you can have one fixed point, roaming points and still have some manual reads and the master data management software package in Neptune can ingest all that data and you don’t strand a customer having to pick piece of technology for the totality of what they have to do.
So it comes from a product orientation that starts with flexibility. The second thing is the products are just well thought out for the long arc of what the customer wants to do. For instance, on the large commercial meters for ultrasonic, you have to be able to read high flow and low flow equally accurate our products do that. So think about a big hotel application, a trickle that happened 3 in the morning versus the high flow takes their showers in the morning, our ultrasonic meter will perfectly read the low flow and the high flow and the competitive products have to tend to be focused on one or the other for the precision. More so for that application when the ultrasonic — the battery that drives the ultrasonic technology needs to be replaced.
In our case, it’s essentially a drop in battery, the competitors you have to cut the meter out and replace the meter. So it’s small things — it’s seemingly small things like that, that help drive market share gains over a long arc of time. Final thing I would say, in 2022, it was particularly beneficial for us because we had product availability throughout the totality of the year. And so some of our competitors were quoting year plus lead times. I think our lead times went from like 8 to 12 weeks. And so just some accounts that we typically have not had any presence in, they need meters, we can deliver meters, all of a sudden, you have presence and the opportunity to compete in that account. So that’s helped gain some market share in the relative short term.
Rob Mason: Great. That’s very helpful. Thank you.
Operator: And our next question today comes from Alex Blanton Clear Harbor Asset Management. Please go ahead.
AlexBlanton: Thank you. Good morning. First, I just want to say that I think your format for the slide presentation this time is probably the best ever. And I think you should stick with it. It’s really a great presentation.
Neil Hunn: Noted.
