Rommel Dionisio: So you’ve obviously made significant progress on the private network. So I wonder, if you could just give us a little more color on that. Obviously, some significant events here over the last several months and the business prospects both in North America and Europe for that?
Doron Arazi: So I will start with, what I was saying in the previous conference call. We ended up last year with $40 million of booking in the private networks and we aspire to double this amount in 2024. This plan has not changed and we definitely see a path for getting to this level of booking. I think this quarter was characterized by a lot of good results of hard work, especially in the energy segment where we received nearly $10 million value of orders from this segment. And I think that with our unique solution plus the fact that we have a good brand of, some sort of, system integrator concept. In this particular segment, we are seeing the fruits of focusing on this segment that is going through huge transformation, digital transformation, across all segments.
So that’s definitely encouraging. On top of that, we look at the funnel and our funnel is increasing very, very nicely. And that means that we have a very strong signals that we are getting traction with our solutions, our marketing efforts that we started in much higher pace towards the end of last year, but also increased it as part of our budget. In Q1 are also showing very strong signs of traction. And therefore, I’m quite optimistic about our ability to achieve, this double number — doubling the number of booking in this year and maybe even exceeding it.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Gunther Karger[ph]. So maybe we’ll move along for now to Alex Henderson. Alex, go ahead.
Alex Henderson: Regarding the medical industry a specific market, there’s been a rise of interest in the artificial intelligence, the diagnostic areas and such things. With regard to the short range, millimeter range systems and diagnostic trans data transmissions, has there been any notice of market interest in that area?
Doron Arazi: So, I would say the following. First of all, what we are seeing following the acquisition of Siklu that, by the way is, actually heading or moving forward as planned and even, slightly better, there’s a lot of traction for short millimeter wave, transport solutions and fixed wireless access, especially in dense areas. And that’s obviously definitely encouraging because this was the purpose of the acquisition. So in this respect, we see a lot of traction and we believe that we can we can increase our business in this domain, definitely leveraging our position following the acquisition of Siklu. In terms of AI, I know that people are asking questions. Some of these questions are coming via email. Guys, we have already AI embedded in our software and we have different use cases where AI can be used for optimization of either the network or the wireless transport piece.
And with our digital twin, we can even expand it beyond the just the transport itself. So we are already using this kind of tools, and it’s our intention to continue leverage these kind of capabilities into our software solutions and our products.
Operator: Our next question is from Alex Henderson from Nidham & Company.
Alex Henderson: So I get it that you’ve had some very large orders here. I get it that the timing of that heavily skewed to the first quarter, set you up for very strong deployments over not just to the back half of this year and but also into ’25. But I was wondering, given that — those orders, is your pipeline of additional deals still healthy and/or is there enough heft in that to continue to build more order flow over the course of the remainder of the year. What does the pipeline look like?
Doron Arazi: So the pipeline looks quite healthy, and we also actually made that comment in my prepared comment. We’re also encouraged by the progress we made in other regions. It was kind of the first quarter in this year and probably for a few quarters where all other regions, without any exception had the sequential growth in the booking versus the obviously previous quarter. So that’s also a good sign for us. We see a healthy pipeline in most of the regions. We see a nice pipeline, as I said in the private networks and increasing and this give us the confidence, the level of confidence that we need to feel comfortable in the path and in the target we set to ourselves for 2024.
Alex Henderson: And just going back to the inventory, I think your inventory is still a little higher than normal. How do you see that feathering down over the year? And is that going to be tied to the shipments into India or is that just normal course of business? How do we think about it?
Ronen Stein: Yes, indeed. The inventory reduced substantially this quarter. We reduced inventories from $69 million to $61 million. So it’s a positive sign because it’s for quite a few quarters. I think that the last time we were in this level was around 2022. And we made a lot of progress in 2023 to come to this stage, where inventory has come down. And we believe that there is more room to decrease inventory. I’m not sure about quarter-to-quarter levels, but, over the year to continue to decrease and we have a plan to continue to decrease the inventories by at least a few couples of millions. And this is associated, of course, with the fact that we built up inventories for the new products that are now being materialized and that we are now going to start to sell over this year, and then we can streamline the new products as well as coming back from the post COVID-19 building of inventories, due to the challenges that we had of sourcing of components these years.
Doron Arazi: Alex, just to add on top of Ronen’s comment, the only issue of managing our inventory that is obviously a big item on our balance sheet has stepped up dramatically since, we started seeing the component market rationalizing. And there’s a lot, a lot of activities on the one hand, building our plans to more of adjusting time delivery of components. Obviously, looking at some excess and working with this excess inventory very fast in the process and not waiting too long. And all of that is creating a much more meticulous handling of our inventory. So I truly believe that we will be able to continue in this trend. There’s only two factors that you need to take into account. One is that we need also to look at the inventory as a percentage of our volume of business.
