The Benefits of a Publicly Traded Company

This week Sheila Anderson, Daktronics CFO, is guest blogging on what the benefits of working with a publicly traded company are.

Sheila Anderson, CFO

Every day, our spirit is reflected in the products we build and in the way we interact with our customers. Our ultimate goal as a company is to be transparent, honest, helpful and humble. So it may be no surprise that Daktronics is one of the only digital Out of Home (OOH) manufacturers available that is a publicly traded company and offers information regularly to the public.

So yes, you can buy stock in our company, but that’s not really what we’re getting at.

What we’re trying to say, is that Daktronics has been publicly traded since the mid-1990s. At that time, we used the money raised with the initial public offering to fuel our developments in the LED signage industry. Since then, we continue to reinvest in research and development to continuously provide the highest-quality product for our customers.

Over the past 3 years, we spent almost $75 million dollars on this work, work you won’t hear our competitors talk about. They may say they conduct research, and they may even provide numbers to support their case, but you have no way to verify the information. Our Research and Development spending is what supported OOH industry-leading innovations, such as our targeted LED and our Venus^® Control Suite software.

These investments and other business information is visible in our filings with the Securities and Exchange commission. You can access this information on our website at: http://investor.daktronics.com.

We release quarterly earnings release so investors have an idea of where the company is sitting financially. The majority of our competitors aren’t required to do this and have never released their earnings to the public. In fact, Daktronics has been named to Forbes Top 100 Most Trustworthy Companies list for the past 5 years. One of the qualifications for that list is transparency.

Our commitment to be in the business over the long term dictates all of our business decisions. The information shared on these regular reports can help ease the minds of potential customers who look for long-term financial stability in their provider. You might find it more difficult to verify the current financial state and long-term strategies of a private company.

To top it all off, we’re the leader in providing the highest quality LED displays to the OOH industry for more than 20 continuous years. We have never had to leave and re-enter the market, and our financial information has been public the entire time.

Yes, some years have been better than others, but you can see our records for yourself. See where we invest our money and how we perform to feel confident that you’ll have the future support you need from Daktronics.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits of working with us, feel free to leave a comment below, call at 605-692-0200 or e-mail sales@daktronics.com.