Chuck Kummeth: Well, time heals all here. So valuations have come down. They’ve come down all year, but there’s still denial, but there’s less denial. There’s not a robust IPO market right now. So small companies have limited options. We talked about the funding issues, right? So that means a lot of small companies are going to be looking for ways out and help. So our phone is ringing more than it was. We’re very active. We’ve been active, but we’re definitely more active than usual. And I hope we can land a few more. We landed Namocell not too long ago, and we’ve got some more in the pipeline. And yes, it is our number one capital strategy. We’re at net debt zero. We’ve got €“ we’ve got a $1.5 billion work chest rate to go with cash, and we’d love to put it to work.
I don’t think we’ll go over four times leverage, but I’m going to get up near that. Board is very supportive of us getting much more aggressive in M&A. But it’s like what you €“ the €“ your question is all about the price tags, right? And we’ve got to get real price tags to get to make to close some deals.
Operator: Our next question comes from Dan Arias with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.
Dan Arias: Good morning, guys. Thanks for the questions. Chuck, on GMP proteins. Can you just refresh your view on how you think growth shapes up there, when you guys are opening up to St. Paul facility, you talked about expecting a couple of years where revenue basically doubles. It sounds like you dipped a little bit below that, but maybe now you’re accelerating again. So what do you think the trajectory there is relative to the overall capacity, which I think at the time of like $140 million to $200 million?
Chuck Kummeth: Yeah, there’s a little bit of overlap, even in this €“ in the area we’d call OEMs. So we’ve got a lot of customers like 180 customers now for gene proteins, but only a handful that are really sizable and they’re a little bit lumpy still. We have some year-on-year comps in the area, they are tough as well. Even there, we still had a pretty good quarter, I’d say. And going forward, I think it is going to accelerate. We added another product to the same St. Paul were its fixed. We’ll more than double that in the coming year. We have the largest menu for regenerative medicine, and we’re moving with most of those over the St. Paul facility in the coming year or two as well. And we’re number one there. We’re playing catch-up still in the CAR T area, but it’s growing strong.
It’s still kind of, I think, going to be a double kind of year, maybe just a hair under this year, but it won’t be too far off, we don’t think. And next year should start lighting up as we land a few more larger accounts and we get some things further up in the clinicals to get more volume going. We call it turning minerals in the tunes and tunes in the whales. So we have a whole pipeline of how we move these customers forward. More of indication, we had a few of these customers are fairly sizable, and they went to zero, because their funding is tight right now. So they’re going to probably come back online next year, we think, as they get more funding, but they’ve had some stalls in some of their clinicals. These are small to mid-range biotechs that were kind of hot last year and not so hot this year.
