Tecnoglass Inc. (NYSE:TGLS) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Sam Darkatsh: And then, my last question. Thank you for that color, Chris. My last question, there was no share repo in the quarter. I think there’s a reasonable chance that you folks get included within the Russell 2000 at least if not this quarter certainly soon. Talk about your near-term capital allocation priorities especially around share repurchase, knowing that might be on the horizon so the stock would act accordingly.

Santiago Giraldo: Yes. That’s always on the board’s mind and obviously a topic of discussion in each one of them and will definitely be opportunistic. I think there’s a great chance to return value to shareholders via not only repurchases but also dividends. The balance sheet is as flexible as it’s ever been. So, just to answer that, I mean, we’ll be opportunistic and obviously, we have more than half of that program still available to us to execute them. We’ll see how it plays out, but definitely there’s a lot of value to be created there.

Operator: The next question comes from Tim Wojs with Baird. Please go ahead.

Tim Wojs: Hey, everybody. Good morning. Maybe just to step back, just Jose Manuel, you talked about, your backlog continues to grow both sequentially and year-over-year. You mentioned a pretty good pipeline of activity around quoting and bidding and things like that. So, I guess could you just add a little bit of flavor in terms of what you’re seeing on the ground from both a quoting and maybe pricing perspective and would you expect the backlog to continue to grow in the near term?

Jose Manuel Daes: The backlog will continue to grow. It is continuing to grow every day because we invoice much less than the jobs that we’re closing. I mean this past month we closed much more than what we invoiced. We see the trend, I mean, Florida is booming everywhere. It’s not only Miami. It’s for Florida, Boca Raton, Pompano Beach. Western Beach is crazy. And then, you go up to Jackson Beach, Tampa. We are seeing a lot of opportunities. We are very enthusiastic because all the jobs are fully funded. It’s not like they’re playing games. So, we see the backlog growing. Just remember that in the backlog, there is nothing of retail and retail is coming up. I mean, the residential. So, we believe that, after all the new products are aligned from July on, everything is going to turn around but we want to be conservative on the outlook. Anyhow, we believe, we’re going to do good, very good on the second semester.

Tim Wojs: Okay. Got you. That’s helpful. I guess, Santiago, just on the residential side. If you plug in the residential kind of expectation for the year, I think you get something like $375 million or something like that for sales for resi. Is the math really just kind of $20 million or so in base case vinyl and then you get will that be kind of 6%, 7% legacy business? Is that kind of the math?

Santiago Giraldo: Yes. I mean, your math is right on, Tim, based on the percentages that I just gave earlier and that’s a significant pickup from Q1 obviously. As we mentioned in the presentation, sequential orders were up over 20%, right. So, on Q2, we already have really good visibility on what’s coming. I think the key ingredient here is whether that continues to be sustainable and I think that’s going to be partially related to what happens with interest rate and overall psychology. That’s why we wanted to lay out the different cases. But on the base case, your math is right on.

Tim Wojs: Okay. The last one I had, just you mentioned in the slides just smaller commercial projects. I guess, what exactly, and if you want to just give some definitional examples of what that is and just how big of a percentage of the commercial business that is for you guys?

Santiago Giraldo: Yeah, think about that, Tim. You have your, large projects, multifamily that are multiyear projects, but you also will have maybe, like, a car dealership or something, like, really small, like a street mall, something to that extent, and that comes in much more spot in nature, right? I mean, that’s something that you could get in March and be invoicing the same year. Typically, that will range between $10 million, $12 million, $10 million, $13 million per month. So, depending on where we end up. What kind of range on light commercial, we end up on the higher end or the lower end of these three different scenarios?

Operator: The next question comes from Alex Rygiel with B. Riley FBR. Please go ahead.

Alex Rygiel: Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for taking my question. A couple of questions here. First, could you provide a little bit greater detail as it relates to vinyl windows and the successes to date, maybe either quantify quoting or orders or number of dealers or manufacturing lines? Just a little bit more detail there.

Jose Manuel Daes: So, let me explain what happened. We launched the line and since we didn’t know everything about the new line, we made a few mistakes and it wasn’t a complete line. When we went to our dealers, they said, oh, yes, I like what you are doing it, but you are doing a mistake, if you don’t have it, I cannot go to a complete line to my customers. Like that, we had a few hurdles even with the supplier of our extrusions and we are on the way of redeveloping everything. Like I said in the before question, we are going to be ready by the end of June with a complete line. We know and we expect the second semester to be much, much better and we’re being very conservative on the outlook for the second semester, but this is going tenfold by next year for sure.

Alex Rygiel: It’s very helpful. As it relates to residential, can you remind us what your mix is there between new construction and R&R? And then talk a bit about sales into homebuilders and how that has changed in the outlook?

Santiago Giraldo: I’ll talk about the breakdown. It’s roughly two-thirds repair and remodeling and one-third, new home construction, Alex. I’ll let Jose talk about the dynamics with home builders and such.

Jose Manuel Daes: We are seeing the new construction is stalling a little bit because of the interest rate. R&R has taken more of the market. But, we believe it should be a mix of 50/50 as soon as the interest rates start coming down.

Operator: The next question comes from Julio Romero with Sidoti and Co. Please go ahead.

Julio Romero: Hey, just to clarify, I wanted to stay on vinyl for a little bit. The shipments of vinyl products in December, they were just samples, or, were they actually orders that did translate into revenues in the first quarter?

Jose Manuel Daes: No, no. In the first quarter, we had minimum shipments because there were real orders. We shipped the samples don’t even account. We keep them for free. There were real orders, but every day, we see the orders getting stronger and stronger and coming up more and more.