Our focus historically has been on health care and very high end industrial automotive and other demanding industrial applications. That will remain our focus, although I have to tell you, some of the exciting new materials that are coming out are moving us rapidly into other industrial products like shipbuilding. We can do some unique things with metal printing of nickel-based, copper-based materials, copper-nickel alloys, others that are required for demanding either thermal or environmental conditions. And that’s really where we’re going to focus is on those markets that are most demanding of quality and performance. The parts we make are extremely high density. They’re obviously suitable for human application and for demanding industrial application.
That’s really where we’re going to focus. Once you’re there and you have the materials, it’s all about throughput. So, you know, some customers want single large parts, others want multiple small parts. We’re designing systems that are application specific in that range of products. Healthcare is often a large number of smaller parts for embedding in the human body. And things like ship building and aerospace can often be single run large parts that you need extremely good environmental control. I would say environmental control is probably our number one attribute right now. We can produce the highest purity, highest density parts, I believe, in the industry. And we are scaling that with our organic investment. And Tyler, on the investment front, we’ve got so much runway.
We’ve got a nice hole in both polymer and metal technology bases today. We’re driving synergies across those. So we can get where we need to be organically through internal R&D investment. And obviously we’re not oblivious to the external environment and other companies in the industry with interesting technologies. But we can get where we want to be with internal investment in both metals and polymers. And then anything on top of that is icing on the cake.
Tyler Hutin: Thanks, Jeff. Yeah, that sounds great. And just a follow-up, a pretty short question. With the restructuring, will that create any new challenges for your new product introductions? Do you see that having any impact on like fuel installations or adoption? Can you just elaborate on how you’re handling that?
Jeffrey Graves: Yeah, thanks for asking that, Tyler. I would tell you, we’ve protected certain areas of the company heavily to make sure we can drive efficiency in our back office operations. I would tell you just those efficiencies are very important so we preserve some of those, particularly around IT, things like that, cyber security, other areas that are just essential to running the business. We’ve also taken great pains to preserve the predominance of our R&D investments, because that’s critical to the new product launch. And then obviously we have a very large sales and service team. The service team is essential to not only serving our install base, which is one of the largest, if not the largest in the industry, but also the installation of new products.
So those areas of the company we’ve heavily protected. We’ve found efficiencies in other areas. And certainly by reducing our number of sites and the insourcing of manufacturing and ion supply chain operations, that gives us a really nice bump in terms of cost takeout that impacts COGS and even somewhat on OpEx. So we’re very focused, we’re very proud of our gross margin performance, quite frankly. Even if you take out the one-time benefits of regenerative medicine, we’ve stepped up from 39% and change to 42.7% in this quarter operationally. And that reflects really efficiencies in supply chains and driving some of that earlier restructuring that we did in the year, without slowing down our R&D execution, we’re really proud of that. You know, on top of that, we’re thrilled to have the technical progress on regenerative medicine that boosted gross margins even further.
But to move from 39 to 42.7, we were, operationally, we were extremely proud of in the quarter, and we see, you know, further upside as we go forward. You have to be a little careful quarter by quarter, depending on revenue fluctuations, but we see continual improvements in our gross margin capability as we move through the New Year.
Tyler Hutin: All right. Appreciate all that. I’ll pass it on.
Jeffrey Graves: Thanks, Tyler.
Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Jacob Stephan from Lake Street Capital. Your line is now live.
