Alan Yu: Well, in the past year, prior to pandemic, our company has been growing double digit every year, year-over-year. And last year was a much different environment because in 2022 there’s a major spike in ocean freight and that we have to add the price of cost of goods sold and the reselling prices based on that and there was a deflationary factor during the last year 2023. But in 2024, as everything stabilized, our selling volume is going to increase with adding new sales rep that’s going out — has been going out there in the street selling to more new chain accounts. And we’re already seeing that, we’re adding several dozens of new accounts in the past few months basically. So we’re adding about 20, 30, 40 accounts, I would say, 40 accounts every quarter’s distribution and chain accounts.
And with that said, that’s going to add a lot to our top line as well as our existing customers. We’re adding additional new items such as napkins and other new categories that we’re selling in that we’re looking to bring in this year additional 300 to 400 SKUs that will also add to our top line. On top of that, we’re looking at acquisition this year. As we mentioned during our IPO, one of the things that for our growth strategy is started looking at acquisition target. And in the past years, we’ve been looking at it but the price was not that reasonable. And we’re seeing that people that are looking to sell their business that were potentially we can acquire are becoming more realistic numbers that we can see that we can look into now. So if we were to hit the 15% range, I would say that would have a small acquisition.
I’m not going to — we’re not going to talk about large acquisition but we’re looking at the small side acquisition.
Ryan Meyers: And then if we think about the softness that you commented on in the distributor and national channels in the fourth quarter. Just want to get a good understanding of how much of that was driven by just the California market versus how much of it was the overall system as a whole?
Alan Yu: California market, in the fourth quarter, we saw a decline of almost like a double digit decline in terms of California year-over-year. The restaurant environment in California, it’s really bad in this industry and also as well as competitiveness. There’s a lot more importers in California. Restaurants are not doing well, especially the mom and pop that are serviced by distributors. The chain account, however, is doing much better than the distributor that’s mom and pop shops, which we’re seeing a lot of restaurant closing and going out of bankruptcy. That’s what we’re seeing in fourth quarters in California.
Operator: The next question is a follow-up from Jake Bartlett with Truist Securities.
Jake Bartlett: My first was just on that discussion on guidance, Alan. And you had mentioned volume expectations of 15%, but the guidance is 8% to 15%. So is that just a follow-on of the lower pricing that we had by the end of the year? Just helping us understand the dynamics. I know there’s mix that goes on as well impacts sales growth. So maybe just help us mesh the 15% volume growth and the 8% to 15% revenue guidance.
Alan Yu: We’re volume wise, it’s per case count. The case counts could be something that’s worth $3, $4 a bottle or something that is $80 a case. So that’s where we’re seeing the volume growth is. We’re calculating by the numbers of bottles and number of cases that we’re selling, the year-over-year comparison. And we’re already seeing — we’ve seen the growth starting in fourth quarter, especially November and December of last quarter last year. And we’re seeing — already seeing some strong growth this year already in the first two months — first three months of this 2024 already. And with the new customer that we just acquired recently and also the potential customers that are in our pipeline, we’re seeing this number to continue to grow.
So 15% is, I would say that it’s more of a conservative number that we — I’m going to say in terms of volume growth based on the number of customers that we have in pipeline, but this can be average. Because, of course, we’re looking at second quarter and third quarter is always a stronger quarter versus our first quarter and fourth quarter in terms of volume growth wise. So we’re going to be looking at 15% is our target in terms of ops growth quarterly wise. And in terms of revenue, revenue, we have kind of a strong base already in the 2023. And we’re seeing that with these volume growth and new account added and that’s where we see the revenue growth at 8% to 15%. Of course, that is a revenue guidance that we want to be conservative because in 2023, we have a very — we kind of have a decline in our revenue growth from 2023 compared to 2022.
