And it’s very technical with a very hands-on approach, matched with a team of smart guys via what we call them are smart guys that have come — either previous employees — customers who become employees, or many are military personnel who have deployed fiber in the harshest environments. And I think that sales organization, which deals directly with our customer base on a technical perspective, is one of our biggest competitive advantages. Now, we also support our distributors as well, and about 50% of our business does go through distribution based upon customer’s request for a financial or fiduciary relationship. But being able to have that technical relationship and that training relationship on a direct basis, I think will be what strengthens our relationship or our revenue opportunities over the long-term.
But we certainly respect what our competitors are doing and expect that there’s going to be a big enough market there for all of us to get an increasing amount of revenue moving forward.
Tim Savageaux: Great. Thanks and congratulations again.
Cheri Beranek: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. . Next, we have a follow up question from Ryan Koontz, Needham & Company. Please go ahead.
Ryan Koontz: Thanks for the quick follow up. When asked about backlog and composition of backlog, I see that coming down as a percentage of total revenue as your revenue out grows that. Does that mean your lead times are coming down? And what does that mean for your customers as your lead times come down? Does that give you more opportunity for share gain.
Cheri Beranek: Yes. We are even though the backlog went up as a dollar value, we are aggressively working to increase capacity. And whether that is in Minnesota, whether that’s in Mexico, whether that’s in Finland, capacity increased is core because we see this market just continuing to grow and grow for the next really five to 10 years. And so and in fact, I will talk to people and say we’re limited only by our ability to scale as fast as our quality systems will scale. And that’s the gating factor for our revenue and our quality systems have done a fabulous job as we’ve hit to this point. And so we’re kind of hit that kind of rhythm now. And I think we’re going to see moving forward some normalization. And so as a result, that will mean that our backlog will come down, the dollar value is going to come down as we increased that capacity even to the backlog reduce lead time and provide the opportunity for the organization for our customers to depend upon us more and more as they have in the past.
So absolutely, we think that will be a competitive advantage for us. And we will work to be able to — to not only have limited lead times, but more or equally importantly, is to be able to ship to our promised dates, because we need our service provider customers to be able to really maximize their labor teams. And that ability to shift to those commitment dates, is really core to ongoing savings. And I think, growth for Clearfield.
Ryan Koontz: Sure. That’s actually great to hear. And on the mix of backlog, any changes there? Or is it pretty representative of the current mix of revenue in general? Or how would you characterize the mix in the background total?
Cheri Beranek: I mean, the backlog is a little more oriented toward the larger carriers right now. And that we do have — we changed over the course of the last quarter, 90 days ago, 75% of our revenue was shipping in the next six months. Now we’re at about 65%, which means we got more orders associated with those longer scheduled events. And so it’s a little bit of a skew toward the larger carriers in cable TV and the national carrier community, but not so significant that it really kind of dwarfs the outlook.
Ryan Koontz: Perfect. Super, thanks for the help.
