My name is John Franzreb. I'm an Analyst here at Sidoti & Company. Our next presentation of the day is Powell Industries, ticker POWL. For those who are not familiar with the name, simply put, Powell is a manufacturer of equipment that manages the flow of electricity. With us today is CEO Brett Cope and CFO Michael Metcalf. Following the presentation, there'll be time for Q&A. Should you have a question, please put it in the Q&A section. I'll present it to management. That said, gentlemen, thank you for being with us. The floor is yours. Thank you, John, and thanks to you and the team at Sidoti for allowing us to participate and present Powell Industries to the team today. I'm Brett Cope, Chairman and CEO of the company, and with me is Mike Metcalf, CFO of the company. I'll cover the first few slides on the business, and then let Mike jump into some of the details around financials. So who is Powell? Powell is a 76-year-old young company here in Houston, Texas. We have eight manufacturing facilities throughout the world. We build electric distribution solutions to two standards: the ANSI standard, which is predominant in North America and other various select parts of the world, and then the balance of the world is an IEC standard. And so for Powell, we are predominantly ANSI, which is where you find our footprint here. The majority of the work that we do on the revenue side is U.S.A. based. We just eclipsed $1 billion in revenue. We just finished our fiscal 2024 at the end of September. Having grown up here in Houston, you'll find a lot of our business today is driven by heavy industrial, very oil and gas-centric over the decades. The last 10 years, we've built an intentional build-out in the utility sector and then a few other segments that I'll come back to throughout the presentation, Mike as well. Commercial and other industrial is a more recent segment that Mike introduced to the market, and it's been growing pretty handsomely over the last few years. What we do, so Powell, as a manufacturer, builds electrical distribution equipment. At its core is a breaker. Similar to your home or apartment where you live, you have breakers that safely distribute energy. The utility line comes into your place of residence, comes into that electric panel, and then there is a breaker. We build the industrial versions of those: different flavors, but generally large, larger devices that safely will trip if there's a fault and provide the on-off and safe flow control of power throughout the circuit. We take those circuits or the breakers and we put them into circuitry, which, again, kind of like that box in your place of residence, the gray box probably, we call that a substation. And Powell builds a substation at four of our facilities where we actually build the big metal building, predominantly metal. And inside there is switchgear where the breaker lives. There's a lot of copper busing, and then there's a lot of devices that monitor and control the flow of energy safely throughout the circuits as they go on to then power motors or pumps or fans or things that consume the electrical energy. An example here on your slide to the far right is a very heavy-built version of an electrical substation. This one in particular happens to be at our 60-acre construction yard, which is about 20 mi to the east of where Mike and I are sitting here in Houston, where we build large substations for both on and offshore. This one is particularly built for the offshore environment where over the years we've built a lot of mechanical know-how. So this one has the electrical distribution, also may house a lot of other ancillary equipment, including mechanical buildouts, water systems, in this case, helideck, and all types of other supporting devices that the end user wanted to consolidate in the substation design. We are predominantly in the space of low to medium voltage, so up to about 38,000 volts. We build products, systems, solutions, automation. That's our core. We do go into the higher voltages from an integration standpoint. So when it comes to designing a system, we'll go into some higher voltages to a point, but from a product development standpoint and a core knowledge, it is low and medium voltage in terms of what we are looking to build out in the business for the future. A lot of what we do in terms of projects are very complex. Our products can stand on their own, and they do go into the market on their own in terms of an ability to sell direct to the client or through a distribution channel. But a lot of our work on revenue comes through projects, which will go anywhere from six months to three years, from PO to full revenue. And the more complex the project, the more difficult the system will be, either tying to the generating source and along with the distribution of the electric energy, the more that's happening within that space. Typically, that's better for Powell, given the strong nature of our employee base, strong engineering load for mechanical, electrical, civil. We can solve a lot of problems along the way, really complementary to our client's needs. Then on the client side, we aspire to build long relationships with many of our clients and their engineering partners doing project work and delivering electrical solutions all over the world. Just a quick pictorial here to show you very high level on a grid. We're very agnostic to the generating source, whether that's a renewable, a fossil, or nuclear. It really doesn't matter, however you generate the electrical energy. We then get very involved as the energy goes into the facility to distribute to bulk power transmission at the other side of bulk power transmission. So after you get through above or below ground transmission and you get to the other side where it's going to be used, again, we pick up on distributing that energy in the facility or out in the neighborhoods, again, within that voltage class that I showed on the slide before. Just pointing here to number three, I'll come back and mention this a couple of times. Throughout the whole value chain of distribution, whether it's at the generating side or on the distribution side, the role that automation is playing in electrical distribution is increasing. This is not something that you might think that that would have always been the case. Our world has been dominated by a lot of electromechanical devices decades prior, and it's really more recent that you're seeing automation really find its way into the electrical of everything, if I can use that phrase. And Powell plays there as well, and I'll come back to that in a second. So I mentioned the two electrical standards. We build to both standards, predominantly the ANSI standard that we find in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, parts of the Middle East, and parts of the Far East in and around the Singapore and the Pacific Rim. You'll find that standard, and then everywhere else basically is the IEC standard. Another example of some power control rooms. Again, out of our seven heavy manufacturing facilities, four of our facilities build versions of these substations over the years. As we've gone into different sectors, market sectors, and different geographic sectors of the world, there are differences and preferences. There are different standards around energy and construction standards, whether it's the 50 U.S. states or the provinces of Canada. There are a lot of local codes that you have to adhere to. So we've developed a lot of capability to address and be compliant to those codes. And over the time, we've developed different flavors of substations to house gear completely within one of these buildings. We have outdoor designs that can live out in an unconditioned environment. And so we continue to look at that as a value add in our model. A typical power control room is very, I mentioned the complexity earlier. A lot of what we do when we engage a client, there's a lot of upfront work before we receive an award. When we win the award, there's a lot more work that goes before we can start cutting metal to build the breaker, the switchgear, and ultimately the substation. There are just thousands and thousands of drawings that we will generate over the first couple of months of an award, whether that award is in a million-dollar substation or it's a $50 million multiple substation award. There's a lot of pre-work that goes into it. We generate tons of drawings that go back and forth with the engineering partner and the client. And we get to the point where we then reduce that down to a bill of material. And at all of our facilities, we bring in raw commodities, and we'll produce the vast majority of the metal work that goes into our finished product. You'll find integrated at each of our facilities where we'll do all the fabrication and full assembly before we get into the build of the substation and the final integration. The control and monitoring side of our business. We've been in the control and monitoring business for electrical energy for the better part of 30 years, but it's really in the last 10 years that this has really taken a step up, not just from monitoring and controlling and safely ensuring the energy is safely delivered to its end source, but now the actual monitoring of the asset, and this is an area that, within the industrial space, it's not new. It's just that in the electrical side of things, this has been a little bit slower acceptance. And what we see over the last 10 years and what we believe looking forward is that the acceptance of this technology is going to grow logarithmically just due to the number of assets, if nothing else, in terms of the electrical grid, microgeneration, the industrial space that's out there, whether it's oil and gas or commercial or consumer products. The amount of assets that are going into the electrical side of things is growing huge. And just demographically, there's not enough people to keep up. So you're finding more and more acceptance and more and more applications for the automation standard. And we see this as a growing area for Powell and for the industry. Our primary end markets, as I noted. We were born and raised here in Houston, Texas. So we have a very strong affinity. A lot of our products were built for the heavy industrial environment. Over the last 15 years or so, we've started to migrate our model, diversify, if you will, to lighten up some of our products to make them more applicable, for instance, in the utility space around utility distribution and more recently into some more commercial applications. So anywhere you're moving a lot of liquids or, say, compressing gas or moving material, great space for Powell. Things that are happening in the economy, whether you're into the green diesel, sustainable aviation fuel, more grid resilience, there's all kinds of technologies now coming to market and new design around grid resilience, carbon capture, again, another great space for Powell. Some of the new energy technologies such as hydrogen takes a lot of energy to separate air into its components for hydrogen as a fuel source. But as that grows and blossoms around the world, again, an area that we're in on the early adoption projects and as that builds out, be a great market growth area for the company. Competitors. We do get asked this question quite a bit. Where do we exist and how do we compete? Every time we go to market and compete, we're up against one of the large four multinational electrical companies. They're on the left as you're looking at the screen to the left. When you do the substation part, that's the side on the right. A lot of the multinationals don't do the electromechanical substation, the part where we're taking all the gear and integrating it and delivering a plug-and-play substation to our client. They'll go out into the world largely, and they'll buy a third-party building, and then they'll work back and forth to integrate it. We have an integrated model at Powell. It's an integrated model. We do all of the gear, all of the engineering, and all the substation work at our one facility, and it leaves here ready to go when it gets to our client site. So we always compete on the merits of our gear and how it compares against our competitors. And then we show them what we do through the life of the project to ensure that we're going to hit their project schedules on time and on budget. And that's how we differentiate and secure the business. Last slide for me. From a strategic growth standpoint, these are the areas that we've been managing the company and how we're going forward to grow the company. I'm going to start from the bottom of your slide. As a manufacturer of electrical products and solutions, it's important that we're working with our clients in the sectors we're in to help solve problems and bring products to market that are cost and right for the right application to solve their needs. So there's a lot of work we're doing organically and some inorganically out in the market right now to solve problems for the future. The services piece, we always aspire to install and commission our equipment. We're getting a lot of conversations these days with our clients about expanding into the design side of systems and projects and brownfield work, as well as maybe becoming more relevant on the operating side. How could we help augment or supplant, in some cases, operational management of the electrical subsystems within their facilities? And then, as I noted a few minutes ago, the electrical automation. This is a really wide space. When When you just say automation, but relative to applying electrical SCADA, doing power management and load shed, so managing the asset, managing the power flow to now moving into the asset piece. How do you know when something might need maintenance? If you've ever been caught up into an electrical outage in your place of business or your home, things fail sometimes in the electrical utility side. It can be a long time before they're up and going, so how can we become more predictive? How can we aid in the recovery of those systems so that we have better resilience and better uptime on the electric grid, so that's where we're focused looking forward. That'll share Mike. Great. Thanks, Brett. Just a quick snapshot on what we think about when we think about capital allocation. Clearly, we are a capital-intensive business. Working capital is always top of mind. We've got a very healthy order book, and we need to fund those orders as they're executed. Brett talked a lot about the organic growth in the business. We do invest in the business via R&D, CapEx, things of that nature. That has taken an uptick over the last year. And shareholder returns. We are going on our 45th consecutive quarter of dividends. And over the last couple of years, we've had a modest dividend increase over the last 8-12 quarters. And as Brett noted, we always have our ear to the ground from an inorganic perspective in those areas where there are gaps in our product portfolio where we think we can grow the business inorganically. Give you a little bit of an overview on the financials. We're just exiting. Our fiscal year ended September 30th, and we exited our record year for the company over $1 billion in revenue. We finished with 27% gross profit on the year that reflected better than an 18% EBITDA, $12.29 EPS, and another banner year from a cash flow perspective. In 2023, we generated $183 million of cash flow on the heels of a lot of the large petrochem and LNG orders that we won in fiscal 2023, and we consumed some of that cash executing, as I noted a minute ago, but still with that usage, we generated almost $109 million of operating cash in the year, so we're very happy with where we ended the year. If you kind of take a look at what happened in the business from a commercial perspective, we ended the year with the highest backlog on a year-end basis that we've seen, over $1.3 billion. That was about 40-some-odd million better than 2023 when we had roughly six mega orders or mega, as we define them, over $50 million. In our orders cadence this year, we didn't have one mega order, just a lot of good, meaty orders really across all sectors, very good commercial activity, and we finished the year at a 1.0 book-to-bill, so what we burned out of our backlog and converted into revenue, we replenished that bucket with new orders, so a very healthy year for the company and very positive as we look forward into fiscal 2025. As Brett noted, the predominance of our footprint is in North America, U.S. in general. Of our revenue, of that $1 billion of revenue, really over 80% of it's generated in the United States. The rest of it, Canada and the U.K., predominantly, and that's roughly 15%, so really, the ANSI footprint really dictates where the revenues are generated. When you think about revenue by the sectors which we compete in, clearly, our core industrial sectors, petrochemical, oil and gas, and within the oil and gas, it's not just your legacy oil and gas refineries, pipelines, but it's also some of the nascent technologies with LNG, alternative fuels, carbon capture, hydrogen. That all falls within our oil and gas, so between oil and gas and petrochem, it's almost 60% of the total revenues in the business. As Brett noted, electric utility, it's not by accident that that is a large piece of the business. In our backlog, it was actually growing. So as the LNG work exited revenues this year, that kind of offset the utilities. Utilities usually runs 20%-25% of the business. So that's a real positive area. And then commercial and other industrial, this has really been buoyed by the activity in data centers. If you went back to fiscal 2021, which is not on the page, that blue pie shape would have been about 9%. So that's six points of growth between fiscal 2021 and 2023 and 2024 has really been driven by the activity in data centers. When you look at the income statement metrics that we focus on every day, gross profit, very healthy gross profit growth, almost six points of growth, 600 basis points of growth from 2023 to 2024. We're really proud of the leverage that we get in our operating expenses, SG&A decreasing year- over- year from 2021 through 2024. That's generating really fantastic EBITDA, $186 million of EBITDA in the year. As I noted on my opening comments, over 18%. And that generated over $12 in EPS for the year. And the balance sheet, probably one of the more stellar things that we're proud of in our maintenance of the balance sheet, very, very, very, very strong, healthy balance sheet, very liquid company. Our cash was very strong in the year. And that was really generated by strong working capital. Our working capital turns were over three and a half times again for the second year in a row. Our return on equity continues to be a stellar point. Last year, we were very happy at reaching the 15% ROE threshold, and we doubled that this year at 31% return on equity. The balance sheet is something that we're very proud of in the business. We take a look at all these financial metrics quite often and have a lot of sub-metrics to drive the right behaviors. With that, John, I will turn it back over to you for any questions that may be in the queue. Okay. We have some questions from the audience, so let's get right to it. First question is regarding the gross margin profile or the margin profile in general. Can you talk to the jump in 2024 versus 2023, and what was the key driver there? You want to take that one? Yeah. Yeah. When we exited 2022, I'll go back even one year prior, we were executing projects that we won during the pandemic. We were navigating through hyperinflationary periods. Remember, we're a projects-based business, so a lot of our projects are really firm fixed-price projects. In 2022 and trickling into 2023, you saw margins coming out of backlog that were really impacted by the inflationary pressures that we saw post-pandemic and then the lower pricing levels during the pandemic. Now, fast forward to 2023, the orders cadence picked up dramatically. As I noted in my comments, we booked $1.3 billion of orders in 2023, ended the year at $1.3 billion of backlog. That backlog had a much healthier construction than what we saw in 2022. Given that this business executes projects anywhere from probably 12 months to three years today, it takes a while for those projects to exit backlog. That's what you saw. You saw the uptick from 2022 to 2023, and then the gradual uptick to where we are today at 27%. It's choppy across the quarters, but it's kind of plateaued at that 26%-27%-ish rate. That walks right into the second part of the question. What can you do to further expand upon those margins? What kind of pricing power? Can Can you talk a little bit about what's going on there? I'll take that one first. Ask Mike to jump in for what I might get a complete answer here. I think from what we manufacture and deliver on the gear and the substations in the current environment, as we sit here today, maybe not too much. Now, I know there's some questions or thought about the next administration. We're being very. I believe there's an increased likelihood of some additional inflationary challenges as we look forward. That would present. I wouldn't say an opportunity, but it will have an effect on pricing because it will start to reconstrain the market, maybe take us back a year, a year and a half to where we were in the market. That scenario is likely. That's more of an effect in terms of what we can control. We are working on a couple of strategies to, one, around our services strategy. Typically, the services side commands higher margins than your product side. Putting your mind share to work, leveraging our engineering base. We've got some nice things moving now over the last 18 months to do that. Along with that would be a build-out of the commercial industrial that took off post-pandemic. That market is letting us to accelerate learning into distribution and building new straws in certain sectors. So selling products without all of the long tail of a project, they'll have a much shorter tail. So things that can go on a shelf through distribution, good technology products around automation, or even our breakers to some key markets, we can turn those quicker, and those typically carry a much higher margin profile than even sort of past performance. So as we can kind of build those pieces intentionally, we'll see what happens, cause and effect over the next couple of years. But I believe the stage is set for some challenges there, which for Powell would be opportunistic. I think that would be a potential upside. Yeah. No, you covered it. In your prepared remarks, you did touch on being part of the data center market. Maybe a little bit of color about how much of that is the revenue and where your products participate in that market. The profile is roughly, we'll call it just over the double-digit line, 10-ish%, give or take, quarter-over-quarter. We see it both direct. It actually found us, the data center market, not that we didn't understand it pre-pandemic, but when the world really started doing a lot of this, it found us in a big way, and we find it both direct. We also find it through the effect, just through the power demand, with utilities clearly amping up their work. The demand for power has just kind of grown exponentially, so we're seeing a renaissance of power generation from multiple areas. Certainly, utilities are participating in that. That's been a big area of growth, so for us, it is our core distribution products. A couple of years ago, we saw a lot of the 15 kV level. The power levels are growing. The megawatt consumption of the data centers, we're seeing a real build on a 38 kV. So you're coming off utility line or you're self-generating with turbines on site, 38 kV distribution voltages, which indicate higher power consumptions generally. We're seeing that build quite nicely right now, which is a good sweet spot for Powell. We also see a lot of, for better or for worse, I don't think my colleagues would like in Chicago, we build bus duct products. They're basically big industrial extension cords to transmit power at the industrial scale, not utility scale transmission. Those products have been a very big play on the data center market specifically. Some of our products that we built up there were a couple of million-dollar revenue type things, and those have grown an order of magnitude, if not more, so. You mentioned this in your inorganic comments, Brett. Are you considering entering into new industries and maybe other thoughts on acquisition and M&A? We're not targeting new industry growth through potential inorganic, certainly not organic. We have a lot of work going on in organic to build out, as Mike noted, white spaces in our portfolio across the sectors we participate, both historically as well as some of the new sectors, including commercial and other industrial. In terms of the M&A activity, John asked me, in fact, last call here on Q4 report out. I think I trimmed off the long term and said more short- to midterm would be more of the thought now. We've been working at this for a couple of years with the board and building out the funnel, running around the world and seeing where things could line up. And things are moving along. And so we're slowly working our way through where thoughtfully we could add to the portfolio to enhance exactly where our strategic slide is on our deck out of those three areas. Excuse me, one last question. Can you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape? You mentioned you have four large competitors out there. Are they becoming more aggressive given the attractiveness to the North American market? It's kind of two points that I make. The latter part of that question, we're seeing new entrants to the North American market due to the attractiveness. Yep. So beyond the four that we have on our slide, we're seeing new players from the Far East make their way in here. We're seeing elements of companies that I've known for a long time in China coming in through different wrappers into the States or through Mexico. We're seeing the Koreans come in in a new way. The Japanese are coming with some of their kit and moving factories. So we're seeing some of that. And the first part of the question from a behavior, yeah, we're seeing there are strategy changes that are happening at the Big Four. We're watching those very closely. We're not reacting to it. We're just keeping abreast of it. So we understand it. We're driving our strategies for what we can control. But there are changes that are important to understand the story so that as we kind of execute our strategy, that we're as best positioned we can to win for our stakeholders. So yeah, it's something to keep an eye on. There are a lot of. It's a very dynamic market, and there are a lot of things going on. So there are no dull days in the electric market these days. Well, certainly, thank you very much, gentlemen. We're out of time for sharing your story. Brett, do you have any closing remarks? John, again, for you and the Sidoti team, really appreciate the opportunity today. It's been a great relationship. We appreciate the time today. Look, Powell is one of the last publicly traded companies based in the States with a strong market in the ANSI environment that looks like it's got really good legs to go. We're super excited about the future for our stakeholders, for our employees. And we look forward to really spreading the message about where Powell is today and the potential where we think we'll be in the next 10 years. Well, thanks again, Brett. Mike, appreciate having you with us. Have a great day, guys. Thanks, John.