Badger Meter (BMI) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

Motley Fool Transcribing, The Motley Fool

Fri, April 17, 2026 astatine 11:29 AM CDT 35 min read

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Friday, April 17, 2026 astatine 11 a.m. ET

• Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer — Kenneth C. Bockhorst

• Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer — Daniel R. Weltzien

• Vice President — Robert A. Wrocklage

• Director of Investor Relations — Barbara Noverini

Kenneth Bockhorst: Thanks, Barbara, and bully morning. Before getting into the specifics of the quarter, I would similar to commencement by mounting the signifier for a much elaborate treatment connected our Q1 results and however we are reasoning astir our metering concern much broadly. We run successful a marketplace supported by beardown semipermanent macro drivers, recurring replacement cycles, and expanding adoption of precocious technologies ranging from our ultrasonic meters to industry-leading cellular AMI, beyond-the-meter solutions, and recurring bundle and analytics. These durable factors, combined with coagulated execution, person driven accordant worth instauration implicit time. At the aforesaid time, it has ever been existent that our concern tin beryllium uneven 4th to 4th and twelvemonth to year.

Over the 2023 to 2025 clip period, robust gross maturation driven by multiyear cellular AMI stock gains and overlapping task enactment reduced the visibility of this inherent unevenness. In mid-2025, we began to awesome that the gross publication from definite humanities AMI projects would diminution arsenic deployments concluded up of awarded but not yet started AMI projects. As a effect of this task pacing and backlog normalization dynamic, we antecedently communicated that our 2026 revenues would beryllium weighted toward the backmost fractional of the year. On leafage 3 of our net descent deck, you tin spot the interaction from task pacing successful our archetypal 4th 2026 revenue.

In addition, short-cycle bid rates, for which visibility is ever much limited, were weaker than we anticipated, resulting successful astir $15 cardinal to $20 cardinal of little gross versus our interior expectations. As a effect of those combined headwinds, archetypal 4th income were down 9% twelvemonth implicit twelvemonth to $202 million. While our expectations for a coagulated 2nd fractional person not changed, the softer commencement to the twelvemonth prompts america to expect full-year 2026 integrated gross to beryllium connected equilibrium with 2025. Normally, I would crook the telephone implicit to Daniel astatine this constituent to locomotion done the fiscal results successful detail.

However, successful airy of the below-expectation income results, I americium going to crook it implicit to Robert to locomotion done greater item connected this multilayered lawsuit dynamic. In short, Robert volition explicate our presumption that this archetypal 4th result is timing-related and does not bespeak a structural alteration successful either marketplace demand, our broader competitory position, oregon the semipermanent marketplace drivers of our business. Robert volition locomotion done a subset of anonymized details related to respective awarded but not yet started AMI projects that are expected to statesman deployment successful 2026.