NVE Corporation (NASDAQ:NVEC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeffrey Bernstein : Thanks. And then just on the growth rate, 20% product growth plus in this quarter. Do you think that kind of growth rate is a sustainable number here going forward? Or how should we think about modeling product growth?

Daniel Baker: Our goal is to grow. And so that’s what our plans are. We invest in the future. As Joe mentioned, we invested over $900,000 in fixed assets to increase our production for the year. We continue to invest in people, as Joe mentioned in his comments about our expenses, which are investments we see as investments in the future. So, it’s hard to predict the growth rate. As you know, we’re in an industry that has — that’s cyclical and has its ups and downs. But our goal is — our goal over the long term is certainly to be a growth company. We believe we have products that are in demand. We have excellent technology. We have great people, and we’re picking up some really top-notch customers in key markets that we talked about in the prepared remarks. So that is certainly our goal is to be a growth company.

Jeffrey Bernstein : Thank you for that. And then I wanted to just ask about the — I think you had signaled the investment in test equipment. I believe it was and talked about that being kind of a bottleneck and that packaging supply was another area with some headwinds. Can you just give us an update now? So is that equipment in place? And do you expect that’s going to do something significant for the — your ability to grow now?

Daniel Baker: So, the equipment is physically here, which is why it showed up in the fixed asset expenses and in our cash flow statement. Our team is working on deploying the equipment and it’s partially deployed. We still have some work to do, but it’s looking very good. Our suppliers and our engineering team have given it a top priority, and they’ve really done an outstanding job on deploying some very complicated state-of-the-art equipment with artificial intelligence and other features that will help us be more efficient, help our employees be more efficient and continue our trends being a very productive company with high revenue per employee. So I think we said our goal would be to fully deploy that equipment this quarter.

That’s an aggressive goal. That’s the March quarter. But we believe it’s achievable, and so that will help our capacity in the relative near term. So as Joe alluded to in some of his remarks, we — one of our advantages over other semiconductor companies, traditional semiconductor companies is that we have our own front-end and back-end operations. So that equipment that you referred to as the back-end operation or part of packaging and test. So we don’t package ourselves, but we do test ourselves. So that gives us a big advantage over other companies, removes that bottleneck. And those investments, this equipment has a long lead time. So these are investments that we made some time ago, committed to them some time ago. So they’re just coming to fruition now.

So the timing, I think we see as fortuitous. We see ourselves with opportunities to grow and having the capital equipment in place will help enable that growth.

Jeffrey Bernstein : And so, Dan, just from a revenue perspective, is that the impact of this test equipment from the fact that you can show potential customers a domestic supply chain capability kind of thing down to testing? Or is it that you actually have product that your backlog on because you had a bottleneck of testing? Or is it both?