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

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Jake Bartlett: Great! And then my other question was just on manufacturing and the decision to I guess take away the manufacturing in the Chino facility. One question is, are you keeping the manufacturing in Texas facility? And you know what is €“ just maybe a little more detail in the decision to make that change. There were some reasons why you did, you had manufacturing capabilities before. So I’m wondering, kind of what change to kind of drive that decision.

Alan Yu: Yes, we’re actually going €“ we actually have started increasing our equipment and moving some of the equipment from California into Texas. So we’re increasing our Texas manufacturing facility of capability, because it has more space and also the warehouse spaces, it costs less. The manufacturing cost is much lesser in Texas versus California. Finding skilled mechanic, labors, it’s much easier in Texas versus California. California, the warehouse facility cost has gone up triple since two years ago. So in terms of €“ as well as labor costs has gone up a lot tremendously, and we’re seeing that, and that has been one of our key headwinds in the third and fourth quarter of last year, as labor continued to go up, different laws changes in California, So we see California as more as a hub that can facilitate product manufacture overseas into California.

And for us to manufacture more in Texas is more favorable for us, because it’s more in the mid – in the inland area and also most of our new accounts, new customers are actually out of the Midwest and Texas, Midwest and East Coast now. We are seeing most of our growth in the Midwest and East Coast versus a decline in the West Coast area market.

Jake Bartlett: Great! Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Operator: The next question comes from Ryan Meyers with Lake Street. Please go ahead.

Ryan Meyers : Hey guys! Thanks for taking my question. The first one for me, some of like revenue and national regional chain accounts was negatively impacted by some operational issues that you said have since been resolved. I’m just wondering if we can get some more detail on that and what went on there?

Alan Yu: Well Ryan, in the fourth quarter we have some issue of €“ actually have some issues with our equipments. They were shutting down, they were broken. So we have a kind of a decline in production output and we then actually just have to turn over to our oversea partners to help and start producing for us. And basically it was a bit of a delay, because we have to ship them overseas into California versus it was made in California. These products have come in, and we see that this is actually pretty good in terms of it will cost us less to bring the product oversea versus us continue to maintain the CapEx expenditures to fix these equipments, to maintain these equipment, to continue purchase these equipment. So that’s one of the decision that we made in January that we want to reduce manufacturing in California, because we’re losing mechanic, skilled mechanic in California.

It’s challenging to find new one to replace them. So we might as well just start to move our equipment into a Texas and also for the West Coast, we’ve added an oversea partners.

Ryan Meyers : Got it, that’s helpful. And then just kind of switching gears. When we think about the eco-friendly products, you said it was 27% of mix here in 2022. How would you expect that business to grow and what percentage of mix would you expect that to represent in 2023?

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