Dialight is the global leader in industrial LED technology with over 2 million fixtures installed worldwide, providing one of the most efficient ways to drive down energy usage. The company is listed the LSE main market and has a market cap of £100m. Results for the FY to 31st December 2020 were released on 30th March.
We were delighted to welcome the Chair, David Blood, and CEO, Fariyal Khanbabi, to a webinar for private investors to introduce the company and talk about the improving prospects. A recording of the webinar is available here.
David Blood is the co-founder and Senior Partner at Generation Investment Management, who hold a 20% stake, as well as being the Chair of Dialight. He started the presentation by explaining they had been invested for 10 years and that there had been a number of challenges along the way. The decision to outsource manufacturing a few years ago was particularly painful as it impacted lead times and resulted in a drop in sales. The appointed of Fariyal, initially as interim CEO in August 2019 marked the turnaround, and she was appointed permanent CEO in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic. She has been instrumental in delivering the new strategy and has shown great leadership in a short period of time. David concluded his opening remarks by saying how excited he was about the prospects for the company now. They have best in class products, manufacturing has been rectified, they have a great innovation team who are introducing new products and LED lighting will play a key part in meeting global net zero targets which provides a significant tail wind to sales.
Fariyal started her part of the presentation by describing her main goal is to deliver significant growth. The strategy is based around three components of; growing in their core industrial markets; developing a sales team to expand reach and enable them to target larger orders similar to the successful work they did at Ford and thirdly, continuing to innovate to ensure their products remain best in class. Despite all the operational issues, Dialight is still regarded as having as best in class products. They are already working on the next generation of products which is focussed on the sustainability needs of customers and the goal here is to have the first fully recyclable product in the marketplace.
Looking further at…
