Hi, everyone, and welcome to our private client call with Daktronics and CFO Sheila Anderson. We've got a great morning ahead, and Sheila will present Daktronics, and then we'll have some one-on-one meetings after that. Sheila, are you there?
Good morning, Chris. I am here. Thank you.
Okay.
Can you hear me?
Okay, we can hear you well. So, yes, we can hear you. So, please, please go ahead.
Okay, great. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for attending. My name is Sheila Anderson. I'm the Daktronics Chief Financial Officer. At Daktronics, we help our customers inform, entertain, and persuade audiences through dynamic audiovisual communication systems. Here are example displays and solutions that we design, we manufacture and service for our customers over the lifetime of those displays. Our displays and solutions are used by a variety of customer types.
They can include sports venues, transportation operators, and can be used in indoors, like at corporate headquarters, museums, retail stores, military applications, and control centers, to name a few. As a reminder, we are going to be talking about forward-looking information here, that information may change. Please refer to our Securities and Exchange Commission filings for further information and risk factors.
Daktronics is the number one North American LED video display provider, and the third largest by market share globally. We just completed our fiscal year in April, and we've grown to and generated $818 million in revenue for that fiscal year. So why should you invest in Daktronics? Our mission is to support our customers to inform, entertain, and persuade their customers and audiences. We are the best in class in our industry and are the only US manufacturer of scale with a global footprint.
What differentiates us from our competitors is our US base, our technology leadership, the high quality of our solutions, and our high touch service. Our target markets are large and growing, with resilient demand, driven by audience experience and customers and sports fan engagement.
After addressing the operational challenges we experienced during the pandemic and refinancing our balance sheet at the beginning of last fiscal year, we are poised to drive financial results by capturing growth and market share on the strength of our long-term customer relationships, our global sales and service infrastructure, our continuous innovation on displays, control systems, and content creation, and that content creation and services are becoming a greater component of the visual communication experience.
Daktronics provides interconnected systems to help our customers engage their fans. Here you can see in our live event segment, we sell into major arenas like the Detroit Tigers facility, as well as into colleges and universities and other venues that showcase live performances. These sales are generally direct. Our High School Park and Recreation segments sell increasingly sophisticated traditional scoring and video displays for enhanced sporting applications and other curriculum usage that emulate those used by the bigger sports teams, and that are more and more often incorporating content and local advertising.
These relationships are maintained directly and through reseller and other sales channels. In our commercial segment, we serve large projects like in Times Square and Las Vegas, like the Circa display in Las Vegas, Times Square, there's Morgan Stanley system, for example, and others also in the billboard dynamic applications and self-promotion, both indoor and outdoor. We leverage an existing reseller network and AV integrator channel for our distribution in this segment.
In transportation, we are pre-qualified in all 50 states to offer displays, to manage traffic on roadways, and to communicate in railway stations and airports. Our international segment focuses on these markets that are outside of the U.S. and Canada, with the exception of China itself, and for displays like in HSPR. Our control capabilities enable our customers to operate and run the displays, show content that is inviting and engaging, and maintains the physical health of the display. So here are how those segments break down by revenue and gross profit.
Live Events is roughly 40% of the business, and we've earned a 28.4% gross profit in fiscal 2024. In Commercial, that gross profit was 21.2% and is roughly equates to 20% of our overall sales volume. In Transportation, that's roughly 10% of our business and a 30.5% gross profit. International is, again, outside of the U.S. and Canada from a geographic perspective, and around 9% of our business at 14.2% gross profit. In High Schools, we earned a 33.7% gross profit and about 21% of our sales for fiscal 2024.
To earn that revenue, we have this global footprint. That's a differentiator that puts us close to our customers to maximize quality, support, and service. We're headquartered in Brookings, South Dakota, with manufacturing here in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and operate a factory in Minnesota. These factories provide approximately 80% of the revenue. We also have manufacturing capabilities in Ireland and in China. We have sales and service team members across the country and around the world to effectively reach and support the long-term market needs. For fiscal 2024, we had a terrific year.
We executed on a number of strategies and made progress towards our long-term initiatives. Some of our highlights included: We refinanced the company to ensure we have the resources available to serve our customers and build long-term value for our shareholders. We executed consistently to incrementally raise the base profitability of the business by allocating resources to growing business segments and the most profitable projects.
We also generated substantially higher cash flows through our increased profitability and our management of working capital, and through efforts such as reduction in inventory levels post the supply chain correction. On the product front, we continue to innovate to maintain our technology leadership, as seen in releases like the additional narrow pixel pitch product lines used primarily in indoor applications.
With respect to our end market penetration, our teams deepened our relationships with AV integrators and new customer areas to reach growing markets. As an example, we delivered displays to a number of military sites this past year. We laid the essential groundwork for our digital transformation strategy, making progress in our services systems areas, and in investing in enterprise performance management software. In our facilities, we've further optimized our operations and manufacturing and site fulfillment processes as we've returned to serving customers within market lead times.
As we look ahead, we continue to see profitable growth. This slide describes the exciting and durable opportunity we enjoy in the global LED market as measured by Futures ource. Our market share in North America is roughly 45%, and outside the North American geography, it's roughly 5%, excluding China. Futures ource predicts that our market will grow to roughly $20.8 billion by calendar year 2027, from nine point three billion for calendar 2023. They predict growth in all areas and products where Daktronics does business or has the capabilities.
To highlight the charts that shows narrow pixel pitch growth, NPP, we've invested in those product lines from fiscal year twenty eighteen to fiscal 2020 and continue to release new derivatives of that product. Those were available just prior to the pandemic and now are also highlighting that there's much growth to be expected post-pandemic. This chart also highlights growth in our standard displays. Overall, our target markets are large and growing, with resilient demand drivers by our customers' desires to improve their audiences' experiences in the sports, commercial, and transportation environments.
More specifically, we are focused on profitable growth by capturing more of our serviceable available market, by expanding our share of customer spend, adding new customers, developing control options, and expanding the services we offer. Of course, future growth is subject to lumpiness and seasonality for our business. Our industry leadership and market share derives from the diversity of the customers and applications that we serve and our growing ubiquity across our addressable market segments. Here are some examples, like the Seattle Kraken Arena has a unique display.
In Times Square, we have this unique display as well. The traffic displays through Minneapolis are located on this slide and in High Schools and businesses in your local communities. There's lots of examples here. Another best-in-class differentiator for Daktronics is our full service offering. This slide shows that our business cycles that we nurture our global relationships with repeat customers.
These processes start with our innovative designs, often developed in collaboration with our customers, that are then proven in our reliability lab, that realistically tests our products under the conditions to which the display will be subject, to ensure peak performance over the life of the product. It then proceeds to manufacturing in our strategically placed facilities under strict quality controls by our highly skilled teams, and then to installation and ongoing support to ensure our customers are knowledgeable about how to use the display and ensure it is operating well.
Our delivery of innovation, collaboration, quality, and high-touch service solidifies our customer relationships around the world, many of whom come back to us time after time, sometimes over decades, or they come to us after having tried a lower-priced competitor. Our customers use our displays for an average of 7-10 years, sometimes 15 years, and then come back to us for replacement as technology and customer experience needs evolve.
We continue to foster our relationships with our repeat customers and resellers, and have and are building out ways for them to engage through automation and online solutions. Over time, we have been successful in driving our growth through innovation and technology leadership, either ahead of or in lockstep with our addressable markets growth, development, and increasing sophistication as visual communication has permeated every aspect of the customer experience.
Today, we're enjoying the growth and earnings returns of our investments in our narrow pixel pitch line, as well as high-resolution outdoor solutions. We are investing in future potential technologies to poise us for growth in furthering narrow pixel pitch and micro LED, as well as with reflective low power displays, intelligent power management systems, and software-as-a-service control systems. Future opportunities include transportation, international, and street-level advertising markets, along with furthering AV integrator applications.
The pandemic created a dynamic environment for our company. At the beginning, there wasn't a lot of people gathering, but we turned then from fiscal 2023, improving the profitability at the end of that fiscal year to fiscal 2024, furthering profitability, and then into fiscal 2025, we continued to build on our accomplishments from fiscal 2024. We've implemented a set of initiatives for fiscal 2025 to continue to drive future revenue, growth, and returns. We're not done with our efforts to enhance the return on invested capital that our business can deliver.
We're focused on different initiatives and priorities on the backbone of commitments to improve return on capital and consistently earning returns above our cost of capital. These priorities include taking the next steps in our digital transformation to enhance our internal systems. These include modernizing our field service systems, enterprise performance management tools, and automating quoting and sales processes.
Our digital transformation will provide greater insights into our business and end markets, allowing us to continue to guide our investments to our most profitable business segments, and to pursue growth through expanding our share of these customers' spend.
Our second initiative is to continue to further penetrate our addressable markets through innovation, allocating resources and capital to our most profitable opportunities, and adding professional services, control systems, and other content to drive MRR, ensuring that we're driving returns as we help customers achieve success on their investments in our offerings. Third, we're taking steps in parallel to lower our overall costs to operate the business and increase market competitiveness.
This includes increasing the flexibility of our capacity and our plants, manufacturing allocation and utilization, adjusting our production and capabilities to smoothly manage order flow and boost operational effectiveness. With these initiatives, we will continue to advance many existing elements of our strategy and our competitive differentiation, including our premium value proposition, our US design, fulfillment, and high-touch services, our key investments in control systems, and our unique culture of lifetime services to our customers.
In conclusion, we are the global industry leader in video communication with best-in-class products and service offerings. We're differentiated by our US scale, our global manufacturing and servicing footprints, and our technology leadership. Our markets are large and growing with resilient demand drivers, and we're poised to accelerate our growth, profit expansion, and cash flow generation after addressing the challenges of the pandemic years. With that, I would open it up for any questions.
Okay, thanks, Sheila. If you do have a question, you could please ask it in the GoToWebinar questions section. We'll start with some questions of our own, and then we'll hand it over to the... If there's any questions. Can you share anything with your relationship with Stan Druckenmiller and his approximate 5% position in Daktronics?
We, like all of our investors, have meetings with investors, and it's a standard relationship that we've given them the same information we're providing today about Daktronics.
Okay, thanks. Are you seeing other opportunities comparable to the large video boards that Steve Ballmer is incorporating into his new Intuit Dome in Los Angeles?
I've got the picture of the Intuit Dome here, that Daktronics did provide that solution to Steve's team and facility. We do see the use of technology like this, it continuing to evolve and be used, and we do expect in the future that there will be systems like this that we will work on.
Great. Are you seeing recurring revenue opportunities in some control systems and content? And would you expect that over time to be a meaningful part of the business?
We do. We currently have recurring revenue in our control systems and some of the content creation, and the content creation that we provide. It's a small portion of our revenue today, but we do expect that we can find ways to continue to offer valuable services that would be provided in a recurring revenue format, and likely that will grow to not a significant portion of our business, but a more meaningful, profitable part of our business.
You know, so when you're how would you think about that as far as continuing expansion in military?
Military is a great end market for us. We have worked to build relationships with AV integrators that serve military facilities, and we continue to believe our narrow pixel pitch product line is a great resource and a need usable by the military, like it is for other control centers that perhaps used LCD screens in the past, now are using LED narrow pixel pitch product lines.
We don't have a specific amount that we've noted to the street on the amount of military today, but we more broadly look at the narrow pixel pitch opportunity as with military, as one of the market verticals, and continue to invest in that selling channel, the AV integrator networks and the various conferences that decision makers go to, and conventions. But we see that growing, and that investment in Narrow Pixel Pitch product line is a key to that success.
Can you talk more about your new flip-chip technology? You know, what are the benefits there? And what are you seeing as far as contribution into revenue and margins?
Sure. It's a, technically, that it's helping us to, run and create a display that offers great resolution and crisp images. It also helps overall lower the cost of producing displays in that, that range. And along with the, the kind of the class of Narrow Pixel Pitch product lines, we get into the MicroLED. We believe that these technologies and advancements and processes, the, and the constructs, will help overall continue to lower the price of a, a display and open up the market further for, for the use of those types of displays.
What are you seeing internationally? Can you comment on there? How is growth there?
Sure. International was really contracted during the pandemic timeframe. We haven't seen the same sort of recovery yet internationally, but we are seeing more and more quoting activity, and believe that as some of the geopolitical events subside, that could raise the international selling volume.
And then last on my end. For recurring revenue, how is the margins there relate to overall margins?
Sure. Like I've mentioned, that the overall percent of sales for our recurring revenue is low, maybe a couple of percent. We would expect and see that the cost of delivering those recurring services or content or control system applications is much less, so, you know, It would be higher than the overall average of 27% is our gross profit for fiscal 2024. We'd expect, you know, double that likely in that sort of revenue stream.
Okay, well, sounds good. Are there any more questions from the audience? So please, I would say ask them now. I'm just now uploading our most recent Daktronics research report in the section. It looks like it's just gonna finish uploading now. So if you'd like to download it, you could do so now. Sheila, do you have any final remarks?
No, I appreciate everyone's time for listening in today. If you have further questions, you can reach out to investors@daktronics.com.
Great. Thanks, Sheila. I hope everyone has a good start to their day, and that concludes the webinar.
Thanks, all. Bye-bye.