Good afternoon. We're going live with Daktronics. I'm going to give it a couple of seconds for the audience to populate before we kick it off. Okay, so good afternoon, everyone. We have Daktronics with us here, ticker DAKT. I'm Anja Soderstrom, a senior equity analyst here at Sidoti , covering the name. My research is available on our website, and with me, I have Brad Wiemann, the Acting CEO, and Howard Atkins, the Acting CFO, and this will be conducted as a presentation by the management, and that will be followed by Q&A, so if you would like to participate, you can submit your question in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. And with that, I'm happy to hand it over to you guys. Welcome.
Okay, thanks, Anja, and welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. This is Brad Wiemann. Like Anja said, I'm acting CEO for another week. We'll have a new CEO starting up on February 1st, Ramesh Jayaraman. So we're excited to have him come aboard and join us, so this is really enjoyable, interesting times for us, but I want to tell you about Daktronics, a little bit about myself. I've been here, I'm a veteran of the company, been here for 30+ years in a variety of different roles, but business development and running a number of our businesses, and been in the CEO role for the last year. Really enjoyed it, and I'll tell you a little bit about the company. If you don't know a lot about Daktronics, first of all, all you have to do is look up and you'll see Daktronics.
When you go to any sporting event, whether it's major league sports or college university or even a high school, you're going to see scoreboards, video displays, everything front and center. If you're out on the freeway, you'll see us in digital billboards. You'll see us in information displays over the roadway for traffic information signs. When you go by a business and you see a digital sign up front or a fuel price display, we all have to do that. You're likely seeing Daktronics. If you go mass transit, yeah, we all go to airports. Digital signs, parking, wayfinding, curb signs, welcome signage, gate displays, advertising. We do really cool things. What about the displays you don't see? You don't see the military or the traffic control rooms or corporate headquarters or the biggest displays in the world. Maybe in Times Square, you've seen those.
But how about Qatar or even Australia? We have installations over 120 countries. We provide products to over 12,000 customers worldwide or 12,000 annually. What we do is very visual, but behind the scenes, we have developed the best talent in the industry who help our customers achieve their vision using dynamic audio-visual communication systems. And these are designed and manufactured right here in our U.S. factories. More on that later. Of course, we'll be talking about past and the future today, and that includes risk. Please read the safe harbor statement and take this into consideration when we share information with you today. Our trailing 12 months revenues through Q2, Q2 of second quarter of 2026, which is October 31st, about $770 million. We're the number one North American LED video display provider and the largest growing American brand by revenue. Why should you consider investing in Daktronics?
In a nutshell, Daktronics is a world-class business with an unmatched culture of excellence from the quality of our engineering, manufacturing, and installation expertise, our solution-oriented sales team, to our commitment to customer service throughout the entire lifetime of the display system use. What differentiates us is that we're best in class in our industry and the only U.S. manufacturer of scale with a global footprint. What I mean here is that we excel in providing world-class customizable LED video solutions, and we can do this turnkey: sales, design, project management, installation, control systems, and service, and in addition, we have a standard set of solutions that help many customers, and we deploy those through partners, channel partners, sign companies, and AV integrators. Our target markets are large and growing with resilient demand driven by advertising, audience experience, and sports fan engagement.
This slide articulates the business units, the end markets we serve, and control capabilities. In our live events segment, we sell into major arenas like the Akron RubberDucks shown here. We also sell to colleges and universities and have other venues that showcase live performances. Our high school parks and recreation segment sells increasingly sophisticated traditional scoring and video displays for enhanced video applications that emulate those at larger sports teams. These projects often incorporate Daktronics Sports Marketing financial solutions for funding sources. In our commercial segment, we serve large projects like you find in Times Square or Las Vegas. But what is often overlooked is our out-of-home business. We're the largest supplier of digital billboards along freeways or our extensive line of products for on-premise applications such as fuel pricing and digital displays. Here, we leverage an extensive sign company network for distribution.
In transportation, we are pre-qualified in all 50 states to offer displays to help manage traffic on roadways and visual communication systems at railway stations and airports. Our international market segment is a growth area for us to mimic all we do in North America, but on an international basis. In our control capabilities, enable our customers to operate their displays to show content that is inviting, engaging. In addition, it provides us a subscription-based SaaS model for ongoing revenue generation. Our industry leadership and market share derives from the diversity of customers and applications that we serve along with our growing brand identification for both core and adjacent applications across our addressable market segments. Here is a look back over the past 12 months to see revenue by segment. Today, we're focused on further diversifying our business to drive long-term growth and profitability.
From a manufacturing perspective, here's our footprint. About 80% of the products that we manufacture, 80% of the revenue that we do for Daktronics comes out of our factories here in the U.S. You can see our Brookings and Sioux Falls plants. Manufacture a lot of these products for high school park and recreation, out-of-home advertising and live events, as well as transportation. Our Redwood Falls, Minnesota facility, about 90 minutes from Brookings. Manufactures our commercial applications for on-premise advertising. Then we head to Ireland, supports a lot of our European work and international work, as well as Shanghai, China, which serves many of our different geographies. We've invested in a new facility in Saltillo, Mexico, that will come online in this coming April, May timeframe. So we're excited to see that also join part of our overall planning and scalability for our growth objectives.
We have a great customer list. They buy from us because we're the best in class and support them through the life of the products. Our delivery of innovation and collaboration with them, quality and high-touch service solidifies our customer relationships really around the world. Our customers use our displays on average for about seven to 10 years, sometimes longer, and then come back to us for upgrades. We continue to foster relationships with repeat customers and resellers and are building out ways to engage them through automation and online solutions. Over time, we've been successful in driving growth through product innovation and technology leadership, either ahead of or in lockstep with our addressable markets growth, as visual communication has permeated every aspect of the customer experience.
Today, we are enjoying the growth and returns on our investment in our narrow pixel pitch product lines, our indoor offerings, as well as high-resolution outdoor solutions. We are also investing in future technologies to position us for growth and furthering our narrow pixel pitch product lines through micro-LED technologies, as well as reflective, low-power displays, intelligent power management, and SaaS control solutions. With respect to business transformation, a year and a half ago, we went through a major initiative. We brought on an outside consulting firm to help us to look at the company and organize around it. We developed a number of initiatives around digital transformation and business transformation in the process of implementing those. We made progress on these initiatives that line up very well. Our implementation plans on track and driving results.
We've done another number of actions to date, including price adjustments through value-based pricing on products and services aligned with that value selling, allowing us to preserve our value-based products and service positioning. We have launched software as a service trials to target customers. We have a focused approach to prioritize growth areas both in geographies as well as verticals. We are driving faster turnover of our inventory and improved inventory efficiency by leveraging our platform designs. We released a modernized service control software that will help us to provide an enhanced customer experience through better service management and enablement of service options. We are furthering the utilization of previously released AI-guided troubleshooting and technical services. We are making increased use of our purchasing power to improve input costs, and we're simplifying many of our products to allow us to bring them to market more quickly.
Our second quarter closed at the end of October, like I mentioned, and we posted solid quarterly results. Project execution was excellent, and we are expanding on our revenue, growth, and profits. A number of nice installations that we went through are listed here: Zayed Sports City in Abu Dhabi, Baltimore Orioles, Miami Freedom Park, Philly Airport, San Antonio Spurs, Cincinnati Convention Center. That's just a sampling of those. We had our third consecutive quarter of top-line growth. Our transformation objectives are underway, yielding desired results, all leading to a strong backlog, creating a multi-quarter revenue runway. Orders up are 12% year- over- year. With that, I'll turn this over to Howard Atkins, our Acting CFO, to present highlights to our second quarter financials. Howard?
Thank you, Brad. This chart shows you our second quarter actual results, which were released on December 10th, compared with a year ago. You can see the year-over-year comparisons, as well as compared with the first quarter of 2026. You can see the sequential quarter. At the second line from the bottom, you see adjusted net income up $17.5 million versus $13.9 million a year ago. Keep in mind, a year ago was actually depressed by the adjusted fair value adjustments that we took on a convertible note that we had at the time, which has since been converted.
That note has now been converted, and that'll be the last time we have a fair value adjustment on such a note. The only other thing I'd point out for reference on adjusted net income, if you remember the big, beautiful tax bill this year does allow depreciation on certain R&D and other capital expenses.
We will be able to avail ourselves of that as we go through the year as long as we are profitable. So that should, and we'll report on that as we go through the year in terms of what the actual impacts are. So currently, we're looking at an effective tax rate of about 20%. Let me now turn to our operating results on a pre-tax basis. We earned $21.6 million in the quarter compared with $15.8 million from a year ago. So pretty substantial growth. Last year included, however, $3.3 million of transformation-related expenses, mostly on the consultant that we were using last year to help with the transformation project as it got started. But even with that, you can see that our year-over-year pre-tax operating results are up quite decently. And that's now the second or third quarter in a row.
We've been up sort of 10% plus on the pre-tax operating income. Gross profit margin was 27% in the quarter, and our total operating margin, operating income as a relationship to total revenue, was 9.4%, just below the 10%-12% target range that we established several quarters ago. Both of these margins improved from last year, and operating margin, as I just said, was within striking distance of the target range. Now, these key margins are being driven by several important factors. First is the impact of strong order growth. We've had, as you may remember, very substantial order growth in the last three quarters. Secondly, the backlog revenue tailwind we've generated now for those three quarters as a result of that significant growth in order flow and our efficient order-to-revenue conversion process. So that's on the manufacturing side.
The more efficient we are in the manufacturing, the faster the revenue comes in from the backlog. Second major impact on the margins is the benefit of fixed-cost operating leverage as total revenue growth continues to grow relative to our fixed costs. And that affects both the operating margin of the company as well as the gross operating profit margin. Third major.
All right. Howard?
Howard might have frozen up on us.
I think it's just Howard who froze. Yeah.
Okay. I'll continue on. Maybe he'll come back, and I'll come back.
Maybe he can come back in.
Yeah. I'll just touch base on this. Net cash balance at the end of the quarter ending was $138 million versus $115 million the prior year. And we've been share repurchasing. So we had 12.2 million year- to- date. And so we see this as an opportunity for investment, return on investment.
We're purely looking at it from that perspective of where can we get the best returns for our investors. And we saw share repurchase at this time. Our long-term plan will look different on how we might look at that. But if we achieve all the things we're going to do, we're going to build cash, and that opens up a lot of opportunities for us. As of the 9th of December, we had share repurchase capacity of another 25.7 million, which includes an additional 20 million authorized by the board. And we replaced asset-based bank credit facility with more flexible, lower-cost cash flow facility. I want to talk about transformation. Talked about the consultant we brought on, the work that we did internally, what was driven internally and owned internally.
So we laid out a lot of objectives, but it started with this slide of what we wanted to achieve. Wanted to improve our overall return for our shareholders and serve all of our stakeholders, our communities, our employees in a whole new way. So we set targets. They were aggressive, but we wanted a return on invested capital around 17%-20%. We wanted to set a high bar for us. This is on the upper quartile of companies that are operating in this space. To do that, we stepped back and looked at, "Hey, what's it going to take us for us to achieve this?" And certainly, the growth needs to be there. We need to be a growth engine. 7%-10% was the number we selected based on what we were seeing. We think this is achievable.
We certainly have done that in this past year. A number of pieces around that I'll touch on in just a moment, but the higher part was getting to the higher operating margin, 10%-12%. We've done that. We did it in FY24. We've done it previously. We said, "What's holding us back from doing this?" So we stepped back and looked at all the things that we were doing. That led to a whole bunch of initiatives that we worked through with our high-end consultant. We own these internally. I want to speak to just a few of those. Value-based selling sounds pretty basic, but tied back to changing our own beliefs, our internal, how we look at things. A lot of surveying that we did with customers and started implementing value-based pricing, guardrails around our projects and how we're going to bid those.
We're not a low-price supplier. We play at the upper end of the margins. We play at the upper end of pricing. We're a value-based company. We do really good things. Our customers recognize it. So we want to be rewarded for those. Revenue mix diversification is going to be important on how we look at margins and growth. So that was part of the work that we did around that. Enhancing our service and our products. We're a technology company, so we need to continue with that. Services, we can take benefit from it. It's a high-margin business with a high return on that. So we wanted to focus on that side of it. And Howard, I see you're back. So I did my best to cover your slide.
Sorry about that.
Yeah. Yeah. No problem. But structural cost reductions.
Keep going.
Yeah. Go ahead. Howard, you want to.
No, no. Keep going.
Structural cost reductions across the supply chain, really working on the supply chain side of it and our inventories. That generated cash, put us in a much better cash position. A lot of that, as we've talked about already, Howard hit on that. So we're in a lot different position today. Of course, if we can continue with these growth objectives and initiatives that we've laid out here, that can only generate more. So that puts us in a whole different environment for how we can look at our future. I don't want to ignore the bottom ones. Capital allocation and risk management and what we're doing around that, highly important. Executive compensation. We revamped that, made it more equity-based or performance-based around each executive. Stepping back and say, "Hey, you put these plans together. You've laid this out.
We're going to tie this back together and tie it to your performance plan, and you'll be highly rewarded for executing on these plans and performing to them. So it's a new change for us, something we haven't done in the past. We did it as a company in the past. We continue to do that. We're also rewarding individual performance within that. Of course, digital transformation and all the different things that serves on really serving the customer in a whole new way, making it more efficient, make it easier for them to do business with us, whether it's in services, our quoting process, how the interface was on the web, the whole works. So with that, I'm going to last slide. We've got a really nice story. We have a strong backlog along with expanding opportunity pipeline to support our growth objectives.
Our manufacturing and fulfillment teams are executing on timely delivery of products. Our lead times are within market expectations. We've added capacity in our Mexico facility to support our growth initiatives, which offers us global flexibility in our supply chains and cost mitigation. We continue to focus on areas of highest return through efforts in product development and digital transformation. Our transformation objectives are underway. We're demonstrating results and track with the roadmap to higher financial performance, including growth and profitability. We have a number of opportunities for ourselves, both internationally, within our existing markets, long-term markets, seeing a convergence of video displays into our high school markets and indoor products across all our segments. With that, I'm going to turn this back over to the operator for any questions that you might have.
Thank you so much, Brad and Howard. It was a good overview. For the audience, if you want to participate in the Q&A, you can submit the question at the bottom of your screen, and we'll address them as they come in. I just have a question. You're in the middle of this sort of strategic change of direction and transformation, and you have the new CEO coming in. What can investors expect from him coming in in terms of where you're heading?
If Ramesh were in here, he would say, "I'm in a look, listen, and learn process of understanding our company in a better way, putting together his strategic initiatives around what's forming his basis for how he wants to communicate those growth initiatives for the company." You're going to have an opportunity in April, early April, at an Investor Day conference, so we'll be doing an Investor Day in New York City. We'll be getting the dates out soon. It'll be early April. And all of you will be invited to that, of course. And we'd love to have you come, and Ramesh will address all those topics at that time.
Okay. Great. Looking forward to that. And in terms of the new facility in Mexico, I have a question here if it will be USMCA compliant.
Yes. Now, USMCA is under review. They'll come up this spring through the federal government, and we'll see what comes from that. It wasn't our primary initiative to go to Mexico for USMCA. Certainly, we would benefit on that side of it. There's a cost side of it that certainly helps. Diversification of our plant to serve all the markets that we serve was another picture of it.
Opening up to us a labor pool that we didn't have available in all the places we're currently at is helpful to us. It's located very close to the border. We do a lot of business down in that part of the United States. That's helpful as well. A variety of different things. It was one of the things that came out of our work with the consulting group as a consideration for that. We're implementing that now.
How quickly do you think you can sort of ramp that up and what sort of capacity?
Yeah. Howard, do you want to answer that?
In terms of Mexico?
Yeah.
Yeah. We're targeting, I guess, April to get rolling. It'll take a little bit longer to make that happen. That's kind of the target timeframe on you. And again, it's not a huge facility, but it's important enough to give us the kind of growth capacity and diversification in the network to continue on the growth path. Yeah.
Okay. And I have a question here about the gross margin decline in fiscal first quarter over fiscal second quarter. I mean, sorry, fiscal second quarter over the first quarter.
Second quarter versus first quarter.
Yeah.
So again, the gross profit margin is a function of a number of different variables. I touched on them a little bit before. How much revenue we have relative to fixed costs. So fixed cost leverage is obviously a factor. As revenue goes up, our gross profit margin, all of the things aside, tends to go up, and just the opposite when revenue goes down. Mix is very important.
And we showed a slide when we released our earnings that gave you, and this is in our reported financials as well, the gross profit margins by business segment, which range from kind of low-mid-ish 20s% to low-mid-ish 30s%. So it's not all the same profit margin. So mix obviously does impact the company's overall profit margin, and as does the timing of the revenue that comes in from each of the different businesses. So first quarter, we happen to have a higher mix of HSPR in the revenue. HSPR does two things for gross profit margin. One, it's a higher margin business to begin with.
Secondly, because it's typically standard orders, they come in quickly, and we book the revenue all at once when the project is starting to be installed, as opposed to live events, which is a much bigger business, but the margins are a little bit lower, and the revenue is earned over a longer period of time. Mix is very important, as is fixed cost operating leverage on the gross profit margin.
Okay. Thank you. And can you also talk a little bit about the competitive landscape and if that has changed over the past years?
Yeah. Each of our market segments, business segments, has a variety of different competitors. There's been some changes. There's been not so much consolidation. There's been some exits. I won't speak too loudly about that, but in our live event space, we had large competitors that have exited.
So we're having conversations with customers that have purchased from them and looking for down the road. Certainly want to be in position to be their company of choice for replacement. It also solidified our position in the market space of all the values that we bring, long-term support for our customers. They'll recognize that in a bigger way. So our presence here is quite helpful. But competitive landscape continues. It varies, and we're well-positioned in growing our business. I think we lost Anja. Well, with that, without her here, we'll end the conference call. So everyone have a great day.