Accuray Incorporated (NASDAQ:ARAY) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Suzanne Winter: Yes. And I’ll start and then I’ll hand over the ASP question to, Ali. But yes, I’d say in our mature markets, in our developed markets like the U.S., like Western Europe, like Japan, it is largely a replacement market. And so the goal really for our teams is heavily on bringing our aged IB up to the latest performance. I would say, through COVID, the average use of systems have gone from 10-year life to 12 to 12.5-year life. And so there is — this is a growing demand, a growing — growth catalyst for us to be able to bring those customers to the latest revision. And certainly, our NPIs, they’re supporting that as well as the clinical trends with that, it drives higher value and higher pricing. And I’ll let Ali speak a little bit more to that.

Ali Pervaiz: Yes. So just to reiterate, Suzanne’s point, the majority of the trade-in, trade-up and activity is really happening within our mature markets. But going to your pricing question, that’s part of our margin expansion initiative, right? Pricing is the cornerstone of our margin expansion initiative. And we’ve actually done quite a bit over there in terms of changing things around commercially. Number one, we’ve actually aligned our commercial team’s incentive to ensuring that we can reach the profitability targets for new incoming orders. And we’ve actually armed them with tools so that — as they are positioning configurations to our customers, we can optimize it so that we meet our customers’ needs but then we’re also optimizing our margins.

So I think those 2 things coupled together are really driving the focus not only on bringing in orders volume but bringing in profitable orders volume. And actually, we are starting to see some pretty positive signs of that reflect in our overall ASP quarter-over-quarter. So that is very encouraging. And so all of that fills our backlog with good healthy orders and those are — we’re just focused on converting those orders into revenue.

Jason Wittes: And maybe just a quick follow-up. Maybe at the exception of China, I wouldn’t say we’re in a post-COVID world but we did — we have been talking to hospitals and a lot of them are saying, look, we’ve kind of held back in the last 3 years and we’re now kind of going back and reinvesting where we have and notably in some capital equipment products. I mean, is that your sense as well in terms of what’s going on, especially in the mature markets?

Suzanne Winter: Yes. I would say it’s highly dependent on the institution. I think a big factor is also how old is their equipment because I do think that that’s what’s driving certain institutions to be able to upgrade their equipment. But I would say and again, I go back to the research that was done in this area that really surveyed the C level in capital equipment. I would say about 1/3 of them have already seen some capital equipment easing but the rest are feeling like, at least by the second half of calendar year ’23 and into ’24, we should get back to pre-COVID level.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference over to Suzanne Winter for any closing remarks.

Suzanne Winter: Thank you very much. And this concludes our earnings call. We are looking forward to speaking with you all again in April for our fiscal year 2023 third quarter earnings release. Thanks for joining us.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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