Unidentified Analyst: I was afraid I missed something.
Jess Jankowski: Yeah. No. No. You did not miss that and we will — you will see a lot more at it in the next few weeks.
Unidentified Analyst: A second question, if I may. In terms of volume projection for 2004 — 2024 and also taking into account what was said in the last call about customers more and more placing last minute order because of the concerns on the economy and the consumer demand. Do you expect — still expected 2024 growth or do you expect more flight volumes?
Kevin Cureton: Hi, Stefano. This is Kevin. Thanks for the question. We — I think there’s two pieces to our business as we always talk about or have recently talked about. The ingredient side, which is related to our supply to BASF and then the finished product side, which is the Solésence business. As we have also talked about, there’s a lot of uncertainty from quarter-to-quarter still related to the ingredient side of the business. So we are not prepared to project or predict much on that side of the business. On the Solésence side of the business, we do see a little bit more strengthening of the demand than what we had seen previously. In other words, we are starting to see that lead time come back where customers are placing orders ahead.
As Jess mentioned, we have already gotten, for example, over $13 million or right around $13 million in orders for 2024 and that is a good indication of demand and their confidence in the sell-through of the products in 2024. So we still aren’t thinking that it’s like it was back in 2022 where customers were buying six months ahead, but we are seeing some good solid pre-orders, which is a good indication of demand in 2024.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Then thanks a lot and all the best for the remaining of the quarter.
Jess Jankowski: Thank you.
Kevin Cureton: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question please. Next question, one moment, comes from Ryan K. Your line is now open — with RKA.
Ryan K: Thank you.
Jess Jankowski: Hi, Ryan.
Ryan K: Gentlemen, a couple of questions here. I came into the conference call expecting that we were going to have good news on a breakeven situation for the quarter based on what I had heard last quarter in that, my questions were going to primarily circle around the legal issues. But as a result of the call and the — I have a couple of questions on the quarter. The first question I have is that I would appreciate to understand what the increase percentage-wise of capacity was from Q3 2022 to Q3 2023, just roughly. Was it 50% greater capacity to manufacture? Was it 30%? Was it 60%? What was it?
Kevin Cureton: Yeah. Good morning, Ryan. Yeah. I would say, actually, it’s probably more in the order of 2x in terms of our capacity to meet demand from Q3 of last year to now.
Ryan K: Okay. So double, and if I recall, we were halfway into the third quarter when, Jess said, it looks like we are going to have profitability for Q4. So I am curious what happened in six weeks that so changed the landscape?
Jess Jankowski: Sure. I was expecting that question. Part of it had to do with the timing of the closing of the books. I was — when we were talking, I was expecting a different result for the following month, we — partly due to some of the issues we have internally. Occasionally, we don’t get the given month close on a timely basis, so I had information that was basically my feeling, which normally, my gut on it is pretty good and due to the postponement of some of the shipments and the building of material that we didn’t ship and we ended up waiting for the last — the cherry on top of a lot of things, say, we took a beating that I hadn’t expected we would. And so that’s — essentially, that’s what it was, it’s difficult given the — we added a little bit of infrastructure in our accounting group to try to be responsive.
But given the probably more than tripling of transaction volume, it’s been hard to stay up with it in a way where you get the information, you get a lockdown then you spend a week analyzing it or several days and I wasn’t there. I did earnestly think that in — at that time, we were going to make it for the quarter and we were just very surprised for that. So for that, I apologize, Ryan. I didn’t — nothing — I mean, what changed was the problems that we have been talking about earlier really came into the — they bore full fruit that change and I hadn’t expected it to the extent that it did happen.
Ryan K: Well, let me — I just want to double check. The CFO duties are — along with the HR duties, along with the presidential duties are yours, correct?
Jess Jankowski: Yes.
Ryan K: All right. Mr. Barry Blank made a very, very interesting point about shareholder PR and not communicating with shareholders. My concern is not the PR. My concern is the credibility, okay? I have historically watched the company go through situations where it has set its own hair on fire a number of times and as a result has made changes to the organization, the — an operations guy came in, who should have been there two years before because you had operational issues. Now you have had purchasing issues, well, now we have a purchasing guy, okay? You are alluding to the fact that financially, you don’t seem to be able to get a handle on all the financial data in a timely fashion to predict what’s going to happen and I am kind of curious on are we going to have — is the next major fire going to be a financial one before we get a CFO or before we get HR?
