Data I/O Corporation (NASDAQ:DAIO) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Michael Wetherington: Yeah. Fair point there. Also a follow-up, just looking at your cash flow generation and the strong operating leverage as you exited ’23 and your outlook for ’24 for the exception of the one-timers in Q1, you talked about, what are the plans for excess cash going forward? And is a buyback maybe one of those options?

Anthony Ambrose: So I think on the — just the — we get that question a lot. We need a certain amount of cash to manage the business, the excess cash, at least right now. And I guess we’re doing a better job since Dave did not bring up this question on the call around interest income. We actually get paid for our cash, which is good. We’re constantly looking for ways to deploy that cash for maximum possible return for shareholders. We’ve said we’re interested in — can we do accretive M&A, obviously, it’d be pretty small. We have our radar up. Nothing’s come across the radar yet that we can get to our liking, but we’re always looking. We’ve done buybacks historically in the past. Given the increased cost of capital right now, I don’t see a buyback in the short-term future based on, again, what the real cost of capital is, and the potential to find something accretive for us.

In the meantime, we’ll look at our finance team to make sure that the surplus cash that we don’t need for the day-to-day working capital in each of our foreign subsidiaries as well as the United States is deployed effectively to earn some interest income.

Michael Wetherington: Thank you.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. This will conclude our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Anthony Ambrose for any closing remarks.

Anthony Ambrose: Operator, thank you very much. I’d like to thank everyone that had a question today. Given that there are no more questions, I now close this earnings call. Thank you very much.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.