Richardson Electronics, Ltd. (NASDAQ:RELL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Wendy Diddell: That’s not our full system, David.

Ed Richardson: No, no. That’s just the generator. The generator that tubes our 6-kilowatt tubes.

Unidentified Analyst: All right. And is there a waiting list for the full system?

Wendy Diddell: You have to we should contact with some of our customers.

Gregory Peloquin: All right. We’ll work on that for Okay.

Operator: We have another follow-up from Pete Taylor with ARS Investment Partners.

Porter Taylor: A couple of — a call or 2 ago, you talked about the replacement tube business for medical imaging and the indication was it was losing $5 million or $6 million a year, which with 12 million shares out is something neighbored of $0.40, $0.50 a share. You talked about the ability to bring that to breakeven or profitability over, say, the next 4 to 8 quarters, where do we stand in shrinking that loss and pushing it towards profitability?

Wendy Diddell: yes. Good question. So while everybody was talking, I was looking at that exact same question. And in the current fiscal year — last year, we lost a little over $5 million, almost $5.5 million. This year, we’re trending better. And while we’ll still have a loss in FY ’23, it should be in $3 million to $3.5 million. So that’s $2 million improvement to the bottom line. And then we still are trending and believe we should be able to hit that breakeven point by the fourth quarter of FY ’24. The Siemens program is coming along. When that gets launched, and then I mentioned a couple of other things that we’re looking at to kind of get a little breathing room, we feel that we’ll be at that point by, again, fourth quarter of FY ’24. We’re not changing our anticipation there.

Porter Taylor: So this fiscal year, you’re losing pretax about $0.25 a share. And by the end of next fiscal year, you’ll be breakeven and have the ability to make profit? This has been kind of a burger booth for you guys. So getting this to where it’s actually making — generating good revenue and profit and becoming a profit center would be a huge shift.

Ed Richardson: You’re absolutely right.

Wendy Diddell: You are right. 100%.

Porter Taylor: And it puts, as I say, right now from this year, pretax puts into the next year gives you $0.15, $0.25 a share in pretax earnings power as in your pocket, which is a nice thing to have.

Operator: We also have a follow-up from Daniel Berner with Bernard Family Fund.

Unidentified Analyst: On the GE turbine business, you mentioned — you spoke a little bit briefly about the rollouts that you’re going to be in every one of these GE turbines. I guess, can you give us a little bit more color on what could potentially go wrong there? Is it delays coming from GE that might prevent some of these rollouts in the next few quarters? Or is it a substitution of a competitor module? I guess what’s preventing you from being a little bit firmer on the guidance coming out of GE specifically?

Gregory Peloquin: Well, 2 things. One, the only hiccup that we’ve seen, like I mentioned, we have over 30,000 units in the field with little to no RMAs. So the product technically is amazingly sound. Again, we have — still have issues with piece parts. And so the only thing that could slow that down would be a hiccup in our ability to get piece parts to build the product, but the backlog and the dates that we currently have, along with the forecast they’ve given us, there’s no indication that I can see that would slow the program down other than our ability to make them fast enough to fill their needs. And as I mentioned before, it’s very project-based. So as I just mentioned, , we got the orders in November and they wanted them shipped at the end of the month, a multimillion dollar order.

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