And that’s where we came to the client. There really wasn’t somebody else doing it and came up with how we could go out, collect the information that would help them in validating their models and be able to go to market with these products that were highly reliable in that. And so that work began in the mid-teens 2016 timeframe. And since that time, as you have heard us talk about our user study or human subject studies, we have helped them as they have evolved their products to be so integrated with the human behavior and such in the human environment to go out and collect information and help them in that process of doing it both in the human factors side, in the biomechanical safety side, as well as just great data that might not even be a human subject for their – for the machine learning that they were doing and developing that.
And that has definitely gone from being none of our business in 2015, let’s say, to being a sort of mid-single digit, high-single digit percentage of the business that we had in 2022 or so. We did see, as clients hit this challenging market environment, but it also was very much about where they just happen to be in their product life cycles that also impacted how much of that activity that they were engaging us with in 2023. And that is where we hit a lot of it. Yes, we did see tightening as you would expect, but it didn’t go away on that hardware sort of failure analysis. We definitely – we just took that, we were down with clients. but not to the degree that some of this that was driven off a product life cycle and probably the tightening of the belt that occurred really in this area of human subject matter studies that we had in that period of time.
So, what we saw was that our business in consumer electronics in 2022 was a little over 20% of our business, 22% of our business in 2022. And with this pullback that we described, it became 16% of our business in 2023 and only 14% of our business in the fourth quarter. So, that is the headwind that we are having in that area and sort of the evolution over the last 20 years to 25 years of our business.
Tobey Sommer: Okay. Thanks for that expansive in answer. Is it – does that 14% represents in your view, a normalized proportion? Just trying to understand if there is kind of another leg to go in this area? And maybe as an additional follow-up to that, and I will get back in the queue after this. Is there another industry vertical that has seen sort of extraordinarily – extraordinary growth over the last 2 years or 3 years that you would care to highlight this afternoon?
Catherine Corrigan: Thanks Tobey. I will sort of chime in, and I appreciated Rich’s view of the history there. But in terms of forward-looking growth opportunities in the electronics space, we absolutely believe that we can continue to achieve growth in this sector when we look at the evolution of the products, when we look at the role of artificial intelligence in being able to create the kinds of user experiences, and the kind of performance that is being demanded by these. The other piece that I think is really important is the blurring of the line between what is a consumer electronic device and what is a medical device. This is a place where those lines really are blurring. When you are doing it as a wellness feature, it’s one thing, and when you are putting a feature on your device that’s going to tell you, you are about to have a heart attack.
Those are two very different things. And the FDA starts getting interested in that and so forth. And so we are in an exceptional position with our experience across life sciences as well as electronics as well as our ability to do human subject testing that is sufficiently rigorous to be accepted by the Food and Drug Administration. Because of our knowledge of those regulatory environments, we are able to do that, which is an absolute competitive advantage. All of these things, we believe are great opportunities for us as we go forward. Despite what we have seen in terms of this reduction in the overall percentage going forward, we are excited about the opportunities, and we are positioning ourselves for those.
