Robert Wrocklage
Analyst · Ryan Connors with Boenning & Scattergood. Your line is open
Yes. So again, we try not to and have not historically commented on individual components, but I’ll try to give you color to sort of frame out the magnitude. So primary, again, of the drivers, the largest driver in the quarter of the 240-basis-point expansion and gross margin is mix. And so that, I would break that into really two elements. The first is product mix. So where we – while we were down overall, where we did see growth was in higher margin profile products, like Ultrasonic meters, meters with radios, and then certainly BEACON software-as-a-service, so those tend to be above line average. So, you see some margin accretion from that. The second piece of mix is really regional mix. So, while we had to overcome a tough comp with $2 million of Middle East sales a year ago, as everyone knows, those were below line average sales, and so that didn’t recur. So, that’s kind of a mixed story. Within the cost bucket or price cost bucket, certainly we’ve got an element of our business albeit small that is linked to list pricing. On the water utility side, about 25% of our businesses is through external distribution, which has a closer tie to list pricing. And again, we’ve done a price increase on January 1st in that line of business. And then on the flow instrumentation side, we’ve done a price increase in October of last year. So, you see small amounts of price that’s naturally coming through as a result of those, but really it’s on the cost side not necessarily the price equation, but the cost side copper, PAM. Again, if you just look at copper as a proxy for our input, kind of in the 280 range now versus a year ago being $3.10, $3.15. So that’s the cost on that. But the other important piece is, while we did see order deferrals related to the launch of LTE-M, we did launch the LTE-M. And so that radio, as we’ve talked about historically has a lower cost position. And so, while the volume is – wasn’t as high as we would have liked, we did reap a cost benefit from that improved cost position. So when you add all those together, that’s really what’s driving kind of the different components of our gross margin improvement year-over-year.