There is a war in Europe, there’s near peer threats like China, who has surpassed us on some ways. Cyber is the great equalizer, whether it’s Iran or North Korea. A decade-plus ago, we were at war in Afghanistan, very germane to us. We operate in the skies, in the electromagnetic spectrum, and it remains pretty much unencumbered and that’s most likely not going to be the case in any type of near peer conflict, and we’re relying much more heavily on space and that domain is now contested, so. If I had to write the pluses and the minuses, we’re going to continue to monitor it, Bert, but to some extent I’m a guy and we’re a company that are going to work on things that we can influence for now. We’re going to focus on running the business, delivering long term growth and shareholder value, and what we know is national security is extremely important and they have a lot of critical needs.
We know our expertise and technology can address many of those needs. We’re a strategically based company, strategy is where we come from. We’re not in these high growing, very important markets by accident, so I like the fact we have a full government fiscal year ’23 budget that supports where we want to head, and we’re going to continue to focus on a long term strategy that delivers consistent value, no matter what that commentary happens to be. Thank you, Bert, for that question.
Operator: Our next question comes from Seth Seifman with JP Morgan. Seth, please go ahead.
Seth Seifman: Thanks very much, and good morning. I think it was a few quarters ago, maybe it was around the middle of 2022 when there was some of the slowness in government funding, and I think you talked a little bit, John, about being unsure kind of in terms of figuring out what might be delayed versus what might be lost. I wonder if six months on or so, if you’ve gotten a better sense of that, and particularly maybe on the product side, since it seemed like that was an area where maybe there was some more dislocation in terms of what was expected.
John Mengucci: Yes, thanks. I’ll start off, as Jeff mentioned, the year is playing out as we expected, and some of the mission tech work that we have out there is clearly planned to deliver during the back half of the year. Back to where we were, and you’re absolutely right, second half of fiscal year ’22, we were looking at a funding slowdown in dips and the like, and look – some has come back and some has and will come back in a slightly different form, so the update to that is while funding was the original issue and while the customers struggled through funding, some of the threats and the requirements changed. It’s requiring an enhanced capability versus what we all may have delivered just about a year ago until now. Now for us, , what that means for us is we’re working on software mods to our hardware solutions, and we can deliver those items that haven’t yet come back by the end of our fiscal year and that does drive a stronger bottom line.
It’s something that we continue to watch, but it does unnaturally, Seth, play into this concept of software defined, low size weight and power multi-mission tech that can really take on different needs. If we look at what’s going on in Ukraine, there is a lot of UAS activity there, and even those requirements continue to change as the pace of battle changes, so the fact that we don’t have to push all those mission tech sales out through the end of the year is a great kudo to our earlier acquisitions and that they were very software defined. We’ll be able to get back on track – I’m very confident in that, and we’ll need that, of course, for us to close on our fiscal year ’23. Thank you for that.
