LSI Industries Inc.

Good day, and welcome to the LSI Industries Fiscal First Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. Today, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance during today's call, please signal for a conference specialist by pressing the star key, followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. Please note that today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jim Galise, CFO. Please go ahead, sir.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. We issued a press release before the market opened this morning detailing our fiscal 25 first quarter results. In addition to this release, we also posted a conference call presentation in the investor relations section of our corporate website. Information contained in this presentation will be referenced throughout today's conference call. Included are certain non-GAAP measures for improved transparency of our operating results. A complete reconciliation of GAAP and non-GAAP results is contained in our press release and 10-Q. Please note that management's commentary and responses to questions on today's conference call may include forward-looking statements about our business outlook. Such statements involve risks and opportunities, and actual results could differ materially. I refer you to our safe harbor statement, which appears in this morning's press release, for more details. Today's call will begin with remarks summarizing our fiscal first quarter results. At the conclusion of these prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to LSI President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Clark.

Thank you, Jim, and good morning all. Thank you for joining us this morning. Today we'll be discussing our first quarter 2025 earning results. As you have likely noted from our earnings release, sales are up 12% year over year thanks to very robust project activity in our refueling C-Store space, increased activity in our grocery market in our display solution segment, along with strong sales from EMI, which we acquired back in April of 2024. EBITDA for the quarter was in excess of $13 million, with free cash flow over $11 million. Net debt is under one times at 0.8. Jim Gilles will give more specifics in a few minutes. We continue to have a very strong project and quote activity level across all vertical segments. But order timing remains a bit choppy as large project activity continues to push from a timing perspective, and grocery remains mired in court hearings, which we expect will resolve by the end of this calendar year. Our thesis around vertical market orientation remains very attractive to us, and the durability of our model continues to gain strength as we work to offer more and more goods and services to the markets and customers we focus on. Within our display solution segment, we continue to execute on an elevated backlog in project activity in the refueling sea source phase from awards we achieved in fiscal 2024. We anticipate that that project activity will remain elevated through 2025, but thanks to investments made in prior years, we have the capacity to handle our current demand and more. Although our grocery segment continues to remain under a partial cloud of uncertainty, there has been a market increase in activity with order rates up over 90% year over year and remaining strong early into the second quarter. You may have noticed in our press release, I commented that our book-to-bill ratio is 1.3 times in the first quarter based on the success and demand of our R290 cases, along with significantly increased activity in our non-refrigerated display cases. We're excited about this building activity level in grocery, And I expect the momentum will continue to build as the fiscal year progresses. Activity at EMI, which we acquired back in April, reached record performance levels in its first quarter as part of LSI. We've been working closely with the entire team at EMI to create and leverage opportunities spanning from commercial to operational, procurement to manufacturing. And we anticipate that we'll have a couple of years' worth of synergies to harvest and grow. The team at EMI has been outstanding to work with. They've been thoughtful, engaged, energetic, and the integration is going exceedingly well. On our lighting segment, lighting activity in large projects has experienced some headwinds over the last few months, mostly in regards to timing. We've not lost any of the large projects that we've been working on, to the best of my knowledge, but things have remained cloudy and protracted from a timing perspective. There's not one common theme to these timing delays, but it does underline the project timing volatility we've been commenting on over the last few quarters. Staying within lighting, I'm happy to say that we recently released our next generation of our outdoor lighting product called Velocity. Velocity offers a unique approach to outdoor lighting from its performance to aesthetics to its modular construction and build options. In the design of this new fixture, We built on top of our prior investments in adaptability and customization and our ready mount technology, providing a product that offers next generation performance along with reduced installation time and weight reduction. This is a significant investment for LSI and Velocity builds on our very popular Murata series of outdoor products. LSI has always had a very robust indoor product lighting portfolio But the strength of our brand has always been associated with outdoor lighting, and Velocity should pay dividends for years to come. Last month, in early October, LSI along with JSI and EMI attended NACS, the National Association of Convenience Stores, and PEI, the Petroleum Equipment Institute show. These shows are combined into one and coexist alongside of each other. This is the world's largest trade show associated with convenience stores, and attracts large group of attendees from refueling through grocery. LSI had a record turnout at our event that we hosted through the week, and the customer engagement was the strongest I can remember. The combination of LSI, JSI, and EMI created connections that span from entirely new customers to existing customers working in different departments across a wide customer base. We're encouraged by the engagement levels and we look forward to leveraging the contacts we made at this event. We accomplished a lot through this quarter. We continue to build a stronger, more capable business with a durable platform equipped to deliver profitable growth consistent with our growth objectives outlined in our fast-forward plan. We are using experiences of our management team to effectively integrate EMI and optimize other parts of our operations. We believe that we have significant growth opportunities in front of us, and we remain committed to growing our business while balancing the needs of our customers, shareholders, and employees alike. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jim Gilles for a closer look at our financials.