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spk06: Hello and welcome to the Aztec Industries fourth quarter earnings call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is my pleasure to introduce your host, Steven Anderson, Senior Vice President of Administration and Investor Relations. Mr. Anderson, you may begin.
spk05: Thank you and welcome to the Aztec fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Joining me on today's call are Jaco Fundermerve, Chief Executive Officer, and Becky Weinberg, Chief Financial Officer. In just a moment, I'll turn the call over to Jaco to provide comments, and then Becky will summarize our financial results. Before we begin, I'll remind you that our discussion this morning may contain forward-looking statements that relate to the future performance of the company, and these statements are intended to qualify for the safe harbor liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Factors that can influence our results are highlighted in today's financial news release and others are contained in our filings with the SEC. As usual, we ask that you familiarize yourself with those factors. In an effort to provide investors with additional information regarding the company's results, the company refers to various U.S. GAAP, which are generally accepted accounting principles, and non-GAAP financial measures, which management believes provide useful information to investors. These non-GAAP financial measures have no standardized meaning prescribed by U.S. GAAP and therefore are unlikely to be comparable to the calculation of similar measures for other companies. Management of the company does not intend these items to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the related GAAP measures. Management of the company uses both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures to establish internal budgets and targets and to evaluate the company's financial performance against such budgets and targets. You should also note a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results is included in our news release and in the appendix of our slide deck. All related earnings materials are posted on our website at www.aztechindustries.com, including our presentation, which is under the Investor Relations and Presentation tabs. And now I will turn the call over to Jaco.
spk04: Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. I would like to begin my comments by saying how humbled and grateful I am to be speaking to you as the CEO of Aztec. When I joined the company six years ago, I was drawn by what I saw. A strong company with a history of delivering valued product that had tremendous potential. Now as CEO, I'm even more convinced of these early impressions. Aztec has established itself as a market leader in the industries we serve, bringing innovative solutions to the road construction industry for over 50 years. The team here is talented, dedicated, and committed to making the company as strong and resilient as possible. As a leadership team, we remain united around our purpose of Build2Connect. It defines where we are going and what we can become. We have made progress, and I'm proud to be part of the team that has moved us forward. The priorities for Aztec in 2023 are shown on slide four. I'll share more detail in a few minutes, but the priorities are executing on our simplify, focus, and grow strategy and delivering on our commitments to employees, customers, and shareholders. As CEO, I will continue to champion these priorities for the organization while emphasizing the importance of execution to drive consistent and sustainable financial performance. We have a sound framework and motivated team, and we are working together to create a culture of outperformance to reach our potential. Through our Build to Connect purpose, we are enabling our employees to create a customer-centric culture that provides value, and this will benefit our shareholders. That being said, we still have work to do. Our efforts this year will be primarily spent on our simplified and focused pillars. This foundation will better position us to grow profitably through organic investments in the future. Then at the right time, targeted acquisitions can be pursued and effectively integrated into our operations. This is a great company with an outstanding team and differentiated products, and I'm very grateful for the confidence, the Board has placed the need to be its next CEO. I look forward to meeting with you over the coming months, and I commit to performing in a way to earn your confidence in the future. On slide 5, you can see in the end markets, we serve through our two complementary segments, ensuring that needed materials are delivered and installed for ongoing infrastructure investments. I recently attended the National Asphalt Pavement Association's annual meeting and was able to connect with many of our customers. I can tell you that they are optimistic and the interactions were positive as the project pipelines look very full for 2023 as well into 2024. I will also add that a lot of the work that is planned for this year is not yet being driven by the infrastructure bill. as we are still in the early days of those funds flowing into specific projects. Excitement is high, and our customers are anxious to get the solutions we provide. The three pillars of our strategy, simplify, focus, and grow, are best summarized on slide six. They align the elements of our performance culture and provide the organization with a common framework to create value and drive returns. Beginning with Simplify, we are optimizing organizational structure by reducing complexity across our organization, starting with the leadership team and extending into select areas. We are focused on consistent execution and driving efficiencies. The current system and process consolidations help enable efficiencies through better reporting and access to data as well as uncover opportunities for further improvement in our operations. We are also using Simplify to help optimize our product portfolio, including which products we make, how we make them, and where we make them. Once we simplify and remove unnecessary complexity, we are better able to focus, using the one Aztec business model to drive excellence in everything we do. Operational excellence is permeating our entire organization, driving a focus on quality and performance into our culture. Performance includes thorough planning and execution. We are further assessing prior strategic actions and are harvesting learnings that will benefit us going forward. Prior strategic actions under review currently include our Drive to 25 initiative, the performance of our Brazil business, our site closures in Mequon and Tacoma, and the integrations of recent acquisitions. We improve as an organization when we drive functional excellence across every part of the company. As we do this, we discover that operational excellence is not only for production teams, but is applicable to all areas, such as commercial teams, where we can elevate the customer experience through aftermarket excellence. This drives higher customer satisfaction and engagement, as well as growth in our business. Profitable growth will be driven by expanding our parts and service business, our dealer networks, and our international presence. It will also be driven by bringing innovative new products to the markets and by leveraging technology and digital connectivity for our customers. We have great products and a team that is diligently working to develop improvements and enhancements to meet customer needs and deliver solutions to add value. Together, these three pillars of simplify, focus, and grow help ensure we have the right priorities to consistently drive profitable and sustainable growth as we bring value to our customers, employees, partners, and shareholders. Moving on to the financial results and the current business environment, we summarize our Q4 key messages on slide seven. I have already mentioned some of these and focus on those comments not yet addressed. Our fourth quarter results reflect a strong finish to a year that was characterized by challenging and dynamic environments. The global Aztec team rose to the challenge by demonstrating our core values, delivering unique solutions and by providing outstanding customer service to our valued commercial partners. Q4 sales improved 31% compared to last year and full year sales were up 16%. In addition to the strong effort of our team, we benefited from robust end market demand across both segments. Positive customer sentiment is proving sustainable even in the face of ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty. And our record-level backlog gives us confidence as we enter 2023. As a market leader in our industry, we develop and deliver technology that enables our customers to be successful. We are taking this same approach internally as we unify existing systems, standardize processes, and integrate solutions with the rollout of our Oracle suite of solutions. Becky will say more about this in a few minutes. Turning to slide eight, I would like to review current business dynamics and how we are responding. As we enter 2023, the demand outlook is much the same as it was during the second half of 2022. Infrastructure projects, which tend to be longer term and less correlated with near-term economic fluctuations, have remained robust and our customer sentiment has remained positive. This supports our confidence and challenges us to increase output through capacity expansion and operating efficiencies to meet strong demand and convert backlog into delivered product. As funding begins to flow from the Federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, We expect this to provide future revenue growth and visibility. As a reminder, the bill currently runs until September 2026. The health and reliability of the supply chain we rely on has shown improvement over the last year, eliminating some of the challenges we encountered. However, pockets of tight labor conditions are persisting, contributing to supply chain delays. Our procurement and engineering teams have done a good job to identify and qualify second sources when feasible. From a human capital management perspective, we continue to hire and train personnel to increase operations staff and output. At the same time, we are implementing operational excellence initiatives to mitigate future disruptions in our supply chain. Inflationary pressures are stabilizing. but we expect some inflation to persist into 2023. We continue to proactively offset inflation through pricing as needed. We show our historical backlog on slide nine. As you can see, backlog at the end of Q4 is down slightly from the record level we established in the previous quarter. Over the past two years, our backlog has increased 153%. and some moderation is expected. We are making steady progress on our initiatives to convert backlog and expect to see this trend continue as order rates normalize and we increase output. I mentioned earlier how the one Aztec business model shown on slide 10 has aligned us along a unifying framework and centered us around our customers and markets. It is this alignment on core values that unite us as an organization and keeps us focused on achieving our operational excellence objectives. It guides us in onboarding talent and as we add new employees to meet customer demand. It directs us as we leverage our global footprint to reduce lead times, optimize revenue, and manage costs. And it empowers us to better mitigate supply and logistic challenges by building a robust supply chain. This model is a critical component of our success, and I believe it has become an ingrained component of our culture that will enable continued future success. Slide 11 and 12 lay out targeted areas of growth, with our primary focus being the organic growth opportunities shown on slide 11. These initiatives, such as growth in parts and services, and dealer expansion are beginning to gain traction. Organic opportunities offer us the most straightforward and efficient path to profitable growth, and we will continue to prioritize these initiatives while we keep our eyes open for selective opportunities to acquire businesses that meet our discipline, strategic, and financial filters. We are on an ESG journey, as shown on slide 13. That is focused on key areas where we believe we can create the most value. We are still early in our journey, but already we are making progress. Slide 14 shows a carbon footprint model where we can employ our materials knowledge, process tools, and telematics to monitor and drive lower emissions. This is an area where I believe we can add even more value and one that is generating interest from our customers. Staying on the theme of telematics, slide 15 shows how we are developing comprehensive digital solutions, including positive contributions from our GrafWall and Mines acquisitions. This approach aligns well with our Simplify, Focus, and Grow framework as we develop capabilities that improve our operations, elevate the customer experience for our partners, and expand our ability to grow into high-value market opportunities. Finally, bringing these slides together on slide 16, we highlight the ASTEC digital suite, beginning with materials in the ground to completed roads and bridges, and then ongoing service, with providing products and services that differentiate ASTEC as the industry leader. And while I am proud of the progress we have made, I'm even more excited about the paths we have in front of us to deliver sustainable, profitable growth. With that, I will now turn the call over to Becky to discuss our detailed financial results.
spk09: Thank you, Jaco, and good morning, everyone. I'll begin my review of fourth quarter results on slide 18. Sales were $349.9 million, up 31.2%, with strong growth in both equipment and parts, which increased 45.3% and 11.8% respectively. By region, there was a 32.2% increase in domestic sales and a 27.4% increase in international sales. Strong demand also kept backlog near the record level we established in Q3, coming down slightly as we increased output and order rates are beginning to normalize. Compared with last year, backlog is up 19.7% on a consolidated basis. By segment, infrastructure solutions backlog grew 26.2%, while material solutions increased 8.9%. Domestic backlog saw the greatest increase, improving 23.3%. However, international was also up, growing 2.8%. This broad-based increase in backlog across segments and regions is indicative of the robust demand we are seeing in our end markets and the success of our global commercial teams winning business. Adjusted EBITDA increased $22.2 million, expanding adjusted EBITDA margin 370 basis points to 6.3%. This was primarily due to the net positive impact of volume, pricing, and mix that outpaced inflation and higher manufacturing costs due to lingering inefficiencies in the supply chain. We have previously outlined our pricing actions and that we expected pricing to catch up with the rising costs we encountered over the last two years. This quarter, we realized significant pricing, which helped improve profitability and drive margins. we did see an increase in adjusted SGA&E, which was up 6% as we invested in headcount, incurred expenses for our transformation program, as well as incremental costs from acquired businesses. We expect margins to further improve as we overcome supply chain challenges and realize additional benefits from our transformation. Adjusted earnings per share was $0.34, driven by increase in gross profit and maintaining cost controls and operating expenses. This excludes costs driven by our transformation program, which will optimize our company for long-term value creation. We also recorded foreign valuation allowances of $5.8 million, primarily associated with our Brazil entity. As a result, our adjusted net effective tax rate for the quarter was 47.6%. For 2023, we expect our normalized net effective tax rate to be in the 23% to 24% range. Moving on to slide 19. Infrastructure solution sales increased 27.1%. to $238.4 million in the quarter, primarily due to strong global demand for our solutions, especially equipment and favorable net volume pricing and mix. Demand was up for both domestic and international sales, increasing 26.9% and 28.2% respectively. By product, equipment sales were up 42.1%, and part sales grew 6.6%. Segment gross profit increased 34.3% to $48.2 million, and gross margin increased 110 basis points to 20.2%, primarily due to the impact of favorable volume pricing and mix. Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded 280 basis points to 9.7%. Turning to slide 20, our material solution sales increased 39% to $109.8 million driven by strong global demand for equipment and parts along with favorable volume pricing and mix. Equipment sales grew 49.4% and parts were up 23.2%. Domestic sales grew 45.7% and international sales increased 24.5%. segment gross profit increased 35.6% to $21.7 million. However, gross margin decreased 50 basis points to 19.8% due primarily to cost inflation and manufacturing inefficiencies this quarter that offset volume pricing and mix for the segment. Adjusted EBITDA margins for the segment increased 530 basis points. On slide 21, we highlight the key drivers of our year-over-year adjusted EBITDA bridge. EBITDA improved significantly in the fourth quarter, up 217.1% to $22.2 million, which caused EBITDA margin to expand 370 basis points to 6.3%. The positive contribution from volume pricing and mix more than offset the impact from inflation. negative manufacturing efficiencies due to supply chain disruptions are still having a lingering effect, and SGA&E were slightly higher due to increased commissions, research and development costs, and the addition of personnel associated with our mines acquisition. Looking ahead, we continue to expect further benefit from price realization and the implementation of our transformation strategy. On slide 22, We show full-year results. Strong demand enabled us to grow sales 16.3% and backlog 19.7%. Adjusted EBITDA grew 8.8%, even with the various supply chain and manufacturing efficiency headwinds we encountered this year, which is a testament to the entire team for performing in a challenging environment. Turning to slide 23... We continued to invest in growth, which brought our cash position down to $62.8 million, reflecting an increase in inventory and capex to meet demand and improve productivity and capacity. Our balance sheet remains solid, and we expect our cash position to grow as we manage working capital and resolve supply chain disruptions. Our liquidity and manageable debt enable us to withstand a variety of economic situations as well as support investment plans and return cash to shareholders. Should we need to incur higher debt levels in the future, we will strive to operate between 1.5 to 2.5 times net debt to EBITDA. Turning to slide 24, we maintain a disciplined framework to capital deployment balancing investments and growth with returning cash to shareholders. In 2022, we spent $41 million on CapEx to invest in projects to improve operational efficiencies and advance our long-term strategy. We also spent $18 million for the acquisition of Mines earlier in the year to build out our digital platform. Our commitment to return cash to shareholders was demonstrated in the fourth quarter as we repurchased $4 million in shares and increased our quarterly dividend 8.3% to 13 cents per share. Our Oracle transformation, summarized on slide 25, remains on budget and on schedule. This system will be a key enabler of long-term, sustainable improvements in productivity and efficiency. We will begin to see benefits in the second half of this year, as the first waves of solutions are utilized. I am proud of the work our team is doing and excited as we draw nearer to delivering this objective. I will now turn it back over to Tiago for his closing comments.
spk04: Thank you, Becky. Turning to slide 26, I would like to review our key investment highlights. Despite all the changes we saw in 2022, One thing that has remained constant is our customers' desire for our unique solutions. We have built a leadership position by delivering innovative, high-quality products and superior customer service. And our markets are experiencing positive, long-term demand drivers from secular trends such as population growth and aging infrastructure. We have been successful in winning business opportunities. As the global installed base of ASTEC products grow, it creates the need for reliable aftermarket parts that tends to be reoccurring and less cyclical. This strong OEM aftermarket combination coupled with improving operational excellence improves our financial returns. As a result, we have a strong balance sheet that enables us to strategically invest and grow. Finally, our commitment to the simplified focus and growth strategic pillars unites our organization and drives improvement in everything we do. We saw improvements in nearly all financial metrics in 2022 and have made progress on achieving our long-term financial targets, shown on slide 27. The plans we have in place, including the Oracle implementation plus our team's actions to live out our core values daily, gives us confidence that these targets are attainable and that 2023 will be a good year for ASTEC. I'll close by reiterating the sentiment from my opening remarks. I'm humble and grateful to be the CEO of such a wonderful team and organization, and I'm excited about where we are going and what we can accomplish together in 2023 and beyond. With that, operator, we are now ready to open the call for any questions.
spk06: At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press star one. Your first question is from the line of Meg Dobre with Baird. Your line is open.
spk02: Hey, good morning, guys. It's Joe Grabowski from Meg this morning. Good morning, Joe. Good morning. Good morning. So, Iaco, you've been in your new role for about 60 days. Obviously, you're not new to Aztec, but you are new to the CEO role. Any initial observations in addition to your prepared remarks from your new broadened perspective?
spk04: Yeah, absolutely, Joe, and nice to talk to you this morning. The first 60 days, I visited 12 of our U.S. facilities, and I met with a significant number of people on all levels in the organization. One thing that's very clear to me is that we have a lot of good people in our organization, a lot of people that's very focused on delivering results for us. I've also spent quite a bit of time talking to customers, visiting various industry events, specifically the National Asphalt Paving Association. The market is very positive. Our customers have a lot of work to do, and obviously that provides us some confidence for this year. We've also made some structural changes on our executive leadership team. And, you know, I think the structure will position us very well for a company of our size. And what I'm more excited about is that, you know, we're putting the right focus in the right place in the organization. And then we spend a lot of time communicating with our organization around the change, interacting with employees on multiple occasions. So, you know, very positive first 60 days, lots of work, a lot of traveling going on. But I think we have a strong organization behind us and, you know, even more important, our customers are very positive for this point in time.
spk02: Got it. Okay, great. Thanks for all that color. I guess my next question would be, you know, it looks like guidance is still suspended. Becky did mention that you expect margins to continue to improve. But any other thoughts or color you could give on 2023 earnings drivers?
spk04: Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously as part of our simplified focus and grow, we're going to continue to drive our operational excellence. I think we have strong teams in place now. As you guys know, you know, the volatility in the supply chain is still there. Our teams are working hard to minimize supply chain disruptions and And as that improves, we should see a positive effect on margins. Steel pricing is a little bit fluctuating, as you guys very well know. We've seen steel pricing moderating a little bit, however, recently turning back upwards. The other positive thing is that we have seen some stability with regards to you know, employee turnover and actually our ability to hire employees. And, you know, that will help us as well creating a stable environment and improving efficiencies in manufacturing. We invested significant amount of money last year in CAPEX. And, you know, those projects as I walk through our facilities is very visible. equipment this is getting commissioned and and the benefits are starting to flow through our operations and and we continuously working on pricing you know as you guys seen we've had a positive effect on pricing this year and and we're going to continue to work on on that got it okay and if I can squeeze in one more last question
spk02: You know, your sales in the quarter were the highest since the pandemic by a pretty sizable amount, yet the drag on EBITDA for manufacturing efficiencies, you know, got a little bit worse. So maybe kind of talk about supply chain production and kind of the, I guess, the yin and yang between the fact that the sales were much higher, but the efficiency drag didn't get any better.
spk04: Yeah, I can take a first stab at that one as well, Joe. Obviously, supply chain disruptions are not over yet, so we've seen that specifically more in our mobile equipment side where there's obviously a large number of parts that goes into equipment. I think it's also important to remember that the fourth quarter, you know, have significant holiday periods in the fourth quarter with Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays. And then, you know, lastly, we also do our annual physical inventory counts during that period of time. And, you know, that takes some hours out of the shop. So I'm positive that you will see that turnaround here in the first quarter again.
spk02: Got it. Okay. Thank you for taking on my questions.
spk06: Your next question comes from the line of Stanley Elliott from Stiefel.
spk08: Your line is open.
spk07: Hey, good morning, everyone. And, Jaco, welcome to the call. Good morning, Stanley. Yeah, good morning. Could you talk about maybe what happened on the part sales and the material a group, a big improvement there. Was that just an improvement on the supply chain or really just kind of some catch-up? Any sort of help there would be great.
spk04: Yeah, good question there, Stanley. So, you know, obviously, for me personally, parts is something that I'm very passionate about. And you guys will remember with the closures of our – a MEC1 business that was specifically in the material solutions business and created the short-term disruption in the flow of parts. So our teams have been very focused on reducing backlog in that business, and those results are starting to show up. Our teams have also been successful in leveraging our international footprint by getting additional capacity out of our international sites to support that business. So, you know, as the move plays out and as we get the teams back performing before, you know, like before we close the facilities, I think those results will continue to be positive.
spk07: Perfect. And, you know, you mentioned international a couple of times in the call. You obviously have a nice international background. with previous positions. Help us, from memory, Legacy Aztec had some issues on the manufacturing side and on the distribution side in the international, as well as on the margin side. What do you think that you can bring to the table? What do you think that the company is going to do differently this period so that the international margins and growth profile can be improved? not dilutive or accretive even to what you are doing here in North America?
spk04: Yeah, good question again, Stanley. So, you know, my view on international is that that is a significant opportunity for our organization. You know, if you look at our traditional market shares, obviously the U.S. is much stronger for us. And I see the international market as a great opportunity for us. However, we need to be smart about it and make sure that we have the right manufacturing footprints and the right supply chain processes. So in our future growth, as we make our plans to grow internationally, finding the right footprint and the right supply chain processes will be important for us You know, delivering products out of the U.S. is not always the best solution and will not give us the same margins. So leveraging our sites, which we've now started to do already that we have, is really important. And then, you know, when the time is right, we will look for other opportunities.
spk05: Stanley, this is Steve. I would add to that that under our decentralized structure previously, As Jaco said, exporting to those sites, you know, we weren't structured to fully optimize, you know, getting product to those sites. But with one Aztec, considering those as manufacturing sites, it opens up a lot of opportunities for us.
spk04: Yeah. And one other question, one other comment there is, you know, we are investing in specifically, you know, our site in Northern Ireland and Omaha. And that facility will become a very important part for us to service the region there. So we're very well aware that if we want to have good margins and good profitable business, that we have to be local and we have to be great at manufacturing and logistics in the local markets. That makes great sense.
spk07: You know, switching gears to the balance sheet, you know, inventories are up, obviously, just because of, you know, inflation and other things. Help us with where would you think inventories might finish into next year, end of 23? Maybe the implications for pre-cash flow, you know, whether you want to talk about it as a percent of EBITDA or net income conversion. Anything along those lines would be great.
spk09: Yeah. Hi, Stanley. This is Becky. I'll take a stab at that one. Our inventories are up year over year, but so is our backlog, and we continue to see, you know, good order intake. And so we're really focused on do we have the right inventory at the right location for that backlog support. So we have pockets where the backlog is larger than others. And so we're balancing that, but certainly we're challenging the rest of the sites to improve their terms. Across the house, we're challenging everyone to improve their terms. So we expect that inventory with the focus we have on it to come down. But just being mindful that it does move in conjunction with that plot.
spk05: Yeah, and Stanley, Steve, I'll jump in as well. That inventory, you know, the largest portion is raw materials. And there's a little bit of whip that quickly converts to finished goods. Those finished goods are, you know, they go out quickly based on the demand. So primarily raw material buildup to support the demand.
spk08: Perfect. That's it for me. Look forward to seeing you guys in a couple weeks. Thank you. Thanks, Stanley.
spk06: Your next question comes from the line of Steve Ferrazani from Sidoti. Your line is open.
spk03: Morning, everyone. Wanted to ask about a couple, I know you're not guiding for 23, but a couple of lines, maybe you can offer some help if you didn't provide it in the detailed review this morning. CapEx for 2023, how you're thinking about it, and also with the announced limited restructuring, how you're thinking that can affect SG&A?
spk04: Yeah, Steve, good morning. Okay. So, you know, our capex outlook for this year is in the range of 25 to 35 million. As you know, we invested heavily last year. And, you know, the focus is obviously to extract all the benefits of those capex investments. Yes, we did announce the limited restructure. And, you know, we see an SG&A... run rate of about 56 to 60 million. And Becky can maybe provide a little bit more color on the SG&A run rate.
spk09: Sure. Steve, with the SG&A run rate, we do think we'll be pretty flat year over year on a percentage of sales basis. So we're trying to leverage the sales. So we should expect that to stay flat. We are taking some restructure, limited restructuring actions, not necessarily all SGA and E, but we are also required mines, which is software engineers, and that all sits in SG&E. So we have an uptick related to that acquisition because of where those people sit. So all in all, we expect that it will largely remain flat as it moves with sales. Also as a reminder, we have ConExpo this year, so Q1 we always see an uptick. And not that this is all SG&A either, but just I'll throw in that we're continuing to roll out our systems. And so we have some incremental things going on in Q2. And so we've got a lot of launches going on this year with those products. It'll be a little bit lumpy, but it'll be pretty flat with last year. I'll leave it at that. As a percentage of sales, correct.
spk05: Sorry, Steve. I know you're aware of this, or many others, but the ConExpo shows once every three years.
spk03: Great. Two months into the year, can you give any look at how order trends are going? Obviously, this was the first quarter we saw backlog down. I know part of that is the significant sales increase. Maybe it was year-end. But can you give any sense on order tracking for the early part of the year?
spk04: Yeah, Steve, I can do that. As I mentioned, when we met with a significant amount of our customers at Napa, everybody was still very optimistic. We don't believe that a lot of the money from the infrastructure bill has flown yet. So we trust that that will continuously support our order intake. But just for January, we've seen an $8 million uptick again in backlog. So good trend continuing.
spk03: Great, great. You know, I've talked to a lot of companies that are sitting on very significant backlog, and it's provided them the flexibility to be much more aggressive on the pricing side. simply because you're sitting on this much backlog, you can be willing to lose lower margin business. How do you think about that equation?
spk04: Yeah, you know, good question. I think, you know, it's much easier to move pricing on parts and services, you know, as your supply chain moves pricing. On capital equipment, obviously, you have to think a little bit forward and anticipate. So our teams are continuously reviewing pricing. I think we are in a much better position today than what we were in the past. One thing to consider is if a customer buys an asphalt plant from us, that customer has a lifespan on that equipment for 30 years. we definitely don't want to necessarily lose that opportunity as well. But we believe that our teams will be able to offset any additional inflationary pressure for pricing.
spk08: Makes sense. Thanks, everyone.
spk06: Your next question is from the line of Larry DiMaria with William Blair. Your line is open.
spk01: Hey, thanks. Good morning. Obviously, a big increase in equipment sales. Just try to dig that into a little bit more so. You talk about volume, price mix, any big deliveries. Try to understand if we're to catch up in production or if we're pivoting to better throughput at this point.
spk04: Yeah, I mean, the reduction in backlog is obviously a function of getting additional volume out. I will say that our teams have done a really good job implementing some significant CapEx projects. We've also, over the last year, invested significantly in manufacturing engineering capability, and those teams are starting to deliver results by helping us to reduce our manufacturing lead times and cycle times. I'm positive that we will see further improvements in our output versus what we had in prior years. The fact that supply chain is still disruptive in some of our lines makes it a little bit unpredictable, but with that getting better, output will continue to improve over the next couple of quarters.
spk01: Thanks. I'm going to join two questions into one here. You talked about dealer expansion and strategic accounts, and you also mentioned digital connectivity and telematics. Can you maybe just give us a right setting of where we are in those multiple journeys, where we've come from, where we are now, and how much more wood there is to chop? Is all the equipment going out connected with telematics now, or is that in the future? Just kind of right level us on those issues if you can.
spk04: Yeah, so I will take it in three steps there. So let's talk about the dealers. I mean, if you look back at Aztec's history, we were primarily a direct market player. And on the mobile equipment side, the teams have now significantly transitioned to dealers. And what happened last year was the teams have really put good structure in place around how we manage dealers, How do we agree on performance with the dealers? And that process, in my mind, is really going to drive the performance of our dealers. Our teams have also been successful with expanding dealers across the country. And we still have a few white spaces in the U.S., but overall, the guys have done a really good job expanding that. So I will say really good progress on the dealer side. On the strategic account side, this is something that I'm very passionate about. As we see consolidation in our customer base, we need to be good dealing with the larger customers. Our teams have now, I think, found their strides on that. There's still a lot of work to do for us, but I think we're just going to see that improve in the future. On the telematics side, I think we are very early there. With the mines acquisition, the gravel acquisition of about two years ago, taking and putting all of those things together with the current technology we have is something that we are working on right now. At ConExpo, we will actually exhibit some of the new products. but there's still significant runway and work to do before we have all the technology on our equipment.
spk08: Okay, very good. Thank you very much. There are no further questions in the queue.
spk06: I'd like to hand the call back to Steve Anderson for closing remarks.
spk05: All right. Thank you, Brent. And while we're talking about it, you know, anyone who's going to be out in Vegas for ConExpo, please stop by our booth in Central Hall and see us. We'd love to show you some new things that we have on display there. So thanks for that. And, you know, we appreciate your participation on this call and thank you for your interest in Aztec. As today's news release indicates, today's conference call has been recorded. A replay of this conference call will be available through March 15th and an archived webcast will be available for 90 days. The transcript will be available under the investor relations section of the Aztec Industries website within the next seven days. All of that information is contained in the news release distributed earlier this morning. This will conclude our call, but I'm happy to connect with you if you have additional questions later. Thank you all. Have a good day.
spk06: Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.
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