Karat Packaging Inc. (NASDAQ:KRT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Alan Yu: Well, earlier Jake we mentioned in our €“ earlier in the conference call that the 2022 first quarter was the biggest, the highest ever in history of ocean freight. That’s what we’ve seen and also as well as supply chain disruption was all in the first quarter, mainly in the first quarter of last year, that everyone is rushing to buy whatever they can and stocking up everything and then at the higher price, even ourselves, we did that too. And this year we’re seeing that first quarter, we’re seeing everything’s coming down. All the price is coming down, ocean freight is coming down. Right now ocean freight stabilized. It has been kind off continuing to come down since July of last year to even till the end of the last year.

So in January the ocean freight started to stabilize. And I do see that there’s not much of a price difference anymore in the future for 2023, unless we have sufficient spaces that we’re going after, even more accounts that we’re looking to sacrifice our margin and prices to obtain new accounts, which we already have in those pipelines and also agreements that basically it’s going to fill our capacity in terms of warehouse space. Again, we still have capacity in bringing more additional product and manufacturing capacity, but we’re lacking in warehouse spaces, so that is the key components. We can grow as long as we add more warehouses, and it €“ not increasing too much facility costs.

Jake Bartlett: Okay, great and then. I just wanted – sorry, Jian thanks.

Jian Guo : Hi Jake! This is Jian. If I can just add on to Alan’s comments real quick, I think Alan provided a lot of great color on pricing, so hopefully that answers your questions about pricing. Just as far as what the trend is going to be for 2023, I also just wanted to add that we are continuing €“ we do expect to continue to be able to expand our gross margin even when pricing start to stabilize, right? As mentioned, as Alan mentioned pricing as of last year, if you’re looking at earlier part of 2022, it was at peak level. A lot of that was because of the significantly higher ocean freight costs. Now, even as we continue €“ as we start to take actions to be proactive to pass on savings to our customers, because of the significant job in the ocean freight and because of a lot of the other margin improvement, sort of initiatives that we are implementing, we’re actually guiding higher gross margin on a full year basis for 2023, and we’re very confident that we can continue to expand our gross margin, even with this price action that we’re talking about.

Jake Bartlett: Great. My other question

Alan Yu : Let me add one more thing to price margin wise. Jian mentioned that we are able to keep €“ we’ll actually increase our gross margin, even with the price decrease. That is correct, because we’re actually looking to have a full year guidance of 32% to 33% gross margin and if you look at €“ if we take a look at back in the fourth quarter, we actually took almost over €“ around $2.4 million freight duty capitalization. Same thing with the third quarter. It was like more around, around same area of freight duty capitalization. But starting the first quarter of 2023, I don’t believe we’ll see any more freight duty capitalization that we’ll take down on our margin wise, gross margin wise and revenue wise. So we’re seeing that it’s going to be a favorable thing, with ocean freight stabilized for this year.

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