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HP Inc. (HPQ) Q4 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

Published at 2009-05-06 01:38:13
Executives
Greg Klaben – Vice President of Investor Relations Kenneth Kannappan – President and Chief Executive Officer Barbara V. Scherer – Senior Vice President of Finance & Administration, Chief Financial Officer
Analysts
John Bright - Avondale Partners LLC Reik Read - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. Paul Coster - J.P. Morgan Rohit Chopra - Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc. [Bill Devellum] – Titan Capital Management
Operator
Good afternoon. My name is [Kara] and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Plantronics fourth quarter 2009 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Greg Klaben, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir you may begin your conference.
Greg Klaben
Thanks Operator. Joining me today to discuss our fourth quarter fiscal 2009 financial results are Ken Kannappan, Plantronics President and CEO and Barbara Scherer, Senior Vice President of Finance and Administration and CFO. I’d like to remind you that during the course of today’s conference call we may make certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties as outlined in today’s press release. As we have highlighted before, the risk factors in our press release and SEC filings are not standard boilerplate. We update these risk factors every quarter, adding and dropping language and changing the order depending upon the timing and potential impact of the concerns that we foresee. We believe forecasting our results of operations is becoming increasingly difficult and we ask you to focus particular attention on these risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by any such statements. For further information please refer to the company’s Form 10-K, 10-Q, today’s press release and other SEC filings. Our current fourth quarter fiscal 2009 net revenues were $146.8 million compared with $208.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. Plantronics GAAP diluted loss per share was $0.23 in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 compared with earnings per share of $0.36 in the same quarter of the prior year. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share in the fourth quarter were $0.01 compared with $0.46 in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. The difference between GAAP and non-GAAP earnings per share for the current quarter include restructuring and other related costs such as accounting amortization and the cost of stock-based compensation. I’d like to remind you that on the Investor Relations section of our website we have an updated PowerPoint presentation as well as an analyst metric sheet with all the financials and metrics released today. Now I’ll turn the call over to Ken.
Kenneth Kannappan
Thank you Greg and thank all of you for taking the time to listen to our call. Our fourth quarter results were above our guidance for revenues and operating income, a result of better than expected demand for Bluetooth headsets combined with the stabilization of customer demand across product categories in North America. The key takeaways from our fourth quarter. Overall revenue declined by 30% from last year to $146.8 million as a result of continued economic weakness across geographies and product groups. While we anticipated revenues to be in the range of $125 to $135 million, the Bluetooth segment declined less than forecasted from the December quarter and we started to see the stabilization of revenues from our North American customers. Our operating income was also above expectations. We provided guidance for the non-GAAP operating loss of $4 to $10 million and we reported operating income of $3.7 million. In addition to the restructuring activities we announced during the quarter, we’ve remained vigilant in reducing costs throughout the organization and believe that we now have the right cost structure for the current economic environment. Our operating expenses declined 25% from last year and our targeted operating expenses for F ’10 are $195 million versus $231 million that we spent in fiscal 2009. We’re pleased with progress from our other initiatives such as inventory reduction. Inventory declined to $18.3 million for the prior quarter which helped our cash flow from operations increase $39 million, driving our total cash and equivalents balance to over $218 million. On last quarter’s conference call on January 27, we indicated our intention to evaluate alternative actions to bring our consumer business to profitability. Consumer business is principally our mobile headset product group and the audio entertainment group which is comprised of Altec Lansing products. In March we announced actions to significantly reduce our cost structure for the mobile headset business in 2010. One of the outcomes of the review of alternatives was the decision to outsource production of our Bluetooth headsets and close our factory in China, which we believe will enable us to continue to deliver competitive Bluetooth headsets but with a vastly improved return on investment capital as fixed assets, inventory and expenses will decrease and gross margin will improve. We have not yet announced our plans for the audio entertainment group but have been working on this and will update you when appropriate. The audio entertainment group has been executing very well in terms of new product placements with retailers. However, it continues to experience weak consumer demand and price sensitivity among consumers. The product refreshed for the audio entertainment group started last calendar year and remains on track. In fiscal 2010 the increasing mix of these new higher margin products is expected to improve the division’s margins. On the product front, we’ve introduced innovative and competitive products recently for the office and content centered market and for the Bluetooth business. For the office and content centered we introduced the Savi family of products which is a per suite of Unified Communications, wireless headset systems. It will integrate multiple devices and applications to improve business collaborations, flexibility and cost savings. The Plantronics Savi series features two wireless headset systems, Savi Office and Savi Go. Savi Office provides a single wireless headset for mixing desk phone calls with PC audio, cell phones, web conferencing, multi-media streaming and music and switch to from both desk phone and cell phone calls at the touch of a button and up to 350 [feet] away from the desk. Savi Go gives mobile professionals a simple to use wireless wideband headset to connect to PC and mobile phone communications with a range of up to 200 feet. Both products have varying support UC offerings from leading providers including Avaya, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft and other popular servers such as Google Talk and Skype. For the Bluetooth consumer headset market we announced the Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset which features Audio IQ, an improved version of our original digital signal [promising] technology. It delivers pure noise and wind cancellations, both rich natural [inaudible] audio so you can hear and be heard clearly. The market reviews for this product have been among the most positive we’ve ever received. We’ve received accolades from PC Magazine, BNET, Forbes, Fast Company and the New York Times, consistently being ranked ahead of competitor’s products. I’d like to give you a brief update on Unified Communications. We believe Unified Communications will be the biggest, single driver for corporate revenue and earnings growth. During the quarter we articulated the expected size of market and revenue opportunity which we believe will be $350 million annually by fiscal 2015. We continued to make steady progress in the fourth quarter in terms of new trials and important wins. We are committed to executing on our goals for fiscal 2010 which are to be profitable and cash flow positive, establish strong UC market position for future growth, improve consumer profitability, and deliver better return on invested capital. I would like to turn the call to Barbara for a more full review of our financial results. Barbara V. Scherer: Thanks Ken. Overall our quarterly results were better than expected with net revenues exceeding the high end of the guidance we provided on January 27 by approximately $12 million, primarily due to the strength in Bluetooth which was expected to decline more significantly after a disappointing Q3. Our non-GAAP operating income of $3.7 million was also well above our guidance of a non-GAAP operating loss of $4 to $10 million, primarily due to higher gross margins on higher revenue and our cost reduction efforts. We were able to reduce non-GAAP operating expenses sequentially by $10.5 million or 18%, and by $15.8 million versus Q4 last year. This was terrific and occurred despite the fact that we have not yet realized all of the operating expense benefits of the restructuring we announced in the March quarter. Essentially we have managed to bring spending down to the target level of $195 million we announced for FY ’10 on March 26 during this last quarter. As expected, we had a GAAP loss which was $11 million, primarily as a result of the $10.8 million restructuring charge incurred during the quarter and an unusually high tax rate. Turning to the audio communications group, revenues of $128.1 million were down approximately 31% or $57.3 million compared to the fourth quarter last year. The decline was driven by poor global economic conditions and manifested itself as a decrease in net revenues in all regions and all product categories. OCC net revenues decreased $39.7 million or 32%, with $22.2 million of the decline coming from office wireless systems and $17.5 million related to professional grade ported product. 55% of ACG segment revenue or $70 million was derived from wireless products and that breaks down as follows, 59% office wireless and 41% Bluetooth. Geographically, ACG’s decline in net revenues compared to Q4 last year were that we were down 29.8% domestically and down 32.5% internationally, resulting in a 62, 38 domestic to international mix which is fairly consistent with Q4 FY ’08 of 61, 39 and evidence of the breadth of macroeconomic weakness affecting our business. ACG non-GAAP gross margin was 39.2% compared to 45.6% in the March quarter last year due to higher excess and obsolete inventory charges and warranty provisions primarily related to our Bluetooth products and substantially lower factory utilization. The increase in E&O was due to the rapid decline in overall Bluetooth demand compared to what we had been expecting much earlier when we made commitments to buy inventory and to the prices required to sell that now excess inventory. ACG had a non-GAAP operating margin of 6.5% in Q4 and the decrease in operating margin was primarily due to lower gross profit on lower revenues. Now I’m going to turn to the audio entertainment group segment summary. AEG fourth quarter net revenues of $18.7 million represented an $11.6 million decrease sequentially and a $4.7 million decrease compared to Q4 last year. These revenues for the quarter were in line with our expectations. AEG non-GAAP gross margin was 5.3% compared to 19.4% in the March quarter last year to a shift in revenue toward lower price and lower margin product compared to Q4 last year. Also in the fourth quarter last year AEG results were favorably affected by sales of products, prices higher than what those products had been reserved down to. In the quarter just ended there was not much impact one way or the other from inventory reserves, but compared to the same quarter last year the lack of a favorable impact creates a negative comparison. Our AEG team has continued to work hard to reduce the division’s cost structure which can be seen by the decrease in the non-GAAP operating expenses of approximately 33% from the year ago quarter and 4% sequentially. Despite those efforts as well as the strong placements in mostly in line revenue performance, the quarterly year-over-year non-GAAP operating loss increased $0.8 million driven by our decline in revenue and gross margin. On a consolidated basis below the operating income line, we had $0.4 million in other expense compared to other income of $0.5 million in the year ago quarter. Virtually all of this swing came from a decrease in interest income from $1.4 million in Q4 last year down to just $0.2 million in Q4 this year as a result of the significant decline in interest rates. Our consolidated effective non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 83.3% compared to 14.7% in the year ago quarter. The unusually high Q4 rate was primarily due to the E&O provision which, given our tax structure, we do not receive a tax benefit on. On a GAAP basis our Q4 tax benefit primarily relates to the Q4 pretax GAAP loss that reduced by the E&O provision that we don’t receive a tax benefit on. The full year rate of 26.1% non-GAAP and 23.4% GAAP compared to 22.3% non-GAAP and 19.8% GAAP in fiscal ’08. As a result of all the above our Q4 consolidated non-GAAP net income decreased from $22.4 million to $0.5 million. Small as it is, it’s nice to report a profit. Balance sheet. On the balance sheet are $218 million in cash, cash equivalents and short term investments is up from $163.1 million at the end of last year, a $55 million increase. Cash collections were excellent and DSO dropped to 51 days. Due to our concentrated effort to reduce inventory, inventories were down $18.3 million sequentially and turns decreased from 3.5 to 3.2 given the reduction in revenues. Inventory turns were 3.8 in the same quarter last year. Despite the net loss on a GAAP basis, our strong working capital management helped to generate approximately $39 million in cash flow from operations in the fourth quarter bringing the full year cash flow from operations to approximately $99 million. We expect to reduce inventory by a further $5 to $10 million in Q1. Capital spending was $2.8 million, lower than depreciation and amortization of $5.2 million in the quarter. Total capital spending for fiscal ’09 was $23.7 million which was in line with our expectations of approximately $25 million that we had indicated at the beginning of fiscal ’09. I currently expect CapEx to be approximately $11 to $12 million in fiscal ’10. Given the strong increase in our cash position, coupled with the fact that we’ve brought our cost structure into alignment with the current environment and cut our CapEx requirement, we plan to resume repurchases under the stock purchase plan our board authorized last fall. We had temporarily stopped our repurchases under this plan at the end of January as we were working through how to reduce costs and stay cash flow positive. We now feel confident of our plans to be profitable and cash flow positive through the downturn and plan to resume repurchasing our stock. On the business outlook, while the economic news remains largely negative there are signs that the rate of change is lessening and our order rate appears to have stabilized over the last several months. Therefore we believe that each of our major ACG product lines will be relatively flat in Q1 as compared to Q4, though all are expected to be down against Q1 of last year. We also expect total net consolidated revenues to be in the range of $145 to $150 million. Gross margin should be up compared to Q4 but lower than Q1 last year. Relative to Q4, our lower costs, higher volume and new products are all expected to contribute to improved gross margin. We also currently expect operating expenses to be up slightly from Q4 in Q1 to cover the costs of launching our key new products, the Savi line of UC products and the Voyager Pro, and to fund some incremental investments in UC related R&D. Non-GAAP operating income should thus rise to $5.5 to $8.5 million which will translate to non-GAAP EPS of $0.08 to $0.12 on a 28% non-GAAP tax rate. On a GAAP basis we expect to incur a small loss. The GAAP charges we currently expect include approximately $3.5 to $4 million in restructuring charges primarily for accelerated depreciation and tooling impairment, legal accounting and other costs, as well as some employee related expenses. Our recurring GAAP items are $3.6 million in equity compensation expense and $0.6 million in purchase accounting amortization bringing estimated GAAP charges in Q1 to $7.9 to $8.4 million pretax. And with that, I would like to turn it back over to Kara, the conference facilitator for the Q&A session.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from John Bright - Avondale Partners LLC. John Bright - Avondale Partners LLC: Ken, you talked about stabilization in many parts of your business in prepared remarks. Can you talk about the OCC market, what you’re seeing there?
Kenneth Kannappan
In general what we have seen is a firming up of the level of demand within the United States. We’ve continued to see some weakness within parts of Europe, but on an overall basis its left us in a stable position. John Bright - Avondale Partners LLC: Also Ken you mentioned All Tech, you mentioned you’re going to update plans when appropriate. Are any of the options off the table at this juncture?
Kenneth Kannappan
No. I mean we’re, we do have a plan that we’re pursuing but nothing is off the table. John Bright - Avondale Partners LLC: And Barbara, it looked like the gross margins were artificial or depressed during the quarter. I think you called out some obsolete inventory, excess inventory on the Bluetooth products utilization. Is there a normalized rate particularly within the ACG group that you might provide us on gross margin? Barbara V. Scherer: Our long term targets remain in place but it’s going to take, you know, some time for us to get back up into that, you know, 45% to 48% level because we are in fact still operating at low levels of utilization. Once we get through this transition on the Bluetooth ODM side which we’re on track to complete by October 1, that will, you know, that will certainly help move us back into that range. But we still need the OCC business to pick up to fully get back to our business model.
Operator
Your next question comes from Reik Read - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. Reik Read - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.: Ken, maybe going back to the All Tech side of things, could you just walk us through the various considerations that you have with respect to what you’d like to do with All Tech? And I guess with that, can you talk a little bit about what’s the value to you as part of a broader consumer strategy?
Kenneth Kannappan
Okay. Well first in terms of some of the considerations I want to be clear that we can’t be completely transparent even though we understand how important this is to shareholders. There are certain things that would not enhance overall shareholder value were we to go through them, so I hope that you can understand and respect that because we are trying to get back to [my] value for shareholders in final outcomes and sometimes the process of getting there could be jeopardized if we talked about it too much. You know, in terms of first operating the business, it makes sense to operate the business as effectively as we can. We clearly are trying to continue to do that with the management team and they are pursuing [add] replacements and margins. Clearly we understand very clearly that we have to get the overall financial outcome to Plantronics as a whole into a very acceptable category. Acceptable means that there can’t be a risk that there is a loss in the business. And so I don’t want to go beyond that at this point. In terms of the overall consumer, you know, effort that we have a couple of comments. You know, All Tech adds to our overall business. However, we intend to be successful regardless. Let me tell you how it adds to our business. Number one, very clearly it helps us get into a lot of consumer channels effectively with our Bluetooth portfolios and some of our PC headsets which are of course very relevant for some of the UC opportunities that are out there. That size and scale is important to customers and channel partners who are looking to consolidate vendors and it provides us a better economy of scale. There are certain solutions that involve sound across multiple applications, i.e., you’re listening to streaming audio one minute, you want that to pause, you want to go to communications in another area. And so it is helpful to our overall portfolio and it’s recognized as such by our partners. But again, no matter what we intend to be successful with our initiatives. Reik Read - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.: Barabara, as part of your comments can you, you typically will give some sense of how the channels doing. Can you give us an overall perspective on channel inventory levels, sales in versus sales out, in both the office and maybe the Bluetooth side? Particularly with the carriers? Barbara V. Scherer: Yes. In general what we’ve seen is that channel inventories have declined both in absolute dollars and inventory weeks on hand has actually gone up. So that’s, that obviously led to us selling in less than was being sold through. So in our commercial distribution channel in U.S. we saw the weeks on hand rise by about a half week. I mean, that’s not huge but that’s healthy. Retailer inventories as reported to us by the retailers have come down. And the carriers don’t necessarily directly report but we certainly get a substantial amount of information from those, and basically they look to be in good shape as well. Reik Read - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.: So as part of your comments on stability, you’re seeing that the inventory levels are pretty reasonable and selling is starting to equal sell out?
Kenneth Kannappan
Yes. I think inventories had declined in our channel and inventory turns in our channel had actually increased. In other words, actual weeks of inventory declining, so net net we’re in a very good position at this point in time.
Operator
Your next question comes from Paul Coster - J.P. Morgan. Paul Coster - J.P. Morgan: Barbara, I actually missed what the pro forma operating income was for the two segments. Can you just repeat that please? Barbara V. Scherer: The pro forma? You mean the –
Kenneth Kannappan
Probably non-GAAP. Paul Coster - J.P. Morgan: Yes, non-GAAP. Sorry. Barbara V. Scherer: Okay. Hold on one minute. The total, you know, consolidated non-GAAP operating income was $3.7 million and it was $8.4 million in ACG and a $4.7 million loss in AEG. Paul Coster - J.P. Morgan: So Savi’s out there and you continue to be very enthusiastic about Unified Communications. Ken, the inevitable question is what is it that you’re seeing that makes you so excited? Can you tell us yet about any of your pilot programs?
Kenneth Kannappan
Well, I can’t tell you name by name because we’re under non-disclosure but I can tell you that we continue to see many, many corporations evaluating this. Most of the companies I talk to are confident that it’s going to be coming in their future. The companies that have trialed it, quite a number of them are finding the performance acceptable and are proceeding with rollouts of voice or are moving forward in a logical manner in the evaluation process. Some of them are, to be sure, waiting for, you know, upgrades or next revs of particular software from vendors but are seem to be bought into it strategically. For us, as I said before, when we turn the PC into a voice communications tool it creates an opportunity for an audio I/O attachment that is very optional in the case of the telephone with the built-in handset and becomes, you know, really viewed by most as somewhat required in the case of the PC. So we’re seeing that. We’re seeing these go forward and we’re seeing that our own, you know, offerings are being very well received by the market. So that’s what’s giving us encouragement. Paul Coster - J.P. Morgan: Can you share with us what the largest deployment might be?
Kenneth Kannappan
Well, the largest deployment that we have kind of in early stages in the 200,000 unit range. It’s very early stage. The largest one that’s kind of rolled out is in the 60,000 plus units stage. Paul Coster - J.P. Morgan: Wow, 60,000 in one single enterprise?
Kenneth Kannappan
Yes. Paul Coster - J.P. Morgan: Finally, the competitive landscape, have you seen new entrants and have you seen anyone exit the market in any of the segments?
Kenneth Kannappan
We’ve not seen a significant change in terms of people getting into the market or with people exiting the market. There are always talk of people entering and people exiting, but there’s nothing that has happened yet that has hit the market yet in either direction.
Operator
Your next question comes from Rohit Chopra - Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc. Rohit Chopra - Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc.: I had a few questions. One, last quarter you talked about increased placements in the retail channel. I was wondering if that was a contributor to some of the strength or the less weakness that you saw in the Bluetooth side?
Kenneth Kannappan
Not primarily. Those were, comments about placements broadly are kind of significantly further forward and not of relevance to March quarter results. Rohit Chopra - Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc.: And if we do come back to placements, are there some major retailers that you could mention that you’re gaining as far as new channels?
Kenneth Kannappan
Well, we’re not really gaining new retailers. I mean, in almost all major retailers certainly within the U.S., you know, we already have an existing relationship and supply with. We could gain a relative share in terms of sell through or placement where we’re already present. So there really aren’t kind of new retailers that we’re capturing at this point in time. Barbara V. Scherer: When we talked about new placements and increased placements, you can, without adding any retailer we are able to increase our presence within a retailer. So, you know, we might have, you know, two products and we increased that to three or we could have five and take it to seven. So it’s increasing the number of placements per account, and each placement is a peg on the shelf. So you’re increasing your shelf space and there’s a limited supply of that, so basically if you increase your placements you increase your shelf space. It sets you up to increase market share. It doesn’t necessarily translate into that because obviously that depends on sell through. But without the placements you don’t really have, you don’t have nearly the opportunity. Rohit Chopra - Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc.: And then I wanted to come back to UC. Sorry about that. Can you tell us how much more R&D is going to be required to get you what you need to be, I don’t know what you want to call it but to have more presence in UC? Or, you know, the products that you need?
Kenneth Kannappan
Sure. A couple of comments. First, most of our products, one could even argue almost all of our products, are UC products. Okay? In other words, this is not, you know, a sudden discovery from us that UC was arriving in the market. A wireless headset such as the Savi Office which I talked about is a product that you can use with a traditional phone, as a traditional telephony headset, but you can also use it for Unified Communication. You can use it in combination with your traditional phone and Unified Communications, or only for Unified Communications on a softphone client on a PC. So many organizations of course want to buy products that are future proof. So even if they’re not going to go to UC right away, they want to buy products that will allow them to go there without an additional capital outlay. So most of our spending to be clear in my mind is really directly or indirectly supporting the types of portfolios that we need for Unified Communication. Now we are increasing our investment because Unified Communication requires more work in firm ware and software, and that is if you will an additional layer that is somewhat more dedicated to Unified Communications requirements as opposed to kind of our general products. So that’s an area where we’re increasing spending. Having said that, we’re hoping to keep our overall total spending in check by being protective in terms of portfolio and product development efficiency. Rohit Chopra - Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc.: I just want to follow up on Paul Coster’s question, the 60,000 UC deal that you mentioned, did that happen in one quarter? And was that a 10% customer?
Kenneth Kannappan
So, no, first of all these are end users and we sell to channel partners, just so you’re clear. But secondly, these rollouts do not happen at all in one quarter. These are typically, you know, reasonable sized companies that stage these rollouts over an extended period of time. Rohit Chopra - Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc.: How much is remaining in the buyback? Barbara V. Scherer: It’s approximately 900,000 shares.
Kenneth Kannappan
We have had a history of doing the buyback completing it and then, you know, as the conditions warrant doing an additional buyback rather than, you know, having a single step, very large [pull] that we do. Barbara V. Scherer: I want to say from memory that the one that’s authorized is our 17th or 18th , sorry I’m getting coached here, is our 19th such announcement. And each one has been for 1 million shares.
Operator
Your last question comes from Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc.: First on the guidance in terms of gross margins being up, should we think about that more in the ACG business or will it be up in both businesses? Barbara V. Scherer: We’re expecting it to be up in both businesses and with regard to AEG, it really is expected to be a function of the new products that are placed and selling relative to older products that have a higher cost and lower margin that have been in the mix in Q4. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc.: And then with ACG it’s a lot of the, not having the inventory, obsolescence issues? Barbara V. Scherer: Absolutely. And even beyond that, even up into the standard margin it’s also new products. It’s also the lower cost structure in our factories. I mean we’ve reduced costs in every part of the business. It sort of stands out more in the OpEx, but if you look at the actual spending levels up in operations costs they are also down on the 20 to 25%, you know, versus the prior year as well. So all of those factors are expected to help us pick up our gross margin some in Q1. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc.: And can you walk us through a little bit about how the expenses change between now and I guess October when you expect the full transition out of the China manufacturing plant to be done? Are all the expenses in that plant already accrued as part of the restructuring? Or will you get some OpEx benefit once that transition is complete? Barbara V. Scherer: The additional OpEx benefit that we’ll get once that transition is complete is on the engineering side, because we will be leveraging the engineering resources of our ODM partner Gortek. Meanwhile, there are products that we’re completing with our team and we’re also going through a transition with Gortek. So the people that are still our employees in China, and you know we just announced that we were going to do this at the very tail end of March, I think literally it was the day before the end of the quarter, so many of our Chinese associates will be employees of ours through the June quarter and on a manufacturing basis well into the summer quarter as we complete the transition. But on the engineering side, once we’re really through all of this you’ll see a drop in OpEx on R&D. Now that may be offset by that time with the incremental investments in software and firm ware, engineering and other UC related items, but the Bluetooth R&D will actually be dropping. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc.: And in terms of the gross margin transition, because it sounds like most of the employees there hit the cost of goods sold line, you mentioned that you expect gross margins to improve as that comes to fruition in October. Can you talk about maybe the degree to which it will improve or kind of the variability of gross margin going forward versus what it’s been in the past in that business now that it’s going to be an outsourced model? Barbara V. Scherer: Yes, so, incidentally we’re just talking Bluetooth. So, you know, when I say the levels of improvement it only relates to the Bluetooth revenue not to all consumer revenue and certainly not to the total company revenue. But the level of improvement that we’re expecting is very significant. It’s on the order of 10 to 15 points of gross margin and that’s based on really just three things. One, the firm quotes that we have from the vendor in comparison to our costs and the reason those quotes are lower is that that vendor is making, you know, products for a variety of companies and is able to leverage their overheads across a much larger base. Then our overheads are obviously going to be going away. And given the way the contract is structured, just the basic framework of an ODM agreement where you’re buying essentially finished goods or very close to finished goods, the amount of E&O risk drops significantly so the first two effects are the big ones. But, you know, is another one that certainly over time we expect will show big improvement versus where we’ve operated historically. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc.: And the 10 to 15% improvement, is that, what’s the base on that? Because I know that historically your gross margins in that business have been a little bit choppy depending on where the volumes have come in. Is that relative to where you guys peaked out or where you are now? Barbara V. Scherer: Well, the gross margins have been extremely volatile depending on things like E&O charges but in general they’ve been, let’s call it and I want to emphasize there’s been quite a bit of volatility in them depending on volume, factory utilization, E&O charges, etc., but they’ve been probably closer to 10% than any other number. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc.: In terms of the kind of the distributor situation out there in the world, is there and especially in relation to more international markets, have there been any issues with credit or distributors of yours getting into any kind of trouble that would leave you at any kind of receivables risk? Barbara V. Scherer: There have been. Many of those we’ve, well, we’ve certainly worked through a couple of those without any hit. There are others that we’ve had to take some bad debt expense and it’s in the numbers. And the net receivable balances that we’ve got and the partners that we have, you know, we feel good about. So the receivable balances to the extent that we had to take any bad debt have been written down to what we believe is the realizable value. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc.: And last question relates to the manufacturing in Mexico. What is the capacity utilization down there at this point and how should we think about the product coming out of that facility in terms of where the gross margin is now relative to where it was when you were fully utilized? Barbara V. Scherer: Our OCC revenues are down about 30% from a year ago and more than that from their peak. And one way to think about it is that that plant could certainly produce all of our OCC revenues, so we could easily produce the 40% more revenue out of that plant, which is to say relative to that capacity we’re, you know, we’d be at 60%. So we have headroom above that. We’ve let go many of the direct labor and we’ve also cut back on indirect labor. So we’ve reduced the cost structure but we could once demand starts to improve, we can rehire and retrain and bring capacity in the form of human capacity back on line. But in terms of the test equipment, the square footage, all the other, the management facilities, etc., we have, I mean, we could probably double output without any need for increased capital expense. Tavis McCourt - Morgan, Keegan & Co., Inc.: And then in terms of, I was really thinking in terms of the impact to gross margins. I mean I think historically the last few years you’ve talked about that being kind of a mid-50s if not slightly higher gross margin business. When it falls off this severely, what does the gross margin profile look like when the volumes are at this level? Barbara V. Scherer: Actually it’s still very good. It’s still in the kind of historical range.
Operator
Your next question comes from [Bill Devellum] – Titan Capital Management. [Bill Devellum] – Titan Capital Management: Last or during this past 12 to 18 months you had some important product introductions, largely to refresh product line. But looking forward over the next 12 months, fiscal ’10, do you anticipate equally important product introductions, whether it’s officially a major refresh or just part of the natural evolution? Or should we not be thinking about product introductions so significantly this year?
Kenneth Kannappan
We think we have some significant product introductions coming in the year. I think that the Savi Office family in and of itself because of the importance of UC in their wireless products are, you know, just perhaps especially important. But having said that we have a generally rich pipeline.
Operator
And that was our final question in the queue. Management, I’d like to turn the call back to you.
Kenneth Kannappan
Okay, Kara, thank you very much, and again I’d like to thank all of you for participating in our call. As always we’re available if you have any additional questions or would like to follow up. Thank you.
Operator
That concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect your line.