Porter Taylor: The market doesn’t want to give you respect. You guys have the Rodney danger for a successful investment I want to couple things real quick. One, wind power last year was a tough year, wind power in Europe, winds changed direction, and they didn’t deliver a lot of projects actually ended up not getting done or getting pushed out. Are you seeing an improvement in the market this year in Europe with everything that’s been going on and clean the winds returning to their normal courses?
Gregory Peloquin: Yes. So right now 95% of our business is North America. The products I mentioned for Nordex, Senvion and Suvion, they’re 2 of the 3 largest manufacturers of wind turbines in Europe, and they’re pushing us very, very hard for this product. So this product is, in essence, a replacement product that they need to get done to get those lead acid batteries out. So our market share is small enough that we feel that the market growth will be very strong for us, but the market itself is all based, to me, what I’ve seen and heard is on subsidies. And there’s a lot of push to get certain things done so they can collect their subsidies for 2022 at the end of the year, which was part of our large shipments and work in 3 shifts because we need to get those products to them in this fiscal year.
So rollouts of new wind turbines, I don’t think it’s accelerating much, but the upgrading or refurbishing, they call it, using our products, whether it be the ULTRA3000 or the UPS or our shunt, which is a product we’ve developed for GES specifically, that seems to be continuing, based on their forecast, 2023 is going to be another strong year for us.
Porter Taylor: Okay. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding. In fact, when you started to talk about the semi cap equipment space and the idea that there was uncertainty beyond the next 2 quarters, the market immediately sold your stock off pretty aggressively. Can you give people a better understanding of kind of the role that plays. And as you said, everyone is cross-trained. Do you actually think the issues in semi-cap equipment, if they do show up in the next fiscal year, will do anything to really slow your overall growth? Or will they simply allow you to take those people who aren’t being utilized in semi-cap equipment or might not be utilized and push them over to these other faster-growing areas?
Gregory Peloquin: Yes. I don’t think it’s going to slow our goals of 10% to 15% growth going forward, our internal numbers. The semiconductor wafer fab market historically, and I’m talking about the last 20 years that I’ve been involved in and also in this company is it’s been cyclical. It runs for about a year to 18 months of the upside and then it slows down quite a bit for like 9 months to a year. It’s just this last run has been close to 2.5 years. But I think the slowdown is going to go back to not 2.5 years, it will be 9 months to a year. But if we look at just internal projections about what it could be and then what we’re have on the books with a strong backlog and new products, et cetera, in terms of profit dollars, gross margin dollars and top line, I don’t think it’s going to have much effect at all. In fact, we’ll more than overcome it based on the numbers that we’ve been talking about so far in this call.
Porter Taylor: Yes. I mean the call sounds exceptionally bullish the stock market reaction seems to be one . I would say that it would help a lot of investors if they had someone who could tell them what they’re supposed to think. So if you guys could get some sell-side coverage, that would actually be nice because most people in my business under turn to someone else to have a interpret results and prefer to active , but that’s only 40 years of experience working in the micro-cap. I wanted to talk to you guys about the battery, the electric vehicle market, both from a car perspective, which is very interesting. How big do you think that opportunity can become? How unique is your offering? And do you see that as an offering that will become — have a broader appeal beyond the people you’re currently working with?
Gregory Peloquin: Yes. numerous electric transformations, whether it be locomotives or forklifts, and I think our niche is going to be these larger type of niche products. The electric vehicle power market, is this so saturated, everybody going after it? Obviously, it’s a multibillion dollar market, and that’s why everybody’s going after it. Our current capabilities are, again, similar to wind turbines or electric locomotives as we have a niche product, it’s a charger module that we — we sell VinSmart along with some other controlling circuitry. But that today is probably a $3 million to $4 million opportunity for us, and we have about $2.5 million backlog. The charging stations are a little bit higher opportunity for us because we can develop unique products for charging stations specifically.
But the electric car market, that’s just — it’s like the handset market, which is the other part of my career. It’s just saturated and lower margins and everybody wants at it. We don’t have a ton of value today on the electric car market other than our component designing capabilities, working with these customers to help them build systems. But our size is going to be on solar, wind, power management applications that are a little more high power, a little more niche.
