Ultralife Corporation (NASDAQ:ULBI) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Josh Sullivan: And then just one last one, just on the ThinCell, the medical wearable partner that’s working through the FDA testing, what do you think the timeline on that looks like?

Mike Manna: Well, we were hoping we were going to be in production last year. So obviously, we’re not showing a huge revenue spike in ThinCell or really announcing anything. So the FDA is a fickle process. We’ve been through it with a lot of our customers. Sometimes you get through it in six months, sometimes it takes four years. Unfortunately, it’s another one of those processes that I stated earlier, we’re kind of hostage to our customers’ time line and their successes in that regard. But we’re poised and ready to go.

Phil Fain: Yeah. The automated equipment is in place, and we’re ready when the orders come in.

Josh Sullivan: Okay. Well, thank you for the time.

Mike Manna: Sure.

Operator: Thank you. One moment, please. Our next question comes from the line of Brett Davidson of Investletter. Your line is open.

Brett Davidson: Good morning. I got just a couple of quick questions. One of them is, where are you guys in regards to production capacity right now?

Mike Manna: Well, production capacity, we’re still pretty low. I mean, as far as our overall ability to serve, we’re pretty much a first shift operation worldwide. And we have a lot of open capacity as far as footprint and building space. So if I had to guess, we could easily add another 30% capacity just on first shift, maybe even more than that. And then we still have the option of going to alternate shifts, additional shifts to probably triple our capacity if we needed to.

Brett Davidson: And I know you guys have gone through some growing pains introducing some of those new products regarding operating efficiency. Where are you guys in that process right now? If you could put like kind of a percentage number on it, if you were at 50% before, are you guys at like 85% now? Or what does that look like?

Mike Manna: It’s a little hard to nail down because there are so many different products and projects going on. But if I had to guess, we’re in that 80% range probably, but some projects are probably closer to 95%, and some are probably still closer to 20% at this point. So a lot of things going on, and we’re trying to prioritize obviously the highest revenue, more resource-intensive projects first, so we can see the maximum benefit.

Brett Davidson: And on some of those, like maybe some of the things more like the 20% level, I mean, do you guys still have some low-hanging fruit that you can easily address to ramp up the efficiencies?

Mike Manna: Well, absolutely. I mean the real challenge now that we’ve become a lot more medical involved in some of our other customers, I mean, the medical process to just change either process or product is just a lot more lengthy than some of just the industrial and other projects that you deal with. There’s just a really long qual and supplier approval process to really go through any type of change. So even though we have the best intention, sometimes what you think is a simple change that should take a quarter might take three just because you have to get resources from the customer to actually prove it and actually give you the green light to implement it.

Brett Davidson: All right. Thank you. I appreciate the time.

Mike Manna: Sure. Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of John Deysher of Pinnacle. Your line is open.

John Deysher: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Looks like a solid quarter and a nice way to wrap up the year. Just a couple of quick questions. One, what is driving the medical sales? Obviously, that helped you a lot in the last quarter. And I’m just curious, were there any specific items that really help boost the sales in that segment?

Mike Manna: Well, we have some recurring products that under FDA and other things are under a battery replacement cycle. Obviously, we had a lot of sales in medical during COVID. So you have some of that coming due where you get a little bit of a bump because there’s a replacement being used. But in a lot of cases, our main customers have had, their competitors have footfalls in some cases, recalls and other things that have really driven their businesses to grow a lot faster than I think even they thought, which we are a beneficiary of.

John Deysher: Okay. What’s the cycle time for the ones that you put into place during COVID. Is it four years or so? Or how does that work?

Mike Manna: Typically, the ventilation devices are three-year cycle typically.

John Deysher: Okay. And that’s the key product line, is the ventilation products?

Mike Manna: It’s one of our more prevalent lines, yeah, I would say. But we do a lot with infusion pumps and other medical power. So it’s spread across a bunch of different devices.

John Deysher: Great. What percentage of the backlog would you say is medical right now, roughly?

Mike Manna: I would say, probably 30% just off the top of my head, but I don’t actually have the number right in front of me, but.

John Deysher: That’s helpful. You mentioned business interruption claim is under review. What’s the approximate amount of that claim right now?

Phil Fain: Well, we haven’t disclosed that, but you can look at our quarterly results, and you can use intuition on determining what that is because if you look at the last three quarters — well, we’ll start with Q1. Q1, we had $32 million in sales. The last three quarters, we averaged, call it, $43 million. And over — and in Q1, whereas we were breakeven on the bottom, we averaged $3 million on an average per quarter over the last three quarters. So without giving you an absolute number of what our insurance coverage is and all that, it’s in that range.

John Deysher: Okay. I got you. When do you expect to have that resolved?

Phil Fain: That is a great question.

Mike Manna: Six months, I hope.