RE:RE:Picture > than thousand words
Pictures are associated with the past – the pictures of installations in progress and steam traps waiting to be shipped help describe sales that are already built in. They are in the current backlog. What the market cares about is the future. The fact that we are going through a sales rough patch is irrefutable at this point; just look at the data:
1. There have been only 2 turnkey projects announced since early December of last year. That’s a pandemic era of slowness. After the lack of announcements in the spring and early summer, many investors including myself were expecting a flurry of projects in Sep/Oct. Obviously, this flurry never happened.
2. Steam trap sales fell FY over FY. The expectations were for a continued ramp up due to their new assembly capability. Custom sales as a whole for the first 3 months of this FY were coming in a lower monthly average than the previous year.
3. Backlog at the start of the FY was flat compared to the previous year’s backlog.
4. Current backlog is probably 4-5 million behind where it was at this point last year. The revenue from turnkey projects is mostly recognized during the 6-12 month period of a project, meaning that any new turnkey projects announced from this point forward will be FY 26’s story.
The elephant in the room, therefore, is the slow sales. Ideally Bill addresses this in the earnings call. Maybe there is a plausible issue that will be corrected in the near future. Maybe some companies are waiting until after the US election. Maybe the bear market in natural gas is taking its toll, or perhaps TEI is getting bogged down with the training of the new staff. Who knows, but the worst thing for the share price will be if Bill doesn’t acknowledge the slowdown and maintains the narrative that everything is great because even the permabulls know that it isn’t. Yes, we can always wait another 2 or 3 years, but 2 or 3 years ago Bill was telling us that in 2 or 3 years we would see a payoff. We were led to believe that a long term average growth rate of 30% was possible, and the path to 50 million in revenue was straightforward. This clearly isn’t the case, so what gives?