Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLFD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Tim Savageaux: Hey, congratulations, as well on the great results. And I’ll follow up right there on the receivables front. And just wanting to see to what extent the acquisition contributed to that increase. And maybe, ask a question about kind of overall shipment linearity throughout the quarter. And then I have a couple of follow ups.

Dan Herzog: Yes. Nestor did not contribute that much to the DSO a little bit. But Clearfield continues to do business with larger and larger customers. And while they may be under 10%, they may only slightly under 10%. And some of those customers, and the larger they are sometimes you have a little bit longer payment terms. And that’s pretty standard in the industry. And then, as far as shipping linearity, we were pretty consistent, if you just take the quarter, take out the 7 million of Nestor, you take out the quarter, I think we average about winning 9. And that’s, we were right within that range of 29 to 30 each month of the quarter.

Tim Savageaux: Great. And kind of got to another question of mine there about customers, which is historically been pretty well distributed for you guys. Is that commentary for the quarter and you’re finishing up the year here? I’m assuming no 10% customers for the year, but I guess I’ll ask the question or the quarter?

Dan Herzog: One for the year.

Tim Savageaux: Great. Okay. And moving on to cable, and it’s a pretty impressive kind of step function here really the last couple of quarters. I wonder if you can give us any color on kind of how you expect that to proceed going forward. Right? You’ve been moving up pretty significantly here. Is this kind of a new run rate or do you expect that cable number to bounce around a little bit with given the bigger operators who are working with?

Cheri Beranek: Parts of that business are consistent on a month-to-month with a long-term scheduled manufacturing program. So that will be consistent and then on top of that, the regional carriers tend to be more project based with a little more volatility in regard to their world. And because they’re regional, and many are located in more northern climates and with excessive cold that we’ve had now, sort of early this quarter, I think we’ll see the rate of cable TV go down just a little bit more consistent with our overall growth projections rather than the explosion that we’ve seen in the last six to nine months.

Tim Savageaux: Right. That’s very, very helpful. And I guess last question, for me is sort of coming back on the competitive side. I think we did see something out of Corning and Nokia trying to target the rural broadband market with via distributor. I imagine you’ve had a chance to see that, and I’d be interested in if you had any more specific comments about expectations for increased competition from those larger guys, as we head forward here? Thanks.

Cheri Beranek: Certainly the amount of revenue that is coming to community broadband from the Infrastructure Act, i.e., certainly one that is attractive to all of us. And our competitors across the board are looking at that and seeing how they can get a piece of the pie — a bigger piece of the pie than what they got over the course of the last calendar year. Anyone, all of our competitors are very formidable and very sizable organization. I think Clearfield continues to have an advantage not only because of the product lines, which we promote here, and the time savings and labor savings that we’ve promoted within the field report. But the one of the things that is really core to who we are is the fact that we built a national sales team for community broadband, which is very distributed across the country.