Gibraltar Industries at Sidoti Small-Cap Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 19 March 2025, Gibraltar Industries (NASDAQ: ROCK) participated in the Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference, providing a strategic overview of its diverse business segments. The company highlighted its strong balance sheet and growth prospects, particularly in the Residential and AgTech sectors, while addressing potential challenges in the renewable energy market.

Key Takeaways

• Gibraltar Industries outlined strategic growth plans across its four business segments: Residential, Renewable Energy, AgTech, and Infrastructure.
• The company emphasized its strong financial position, with limited debt and a focus on mergers and acquisitions, particularly in the Residential and AgTech sectors.
• Concerns about potential changes to the IRA and their impact on the renewable energy sector were addressed, with confidence expressed in navigating regulatory uncertainties.
• The recent acquisition of Lane Supply is expected to enhance the AgTech segment, contributing to more predictable revenue streams.
• The company remains optimistic about growth opportunities and its ability to adapt to changing market conditions.

Financial Strategy

• Gibraltar Industries highlighted its robust balance sheet with limited debt.
• Capital deployment is primarily focused on mergers and acquisitions in the Residential and AgTech sectors.
• The company has a $200 million buyback program authorized, with potential for continued share repurchases.

Operational Updates

• Residential Segment: Represents about 60% of the business, focusing on building products and mail/package solutions. The segment benefits from USPS mandates in new home construction.
• Renewable Energy Segment: Concentrates on commercial and industrial solar projects, with a focus on state-level incentives to mitigate federal policy changes.
• AgTech Segment: Includes produce and other commercial markets, with growth driven by new builds, retrofits, and service revenue opportunities.
• Infrastructure Segment: Focuses on bridge components, benefiting from state and federal funding.

Future Outlook

• The AgTech segment is expected to see significant growth, with the Lane Supply acquisition enhancing revenue predictability and margin expansion.
• Gibraltar anticipates challenges in the renewable energy sector due to potential IRA changes but remains confident in managing these through strategic planning and past experience with similar disruptions.
• The company is committed to long-term growth across its diverse portfolio, leveraging its strong financial position and strategic acquisitions.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO Bill Bosway emphasized the company’s ability to sell a return on investment, particularly in the AgTech segment, driven by increasing demand and customer base expansion.
• The renewable energy segment’s challenges were discussed, with Bosway expressing confidence in navigating potential regulatory changes and cost pressures.

In conclusion, Gibraltar Industries presented a comprehensive strategy focused on growth and adaptability. For more detailed insights, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference:

Julio Romero, Sidoti & Company, Sidoti and Company: Conference. My name is Julio Romero, and I cover building products, industrials, and engineering and construction at Sidoti and Company. We’re really pleased to be able to host to broker industries. Their ticker is ROCK. With us today is Bill Bosway, chief executive officer.

The format of this is gonna be a presentation followed by by q and a from, myself as well as the audience. If you have any questions for Gibraltar, feel free to type them into the q and a section at the bottom of your screen, and I’m happy to ask at the end if time allows. With that, Bill, very much appreciate you being here, and the floor is yours.

Bill Bosway, Chief Executive Officer, Gibraltar: Thanks, Julio. Hey. Welcome, everybody. Let me just start give you I’ll give you a quick overview. Some of you may know us, some of you may not.

If you don’t, this may be helpful. But we have four, reporting segments that we talk a lot about. Residential, which is our largest segment, probably 60 of the business. Renewable energy, ag tech and infrastructure. And I’ll give just a little overview of each.

You know, in a residential segment, it’s probably something that we’ve been in longer than anything else within our portfolio. There’s really, three pieces of the business. Two of those three make up 95% of the business. One is our building products group. The other is mail and package.

And then we, do some home improvement as well. In our building products group, think about, everything that goes on around the roof. Not shingles, but trims, flashings, and ventilation. That is 85% repair. The rest is really new construction.

What drives the business is housing stock wears out, you have storm damage, and then obviously new construction. In mail and package, we are the largest provider of single point mail as well as centralized mail solutions. I’ve been at it quite a long time. That’s a really good marketplace. It’s got an actual moat built around it because USPS manages basically everything associated with it.

There’s some really interesting trends going on in that space, particularly with new home construction, as it relates to neighborhoods as USPS is mandating centralized mail, which we’re very strong in and and, so we’re excited to see that happen. Our renewable energy business is really solar. We’ve been in it since 02/2015 when we acquired into the space. Those do follow the industry. It’s been an interesting, you know, ride the last three years with everything going on inside it.

But effectively, if you think about the solar marketplace, there’s really two large buckets, when we think about the end markets. Now to clarify, we’re not in residential solar nor have we ever been. But the, the other two buckets I refer to as utility scale, and then we would call C and I commercial and industrial. We’re really in that commercial industrial space. We do very little, if any, in, in the utility scale space.

That what we call distributed generation or the C and I space is, you know, somewhere around a $2,000,000,000 market. And that’s really made up of racking. It’s made up of, EBOS and then field installation, all of which we do. And so that market, is, really in a size range of, say, between five and ten megawatts. And that’s our average size is seven to eight megawatt versus utility is probably really more between a 500 megawatt.

Competitively, we don’t really overlap with the folks that support utility versus C and I. And the business model is obviously a little bit different when you’ve got to design, manufacture, and install in the field, a smaller size project. We’ve done about 24 gigawatts worth of business, since we’ve gotten into the business. It’s about 5,800 different fields, over the last, ten years. We do probably two fifty fields a year plus.

It can, scope up and down. We have 200 different customers in the space. Most of them are developers and or smaller EPCs. And, you know, really, we’ve got strong leading positions, particularly in the Northeast or East Coast and and now evolving in the Midwest. The the strategy behind the business has been to to to have a portfolio of products that make sense for a piece of land.

So we’re the only really company that has city significance in tracking now tracking technology, whether it’s one p or two p, fixed tilt technology, canopy technology, and EBOS all under one roof. And the reason that’s important for us is when you get a piece of land, that someone wants to develop on, you really have to dig in and understand what type of technology makes the most sense for the return for that investment that that developer is gonna make. And that could be, tracker, could be fixed tilt, could be a combination of both. So we don’t really sell what we make. We sell a return on the piece of land and that’s why we built a portfolio.

Switching gears, we also had a business called AgTech. And AgTech actually came with our solar business when we acquired it, back in 02/2015. And it was actually one company. It had solar and it had, a greenhouse business combined. And the greenhouse business had been around really for eighty years.

And at the time, you weren’t sure exactly what we’re going to do with it. But subsequently, to that, we’ve really made a made a strong effort to build this into something we think is gonna be pretty interesting going forward. There’s a couple things about this business that that, you need to know. One, very similar to renewables, there’s a business process associated with structural engineering, the ability to design something for a piece of land, the ability to manufacture, and the ability to install and construct. We do the same thing with an AgTech facility as we would a solar field, except an AgTech facility is obviously more complex.

There are three businesses within this this space, if you will, or three end markets, I should say, we serve. One is the produce space. So think of produce as really, you know, food. It’s fruits and vegetables. There’s our traditional commercial classic space which has commercial growers for plants and flowers that you would buy at your big box retailer or through a nursery.

We do a lot of institutional work, which is either botanical gardens or we work with over a hundred different ag tech universities in The US building research facilities for the future of ag tech and growing environments. And then the third, end market is really a structures focus where we’re taking all our knowledge on building structures in general from structural engineering all the way through installation and construction into other end markets. So whether it’s car washes or canopies for, c stores or quick service restaurant drive thrus, travel centers, etcetera, all of that is very much the same and we leverage that accordingly. So we’ve been adding more end market exposure opportunities for us in that space. So it’s an interesting business.

Two things to kind of keep in mind. One, there’s more people than there is food, and that’s kind of a driver of the produce business, as well as all the ag tech research facility and work that we do with universities. And that’s not gonna go away, by any stretch of imagination. Also, secondly, recognize that about 1% of overall farming is indoor or in these controlled environment, facilities. And, so we don’t need the market.

The end market or more we don’t need, you know, people to eat more. We just need more farming to kinda move indoor, it doesn’t have to be a large percentage. You can take a pretty good sized market, increase at 1%, and it becomes that much, you know, doubles in size. So we think there’s a trend there that matters. It’s a well established space.

It’s been around for forty years. This is not vertical farming. This is actual controlled environment in indoor agriculture, which, has been around for quite a long time. So, we’re excited about the space. A lot more to do there.

This is a 2 and 1 and a half and 2 billion dollar annualized market. We think it’s gonna grow, you know, high single digits going forward just based on the investments we know are coming across the customer base, both in The US and Canada and the established business that is existing today. There’s probably 750 truckloads of fruits and vegetables going into The US from Canada every day, to all your large retailers that I’m sure most of you or many of you shop with. Very similar to to renewables, we do a lot of the same stuff. You give us a piece of land based on what you want to grow, then we will design everything from the structure that’s required and all the subsystems that go in, and then we’ll integrate them.

And then we’re gonna construct the entire thing for you and hand you the keys. So it’s a full service type of thing. We do new builds. We’ve been doing much more retrofit as well recently, and we also do we’re starting to generate some service revenue from operating some of these facilities, which is also relatively new. So that’s the business model.

We’re excited about it going forward. And then lastly, just touch on quickly is our infrastructure business. That’s a business that was once captured underneath our industrial business and reported that way but it really was never part of it. This business has done a lot of good things in the last three or four years, it’s been growing, it’s very good margins but effectively, we are focused on bridges, somewhat of a niche for us and it’s bearings and things of that nature, structural things that matter. We’ve probably had some benefit from the infrastructure bill but I would suggest that it’s been more of just our ability to operate a little bit better than we were before on a number of fronts.

It’s some new products that we brought to the table which I think have been helpful and we’ve got some other technology coming as well. So it’s an exciting business for us. It’s contributing a lot to the value of Gibraltar, and it’s one of those things we think will continue to be funded. If you recall, infrastructure effectively benefits from having bills like the infrastructure bill, but the way the bills actually work is they earmark money but you still have to go fight for what you need every year just as if the bill didn’t exist. So it comes from both state and federal funds and and it’s how well you’re positioned with the right contractors in the right states that are actually making investments is what drives the business ultimately at the end of the day.

So let me, that’s it on the respective four businesses. I’d say, you know, from a balance sheet perspective, very strong. We really don’t have any debt. That’s not ideal per se, but how we deploy capital going forward and what we’re looking to do mostly of is obviously M and A. I would say most of that’s going to be focused in residential or building products in general as well as some of the ag tech space.

We just recently finished or completed an acquisition called Lane Supply and AgTech. And you’ll see more CapEx or capital deployed in those two end markets going forward. Why not the others? Well, in the world of solar right now and renewables in general, I think everybody’s in a holding pattern trying to figure out what the new administration may or may not do with the current IRA. And I think once those things settle in and we get some clarity, then you’ll see more activity, from an NA front as an industry versus the last two years, which has not been a whole lot.

In infrastructure, I would say that’s probably not an area that we’re gonna invest too heavy in in terms of building out the platform at this stage. So, again, most of our capital deployment is gonna go towards, sustaining the business and acquiring into, those two end markets. We have, we’re finishing up a buyback program that we approved a couple years ago, $200,000,000 and I suspect we’ll continue to buy back shares going forward. We generate a lot of cash and, it’s a good problem to have, but, you know, it’s about deploying it going forward and building the businesses accordingly. With that, I will stop and see if there are any questions anyone might have on the businesses or anything else.

Julio Romero, Sidoti & Company, Sidoti and Company: Great rundown, Bill. Very much appreciate it. So just a reminder for folks on the line, if you have any questions for Gibraltar, feel free to type them in the Q and A section at the bottom of your screen. Happy to ask on your behalf. Maybe I’ll kick it off here with what you mentioned at the end, which was that Lane Supply acquisition.

It’s pretty notable in my view. It’s largest deal you guys have done, I think, since TerraSmart in late twenty twenty.

Bill Bosway, Chief Executive Officer, Gibraltar: Right.

Julio Romero, Sidoti & Company, Sidoti and Company: Goes into AgTech segment. If you could maybe expand on the quicker turn nature of the structural canopies business and how lane supply complements the legacy ag tech segment.

Bill Bosway, Chief Executive Officer, Gibraltar: Yeah, it’s a good question. So guys, when you look at those three end markets I talked about, the produce in particular, these are much larger projects. And, you know, if you you got to stack them over a period of time with a broader customer base to give you this clear cadence going forward on revenue and profitability. Right? Because if one of those projects were to move out of quarter two, it can be impactful quarter to quarter, but it washes out over a course of a year or so.

The lane business is a little bit different in that regard. It’s it’s the same type of business except for if you think about some of the large customers that, Lane’s been with for quite a while, they’ll get a plan for, you know, say 40 stores over the next, forty five weeks. The average project length of time is gonna be anywhere from seven maybe to ten days, maybe two weeks. So year one, you’re gonna get a backlog that’s kind of laid out in the near term with a cadence that is not dependent on one large project. So it gives you a I think a better foundation going forward to build off of for more predictability, etcetera.

And I think, you know, not outside of the end market being where we want to be, that’s a nice addition to the to the business, to where we can complement the large projects as well as the cadence that we get out of a a lane type business across the end markets that it serves. So we’re excited about that. It really does leverage what we’ve been doing for eighty years. You think about structural engineering, stamp drawings, manufacturing, construction, installation, that’s exactly what Lane does. They’re going to bring some things to the table that will help us and vice versa.

So there’s some nice synergy there but, there’s some technology in what they do, which is kind of interesting. And people will say, well, it’s a canopy. I mean, how hard is that? Well, what you don’t what you may not think about is, the technology that goes into just water management alone. And you’re running power through those canopies as you see them lit up.

So there’s a lot that goes into how to actually design based on what the customer’s looking for, the look and feel and and how to how do you actually, accomplish both those things effectively. Another way to think about it in a quick serve world is we partner with Chick fil A. You know, that’s kind of interesting, but what we really partner with is how do you move people through their store or outside their store in a much more efficient way than they have in the past because the trend is people don’t even want to go inside the fast food anymore. So you probably have all seen where those drive thrus are becoming two lane, three lane. Well, they may be up to six lane, but when we sit down and design with them, it’s all about flow of traffic.

It’s all about how do you protect more employees that are outside than inside, you know, the four walls. So a lot of interesting things happening there that we get involved in early on, that I think matter relative to the solution sets that come in moving traffic through things. And that’s why that canopy business for us is kind of interesting. There’s a marketplace that’s growing. There’s investments going into these type of end markets.

And the good news is there’s plenty of room to run, whether organic or inorganic in that space as well. So we’re excited about Lane. It’s accretive day one and, you know, they’ve got a very strong backlog as well. So more to come as we get into that. We’ve and they’ve now been part of Gibraltar about a month.

So, yeah, we’re excited what we’re seeing.

Julio Romero, Sidoti & Company, Sidoti and Company: And you said something interesting there, which was, you know, water running through these canopies. There’s efficiency aspects with Chick fil A too. So kind of like thinking about smart canopies of the future, so to speak. Can you talk to potential cross selling opportunities over the longer term, not near term, but from maybe adding some of the solar tracking products from your renewable segment to those lane supply canopies?

Bill Bosway, Chief Executive Officer, Gibraltar: Yeah. There’s a couple different angles here. There’s one. Almost every c store has a car wash or a lot do, and we build structures there. And so that’s kind of an interesting connection where you’re on-site doing that.

And you think about the broader site picture, that’s one thing. Secondly, we’re doing a lot of EV charging stations right now for a lot of these travel centers. So there’s a solar component there. And then thirdly, there’s the idea of you got customers who are thinking about how do you integrate solar into Canopy. And we do that and have been doing that for years at our core solar business.

So our solar team and our renewables team and our Lane group have already connected on that front. There’s some interesting opportunities, I think, collectively, because it’s not just about the technology and how you bring it together. It’s how you do it really cost effectively from soup to nuts so that the return, you know, ultimately comes together. And I’ll give you an example where we just finished up the last phase at Cincinnati Zoo, which is, I think, the second largest zoo in The US. We’ve effectively turned all its parking into a canopy solar structure to where now that zoo, 90% of its power comes from the canopies to run the zoo.

So you can apply that to a lot of different things, whether it’s a c store or otherwise, but how do you actually, do that cost effectively? And so, yeah, you have more and more people thinking about that. So there’s a lot of interesting dynamics around, you know, having different customer bases that you can pull together, but having some technology and some ideas of how to combine some things that maybe no one else is doing today. So, more to come on that as well, but everyone’s kind of chomping at the bit to get started. I’m trying to tell, hey, guys, settle down.

Let’s run the business. Let’s get laid on board and then, we’ll take off from there. So, yeah, more to come on that

Julio Romero, Sidoti & Company, Sidoti and Company: front. Absolutely. Definitely looking forward to it. Maybe just to touch on the legacy AgTech side, you talked about the three end markets that are the broad categories historically, but you can just give us some color as to the range of kind of sales outcomes over the next twelve to eighteen months.

Bill Bosway, Chief Executive Officer, Gibraltar: Yes. Listen, I think ag tech in general, even without Lane, is going to be a pretty big contributor to Gibraltar’s success over the next couple of years and beyond. And part of that is we’ve done a pretty good job in the last two years of expanding our customer base, particularly in our produce world, where there’s been significant investment continuing to flow into that. And so you have pretty large companies that are now jumping in, Cox Communications, which I think probably most people know. I know they’re private, but, you know, they’re $60,000,000,000 company and they have gone full tilt into this space and now are the largest controlled environment agriculture company in North America, and they’ve done all that in the last two years, maybe three years, sorry.

And it’s, you know, investment of just in that short period of time, maybe close to $3,000,000,000 So, I I think that, one, you’ve got this in demand of product where people want more of it, and you see that every day. You’ve got investment coming in in a big way, and you’ve got an installed base of growers that have been around for four generations that earlier, you know, invested in doing this and and, I think are gonna make more and more investment. So I do think that produce piece is gonna be a big contributor. And when we get through q one, you’ll see the type of, activity that’s going on. I mentioned in our earnings call, you know, we just signed up another 40,000,000 or so of new contracts.

That wasn’t all produce. We had some pretty big projects with universities that we’re doing for research facilities for ag tech. But since that time, there’s been even more activity. So, you know, it’s just a matter of just keep keep, keep the churn going and and stay connected with your customers, broaden your customer base. And we gotta do more than just new build.

So, you know, a a big chunk, I’d say relatively big chunk of some of our new business is going in major retrofits. So we’re working on a project now that’s an existing facility that we’re gonna retrofit over multiple phases over the next couple of years. The greenhouse itself is five miles long and it’s a mile deep. So to give you an idea of the magnitude of that type of opportunity to win that project but to, again, do that from a retrofit perspective, it’s it gives you a lot of other things that maybe new build wouldn’t. One, you learn a lot, but secondly, it broadens the customer base.

And, you know, your name gets out there pretty quickly that you can go help people transition from one crop to another. And that’s not as easy as people think. All the subsystems can change and so on and so forth. So, you know, I think it’s new builds, it’s retrofits, and now we’re getting customers asking us to come actually perform day to day maintenance or be their operating maintenance kind of group. That’s early, but, that’s an interesting development as well.

And that just comes from the guys that run our business. We’re once these growers in these controlled environment facilities, they understand what our customers are going through and what they need to consider or how they should consider. They are experienced indoor farming people, and that’s makes a difference when you’re thinking about retrofitting or new build or actually maintaining something. And that’s new to us in a sense we brought built that team up the last couple years, and it’s really been impactful. And there’s more folks like that out there, I think, that will join the team going forward.

But that’s meaningful when you think about trying to drive the business. So, excited about that. I think in our core business that’s been around for a long time, that’s more steady eddy type type of stuff, but there’s still a lot of investment going on at the university level that matters. There’s, a lot of expansion that comes in. It it more ebbs and flows a little bit on the expansion for commercial growers that are doing plants and flowers.

But, you know, that’s a good steady business for us that that, that we like that’s profitable, and we’ve been in it for eighty years. And then I just mentioned the structures business. It’s not just the lane acquisition, but we’ve been in structures for some time. We’ve been doing car washes and and kinda unique applications, and we’re seeing that, also, you know, pay some dividends. So we’ve simplified the business, believe it or not.

Even though we have three segments, we used to have six. And so how we’re focusing the team, the type of talent we need to run or to be involved in each of those segments has been a lot of work. But, and by no means do I wanna paint a perfect picture. We’ll never do that. But the opportunity to drive margins north of 15% to drive growth, at a much higher rate are, are gonna be here sooner than we think with with AgTech.

So we’re pretty excited about that.

Julio Romero, Sidoti & Company, Sidoti and Company: Really helpful. You know, on the renewable segment, you talked about solar as kind of in a holding pattern of sorts. If you, can you just talk about what kind of needs to change to get more community solar projects in the future?

Bill Bosway, Chief Executive Officer, Gibraltar: Yeah. I I, you know, so if you step back and say, well, what’s going on now? You know, the biggest thing that people are thinking about right now is what is the new administration gonna do with the IRA? And so when we built our plan this year, the one thing that we wanna do is put some, you know, put some bookends around what could happen with the IRA, what would that mean to the business. So we came out and said, look, the business can be flattered down.

I’ll explain that in a bit if people are interested. But but we don’t think it’s gonna be a nuclear option, and we don’t think it’s necessarily gonna be status quo, but it also may not be any impact in 2025. If any change comes to the IRA, it’s gonna be through some reconciliation bill. We get updates every day that’s being worked on, or if it’s being worked on or not, what’s gonna fall on the purview of that. And I think people also need to keep things in perspective.

There’s a number of red states that are very supportive of solar. People may not realize the largest state that, the most solar that we have in any given state is the state of Texas. So, you know, it’s important, and you’ve got a lot of people supporting out on both sides of the aisle. I I think I I break it down into real simple ways, and I’m not suggesting I know anything what’s going on in DC. Maybe I’m not smart enough to be there or don’t know how to play that game.

But regardless, think about 45 x as a benefit today. It’s really a tariff. It’s a tariff in a positive way for those that are in the industry because you get the benefit if you’re local with what, you know, you’re making with Tracker. You get a tax benefit for that. Right?

Thinking about the ITC benefit, same thing. But what they may wanna do to that is tie it to more to domestic manufacturing. And if they do so, it’s effectively a tariff, which fits within, you know, kind of the framework of where the administration’s thinking right now. So, you know, those are the two big ones I think matter. The PTC matters as well for a lot of our customers.

And if those kind of get worked out, then I think, you know, things would be fine. That all being said, if there’s some changes to it, I think we’ll still be fine. And the reason for that is think about two things. Before the IRA, all we had was an ITC, and it went away every three years, and it and it reduced every three years before it had to get renewed again. Right?

So you’re living in that world, but that’s all you had, and we were growing at 20%. So that’s great. So we got stripped back to something like that, maybe it would be okay. The only difference is, you know, the the the panel cost is higher today because of the DOC investigations. But but ultimately, you know, I think those are the three things that matter most.

And once we get some clarification on that, great. If those things get phased down sooner than the ten year cycle, that’s probably okay as well. People just wanna know what the rules are then they can go. But here’s the thing you always gotta remember. We were sitting with a customer just a couple weeks ago and he said, we’re like, well, what do you think about the IRA and what’s gonna happen?

He goes, yeah, you know, I don’t really care as much as you might think. He goes, I care but I can’t worry about it. And I was like, well, why not? Well, the project that we’re signing today, I’ve been working on for four years. I’ve got $5,000,000 invested in a project I started four years ago when I bought the land.

I’ve been tied up in doing permitting and all this other stuff. So the average length of project for a c and I type project is six years. For utility, it’s even greater. So these guys aren’t gonna pack up their tents and go away just because they would have done that over the last three years based on everything that that was thrown in their face. So, you know, I think people will navigate through whatever comes.

And so that’s one thing. Secondly, you know, there’s a lot of incentives at the state level that people may not remember or realize. And so as you track where those are and and, each of those states and what they’re doing, that’s kind of a roadmap to for a C and I perspective that you would follow and and go forward with. So I would say our view is we’re gonna continue to work the Northeast and the East Coast where we’ve always been strong. We’ve been moving more in the Midwest, but we’re doing it state by state based on the local incentives those states have put in place and the mandates that they have.

And those probably don’t change as it relates to the IRA, but there’s still attractive benefits there that weren’t there five years ago. Right? So, yeah, you might have higher cost of panels, but you have incentives in place at the state level that weren’t there five years ago. The IRA gets moved or changed and so bit, so be it. But when you throw it up on the wall and you go, alright, well, let’s wash it out and see what it looks like, You know, is it really gonna be a bad picture?

And I don’t think so. The last thing I’d say in the whole front, just as people think about tariffs right now and I know there’s a lot of noise around that, and I understand it. But here’s the deal. Two and a half years ago, hot old coal steel was $2,100 a ton. It’s $900 today.

And that’s gone up from $700 in the last month because of the pending tariffs that are coming. We’re not going to see $2,100 done. On top of that, the supply chain issues associated with the high cost two and a half years ago were extraordinary. They don’t exist today. So there’s an inherent global demand situation now that probably doesn’t support even with tariffs stuff running through, like we saw two and a half years ago.

And guess what? We got through two and a half years ago. There’s a playbook out there that says, here’s what you need to do. For each of your respective businesses, dust it off, button it up and apply the new inputs and then work it from there. And that’s effectively what, you know, we did in January.

It’s kind of how we thought about the levers we were gonna need to pull and win. And as things evolve, we’ll evolve with it. But voice assured, believe it or not, I can’t believe I’m saying it out loud, as much as it’s causing people anxiety, I was thinking about the $50 a week increase for fifty straight weeks that we were seeing with steel and aluminum two and onetwo years ago, and we got through that. So I’m not saying I like the situation right now. I do think it’s causing some pause, and everyone reads about that every day.

But it’s not as extraordinary as what we saw two and a half years ago. So, we’ll be ready. We’ll work through it. I’m sure it’ll be bumpy along the way for everybody in in some regards, but, you know, we’ve been there, done that. And and so let’s focus in.

If it’s 25%, that probably floats through to your product cost to something less and, you know, there are levers to pull once you understand that and you go work it in the industry or you work with your customers. And it’s not rocket science. The question is gonna be, if anything, does it do anything to end demand? And I think, ultimately, no. Not as much as people might think.

I think there are other forces that will impact demand that, we’re already dealing with and have been dealing with, more so than than this. But I do think it’s causing people right now to to wait and see because they don’t know they just need to know what is it gonna be, what’s gonna happen on April 2 and if anything’s gonna happen after that. So we’ll work through it, but, you know, that’s how we’re attacking, today’s environment. You know, you you know what you gotta do, put your plans in place, be ready to roll, can’t control what you can’t control, so focus on what you can. And, we’re kinda back to two and a half years ago or when we went into COVID for honestly, it was this very similar feeling with what’s gonna happen.

Right? So, you know, we’ll work through it, but we’re fairly confident in our ability to manage

Julio Romero, Sidoti & Company, Sidoti and Company: it. Excellent. Bill, thanks so much. Laurie, everyone at Gibraltar and the LA CHA team as well, really appreciate you all taking the time.

Bill Bosway, Chief Executive Officer, Gibraltar: Yeah. Anytime. Appreciate everyone, joining us as well. Reach out if you wanna talk anymore. Take care.

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