Cutera, Inc. (NASDAQ:CUTR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Margaret Kaczor: I maybe wanted to start a little bit on the macroeconomic factors that you referenced at the beginning of the call and kind of throughout. I am curious is the slowdown demand that surprised you still coming from the Med-Spa channel? Or is it starting to expand beyond that into [indiscernible]? And then I don’t know if I missed this, but was there a U.S. or U.S. split on capital? Sorry if I did miss it.

Taylor Harris: Okay. I’ll answer the first part, and then I’ll see if Stuart or Greg can chime in if we have that detail yet on your second question. So Margaret, in the third quarter, we saw reduced capital purchasing activity across all segments of the customer base. And I’m hearing from customers that — of all stripes that they were seeing a procedural or a patient slowdown as well. However, what I would say is that we have shifted our business over time to be about 75% what you might call noncore. In other words, outside of dermatology and plastics. That is largely the Med-Spa channel, but does include other elements. And so we do think that, that is a more economically sensitive portion of the market, and we’re more heavily exposed here. Margaret, I think the second question was the capital sales, the split of international in North America. We were down in both North America and internationally. And Greg, just looking to see if we have any numbers for you.

Margaret Kaczor: Sequential… And part of that follow-up on that one.

Greg Barker: Yes, we were done in both — so we can talk about that in both…

Margaret Kaczor: I wanted to hit the cash burn, it was helpful color both on the call and the front-end comments in the PR. But I think I’m doing the quick math right, where maybe you’re assuming a $45 million burn in the fourth quarter. I know there’s some onetime restructuring cost in that, but let’s call it something like $170-ish million annualized, right? So then you’ve got the restructuring savings of $20 million annualized. So maybe we’re down to $150 million please correct my math, I’m not perfect on that. Now Avis going to be better from a cash flow perspective, but maybe you can bridge back debt by how much? And is there a possibility where that burn can go down to $100 million or less for 2024?

Taylor Harris: Sure. Yes. So to jump to the end of your question, the answer is yes. And just maybe let me give you some color from the third quarter that would be helpful here. So in the third quarter, we burned $43 million of cash. And of that, it was about $20 million that related to the core losses of the business with the remainder being primarily working capital changes, and that’s both the buildup of inventory with AviClear primarily, but also with the core as well as this issue that we referenced of being late with our payables and needing to pay that down so that we’re being a good partner to our vendors. And that’s actually critical as we try to address our inventory and our service parts challenge. We need to be on good terms with our vendors so that we’re getting in the parts that we need.

So hopefully, what that shows you just from the Q3 analysis is that a substantial part of our burn in 2023 was related to either working capital or nonrecurring items. So just one more comment on this front. Q4 as well as Q1 of next year, we’ll have the similar dynamics. But after that, we do believe that we’re going to be able to shift into a different load with respect to working capital, where we’re able to start working down, AviClear as well as the core inventory positions and will be caught up on our payables. So that’s going to be — that plus the new business model that we have for AviClear should result in more favorable cash dynamics Q2 onward of next year.

Operator: Our next question is from Matthew O’Brien with Piper Sandler.