Dialight plc (LON:DIA) Chief Executive Officer Fariyal Khanbabi caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss full year results, responding to the current inflationary environment and further progress this year.
Q1: Full year results for the year out for Dialight. Now we’re going into a new year, how have you seen demand across markets, especially in the oil and gas and mining areas and are you seeing larger projects starting to return?
A1: So, I’ll just touch firstly on our full year results. We made very strong financial and operational progress in 2021, really reflecting the benefits of our growth model, the strong culture and the leading position we have within the industrial markets and really, we saw good market share gains in 2021.
The one thing we’re starting to see in 2022 is the return of the capital projects. A lot of them were delayed, especially through the second half of last year, we’ve seen good return of oil and gas, but actually many other industries; automotive, petrochemical, they’re all pretty robust.
So we’re pretty excited about the current year and we bid $30 million of large projects just in the last month.
Q2: How are you responding to the current inflationary environment?
A2: The inflationary environment has been pretty unprecedented, we are seeing between 7-15%, and in some cases 30% increases in some of our commodities and we responded to that by raising our prices a couple of times. We are not complacent about this and we will raise them again if it’s needed, but we’ve also improved our own internal efficiencies, we designed our products to take costs out.
So, it’s a two-pronged approach, but really our value proposition speaks for itself and so we’re not adverse to raising prices again.
Q3: Now, you did mention that Dialight made great financial and operational progress through 2021. Do you expect to make further progress this year?
A3: Absolutely. We’re nowhere near done with all the things that we want to do, we’re very heavily focused on our operational efficiencies, bringing more automation, continuing to streamline all the hard work we’ve done over the last 18 months. We’re very focused on our product development, bringing the first fully recyclable product to the market and really, building on our ESG credentials so absolutely the work doesn’t stop here.
