Richard Soloway
Analyst · The Benchmark Company. Please go ahead
Kevin, thank you. We continue to be excited about the two paradigm shifts in our business, which show the addition of SaaS recurring revenue and school security. These two areas are contributing to the growth of our business, and we expect that trend to continue in the future. Earlier during the financial results portion of this call, we highlighted the strong growth of our recurring revenue line. We continue to see demand for recurring revenue premise coming from alarm communication, including fire, the growth of the smart home category and the expansion of the Internet of Things theme. School security remains top of mind with many people and we continue to believe that there is a significant opportunity in this vertical. Many schools do not have physical security in place. Despite all the continued violence we hear about on a regular basis. It is our estimation that this market is very large with over 100,000 K-12 and 10,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. We believe that spending on school security will increase as the legislative environment remains favorable with lots of action and funding being directed to this important topic. Our outlook remains strong for this business line as evidenced by the number of recent press releases, we have issued. I will talk more about school security in a couple of minutes. We continue to expect the professional alarm monitoring market to grow over the next few years as the demand for connected systems over traditional systems continued. Developing new innovative products that are attractive to end-users and will help our dealers grow and succeed as part of our strategy. NAPCO has a top position in the market as evidenced by a survey in Security Sales & Integration magazine that was published a few months ago, which places as one of the best intrusion brands among industry type such as Bosch and Honeywell. We believe that we are positioned well to be part of the growth in this U.S. alarm market with legacy products and new products that our staff of engineers continues to develop. Currently, we have the most extensive line of alarm communicators in the industry with the StarLink line. During fiscal Q4, we launched the StarLink LTE version Fire and intrusion alarm communicators, which utilize the most advanced technology in the market. The StarLink communicators allow for the transmission alarm signal over the cellular network in lieu of the traditional phone line they have been used for many years. About 18 months ago, we introduced the StarLink Connect, which is a great solution for the residential and small business markets. The StarLink Connect won two prestigious awards at the ISC West Trade Show, which is the largest trade show in the security industry. The connect communicator is feature packed and gives the end-user the ability to receive and upgrade of their alarm system without the need to remove existing hardware that is already installed in their residence or small business. Demand for smart home systems continues to grow and our StarLink Connect is the perfect solution for end-users and dealers alike. Interactive services such as the control of the alarm system, lighting, door locks, thermostat and seeing live video are the future of the security industry, and our iBridge smartphone, tablet app, which works in tandem with the connect communicator delivers all of those speeches to the end-users. The StarLink Connect is compatible with many of the major competitor brands and installation type of the connect is a quick process, which our dealers love as they can schedule more jobs during the work day. Additionally, being able to troubleshoot remotely is a great feature as it removes the need to send a truck to the site plus the dealers can still collect a service call fee. Also in this morning's press release, we announced the latest addition to our smart home offering the video doorbell. Recently, the popularity of the video doorbell has grown rapidly and now NAPCO is adding this to our offering, which is something dealers have been asking us for. Dealers will like the fact that it can be integrated with both NAPCO, as well as other competitors' security system. The video doorbell will also add to our recurring revenue, which as you know, has been growing at a very healthy rate. The market opportunity for the StarLink Connect and our newly introduced video doorbell is large with approximately 133 million homes in the U.S. was just 22% of the market being penetrated. While we often hear about DIY products in the market, it’s been our experience they’re not having a major impact on the professionally installed business and no impact at all in the commercial security segment. Our company is 80% commercial. Many homeowners that initially installed a DIY product end up tearing it out and replacing it with a professionally installed product. It is our belief that we are in the early innings of the connected home growth, and the best is yet to come. Next, I want to discuss some of the other products in our portfolio that is adding to our growth. Recently, we've launched the innovative Firelink, all-in-one alarm control panel with a built-in cellular StarLink powered alarm communicator. The installation and cost savings dealers will get from this product will be a big attraction and we believe the FireLink can become a strong contributed to our RMR as well. Other products I’d like the highlight, includes the StarLink Dual Path-Fire communicator, CA4K Access Control software, ArchiTech and Networx wireless locks. As we continue to witness the robust pace of new construction high-rise buildings in the U.S., we believe this bodes well for our business. Many of these new buildings are multi-use residential and commercial space and will require fire communication, alarm access control and modern wireless lock. Of course, there are many opportunities for these products to be used in retrofit projects as well. Our StarLink Dual Path communicators performing well as we have uncovered many new dealers that are dedicated to the fire business and they are enthusiastic about this product. According to our internal research, there are millions of commercial buildings across the U.S., which will need to be upgraded in the existing plain old telephone lines they are currently using as many of the major carriers are no longer supporting these lines. ArchiTech locks encompass wireless access control in the form of a architectural pleasing lock, which can be customized in a variety of finishes and hardware options. Our Networx locks are a popular option for many commercial applications including schools, airports and offices. These locks are wireless and have unique pin codes for each user, allowing for creation of lot of reports such as attendance or list created during emergency. Our R&D team continues to work on the access control as a service solution. This solution would include the use of our CA4K software, will enable NAPCO and its integrators to offer cloud-based services to end-users. These cloud-based services will be a great attraction to commercial building owners as they will be able to outsource many of the in-house functions creating cost savings to them. Services such as employee badge creation, attendant reports, the addition or deletion of employees from the data base will now be handled through our solution. NAPCO and our integrators will share the recurring revenue that is generated by providing the outsource service. SaaS recurring revenue has been a great contributor to our success there in the last few years. Therefore our R&D team of over 50 engineers are hard at work developing more products that can bring more recurring revenues to us. Now, I would like to spend a few minutes on the very important topic of school security and safety. As you all know, earlier this year, we've witnessed two horrific tragedies at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, at Santa Fe high School in Texas. The sadness from these tragedies is still with us today and it constantly reminds us of the importance of our work here at NAPCO. We remain dedicated to providing solutions and products that the schools so desperately need. The vast majority of schools in the U.S. have little or no security in place thus they remain vulnerable to violent incidences. Going all the way back to 2012 with the Sandy Hook shooting, we, like many of you, would have expected more change to have taken place at this point. The good news is that change is starting to happen right now. During our last earnings call, we talked about the many examples of legislation that has been approved since the tragic events in Florida and Texas. As a reminder in 2018, we have seen 26 states passed the legislation directed at school security. Some examples include Florida, $500 million, Wisconsin, $100 million, Marilyn $125 million plus $50 million annually going forward. Also the Governor of Massachusetts has proposed $72 million funds. In total, states have poured almost $1 billion into school security since February. It is our expectation that this trend of funding school security will continue with more states passing legislation in the near future. In fact, during the upcoming election tomorrow, voters of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Mississippi and Utah, will be asked to provide funding for physical security upgrades in their schools. A couple of examples include in Mississippi, the Harrison County School District requesting $55 million and the Balsz Elementary School District in Arizona requesting $35 million. The demand for upgrading school security is significantly increasing. I would note, for example, in the State of Michigan, hundreds of school districts have requested grants and these funding requests are tripled what the state has to offer. Our solutions include options for all schools whether a K-12 with the small budget or a large university with a large endowment fund that can afford the top-tier solution. We have issued a number of press releases recently about school security projects and have been completed using our product. These reinforce our outlook for growth to continue in this area. The pipeline for school security projects looks robust and we will continue to announce new wins when we can as we need to receive approval from the schools prior to doing so. Lastly, we continue to work on our cost savings initiative for component sourcing. Earlier this year, myself and the team of NAPCO employees, visited Asia and identified sources for these components. We’ve begun the process of qualify and quality control of these components, which will be phased into production at our Dominican Republic manufacturing facility. We expect to see significant cost savings from this initiative overtime, which will help our bottom-line for years to come. We will begin our question-and-answer session portion of this call in a few minutes. But first, I would like to give a brief summary. Our first fiscal quarter 2018 was a very successful record breaking quarter for us, and we continue to grow the company and deliver profits. Our shareholders have been rewarded with very healthy returns stock performance this year. NAPCO is in a strong position of growth in sales and profits going forward. We believe that our investments in R&D sales and marketing are beginning to show returns. And we are excited about the rest of fiscal 2019 and beyond. NAPCO’s senior management retains a high level of ownership in our equity, approximately 38%. And I’d like to thank everyone for their support and for joining us in this exciting future we have. Our formal remarks are now concluded. We’d like to open the floor for a Q&A session. Operator, please proceed.