Acuity Brands (AYI, Financial) announced excellent first-quarter 2015 results enabled by the ongoing innovative launches, energy-saving lighting solutions, growth in major channels and regions and betterment of customer service and the entire company productivity.
Investing strategically
Acuity continues to invest strategically in its robust sales expansion and other key growth verticals having significant growth potential like the growth of its lighting control solutions and solid-state luminaire portfolio.
The new product introductions and Acuity exciting the customers with enhanced new services are forecast to improve the customer satisfaction and thus expanding new customer base.
Considering the channel viewpoint, Acuity continues to witness solid growth in infrastructure, industrial, commercial coupled with home development and games.
Overall, the North American lighting market conditions during the first quarter increased in mid single digits contrasting the net sales growth rates in North America increasing over 14%.
The robust well-diversified growth spread across the company’s key development segments is strategically supported by the improvement in the general lighting market conditions in North America.
Strong portfolio
On considering the product and lighting solutions growth viewpoint, Acuity continued its accelerated rate of fresh product launches, growing its solid portfolio of new, innovative, energy-saving luminaires and lighting control solution.
Acuity provide its customers with a wide range of options with over $1.7 million skews to choose from, over three times it offered in fiscal year 2008 and greater than any of the choices provided by other lighting companies.
The greater product choices provided to the customers are believed to place Acuity in a solid position to lead the competition and capture the marketplace with its varied and innovative lighting solutions.
Further, Acuity continues the growth of corporate and luminaires and various other light source technologies like organic LEDs where it continues to grow its successful portfolio of these new and superior products.
Acuity has a solid portfolio of comprehensive and combined tiered solutions, which completely utilizes the advantages of its product improvement capabilities along with the addition of its several acquisitions that include its controls portfolio.
The unique product development capabilities of Acuity are expected to benefit it in a long-term, driving enhanced demand from existing and new customers.
Acuity is expected to be growing faster than its competition in the rapidly expanding lighting solutions market primarily due to its unique LED deployment capabilities to best optimize the visual environment and offer other advantages such as major energy savings to its simple and smart solutions for almost any application.
Acuity Brands is at the foremost of the rapidly transforming simple lighting solutions to intelligent lighting solutions with its widespread portfolio of interior and outside the house solid-state and regular energy-competent luminaries and lighting control solutions. And it’s generating lucrative growth and solid financial returns for its key investors while continuing to invest strategically.
The timely and well-planned transition from the obsolete lighting products to the present intelligent lighting solutions along with considering the interest of the key stakeholders is estimated to allow Acuity to lead the performance charts.
Acuity is strongly witnessing the North American lighting market improvement with enhanced architectural billing index, better vacancy rates, sharp lending availability, solid employment trends and improved office absorption while an ongoing significant improvement in residential construction.
Going forward, Acuity is extremely excited by several key opportunities available for its business expansion such as the launch of holistic lighting solutions including linking smart lighting with smartphones for retailers coupled with the expansion of its electronic component capabilities.
The ongoing significant lighting market recovery is believed to hugely benefit Acuity with greater expansion options into the smartphone and other key electronic markets.
Recently, Acuity stock rose to a new high supported by improved quarterly sales and superior earnings owing to greater demand for light emitting diode (LED) solutions.
Conclusion
At last, the investors are advised to invest into the Acuity Brands, Inc. looking at the solid growth prospects indicated by the PEG ratio of 1.95 comparable to the industry’s average of 0.88.The profit margin of 7.40% is satisfactory. There’s a positive and increasing earnings per share estimate as well supported by a robust balance sheet with total cash of $583.00 million and total debt of just $353.60 million encouraging the company to invest in future growth.
