Over the years i've grown a soft spot for engineer CEOs. They just tend to strike me as straighter shooters, with a tighter focus on providing solutions to customers. Less polish and hype, more "getting it done with little fuss" type thing.

And Andrew at AIH certainly came across the same way. The back story of doing a management buy-out in 2008 and growing the business from a team of 12 to more than 800 today is wildly impressive.

I wouldnt invest in AIH on any of that, but it does help (assuming i got a good read of things..which is hard to be confident of after one brief interaction!).

Anyway, what you have here is a profitable business, with a strong legacy of growth, with a few big tailwinds and is already a major player in a very niche industry. Also lots of capacity in terms of manufacturing their products (Andrew said they could do 160% of current levels), a strong balance sheet and a full order book.

That money is pretty much ear-marked for acquisitions, so i'd expect a few more of those. That was the whole point of listing after all. They seem to have a good history on that front, but we all know that these things also carry risk. So something to be mindful of.

Anyway, a lot more due diligence is needed, and it'd be good to hear some negatives if anyone has had a look at AIH before and come across any. But with a trailing PE of ~14 (using normalised trailing NPAT), and some seemingly decent growth potential, it's probably worth a closer look.

Here's the transcript: AIH Transcript.pdf