Nanophase Technologies Corporation (PNK:NANX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

I think the last piece, which is hard to quantify because it’s more subjective, is that when you have issues like that, you can’t schedule production smoothly. You find out a little too late in the game that, gee, I can’t make X hundred thousand units next week because I’m not going to have what I need until the following week, so now I’ve got to flat something else in. And those costs, I think we’re more — those are something we’ve addressed. I think the gross margin is going to be getting better and better. And that’s really where the biggest part of the hits in the second half of the year came from.

Operator: And with that, I will close the Q&A session and turn it back to Jess for final remarks.

Jess Jankowski: Okay. Well, thank you, Carmen. As we’ve said, demand for our products is not slowing down. We’re working hard to get them out the door faster and to help more people be healthier, feel better and look better with them. We’re growing, we’re winning award after award and we’re winning new brand partners and consumers. The answer to Jim’s question about if we are still growing and some color on how the delays have impacted, well, during that process, we are also adding new customers. So it’s no secret in this industry like every industry that’s as narrow as they can be people know what’s going on. And people know that we haven’t delivered in every case and that we now have addressed that. The funding that we recently received is really going to help a lot in terms of just allowing us to focus on the issues we have to attend to that are operationally related.

The reputation of the company, the Solésence business is still very good. We have $35 million in shipped and confirmed POs through this week. We’re going to be getting more. We’re positioned for sustainability in 2024 and we expect the improvements to start becoming evident in our results. So I’ll thank you all for being here with us today. We’ll look forward to the next call when we have more positive results, including KPIs to discuss as we continue to improve the profitability and sustainability of our business. Have a great day, everybody.

Operator: And thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect, and please have a great rest of the day.