DAKT Reports Q4 Earnings

Daktronics (NASDAQ: DAKT ) released fourth-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

View the webcast at Summary Daktronics Inc reported record annual revenues and order growth, with net sales up 11% and operating margins expanding by 290 basis points. The company is focused on its three-year business transformation plan, targeting growth in sports, transportation, and international markets, alongside operational efficiency improvements. For fiscal 2027, Daktronics has a strong backlog of $356 million and is targeting a 7-10% revenue CAGR through fiscal 2028, supported by strategic initiatives in manufacturing and technology.

The company is expanding its manufacturing capacity in Mexico and emphasizes operational excellence through lean principles and procurement strategies. Management expressed confidence in continued growth and margin improvement, driven by increasing demand and robust project pipelines across all business segments. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day everyone and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Daktronics' fourth quarter fiscal year 2026 financial results.

At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To participate, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised.

To withdraw the question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. Now, it's my pleasure to hand the conference to the Chief Executive Officer, Ramesh Jayaraman. Please proceed.

Ramesh Jayaraman, President And CEO Thank you, Carmen. Good morning everyone. Thank you for participating in our fourth quarter earnings conference call. As a reminder, this presentation will contain forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act reflecting our expectations and plans about future financial performance and future business opportunities.

These forward-looking statements reflect the Company's expectations or beliefs about future events based on information currently available to us. Of course, actual results could differ. Please refer to slide 2 of the presentation that accompanies today's call, our press release, and our SEC filings for information on risk factors, uncertainties, and expectations that could cause actual results to differ materially from these expectations. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement.

During this presentation, we will also refer to non-GAAP financial measures. You can find the reconciliation of each non-GAAP measure to the most directly comparable GAAP measure in the appendix to the accompanying presentation slides, which may be found on our Investor Relations page of our website at Our earnings release for the 2026 fourth quarter, which was furnished to the SEC on a Form 8-K this morning, also contains certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, as well as a discussion of certain limitations when using non-GAAP financial measures, are included in the earnings release which has been posted separately to the Investor Relations page of our website. I'll turn the call over to Ramesh Jayaraman, President and CEO, for his review. Thank you, Lindsay, and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining our fourth quarter fiscal 26 call.

I'm joined on the call by Howard Atkins, Board Member and Acting Chief Financial Officer. This morning, I'll recap our fiscal 26 results and operating highlights, including our business accomplishments, how we are tracking towards our fiscal 28 objectives, and our strategic pillars for growth. Then Howard will review our fourth quarter and full year financials, and finally, towards the end, I'll discuss our fiscal 27 outlook and then we'll take your questions. Let's move to the next slide to recap fiscal 26.

We're absolutely proud of the results our team generated in fiscal 26. We delivered record annual revenues and record annual orders, drove meaningful expansion in operating margins, and EPS growth. Let's focus on the left-hand side of the page. Our actions resulted in the performance we strove for.

05. We enter fiscal 27 with a backlog of 356 million, up 4% over the prior year. Howard will provide more details in the Financial section, and we improved our working capital with a strong balance sheet liquidity and returned capital to shareholders through share repurchases, with nearly 25 million in buybacks in fiscal 26. The handing of the baton from Brad Wieman has been extremely smooth.

I will continue to rely on his perspective and judgment over the remaining weeks until his retirement from Daktronics. In fiscal 26, we accelerated execution of our three-year business transformation. Our teams worked together to advance key growth initiatives, expand our penetration of the core end markets we serve, including sports, both national live events as well as high school level that we call HSPR, our transportation segment, and our international business. We also improved our operational and supply chain execution for speed and efficiency.

More efficient operations combined with streamlined backlog conversion and near-term capture of our demand pipeline drove higher margins supported by value-based pricing actions we implemented. We accomplished several key operating objectives. First, we enhanced our customer experience with the launch of our mod