Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLFD) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Our next question is from Scott Searle with Roth Capital Partners. Please proceed with your question.

Scott Searle: Good afternoon, thanks for taking the question. Just to dive in on the gross margins again. It sounds like most of the beyond the mix issue, that there is a labor content issue here until you get capacity up at the facilities that is kind of weighing on the near-term results. Is that the way to think about it until we get into the second fiscal half of this year?

Cheri Beranek: Absolutely. We are making the addition of those people in advance of meeting them. So are you are efficiencies and utilization on the floor is not at the level that you targethem. But what it does allow us to do is to move those people around, so that they are not trained on a single line, which is what we did when we brought everyone on board. Last year in the second quarter is we hired people and we put them on one line. And we made sure that they could optimize that one line. But it doesn’t allow you to scale, what you need to do is you need to train all those people on all the different functions, and process steps in the fiber termination process, in order to really have the flexibility to ensure these lead times that are so crucial to our long-term success.

And so it is that investment in people and the training that will allow us to hit those six to eight week lead times this summer. That is still far more than what we were doing pre-COVID, we were working on lead times three to four weeks. I don’t think that is in our future. That is a whole that is not necessary. But six to eight weeks should be our goal. And we will have the labor force by which to do that based upon the investments we are making right now.

Scott Searle: And just a follow up, I guess in catalogs a couple of the earlier comments. You are looking for 30% to 35% growth in the second fiscal quarter, which kind of implies like you said normal seasonality is sequentially down December to March. Before we see that recovery into the second half of which you are expecting a 60% loss split, being skewed towards the back half of the years. Is that correct?

Cheri Beranek: Absolutely. Completely safe.

Scott Searle: Okay, and then to just to dig in on the back half. I know, it was asked earlier, but the comfort level there. What you are seeing in terms of the engagement from a customer standpoint requesting of shipments and it doesn’t sound like RDOF is really built into those expectations. I’m kind of curious where that fits either into the backlog or your thought process around a ramp up in the second half of the fiscal year?

Cheri Beranek: Right. I never count on government money in my projections, because it is just it is too much variability and lack of accountability to meeting have a date. And so that is definitely been that is still not in those numbers. And the other thing that is affecting these numbers is, one of the things that I mentioned in regard to our backlog, our lead time is of coming down with the exception of active cabinets and our availability of sourcing rectifiers. You don’t think of Clearfield has being a chipset affected company, but the components that are in the rectifiers for power conditioning are in extremely long lead time positions and it is been frustrating for our revenue models, and for our customers to not be able to get those products as they would like to see them.

And so that is one of the other reasons for the back half of the year coming back on board is as the chipsets, the rectifiers become more readily available. That is, the amount of our active cabinet business will be a much more significant part of our total revenue plan.