Sono-Tek Corporation (NASDAQ:SOTK) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Stephen Harshbarger: Yes. For sure again, the larger customers out of the green energy sector, again, in particular that are transitioning from R&D over to high volume product pilot lines, they’re all looking at multiple lines. They are all looking at five to 10 to even up to 15 lines that should be happening. And again, these are the machines with the high ASPs that are over $1 million typically. And we are continuing still to get a regular flow of R&D machines on top of that that are coming in for R&D and pilot line machines that are, they’re still, that’s still the kind of flow business, I would describe it as a one Z, two Z machines that is coming from the R&D sector that will continually fill in the backlog as well. But the ones that are going to make the big impact for our backlog is going to be these big platform, high volume production machines.

Bill Nicklin: All right. So if I understand correctly, on the announcements that you’ve made, where there are $600,000 machines and $1 million machines, the orders that you just referenced will be multiples of that $600,000 or multiples of the $1 million number.

Stephen Harshbarger: Yes, yes, yes, that’s — they all have the high potential of being multiple to that. None of these customers are buying those first production machines for the intent of that being, that this is the beginning phase for them. If they only bought one machine, there would have been something that went terribly wrong. They all intend to buy multiple machines. The demand for these green energy products right now, it’s just skyrocketed so quickly, that in order to hit what their volume needs are for their products they have to buy multiple lines. Again an area of like typically five to 10 systems,

Bill Nicklin: All right. And not to belabor it, but just to be clear, on the announcement that you’ve already made, where you said a machine was $600,000, that’s for one machine and you have multiple right after one, so if a customer is going to buy 10 machines over time, then that’s $6 million.

Stephen Harshbarger: You’re a 100% correct, yes. So they — when we, the announcement for those ones for $1.1 million, that’s for one machine, and if that customer needs 10, it would be 10 machines, 10 times 1.1, or 10 times $660,000, correct.

Bill Nicklin: All right, that’s great. Now, second question. Several industrial companies that I follow have been impeded by supply chain problems, and they now in their conference calls say they’re coming out of this period and they’re having bubbles in shipments. But then they say they’re heading back toward what most of them are describing as a broad based normalization, where normal is lower shipments than in the past few quarters. So the bubble moved through the system. It sounds like you’re experiencing the same thing, but given the orders you’re getting and it’s kind of a new normal with expectations of significantly higher growth for an extended period of time, am I correct on that?

Stephen Harshbarger: Yes, supply chain, like you mentioned the impacted us for FY 2023 revenue, and we will, certainly will see a revenue bubble working its way through into our FY 2024 due to these delayed shipments. And although we are definitely predicting our revenue to be more lumpy from quarter-to-quarter due to the increased frequency of these large ASP platform machines, we’re still feeling very good about continued revenue growth for FY 2024 supply, for the — during the supply chain surge and after the supply chain surge, because of these high ASP production systems that are starting to flow more regularly into our backlog. When you’re only a $15 million to $20 million revenue company like we are now, it starts to make a huge impact when we start adding a flow of $1 million machines on top of what is our historically normal business already.