Badger Meter - Earnings Call - Q2 2017

Transcript

Speaker 0

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Badger Meter Second Quarter twenty seventeen Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr.

Rick Johnson, Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer. Sir, you may begin.

Speaker 1

Thank you very much, Kaylee. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Badger Meter's second quarter conference call. I want to thank all of you for joining us today. As usual, I will begin by stating that we will make a number of forward looking statements on our call today. Certain statements contained in this presentation as well as other information provided from time to time by the company or its employees may contain forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in these forward looking statements.

Please see yesterday's earnings release for a list of words or expressions that identify such statements and the associated risk factors. Let me reiterate some of our guidelines. For competitive reasons, we do not comment on specific individual product line profitability other than in general, nor do we disclose components of cost of sales, for example, copper. More importantly, we continue our practice of not providing specific guidance on future earnings. We believe specific guidance does not serve the long term interest of our shareholders.

Now on to the results. Yesterday, after the market closed, we released our second quarter twenty seventeen results. Our sales, net income and earnings per share were all records for any quarter, not just the second quarter. While you may argue that the sales record is by a very small amount, remember that the prior all time record for sales was last year's second quarter. So on a tough comparison, we had a very strong quarter.

Let's look at some of the details. Sales were up zero three percent to $104,200,000 compared to $103,800,000 last year in the second quarter. The split between municipal water sales and flow instrumentation sales is roughly the same as it was last year, with municipal water contributing about 77% of sales and flow instrumentation about 23%. Municipal water sales increased just $100,000 to $80,100,000 from $80,000,000 last year. This included approximately $650,000 of revenues from D Flow, the Swedish company we acquired on May 1.

The relatively small change between years was the net impact of slightly lower meter volumes and slightly higher radio volumes. We also believe there are a number of customers who want the latest technology and as a result, delayed orders pending our release of the Orion cellular LTE endpoint, which did not begin shipping until June. Flow instrumentation sales increased 1.3% to $24,100,000 from $23,800,000 last year. We continue to see improvement in the domestic oil and gas markets as well as other domestic industrial markets. In fact, domestic flow instrumentation sales were up over 5% quarter over quarter.

However, we saw lower international sales due to economic conditions. Gross margin as a percent of sales was 39.4%, up from 37.9% in the second quarter last year. The improvement was due to pricing discipline, favorable foreign exchange on purchased products and product mix, all offset somewhat by higher brass costs. Selling, engineering and administration expenses were virtually the same as they were in the second quarter of last year. A reduction in staffing costs and favorable healthcare expenses helped to offset increased amortization expense related to the D Flow acquisition as well as normal inflationary pressures.

The provision for income taxes as a percentage of earnings before taxes for the 2017 was 35.5% compared to 36% in the 2017. At this time, this is our best estimate for the year as a whole, although much will depend upon the relationship between foreign and domestic earnings for all of 2017. As a result of these factors, net earnings for the three months ending June 3037 were $10,600,000 or $0.36 per diluted share compared to $9,400,000 or $0.32 per diluted share in the same period last year. Our cash flow remains strong. For the six months ended June 3037, we generated $37,300,000 of cash from operations compared to $27,700,000 for the first six months of 2016.

Our acquisition of dFlow did have an impact on our short term debt balance, which has increased since year end. However, debt as a percentage of total capitalization is still low at 4%. With that bit of background, I will now turn the call over to Rich Musson, Badger Meter's Chairman, President and CEO, who will have some additional comments. Rich?

Speaker 2

Thank you, Rick, and thank all of you for joining us today. This was another strong quarter earnings for Badger Meter. Not only did we have record earnings this quarter with a 12.9% increase over last year's second quarter, but this followed a record first quarter where we saw earnings increase 9.5% over the first quarter of last year. So we're very pleased with the 2017 results thus far. And although strong although sales were an all time record, they were relatively flat compared to the very strong sales in last year's second quarter.

As Rick noted, we believe this was due in part to customer delays associated with our introduction of the LTE endpoint in June. In fact, we were also starting to run low on the old inventory, which also contributed to the flat sales. The LTE is now fully released and shipments are continuing. We are also aware of numerous large city projects that still are in the bid process. With these types of projects on the horizon and the continued strength of our water meters, radios and software, we are confident about future municipal sales growth.

We have also started to see the long awaited rebound in flow instrumentation, particularly in our oil and gas business. We had very strong margins this quarter, which reflected continued cost controls and the pricing discipline that we are to achieve. As Rick mentioned, we are seeing the benefits of cost reductions that were made last year in the flow instrumentation area. Further in the municipal water markets, we are maintaining our strong pricing structure by not participating in low margin opportunities and we are seeing benefits from our distribution consolidation strategy. Finally, let me add a few comments about our recent acquisition of dFlow in Sweden.

This company is already providing us with engineering and R and D expertise in the key ultrasonic technology that drives our E Series ultrasonic metering products. We have already had several exchanges between the dFlow engineers in Sweden and the eSeries engineers in our Milwaukee facility. We have also established a technology roadmap that will allow us to integrate the dFlow technology into future versions of our eSeries meters for our larger commercial metering customers as well as our residential customers. This technology will not only improve the performance and functionality of the meters, but will also enable us to reduce production costs. So with those very brief comments, we would love to take your questions.

Speaker 0

Our first question comes from the line of Richard Eastman with Robert W. Baird. Your line is open.

Speaker 3

Yes, good morning.

Speaker 2

Good morning, Rick. Good morning, Rick.

Speaker 3

Hey, you Rich, would you like to take a cut maybe at a dollar amount of revenue that you think may have been deferred out of the majority of second quarter due to the LTE product?

Speaker 2

Well, that's a hard one. And I really can't give you a dollar amount because obviously, it's anecdotal as to when customers are placing orders and what. I do know that to give you some added color, our VP of Manufacturing was very excited last week because he used an interesting word. He said the LTE production line is going gangbusters. So gangbusters is a that must be a technical term used by manufacturing people.

And if you can equate that into dollars, you can get a feel. But I really can't give you a dollar amount, Rick.

Speaker 0

I'd love to, but I can't.

Speaker 3

The transition internally and through customers, basically the three gs cellular product would just evolve into the LTE product. I mean, that the three gs be just discontinued, reason to buy that or?

Speaker 2

No, the three gs has been discontinued. It's a lot like the cell phones you buy. So if a customer has their system, let's say, 5% built out, okay, they can do the other 75% with the LTE and it works exactly the same. They really don't see the difference. The only difference will be that sometime down the road, if the three gs networks start to go away, the LTE product will last longer will be there longer.

So this does not mean we're going to end up with three gs customers continuing to buy the old product and LTE customers buying the new one. Also, let me just comment on this delay, so everybody really understands what we're saying. Generally, if you have the iPhone six and you're going to buy a new iPhone and you hear that the iPhone seven is going to be released in a couple of months, you're going to wait. And that's really what happened. We usually don't like to announce that we've got a product coming out that's going to replace another product simply because this is what happens.

You end up with this dip in orders while people put a delay in. Yes. The reason

Speaker 1

let's clarify. This is not our delay. We an out

Speaker 2

on time. It was out on time.

Speaker 1

Customers delayed ordering until they could get the four gs Correct.

Speaker 2

It was the customers delaying orders. And as I said, we usually don't like to preannounce because this happens. However, we did have some competitors who were saying, well, we're going to be coming out with an LTE someday, so you don't want to commit to the Badger system because we're going to have an LTE. That kind of forced us to tell our customers that we had an LTE coming in June and it did cause a little bit of the delay in orders. We expected this.

So I was pretty pleased that, a, orders that our sales didn't go down. We had record sales. And I was even more pleased that we were able to get a very strong bottom line for the quarter.

Speaker 3

No, I understand. And then could I just ask you, when I look at the municipal water business, maybe the three buckets, I mean, we're looking at kind of no growth year over year and you just explained part of the reason. But was the can I just ask you, was the domestic business up? How did Middle East do and then the commercial meter side, those three buckets within municipal up, down or Are

Speaker 2

you asking for the quarter or for the first six months?

Speaker 3

No, the second quarter year over year that would comp to the flat revenue in municipal. So second quarter over second quarter. I'm just curious on those three buckets if they're up, down or flat?

Speaker 1

Yes. International

Speaker 2

is down. Our international was down.

Speaker 1

Latin America was up, but it's peanuts. Mean, we're talking $100,000 really domestic was down a fraction. I mean

Speaker 3

Less than 10%.

Speaker 1

Percent or something like that.

Speaker 3

Yes. Okay. So Domestic and then

Speaker 2

was pretty flat and the international, we kind of separate Latin America. Latin America from international, Latin America being mostly Mexico sales. So Mexico was up a little bit and international was down a little bit.

Speaker 3

Okay. And then the commercial business must have been up just a tick or something?

Speaker 4

Yes. Okay.

Speaker 3

Okay, I got it. I got it. And then just last thing, Rick, could you just repeat what you said about revenue for deflow that was included in the second quarter? I just didn't Yes,

Speaker 1

it $650,000 We acquired them on May 1, so it's really the May and June sales of D Flow were about $650,000

Speaker 2

As you recall, D Flow does about $2,500,000 a year in sales. So it's about where we would have expected it to be. Yes. And Rich,

Speaker 3

could you just like explain, I mean, there's kind of a vertical integration play here with dFlow on the chip side for the e meters. What is your can you give us a sense of what your board purchases are currently from your German vendor?

Speaker 2

That's a tough one and I'm getting a lot of shaking heads here. They don't want to disclose it. For competitive reasons, they don't want our competitors to know exactly what our work was.

Speaker 3

And

Speaker 1

that's why I sit next to him.

Speaker 3

Okay. All right. I'll try to do some math myself. Thank you.

Speaker 2

All right. Thank you.

Speaker 0

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Quilley with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.

Speaker 5

Hey, good morning, Rich and Rick. So back to the cellular and I think the previous question has tried to size it. Can you talk about size of market or currently the 900 versus the cellular, what's the opportunity you see there? I imagine the delay to your point might have been smaller, but clients are excited about it. But remind us again the overall installed base, where do you think this could go?

Speaker 2

Well, first off, if you assume and I'm just going to talk about The United States for a moment and ignore Canada and Mexico. But in The United States, if you assume that there are about 80,000,000 water meters as an installed base, residential water meters, and maybe another 7,000,000 or 8,000,000 commercial water meters. So you're closing in on 90,000,000 water meters in North America. We also believe that based on the IHS survey that the market is about 55% or 60% converted to some sort of technology. So first off, the first thing you have is a fairly good hunk, say 30,000,000 meters that are available to convert from a manual read to some sort of technology.

And we think cellular is compelling to take a good piece of that. The second piece is all the people out there who have been using technology, but now it's time to upgrade. They've either been using drive by radios or they've been using some sort of fixed network system and they're tired of maintaining all that infrastructure and they would like to have a system that doesn't require them to have the infrastructure. There too the cellular becomes very compelling. The other real benefit of cellular is that you can convert it on a spotty basis.

And what I mean by that is if you have a fixed network system in your city and you want to go to some other fixed network system, you generally have to do it by neighborhood. You put up a tower and you start converting that neighborhood. With cellular, you can convert one meter on the North side of town, one meter on the South side of town without having to put up towers And it's just very it's much easier to make those conversions. So I'm giving you a little background on these numbers. But cellular will cannibalize some of our drive by and fixed network market, okay?

There's no question about that. Cellular, we think, will take a good piece of these cities that have not yet converted that are looking to a new technology, and they're going to want the latest technology, and we think we've got a good shot at that. And then finally, I think we're going to take market share. I think the fact is Badger has cellular. Of our four large competitors, one has we've had cellular for several years.

One has just announced they're introducing cellular. So they're several years behind us. And the other three really don't have anything. So I think we're in pretty good shape to take some market share from that. That's about the best I can give you, And

Speaker 1

we have disclosed this. In a market that moves at glacial speed, the fact that we introduced this several years ago, it's probably already about 20% of all radio cellular radios, about 20% of the total, and we see that growing in the future.

Speaker 5

And so the glide path towards cost in the past, it was sort of the monthly cost on the SLA from the carrier. That's obviously some of the benefits of having ubiquitous cellular networks at this stage. You're seeing the glide path cost per versus an old RFR getting really comparable, if not the same. Is that fair?

Speaker 1

Well, the cost of the technology is similar to networks and to drive by. And obviously, there's some ancillary costs on each one of those types of technology. With drive by, you need a laptop in the car as you drive by. With network, you need towers. With cellular, you're paying a monthly fee for the read.

Speaker 5

Yes. Yes. Okay. And then lastly, on the ultrasonic side, talk about the potential there. I think it sounds like you're moving upstream in diameter size.

But again, back to the total market, since this is out there with the Pearl for a while doing things on the FLOWLESS side. Talk about share, talk about initiatives, Rich, about how we should measure you guys on that product cycle, too. Thank you, guys.

Speaker 2

Sure. Yes, Badger and were the two that introduced solid state metering. About help me, they're here, five years ago? Eight years ago. Eight years ago,

Speaker 5

my how time Okay.

Speaker 2

About eight years ago, Badger and Sensus introduced cellular. Sensus chose magnetic, and they've come out with the iPearl, and it apparently has done well for them. We chose to go in ultrasonic path. I personally tend to think that as we look to the future, we made the better choice. That's validated by a couple of things.

One is that Neptune has now come out with ultrasonic. So Neptune looked at the technologies and chose not to go magnetic. They chose to use a similar technology to Badger's, which tells me that maybe we made the right decision. The other thing is, as I look at the future, magnetic technology, a lot of the cost is in copper coils that make up the magnetic and the magnetic resonance material, whereas with ultrasonic, a lot of the cost is in circuitry. And if I think about what's more likely to decrease in cost in the future, magnetic coils, copper wires or electronic circuitry, well, history has shown us anything, it's that electronic circuitry tends to get cheaper.

So I think we have a better opportunity to cost reduce the ultrasonic. The other point you made very quickly there was a very good one that you picked up on. We have not historically taken our ultrasonic to the commercial sizes up to the two inches and three inches sizes. We were there focusing a little more on MAG. With the acquisition of dFlow, we believe we can now take our ultrasonic into that commercial size.

So one of the projects that we have launched is the development of ultrasonic meters for the commercial market in the two and three inches series. And our VP of Sales and Marketing has not had a heart attack. So apparently, she's

Speaker 0

not too upset that I announced that.

Speaker 2

But we are working on that project, and we think that's going to give us a very competitive product for the market on the ultrasonic. So that's kind of how we view the ultrasonic. D Flow is definitely a real advantage for us. We were buying a lot of our circuitry and our transducers from a third party. Now with dFlow, we will be able we will be making those ourselves and that's going to give us some cost savings and we'll also have advantage to all of the latest technology.

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Connors with Boenning and Scattergood. Your line is open.

Speaker 6

Great. Thank you. So question, I really want to focus more on the margin line. There's been a lot of focus on the top line issues, but it seems to us that maybe the margin here is really the surprise. And you mentioned both in the press release and your prepared remarks, the forward integration, the dealer roll up as being a contributor to that, which suggests that that must be a pretty powerful impact given that it's a relatively small part of the business right now.

Can you give us any more color there, Rich, on any metrics on that we can put on that contribution from that element or anything qualitative?

Speaker 2

Well, generally, we buy a dealer, okay, for their sales, we will put maybe another 100 basis points on the margin just from the well, I'm sorry, I've said this wrong. We can put a good 500 basis to 1,000 basis points on the margin. We can get like another 5% on their sales, five percent to 10%. In other words, and I'm just using some rough numbers here. If we were selling to a distributor at a 30% margin and they were reselling at an additional 10% for them, okay, we're capturing that 10%.

So that's good. Now, of course, we have additional expenses down in the sales and marketing side when we pick up that distributor. So you have to factor that in. So yes, we are gaining on the margin side from them. But on the other hand, it's also driving increased sales and marketing expenses for us as we do that.

We always knew that would happen. But it does drop profit to the bottom line. So thus far, all of the dealer dealership distributorship acquisitions we've done have been very and there's been two major ones, two of our largest, others are in the pipeline, but they've been very successful at driving up margins and putting additional profits on the bottom line. So we've been very happy with that. I can't really quantify how much of the margin increase is exactly due to the distributors.

We do know that when we talk about the flow instrumentation cost cuts we made last year, we cut about 1,000,000 point dollars out of the cost structure there. So that's about $300,000 that is in the margin, but it's harder on the other ones.

Speaker 1

And this is Rick. Let me give you another little take on this, and this is just this is my personal editorial comment, but we've replaced some of sales management with people who came out of the distribution side of the business. And there's a little bit different mindset than if you came out of the manufacturing side, where it was more of a cost plus so much to get to a certain gross margin. What we see on the if you've been in distribution, what we see is let's get the most amount we can. And lo and behold, sometimes that's a higher margin than we would have gotten than we would have gotten in the past.

And I think we're seeing now that one's really difficult to quantify, but I think just the nature of some of the changes we've made in sales leadership in this company, I think we're seeing some of those impacts also. I also think we

Speaker 2

should point out that we mentioned pricing discipline in here. And at the beginning of the year, we knew we were going to have a headwind from the brass costs. Brass last year averaged about $2.2 a pound. This year thus far it's been $2.55 to $2.6 sometimes even more. So we knew we were going to have that headwind.

And we did at the annual sales meeting earlier in the year, challenge the sales force and say, look, we've got to offset that. And that means we've got to be pretty firm with our pricing in order to be able to offset that. I think they've done a very good job of that. And I to congratulate them because they have gone out and they've put in some pricing discipline. Yes, it means we did not chase some low price business.

The lower end of the market is not something that Badger plays in real well. We don't have the cheapest products. We don't try to have the cheapest products. We try to have the best technology and the best quality. So that pricing discipline has also benefited us.

And I think we're going to see these levels going forward for a while

Speaker 1

depending on

Speaker 6

The how what ramp other element of the margin side that I thought was interesting that was not mentioned was mix. You mentioned price, you mentioned cost controls, dealer roll up, But there was no specific mention of mix, which I know for years has been kind of part of the margin story that as you shift away from manual towards some of the newer technologies. Is that how should we read the absence of mix from that discussion?

Speaker 1

No, actually I did say product mix in explaining gross margin. And part of that is a little higher emphasis on the Flow Instrumentation. We saw a little bit of rebound there. Obviously, split the eightytwenty split is about the same, but I think we're getting a slightly higher margins in the flow instrumentation. And just the product mix within municipal water, the trend towards technology is going to help us.

So when I throw in product mix, it's kind of it's a catchall for a lot of those things.

Speaker 6

Got it. Okay. Must have missed that. Thanks a lot guys. Okay.

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jose Garza with Gabelli. Your line is open.

Speaker 4

Hey, good morning guys.

Speaker 1

Good morning, Good morning.

Speaker 2

Hey, I just wanted to

Speaker 4

ask you about the SG and A and how kind of we should think about that. It's been pretty flat here. How do we think about that going forward, especially with kind of the addition of deflow now?

Speaker 1

Well, deflow that's an interesting deflow may add, I'm going to guess, 200,000 a quarter, maybe $1,000,000 a year, something on that order, plus some amortization, which I off the top of my head, I don't want to quantify here because we're still in the process of sorting out the structure of the deal. We still haven't finalized that yet. But in terms of cash, up probably no more than $1,000,000 a and that even no, not even that high probably. Okay.

Speaker 4

And then anything on the R and D side?

Speaker 1

I don't I'm about to disagree with my proposal. This will be interesting. Go ahead.

Speaker 4

DFO does about $2,500,000

Speaker 1

Correct. Now we're thinking about I'm not going to I

Speaker 4

can't hear you too well, Rich.

Speaker 2

If you turn That's on because my microphone was off. I apologize. Let me start over here. I was about to disagree with Rich.

Speaker 1

That's why he was going to disagree with me. Denny is now acknowledging that I might be right. So just to walk through

Speaker 2

the numbers. DFlow had about $2,500,000 of sales a year, and we're continuing to see that. They do about $05,000,000 on the bottom line, so that's about $2,000,000 of expenses, okay? About half of that is in the cost of sales, and about half of that is in all of their engineering and staffing costs. So there's probably about $1,000,000 at most in the SG and A, and that's what Rick said, so I have to admit he was right, okay?

But then, of course, when we acquired them, we had to write things up and we also have patent amortization and acquisition amortization.

Speaker 1

That's what I'm saying. The intangible the final allocation between intangibles and goodwill is not finalized, but that will be a non cash expense going Okay. Forward,

Speaker 4

And then I guess just color on kind of the R and D kind of if you guys kind of expect that to pick up there with that acquisition?

Speaker 2

Yes. I think you're going to see more R and D expense because the bulk of dFlow's SG is and engineering, And we're adding that to our engineering expertise. It's something we certainly needed. It was something that we had in the plans to try and hire, but finding dFlow gave us this ready source of engineering expertise that we didn't have to go out and try to recruit. So we considered ourselves very, very lucky for that.

The other benefit we have is basically we acquired these engineers and their salaries are paid for by dFlow's business. So that's a real plus too. But you will see higher engineering costs. The bulk of that $1,000,000 in expenses and SG and A that Rick talked about, that's in the engineering area. Correct.

Speaker 4

Okay. And then I guess just going back to the discussion of the distributor acquisitions. I don't if you want to just take a step looking back and just kind of talk to us about just the growth in those maybe kind of the outside sales I guess relative to the internal volumes.

Speaker 1

Well, let me start and then you can add a comment.

Speaker 2

Then I can tell

Speaker 1

you you're wrong. Yes, that's right. I'm used to that. We've only purchased two so far. And if you just compare the original territory for those compared to what we have now, you could say, it's been successful in that sense.

But the reality is we had a lot of unassigned territory that we basically bolted on to those two now company owned distributors. And we go to market now under one name called National Meter, and that's our distribution arm. So I mean, the sales are much bigger than the original footprint of just the two we purchased. So when Rich says we have additional things in the pipeline, eventually, we now are to the point where we're becoming comfortable with underlying systems. We know how it's going work.

We can just anytime we add a distributor in the future, we'll be able to bolt them on and I think to go in that sense.

Speaker 2

And that distribution model is achieving exactly what we were after. If you recall, we talked about the strategy for acquiring distributions. Distribution was not so much purely a financial strategy. It was a strategy driven by our customers' needs. As we move to these more complex systems, cellular and E Series and Beacon, we need more boots on the ground.

We need to get closer to our customers. And we wanted to assure our customers that they would have some consistency from field service. By buying the distributors and rolling them up, we're able to get that consistency. And with those distributors, we're able to get incredible resources that we can deploy out in the field where we need them. So there's been a real benefit to us and to our customers as we've done that.

Speaker 4

Okay. That's very helpful. And then just anything kind of abnormal in terms of weather in the second quarter, either positive or negative?

Speaker 2

No. If anything, the weather front, I would say that I was a little nervous coming into the second quarter because as you remember, the first quarter was we had some mild weather in the first quarter. It was not a harsh winter in the North and the Northeast. So I was a little worried, did our customers start installing earlier, which would mean that maybe the second quarter would start to peter out. We haven't seen that.

And really the second quarter weather, there was nothing unusual in there that you've always got some regional flooding and stuff, but nothing that had a big impact on us.

Speaker 4

Okay. Excellent. Thanks very much guys.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Speaker 0

Thank you. And we have a follow-up from the line of Richard Eastman with Robert W. Baird. Your line is open.

Speaker 2

So you finished crunching the numbers and you've come back with another question.

Speaker 3

Yes, want to give you the number, Rich.

Speaker 2

You calculated it for us.

Speaker 3

Yes. I'm thinking it must have been $4,000,000 No, which then your revenue would have better matched our estimate. Hey, just a couple of things. Was there any uptick in the AWK sales in the quarter?

Speaker 2

Yes, there were. And in fact, I've got them.

Speaker 3

I mean just 2,000,003 million dollars if you could just kind of range it out a little bit or

Speaker 2

Let me put it this way. We're on a thank you. We are on track, I believe, to do about $8,000,000 this year. So we are yes, we did see an uptick in the second quarter, although certainly over the first quarter, but we see that through our whole business. But also, we're on track to do about $8,000,000 this year, and I think that's pretty good.

The issue with American Water has been, as you know, that it has taken us time to get all of their billing systems integrated. In American Water, the various subsidiaries of American Water, some of them use different billing systems, and all of that takes time. We're now getting there. There's a lot of interest in the cellular, and I think we're going to continue to see some good business growth on that one.

Speaker 3

Okay. And then just two other things. One is, I noticed just from your commentary, if you piece things together, your international sales again sounded weak, whether it be on the flow side or on the municipal side, the water side. And it's curious because again when you look at your geographic mix for all of 2016, your North American business across the board was pretty decent, was up. And all the rest of world geographies were down meaningfully.

And I'm just kind of curious, mean, what's maybe your take on that? I mean, we have two very different sides of the business, obviously, the meter side and then also on the industrial flow side. But what's your take on that? And when do you kind of think we can start to see a rebound in rest of world sales?

Speaker 2

Well, big issue in rest of world is The Middle East for us. That's where we have some really big opportunities. You know we did a big project with Qatar or Qatar, depending upon how you want to say it. And we're done. And we're done.

But that project came to an end. I'll probably say that project came to an end fortunately because there are some political issues that are restricting shipments into there. But we're done with that. And we had hoped by now to see some movement out of Dubai. We've been working with the DIVA, the water utility in Dubai for several years now.

We have our meters in there. They've been tested. They've been validated. And we're really waiting for some of the big orders from Dubai and hoping to see some. They haven't come yet.

I can't say when they will. That's the nature of The Middle East. We also have opportunities in other countries in The Middle East that also are very interested in that E Series meter. And so I think we still have we're still optimistic about what could happen there. But right now, we're just not seeing it, Rick.

Speaker 3

Yes. And we noticed that Itron won a UAE contract of some size. Is there the potential for you to be a meter vendor there?

Speaker 2

There is. Although, remember, winning a contract does not necessarily mean shipments, okay? And so I've been amazed at how many people have announced that they've won contracts in The Middle East and how few people have actually shipped product to The Middle East. So I think the follow-up question has to be exactly how much are you guys shipping. We haven't seen it yet.

So it'll but obviously, yes, there's an opportunity just like in The United States to put Itron radios on E Series meters. However, I'll remind you that in Europe, Itron has a water meter called the Iteris meter and they do sell it. So they would probably prefer to use that on those contracts.

Speaker 3

Yes. Okay. And just last question, Promise. Just in terms of the M and A pipeline, are there a couple other distributor prospects that are front of pipeline or anything else that just handicap maybe second half We ability to do

Speaker 2

have a couple more in the pipeline. Some of these are slow because we're not taking an aggressive position. We would like to find our distributors who we would like to acquire our distributors when they are comfortable selling to us. Sometimes that falls down into age, family issues, things of that sort. So we don't push really hard, but we do have a couple more that are in the pipeline.

Whether or not we'll be able to close one this year, I'm optimistic. I'd like to see us close one this year, But it might fall into next year.

Speaker 3

Okay, understood. Thank you again for your time.

Speaker 0

Thank you. And I am showing no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Mr. Musson for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us today. Obviously, we don't want to lose sight of the fact that we had a record quarter. Again, this is two record quarters in a row. Sales were impacted by that delay associated with the LTE. That is now, as my VP of Manufacturing says, going gangbusters, so we're pretty confident about that.

And we were very pleased with the bottom line. I think we've had some good pricing discipline. We're showing good margins. We've had good cost control, and we're continuing to deliver some real value for our shareholders. So we're very pleased with that.

We're optimistic about the rest of the year. And again, I just want to thank everybody for joining us. Thank you.

Speaker 0

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude the program, and you may all disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.