Michael Altschaefl
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright
Thanks, Bill. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Orion executed a strong finish to fiscal '21 with nearly $117 million in revenue and improved gross margin; net income of $5.2 million, exclusive of a tax benefit; solid operating cash flow; and a very strong balance sheet. It was really a tale of 2 halves of the year, with the first half severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the second half demonstrating a return to the true strength of the business platform we have built.
Revenue in the second half of fiscal '21 rose 33% over the year ago period to nearly $80 million, driven by pent-up project demand, as many customers returned to pre-COVID levels of activity. Our strong rebound and full year performance was possible as a result of the hard work and dedication of the entire Orion team. The perseverance of our people throughout the pandemic has been amazing. The commitment of our people enabled us to successfully navigate the pandemic challenges and to emerge as a stronger and more diversified company with a broader set of growth opportunities and long-term potential.
Our people are clearly what make Orion a successful company.
During fiscal '21, we worked to expand and diversify our customer base and our business pipeline. As a result of these efforts, our largest customer represented about 56% of fiscal '21 revenues as compared to 74% in fiscal '20, our first full year of business with this customer. We believe this customer will remain an important but smaller part of our business in the coming years, with its share of our annual revenue expected to be about 1/3 of our total revenue in fiscal '22.
We achieved this progress through our success in developing significant new national account relationships in our efforts to broaden our product and service offerings. Our primary differentiator in our markets is our turnkey business model with its single source of accountability. Our fiscal '21 performance was largely driven by strength in providing these solutions to national accounts. Orion's turnkey solutions begin with an in-depth dialogue regarding a customers' needs and objectives, followed by individual lighting and energy audits at each customer site.
We then custom engineer products and services to achieve specific customer goals, following with rapid order production via U.S.-based manufacturing, supported by global sourcing experience with on-time delivery to each site. Orion then overseas installation and commissioning of lighting systems and controls, providing overall project management every step of the way. In addition, we are now able to offer the option of Ongoing Maintenance Services.
Customers with extensive national operations appreciate the value and efficiency of centralizing their LED lighting retrofit or new construction process with one highly experienced point of contact. They also value Orion's proven commitment to the highest levels of customer service, including on-time delivery, high-quality components, industry-leading energy efficiency as well as our ability to incorporate a wide range of technology, not only for lighting controls, but also IoT data systems, which together provide a very strong and compelling product offering and an even more attractive ROI to our customers.
The primary value proposition of energy-efficient LED lighting is reducing our customers' ongoing energy costs, which drive their ROI economics. At the same time, we help our customers meet their environmental goals by reducing their carbon footprint. Our growth opportunities and future success also depend on our ongoing investment in new product development and continued enhancement of the design, performance and capabilities of our LED lighting fixtures.
Innovation and smart product design are core to our strategy and competitive position. We strive to develop new and custom products that deliver improved performance, including reduced energy consumption, better quality of light and safer work environments to meet the evolving needs of our customers. In fact, helping our customers achieve environmental, safety and operational goals is core to what we do at Orion and also key to enhancing our overall margin profile.
Successful new product introductions over the past year included our next-generation Starline high-bay LED fixtures, several new LED linear fixtures and a new line of exterior fixtures that combine smart design, excellent illumination and energy efficiency in a competitively priced product line. In an effort to expand our healthy, safe and sustainable product offerings, we recently launched our new PureMotion product line, which provides airflow solutions for healthier indoor spaces.
The PureMotion line is designed for standard drop ceiling panel systems and offers enhanced air flow solutions, including a stand-alone airflow solution, an airflow plus LED lighting solution and an airflow plus UVC solution that circulates air through a sealed UVC light ray chamber in the ceiling to safely kill virsues, germs, bacteria and mold. Air circulation also helps to eliminate hot cold spots, providing a greater comfort, along with energy savings. These products further enhance our ability to provide safer and healthier work environments and are ideal for almost all indoor application, including health care, education, commercial and community facilities. We expect the PureMotion line to build on our reputation for healthy, safe and sustainable workplace solutions.
During fiscal '21, we launched Orion Maintenance Services, a lighting, electrical and other services business. We identified both the need and the opportunity for this business through the execution of our turnkey solutions for major national accounts, and we gathered supportive feedback for the concept from several customers.
Fiscal '22 will be the first full year of operations for this new division, and though it will start off small in scope relative to our other business lines, we are optimistic about its potential synergies and the long-term opportunity to build a recurring maintenance revenue stream. We expect fiscal '22 to benefit from a growing base of large national account customers and projects, particularly large enterprises interested in the unique turnkey capabilities, industry-leading products, growing base of service as a commitment to customer service that Orion provides.
Backing this up is, is our expanding track record of success in rolling out large national installation programs, both on time and on budget. We remain very encouraged by new and existing customer dialogues and our developing pipeline of opportunities, particularly for energy-efficient LED lighting retrofit and new construction projects planned or contemplated over the next year or 2.
Given our strengths as a company, we expect our business could also benefit from the new administration's focus on clean energy and infrastructure as well as Orion's overall focus on healthy, safe and sustainable solutions that are of increasing interest to our customers. With all of these tailwinds benefiting our business, we nonetheless are facing a couple of headwinds. We are experiencing some challenges in our supply chain.
Worldwide electronic shortages, domestic and international logistics delays and other raw material and component shortages as well as general inflationary price pressures are creating some obstacles. In addition, like many other businesses, we are experiencing some labor shortages. However, the Orion team continues to effectively work through these challenges, meeting the needs of our customers.
I will now turn to our future. Orion's vision is helping our customers to achieve energy savings with healthy, safe and sustainable solutions that enable them to reduce their carbon footprint and digitize their business. Our mission is to provide energy-efficient LED lighting systems and turnkey project implementation, including installation and commissioning of fixtures, controls, IoT systems as well as ongoing system maintenance and program management.
Our strategic plan has 5 initiatives: first, we will focus on direct sales with an emphasis on large opportunities in all of our market channels. Our single source of accountability, turnkey, project and program management capabilities are our most valued differentiators in the marketplace. We have strong credentials and have the people, systems and processes in place to be successful. In addition, there remains tremendous market opportunity.
Second, we plan to build our new Orion Maintenance Services division. We already have strong credentials in place with our existing customers. We believe this new division provides us with the opportunity to generate significant recurring revenue streams with the possibility of multiyear contracts.
Third, we intend to expand our control and IoT capabilities. We are positioning Orion for a leadership role in the substantial long-term growth opportunity that we anticipate from the increasing digitization of business through IoT-enabled systems. We believe that we are well situated to be a one source solution for our customers' entire system, including system design, engineering, installation of lighting fixtures and controls, commissioning controls, integrating IoT technology, linking lighting, energy management and operational controls into management's dashboard systems and providing ongoing service.
In this role, we intend to remain technology-agnostic and qualified to work with many of the leading IoT solutions in the market. We believe this strategy is a competitive advantage as our customers can utilize different technologies at different locations, where they may have a specific solution preference or where they simply seek an impartial introduction to new possible solutions. We have the opportunity to own the [ fielding ] technology landscape.
Fourth, we intend to continue to develop higher-margin products and services. We believe we have the ability to continue to develop healthy, safe and sustainable products for our customers. In addition, since our business model is to be close to the end user of our products and services, we are able to listen and understand their future needs and develop products and services to meet them.
The fifth and final initiative of our strategic plan is to actively pursue potential business acquisitions, which would add expanded and unique capabilities to our product and service offerings, potentially transforming our business. We believe the current business climate in our industry could create some attractive acquisition opportunities. The goals of our potential acquisitions include adding recurring revenue streams, accelerating the ramp-up of our maintenance services business, adding new products and services and entering new markets, such as solar, EV charging and energy storage.
We are aggressively pursuing opportunities that fit with our existing customer base and leverage the strength of our turnkey capabilities. To date, we have extended a number of indications of interest in proposed letters of intent and term sheets to acquire certain companies that we believe fit our expansion and growth criteria. We expect to continue to do so, although we don't plan to publicly announce any of these ongoing efforts unless and until we enter a definitive purchase agreement.
In an initial modest step, we recently completed a $500,000 strategic investment in ndustrial, a provider of IoT software and services that provide new levels of data, analytics and business insights used to optimize industrial performance. Its software enables customers to better aggregate, access, analyze and act on data. We see synergies with what ndustrial is doing and the connected [indiscernible] capabilities that our lighting systems provide to host sensors and controls.
We believe this investment will help Orion to extend our customer value proposition and enhance the potential return on investment of our LED lighting systems and controls. As a result of these factors and initiatives, we believe that Orion is well positioned for fiscal '22 revenue growth of at least 28% to a range of $150 million to $150 million (sic) [$155 million ] excluding any recurrence of COVID-19 business impacts or significant worsening of our supply chain or labor shortage challenges.
This view is based on the strength of our new and existing product offerings, our turnkey design, build install capabilities and our expanded portfolio of solutions and services. In addition, we are also progressing efforts to identify and pursue potential strategic acquisition and partnership opportunities that can accelerate our growth.
Underscoring our optimism is the enormous untapped market for LED lighting and controls upgrades at facilities that have yet to be updated. Based on a U.S. Department of Energy study, the domestic LED retrofit opportunity in Orion's key markets is estimated to be in excess of $20 billion today and growing to over $80 billion by 2035. To pursue this substantial market potential, Orion's Board and management team have updated the company's strategic plan to help guide our organic and inorganic growth initiatives, with a long-term target of building Orion into a company generating up to $500 million in annual revenue in approximately 5 years.
To achieve this long-term target, our plan envisions organic growth of at least 10% per year, augmented by external growth initiatives, including the active pursuit of strategic acquisitions and business partnership. We set these financial goals to provide our stakeholders with a vision of what we believe Orion can become.
Now let me turn the call over to Per Brodin, Orion's CFO, for additional perspective on our financial results. Per?