Remember, they’re already cash flow. So I mean, just – it’s a – this has been just a perfect match for our requirements, this opportunity. And it’s very hard to find that’s taking me years. I’ve been looking for international expansion opportunity for about 5 years now, and we found it here. I’m really encouraged by the work they’re doing.
Chris Souther: That’s great to hear. And then maybe just on kind of the overall backlog trajectory. Obviously, we’ve been kind of working through those large orders from the second half of last year. You talked about kind of government shutdown. It’s kind of an obstacle that we’ve recently been kind of facing. But can you just give us a sense, the pipeline versus kind of backlog kind of growth kind of discussion, I think, would be helpful for folks in framing, obviously, it’s lumpy. You’ve talked about, but what can you kind of say around kind of the overall backlog, where it should be kind of exiting this year to give visibility for growth next year and how we should think about it overall.
Desmond Wheatley : So we’ve got purchase orders in and now for pretty much through the end of the first quarter. I know it’s given people some concern that this – we haven’t announced some gigantic federal order here. I’m aware of that. I am not though concerned about our growth. And the reason for that is because the nature of any time when you get these large orders, particularly when there’s lots of other complexities in terms of getting them over the finish line. You’re going to have this type of lumpiness. And I’ve been pretty consistent with that. I’m not – I don’t view it in any way as an indication that there’s any fundamentally wrong with our long-term growth. On the contrary, it’s just everything that we’re hearing from all of our prospects, federal, state, local and corporate is that they’re going to be doing more EV charging deployments not less.
It’s only getting harder to do the grid tide ones as the low-hanging fruit is being plucked, meaning locations where it’s easy to deliver a circuit to a charter where somebody would park a car. So – and we’re beating up available circuits of capacity and everything else. And frankly, the other thing that’s encouraging for us is that everybody, government and corporate is becoming more aware of capacity and vulnerability issues around it. People cut off and say, oh, well, Beam’s going to solve the disaster preparedness upside of this and perhaps nothing else. No, it’s both. We’re speed, we’re scale, we’re lower total cost of ownership, and we’re solving the disaster preparedness and capacity issues. So all of these things are becoming more meaningful to people as they deploy more and more chartering.
So I am not concerned by this lumpiness. However, as I said in my comments, not being concerned by it doesn’t mean that I’m not taking steps to make things better, and I am. And the way that I and the whole team are doing that is by diversifying these opportunities for revenue, new product offerings, new geographic environment, obviously, the biggest of those being Europe and then just different verticals that we’re going after in the United States. But I think you have to be very, very pessimistic indeed to think that with the introduction of this new market, Europe has 405 million cars. The United States has $290 million. China has 319 million. This is by far the biggest market in the world. I think you have to be very, very pessimistic to suggest that Beam Global’s going to have a worse future and have less growth than we’ve had after this day with the steps that we’re taking.
And I’m just not that pessimistic because I’m not getting any of those signals from the broader market or from what we’re seeing from our prospects.
Chris Souther: That’s good to hear. Thanks.
Operator: The next question comes from James McCulloch with Private Investor.
James McCulloch: Thanks for taking my call. A couple of questions. First, on the U.S. operations and the prior analysts just touched on the backlog. You mentioned there was some lumpiness and delays due to the government shutdown. However, it doesn’t look like those delays resulted in any increase in backlog. So from last quarter, sales were down about $0.5 million on a quarterly run rate and the backlog was down about $3 million. So I would have expected maybe any delays in purchase orders to show up in an increased backlog. Is there any seasonality on the order rate or any other factors in the fourth quarter that might have impacted the incoming order right?
Desmond Wheatley : Yes. So the same answer I just gave, Jim, really. It’s all just a down to timing. I’m not – the problem – these things are not very well measured quarter-by-quarter. Third quarter it was up 149% over prior year. And from an order cadence point of view, it’s really just the answer I just gave to Chris. It’s lumpy. It’s going to move around. And we’re not going to do a very good job of predicting it in the early days. We don’t have a lot of historical data to go on. But again, all the indications are of macro growth across the board. But we’ll keep working to find other opportunities, of course, as well. Not – again, not because I’m concerned, but because it’s prudent, and I want more and more growth. I’m very aggressive about this. I’m not looking at treading water here. We’re looking at continuing this meter growth, and we’re going to.
