Standex International Corporation (NYSE:SXI) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris Moore: Got it. It’s helpful. I will jump back in line. Thanks, guys.

David Dunbar: Thank you, Chris.

Ademir Sarcevic: Thanks, Chris.

Operator: Our next question comes from Michael Legg from Benchmark. Please go ahead.

Michael Legg: Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Can you talk a little bit about the inflationary environment what you’re seeing in supply chain pricing and your ability to pass that on to your customers? And what that means from a, you know organic growth perspective? Thanks.

Ademir Sarcevic: Yes, yes. It’s Ademir, Mike. So yes, I mean I think we are still seeing some inflationary pressures, but frankly, it’s not as strong as it was in a few quarters ago, and specifically, you know we are seeing a bit of a deflation, if you will, because the oceanic freight cost is still at a kind of pre-COVID levels and you know kind of how it exploded during COVID. You know we have developed a pretty sort of playbook around price and productivity, you know few years ago. We continue to abide by the playbook and as you know, as you have seen, we had 10 consecutive quarters of you know highest adjusted operating margin in company history and you know the one of the reasons we are able to do that is because we have a pretty good way of you know managing price and productivity and we expect to be able to continue to do that even in the environment with the — you know with the softer end markets in electronics, we want to make sure we protect the margin, and there will be a combination of price and productivity.

So that will be my take on it.

Michael Legg: Thanks. And then just one other question. On ENEL with your technology you’ve developed there for solar. What’s going on over at ENEL? Can you just give us some comments on that, please?

David Dunbar: Yes. So that project is as you know we’ve reported before that we think — we’ve developed some special technology developed together with ENEL and we are spending this year to complete industrialization to make sure that we are prepared to launch products that target cost and quality. There are two significant things have happened kind of in the external environment to that project. Remember we are talking commercial solar panels here. And in Europe, the market for commercial solar panels has changed quite a bit. There’s estimates there are $80 million Chinese panels in inventory over there. The price for panels about 50% but it was a year ago. So much more competitive end market than it was a year ago. The second external to the project impact is ENEL.

ENEL is government-owned, partly government-owned and the new Italian government appointed a new leader there. They’re in the process of reviewing their entire portfolio of projects. They have been selling some assets. They’ve canceled a couple of renewable projects. So if you add those things into the project we are kind of stepping back and looking at where is the best –what’s the best way to deploy this technology. The market for commercial panels is about 80% of the global market for solar panels. But that other 20% is significant. There’s some potentially attractive niche markets there. So we are stepping back and looking at, is there a better place to introduce this technology in the market, and you know in the next quarter or so we’ll have a clear direction on that.

Michael Legg: Great. Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from Gary Prestopino from Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

Gary Prestopino: Good morning, all. A couple of questions. The acquisition of Sanyu or the planned acquisition. Is there any customer overlap? And what do they bring product-wise that you don’t have already in the market?