Earnings Labs

Daktronics, Inc. (DAKT)

Q4 2018 Earnings Call· Wed, May 30, 2018

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Daktronics Fiscal Year 2018 Fourth Quarter Earnings Results Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, Wednesday, May 30, 2018 and is available on the company’s website at www.daktronics.com. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Sheila Anderson, Chief Financial Officer for Daktronics, for introductory remarks. Please go ahead, Sheila.

Sheila Anderson

Management

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for participating in our fourth quarter and year end earnings conference call. I would like to review our disclosures cautioning investors and participants that in addition to statements of historical facts we will be discussing forward-looking statements reflecting our expectations and plans about our future financial performance and future business opportunities. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which maybe out of our control and may cause actual results to differ materially. Such risks include changes in economic conditions, changes in the competitive and market landscape, management of growth, timing and magnitude of future contracts, fluctuations of margins and the introduction of new products and technology and other important factors as noted and detailed in our 10-K and 10-Q SEC filings. With that, let me highlight some of the financials starting with fourth quarter comparisons. Orders for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018 were $162 million as compared to last year’s fourth quarter of $178 million. Most of the order fluctuation this quarter is attributable to the variability of timing in large projects and account-based businesses in Commercial, Live Events, Transportation and International business units. Notable orders for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018 included projects from all applications in Dubai and number of college stadium upgrades, transportation orders in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, a soccer stadium in Europe, and a couple of projects exceeding $1 million in the high school markets continuing the trends we see in high schools using larger video applications. As a reminder, we derive a significant portion of our orders and sales from large dollar size projects, primarily for college and professional sports facilities, entertainment venues, transportation market applications and from account-based business in the out-of-home niche. The timing and the amount of these contracts can…

Reece Kurtenbach

Management

Thank you, Sheila. Good morning, everyone. While the overall results for fiscal 2018 were below expectations, we remain optimistic for the future. We proactively increased product development activities during fiscal 2018 and introduced additional narrow pixel pitch solutions and control features to our broad array of offerings. The marketplace is using these types of solutions in many applications from sports to retail to commercial buildings and transportation hubs. Warranty claims challenged our bottom line however. We have maintained strong relationships with customers through our demonstrated commitment to serve them over the long-term. We made facilities improvements and invested in new testing machinery and processes to further the robustness of our product lines and we continue to grow our global accounts business and have continued success in European, Middle Eastern and Asia-Pacific geographies. We are focused on winning more orders and will continue our velocity of product development to match the industry’s growth and solutions demands. Specifically, we see these opportunities and trends in the marketplace. Sport, commercial and governmental entities continued to choose digital applications to support their needs. This demand is driving long-term growth globally into LED video display industry as well as other digital applications. Digital systems have a known end-of-life that will drive continued replacement or refurbishment of the installed base. Our range of solutions and global capabilities makes us the industry’s most experienced digital display provider and we continued to release new or enhanced product lines and comprehensive solutions targeted towards our broad market base as well as specific customer needs. This allow us for success in markets during natural ups and downs of each segments. In each business area, we are expecting the following. Our international business unit will continue to be poised for growth through increased adoption of digital systems as well as our…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Greg Pendy with Sidoti. Your line is now open.

Greg Pendy

Analyst

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my call. Just I guess two questions. One on the warranty expense, are you guys still comfortable I guess long-term I think in the past you stated a goal of more like 1.5% to 2% of sales and can you just kind of give us any color on how we should think about that if that is still sort of the longer term target?

Reece Kurtenbach

Management

Greg, this is Reece. That is still our target to have our warranty spend less than 2%.

Greg Pendy

Analyst

Okay. And then I guess just second question just on Live Events, you mentioned that you are going to be cycling some I know it’s a lumpy business and you are going to be cycling some NFL business. But just what – can you give us any color on what the environment is like this year heading into some of the key sports just given the challenging attendance and how kind of operators are looking and thinking about that? Thanks.

Reece Kurtenbach

Management

Yes. On our Live Events business, we still see strong interest in digital both in the competition wall and outside of the competition wall. But the business itself will change based on the projects available in the current year and there is not as many new facilities opening up this fiscal year as some of our previous fiscal years.

Greg Pendy

Analyst

Okay, thanks. That’s helpful.

Reece Kurtenbach

Management

Thank you, Greg.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Lisa Springer with Singular Research. Your line is now open.

Lisa Springer

Analyst · Singular Research. Your line is now open.

Thank you and good morning. My question concerns product development spending as a percent of sales, it rose to 5.8% for the year, how should we think about the percentage next year, do you think the percentage is going to actually increase as well as spending?

Reece Kurtenbach

Management

We believe we’ll continue to invest in product development at the similar levels of last year, so we don’t – we do not intend for the dollar value in product development to grow, but we believe that products that we are releasing will give us room on the top line to grow and so we believe the percent spent and product development will start to become more in line with what our expectations are internally.

Lisa Springer

Analyst · Singular Research. Your line is now open.

Okay, thank you. And the products you introduced during the quarter which was fuel pump price data kit and the digital traffic display, are those products for sale now and are being – are they available worldwide or in the U.S. or?

Reece Kurtenbach

Management

They are available now and they are mainly targeted at the U.S. transportation fuel market, not that they couldn’t be sold elsewhere, but that’s where the – they were tailored for that customer base.

Lisa Springer

Analyst · Singular Research. Your line is now open.

Okay, thank you. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I am not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Reece Kurtenbach for any further remarks.

Reece Kurtenbach

Management

Thanks everybody for attending the call today. We appreciate your attention and we hope that you have a great summer and look forward to talking to you again at our Q1 call in September.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today’s conference. This does conclude today’s program and you may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.