Key Tronic Corp (KTCC) 2022 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the Q2 Fiscal 2022 Key Tronic Corporation Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Brett Larsen. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Brett Larsen, Chief Financial Officer of Key Tronic. I would like to thank everyone for joining us today for our investor conference call. Joining me here in our Spokane Valley headquarters is Craig Gates, our President and Chief Executive Officer.

As always, I would like to remind you that during the course of this call, we might make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the company's future financial performance. Please remember that such statements are only predictions. Actual events or results may differ materially. For more information, you may review the risk factors outlined in the documents the company has filed with the SEC, specifically the latest 10-K, quarterly 10-Qs and 8-Ks.

Please note that on this call, we will discuss historical financial and other statistical information regarding our business and operations. Some of this information is included in today's press release. And a recorded version of this call will be available on our website.

Today, we released the results for our quarter ended January 1, 2022. For the second quarter of fiscal 2022, we reported total revenue of $134.5 million compared to $128.3 million in the same period of fiscal year 2021. Revenue for the second quarter of fiscal year 2022 related to customer reimbursements for tooling equipment and other expenses increased approximately $10 million when compared to the previous year.

For the first 6 months of fiscal 2022, total revenue was $267.2 million compared to $251.5 million in the same period of fiscal 2021. During the second quarter of fiscal year 2022, the global supply chain, pandemic and transportation issues continued to disrupt production, including intermittent parts supply, factory downtime and overtime expenses.

In addition, we had a seasonal closure for 2 weeks at the end of December in our Mexico facilities that limited production time available for the quarter. Legal costs related specifically to the SEC's review of last year's whistleblower complaint totaled approximately $0.7 million during the quarter.

For the second quarter of 2022, our gross margin was 7.3%, and operating margin was 1.2% compared to a gross margin of 8.3% and an operating margin of 2.1% in the same period of fiscal 2021. Note that revenue attributed to customer reimbursements during the second quarter of fiscal year 2022 did not contribute much to our gross margin.

For the second quarter of fiscal year 2022, net income was $0.6 million or $0.05 per share compared to $1.6 million or $0.14 per share for the same period of fiscal year 2021. For the first 6 months of fiscal year 2022, net income was $1.4 million or $0.13 per share compared to $3.3 million or $0.30 per share for the same period of fiscal year 2021.

Turning to the balance sheet. We continue to maintain a strong financial position. As a result of supply chain-related production delays in the second quarter of fiscal 2022, and the continued ramp and transfer of new programs our inventory turns decreased from the prior quarter. We are carefully balancing customer demand and the likelihood of successfully bringing in parts in time for planned production. The production planning now requires that we look out much further in the future than in historical periods.

In future quarters, we expect to see our net inventory turns to be more in line with expected revenue as efforts to mitigate the impact of supply chain issues began to yield improvements and new production programs begin to ramp.

At the end of the second quarter, trade receivables were down about $3 million from the prior quarter, reflecting the timing of shipments and improved collections. Our DSOs remained at about 83 days, same as in the first quarter, which reflects both timing of shipments during the quarter and some delays in payments from customers who were also impacted by the pandemic-related slowdowns and restarts in their respective markets.

Overall, our balance sheet has total working capital of $176.4 million and a current ratio of 2:1. This is down from the prior quarter, largely due to growing customer production requirements and onboarding new programs.

Total capital expenditures were about $1 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2022. We're keeping a careful eye on expenditures during fiscal 2022 and expect our capital expenditures for the full year will be around $6 million. We plan to continue to invest selectively in our production equipment, SMT equipment and plastic molding capabilities as well as make efficiency improvements in our facilities to prepare for growth and add capacity.

Despite growing customer demand and new program launches, we expect the delays in the supply of key components will continue to limit production and adversely impact operating efficiencies.

For the third quarter of fiscal 2022, we expect to report revenue of approximately $130 million to $140 million and earnings of approximately $0.05 to $0.10 per diluted share. We're working closely with our customers, key suppliers and employees to minimize the effects of delays attributable to the continued global pandemic, increased global freight and logistics costs and limited availability of key components.

While our facilities in the U.S., Mexico, China and Vietnam are currently operating, while following current health guidelines, uncertainty as to the possibility of future temporary closures, customer fluctuations in demand and costs, future supply chain disruptions during the rapidly changing COVID-19 environment and other potential factors could significantly impact operations in coming periods.

In summary, we continue to see increased demand and new customer wins improve our total backlog. However, supply chain disruptions and the pandemic continued to impact our business during the second quarter and remain risks in future periods. However, we are encouraged by our growing backlog and by our prospects for future growth. New sales prospects and recently won programs continue to increase our customer demand to unprecedented levels for Key Tronic.

The overall financial health of the company appears strong, and we believe that we are increasingly well positioned to continue to win new EMS programs and to continue to profitably expand our business over the longer term. That's it for me. Craig?

Okay. Thanks, Brett. While we continue to face the stiff headwinds from worldwide supply chain challenges in the pandemic, we're pleased with the successful ramp of new programs and our expanding customer base in the second quarter of fiscal 2022.

During the second quarter, the industry continues to face persistent worldwide shortages in the supply of key components, particularly for electronic parts. These shortages have extended production timing and caused transportation costs to triple. Had it not been for the supply chain issues, we believe burgeoning customer demand would have driven revenue for the second quarter in excess of $160 million.

Unfortunately, we do not expect the supply chain disruptions to improve significantly in the near term. We also struggled with increasing labor costs and shortages of production staff at some of our sites as a part of the industry-wide labor shortages. In the face of all these challenges, we continued winning new customers and ramping new programs.

During the second quarter, we won new programs involving industrial robots, lighting control, disinfection, food production and energy management systems. We also announced a significant new program win with one of the world's leading power equipment companies, for which we expect to begin manufacturing in the first quarter of fiscal year 2023, and once fully ramped, could contribute approximately $80 million in annual revenue.

We were selected in large part because of our design and manufacturing expertise to help them accelerate introduction of new products as well as to enhance their ability to increase product availability to fulfill demand.

This new relationship represents an important expansion of our customer base. We would not have won as many new programs without our design capabilities and our multiregion footprint, which is designed to be the ideal solution to our customer supply chain issues.

During the second quarter of fiscal 2022, we saw a significant increase in production across our U.S.-based facilities. In fact, over the last 3 quarters, our Midwestern facilities have won business, which we expect will result in an increase of over 35% in annual revenue generated by those facilities by this time next year.

Moreover, production at our new Vietnam facility continues to grow, and we expect big things from our Da Nang facility in the future. As we've discussed on previous calls, the pressures on our customer base to lessen their Asian supply concentration remain very powerful.

Demand for North American production continues to grow with no foreseeable end to tariffs, intensifying political tensions between China and U.S., increasing Asian production costs and time to market and a weakening U.S. dollar. These factors have driven a significant increase in our business.

Key Tronic has emerged as the ideal answer to overconcentration of Asian supply and for onshoring to North America, particularly for those companies with programs in the range of $5 million to $100 million. We provide everything needed to make supply chain diversification easy, less risky and less costly. Our solution set provides companies with both local sources for low-volume products and low-cost sources close to the geographic markets for higher volume products.

We also attract the companies that have been overly concentrated with an Asian source and hence, are more likely to have lost engineering control. We can facilitate the move of production from a competitor to our site, enabling a smooth transfer by providing design and production engineering services to those companies who no longer have the capability.

Our vertical integration can lessen the risk, time and cost involved in a transfer. Moreover, after a decade of developing custom processes for a staggering array of products, we can onboard just about any product imaginable.

Moving into the third quarter of fiscal 2022, significant uncertainty still surrounds the continuing disruptions to global supply chains for key components and the threat of the pandemic. At the same time, we believe that these challenges will continue to force our customers to weigh carefully the degree to which they concentrate their supply chain on any one region and see their design control to their outsourced partner.

The recent macroeconomic events continue to force many companies to more fully recognize the significant impacts and elongated supply chain can have on both costs and availability, the risk of IP appropriation and the attractiveness of doing business with an outsourced partner who can minimize their risk on all of these factors. These market trends and our capabilities should continue to power our growth over the long term. This concludes the formal portion of our presentation.

Brett and I will now be pleased to answer your questions.

(Operator Instructions) And our first question today comes from Bill Dezellem with Tieton Capital.

So in the release, you noted the 6 new program wins, one of which was $80 million annual revenue. Congratulations. The other 5, how would you characterize the size of those, please?

From $5 million to $15 million per year.

For all 5 of those?

Yes.

Great. And then would you characterize the supply chain situation in more detail than you did in your opening remarks and maybe how it changed over the last quarter, where you're at today? And I'd love to ask kind of when you see this returning to normal, but maybe just what you see coming maybe is the more appropriate question.

Okay. There's 2 sides to that question, and I want to be clear on that because it has important effects on our outcome. The side that many people don't think about, at least for our business, is our customers' understanding of the situation.

In the last year to 1.5 years, we've gone from denial and anger. It's almost like the 5 steps of mourning I guess. But we've gone from denial and anger to acceptance to a willingness to plan and deal with the situation that we face today. So our customers, as an average now, are willing to give us much longer binding forecasts against which we purchase components, are willing to much more quickly agree to increases -- I mean short-term increases in component costs whenever we find some component on the gray market used to be probably 2/3 of that time that mining that we had done would go unfulfilled because it took our customers a long time to decide if they wanted to spend an extra 5x the normal price of the component to get that component in. So that's going quite a bit better for us now.

So that's kind of the one side of the teeter-totter is how the customers are reacting and dealing with the component shortages. Then actually, there's another side of it, so it's a 3-way teeter-totter and that is how the customers are dealing with ongoing price increases. We have been more successful in passing along price increases that are fair, but at the beginning of this, it was very hard to convince our customers they were fair.

And now that this has become common knowledge and accepted, people have seen the inflation numbers. People are themselves having hard time hiring staff and keeping it. So that side of the equation too has gotten better, not because the situation has improved, but because our customers understand and accept the situation more than they used to.

On the other side of the equation, the component availability I'd say has stabilized. It hasn't stabilized in a great place but it has stabilized. So lead times are still a year to 1.5 years. But they haven't continued to balloon like they were doing, and there are less, although still quite a few, surprises on a day-to-day basis when somebody calls us and says, hey, that shipment that was supposed to leave today isn't going to leave for 6 months.

So I wouldn't say on the supply side, things have gotten better, but I'd say that they've stopped getting worse. And as far as when I think this is going to turn around, I don't really know. Our politicians continue to do crazy stuff. I think the most -- I don't know.

The one that really gets under my skin is making all of the ships in LA Harbor go out and steam around the ocean so they can improve the way it looks from the air. But there's just a number of examples where I'm not sure what's going to happen because I can't see the logic behind it, a lot of what's going on. So that's my answer, Bill.

Do you see in the next, let's say, 3 months between now and when we talk next that this is going to continue in this stabilized mode? Or do you feel like we're at a bit of a transition where we could see a modest improvement begin in the next 3 months?

I think you have to be optimistic to say it's not going to get any worse and it's going to be stable for a while. I certainly wouldn't predict that it's going to get better in the next 3 months.

And your guidance, we're seeing revenues increase from the $135 million to the -- to -- gosh, let me make sure I get your guidance here correctly, the $130 million to the $140 million, but the $135 million or $134 million you did this quarter did include some customer reimbursements. So that uptick that you're seeing, is that coming about because of components that were ordered many months ago and now is coming together? Or is this a function of products being built that don't have the same lead times?

It is more of the combination of the 3-sided teeter-totter, I wish I hadn't started with that analogy, but I'm stuck with it. Where we're at for this quarter is, for the first time since all this began, the numbers we're projecting are all pretty much cleared in terms of parts showing up per plan.

The last probably 4 or 5 quarters, we were trying to get parts confirmed. We believed we were going to get them confirmed, and we didn't get them confirmed. Whereas right now, we're able to look out probably 2 quarters and see that if we miss our numbers, it will be only because we got a surprise phone call, whereas in previous quarters, it could have been, we got a surprise phone call or an anticipated confirmation did not come through. So is that clear to you, the difference?

It is. So if I'm hearing this right, your guidance is more conservative this quarter because you have been given, I'll call them, promises that the components will be there. And the only reason you would miss the revenues is if those promises don't come through whereas in prior quarters, you had made some assumptions. Sometimes your assumptions were accurate. But if they weren't, then that was a revenue risk.

Yes. And I don't know if I'd call it more conservative because we're trying to run the same path every time we give you a number, but the situation has changed, as I said previously. So maybe there's less variability. The standard deviation has probably decreased a little bit, even though we're still in the...

Confidence side.

In the confidence, I don't know. I don't know whatever. That's why I tried to give you the long explanation because I don't fit -- I don't think just saying more or less conservative is the right word, but anyway, that's the situation.

I think I am understanding. Let me switch, if I may, to the U.S. facilities, and you mentioned that they had a good sales increase. How much were their sales up in this quarter versus the year ago fiscal Q2?

Not much. They've been pretty flat for a long time, for probably 3 years.

And so this increase that you are anticipating and the business that they are winning, that's a meaningful change in what's happening with those facilities.

Definitely.

Okay. I'll ask one more question and then get back in line. So what in your mind has changed leading to the, what I think, 35% or so anticipated revenue growth with the U.S. facilities?

Everything that we've talked about has come to fruition. So it took 1.5 years for people to decide that this Asian supply chain risk wasn't going to go away. It took people the first year of the Biden administration to realize that the Asian political situation was not a administration-specific issue. It was more an awakening of the economic certainties that are operating now. And it just takes time for people once they've made the realization to survey the market, figure out that Key Tronic is standing there with open arms saying, yes, we figured this was coming, welcome aboard. And then once they realize that, it takes another couple of months for quoting and site tours and all that.

So this is pretty much exactly what we hoped and thought would happen. The real question we're asking ourselves is, does it continue at this pace? Or did we pick off a spike of people who are the most desperate to find an answer and it will go back to a more steady rate of growth. I think it's going to continue, but I'm biased.

(Operator Instructions) And our next question comes from Bill Dezellem with Tieton Capital.

All right. I guess I got in the back of a line of 0. So let me continue down the path, if we could. In a normal environment, assuming that one day, we do return to that and you have $130 million of revenues. Would you agree with this math that essentially your SG&A and R&D would be similar, except you would not be paying $700,000 to lawyers for the inventory SEC thing?

And you'd have roughly 9% gross margins and otherwise -- and 25% tax rate, and that would ultimately lead you to something like $0.23 a share as a pinpoint number, but let's just call it, $0.20 to $0.25 a share of earnings in a quarter or working up between $0.80 and $1 per share for a full year at the $130 million level. Is that essentially a correct assessment of the business model? Or am I missing some important swing factors?

I'd say you got that pretty well sussed out. The -- it's not something that you can say is going to happen for sure because at 7% inflation, that means we have to be successful in passing all that through to our customers. If you continue to see McDonald's close down because they can't hire people, we're not going to be able to get enough people to do it. So if you assume all that away and say we're back to normal, then your model is correct.

Right. No, I recognize there's some -- what used to be easy assumptions and they seem a little more lofty these days. Let me take this one step further. I think, Brett, you had commented that you're at unprecedented demand and you were greater than $160 million of demand, which would be meaningfully above the $130 million that I just used with my simple math. Is it a correct assessment that there are some economies of scale, meaning that the business model, again, assuming a way all of those factors that are difficult at the moment to assume away, but that you would then have some leverage in the business model on the SG&A and R&D side, frankly, maybe even the gross margin side.

I would say that probably maybe, but I'd also say that you don't even need to assume any of that to come up with profit numbers that are pretty startling. If you can get to $160 million a year -- I mean a quarter in revenue.

Understood. I'm totally in alignment. So I'll take the bait and ask what is it going to take to reach that $160 million quarterly revenue run rate? Do we just need to wait for some time to pass because you've already ordered parts at these levels? And so it's just simply a matter of time? Or are there other factors that need to be taken into account?

Remember, it's not just parts, it's people.

Hard to order people.

Yes, you can't order people ahead of time. So that's the big issue is what's going to happen with the labor supply in the States and in Mexico as well as the componentry.

All right. Thanks for the reminder. It's easy for me to be myopic on the one issue. Let me -- anything else that you would like to add to that?

Nope.

All right. Well, we will anxiously await you ordering the parts and finding the people to generate that $160 million of quarterly revenue.

Not quite as anxiously as I will be, but we'll be in this together.

I understand. Let's switch to Vietnam, if we could, please. How are -- I haven't paid attention to Vietnam and their COVID lockdowns. I know they, in the past, had been pretty strict. What's the update there? And how are your existing, and separately, your new customers or new prospective customers viewing moving product into the Vietnamese facility?

Okay. I'm going to answer a question that you should have asked too along with this. The Vietnam situation is still tightly locked down, even though they are -- have opened up the actual paperwork and testing and everything required to get in there, it's still really, really hard to get past. So it's going to be, I think, another quarter or so depending on what happens with the next strain of COVID before we can actually start to unlock all of the potential of Vietnam.

The programs that are there, running great. We have won a couple of programs with our customers, actually giving us business there without ever actually seeing the site other than on video tours. So we continue to believe that Vietnam has a really good future. It's just that we can't get people in there yet to add new business.

The question you didn't ask is the future of our Shanghai operation, which is also pretty encouraging. We have never really been able to crack the code of China business built in our Shanghai plant to stay in China. And over the last year, we've won a number of new pieces of business, one of them we announced in the 6 this quarter that are going to be built in Shanghai and ship to a Chinese factory and where, one, the business development was performed by people in our Shanghai facility. So that's one of about 4 new business wins there over the last 3 quarters that are hugely encouraging to us for the future of the Shanghai plant, too.

Craig, what has changed to lead to that because I have had historically been under the assumption that China was producing for somewhere else in the world, not producing for China or I should say your Shanghai facility?

Yes. And that's been the case, and we've had to make quite a few operational and procedural, strategic, structural changes to the way we run Shanghai to make it a viable competitor for Chinese business. There are a lot of unique requirements for the Chinese market that you can't fulfill from the states. So we've made those changes took a risk and it turned out to be successful.

Congratulations. Let me switch to a different angle on that, that I haven't thought of before, so apologies for this question maybe not being well thought out. But given the amount of business that we hear about moving away from China, that seems as though it would lead to excess or at least additional capacity being available in China. With that in mind, why have you won 4 different program wins with my theorized additional available capacity probably by Chinese firms?

Well, I don't want to be flip. So I'll just say it's a very good facility. We've been running it for over 20 years. It's backed by the design team here at corporate so there are some attributes that our Shanghai facility has that are not all that common on the competition in the competitive landscape in China.

That's helpful. And so is -- are these 4 wins for Chinese companies selling in China? Or are they for companies outside of China that want to build in China to sell in China?

Both.

Excellent. I'm going to ask another question since the line didn't seem to be very long or the queue, and you are welcome to kick me off if you would like here at any point. The customer reimbursements that you referenced, I think this is the first time that we've seen that called out in one of your press releases. Would you discuss kind of what the dynamics there are? And what's different now?

Well, that's completely a result of new business wins that don't require custom tooling to be made, designs to be completed and custom equipment to be purchased and all of that is reimbursed for us by our customers. So that's why there's not much profit on it, but it's a harbinger of production to come.

So we should view this as a very favorable indicator of the future?

Of the long-term future, yes, because these programs, they're big. So the $80 million one won't start production until late summer, but tooling is already being purchased and equipment is already being purchased that will be used in the ramp of that program at the end of the summer. And that's not the only program that was in that bucket of reimbursed tooling and equipment.

And is it fair to say that any customer who is going to spend money on tooling ends up being pretty serious? And I mean they're moving forward. And I'm really trying to contrast this to I think what's pretty well known in the industry as more program wins than actual new business that ramps somehow it just ends up disappearing.

Well, for sure, if somebody plunks down $5 million for tooling, it means that they have every intention of using that $5 million of tooling.

Right. All right. Stating the obvious, I guess. Thanks for being polite about that. Let me shift, if I could, to the customer $80 million annual...

Before you do that, Bill, there's kind of a poster child case that's going on that another chunk of change in that it's actually $20 million of customer reimbursements last quarter in total. And this is a customer who had, for years, purchased their product out of China and actually had little to no manufacturing and engineering expertise.

So that program will take us probably 2 years to move into our facility in Juarez. In that case, the customer has actually backstopped us for a lease on another 100,000-plus square feet. We'll be purchasing close to $10 million worth of specialized equipment to build that product, and we'll spend a year learning with us how to build that product since they -- the people who knew how to build it have kind of drifted off as their production was more and more in China.

And this is kind of a poster child for a number of opportunities that we're in the midst of hopefully finalizing of companies like that who are, in essence, branding and ideation companies that need a partner to replace what has become too risky with their supply chain spread out across the world. So that's why I say it's a long-term upside when you see a big investment happening with us. It could be a 2-year lag between the time they spend $10 million and the time we start cranking out product.

That's really helpful. So you mentioned you're hoping this is one of the first, and this sounds quite large, like you say, if you're plunking down $10 million, that's no small number. Is -- are the additional opportunities that you are pursuing of this same size? Or is that one unusually large?

I would say they tend towards that size.

So in essence, the ones that are -- it's important enough to them to buy equipment on behalf of their contract manufacturer, those are the customers that tend to be larger. And I would -- it sounds or seems like they would also be stickier once they ramp?

Yes. They're, for sure, stickier, and they're also -- what's the right word, it's very clear to them that what we've built here in the company starts to become their only answer when they're looking for somebody who's interested in an $80 million project, somebody who has experience learning how to build everything from toilet bowl cleaners to slot machines, somebody who has a decade and a half of pulling projects out of Asia and moving them into the States, somebody who has a design team that can work with their ideation group to bring their designs into production, somebody who has experience in working with the Asian soon to be ex source in regathering the data and the expertise required to make the product. When you start checking off all those boxes and looking across the competitive landscape, you come up with Key Tronic and that's about it.

And so if that's the case as opposed to just a supplier, you become more of a partner? Is that a fair speculation?

You bet.

We look forward to seeing that develop. And maybe that's a good segue to the $80 million win that you announced with the power equipment company this quarter. Would you walk us through how that developed? And why you were the one who was ultimately chosen?

So it's -- that's a good poster child. That company originally hired a consultant firm to try to help them find somebody because they were not having any like finding it on their own. They needed design skills in both metals and plastics. They needed tooling acquisition and design and try out skills. They needed commodity specialists that could deal in the world of metals and plastics and other things that I'm not going to mention because they'll give it away. And by the time -- I mean it took a year for us and them to get to know each other well enough that we could lay out a winning proposition, both for them and their end customer. So -- that will be a sticky program because there's -- it's going to be rough to find somebody else like us to do that in the future.

And you said this one is going to begin in the summer?

Late summer.

Late in fiscal Q1?

Yes.

And how -- as you currently envision the ramp to take place, how do you go -- what's the slope of going from starting late Q1 to 1 year at a full $20 million per quarter run rate?

Again, God is punishing us by answering our prayers, so it's a steep ramp.

So since I just sit behind a desk and don't actually do any real work, does a steep ramp mean that by the December quarter, you're at $20 million? Or is a steep ramp over the course of a year?

No, steep ramp is over a quarter.

So literally, the September quarter, you could start producing and be at a $20 million revenues from that customer in the December quarter?

That's what we're hoping.

Excellent. Well, I think I will leave it there because that takes us pretty darn close to that $160 million that we talked about earlier.

You bet.

And our next question comes from George Melas with MKH Management.

And thank you, Bill, also for all your great questions. They're always a pleasure to listen to. Just a quick question on CapEx. CapEx was relatively low this quarter. And I think that you said you guys -- Brett, I think you said you expect it to be $6 million this fiscal year, which I think is a slight tick down from the previous forecast. And on this strong revenue and revenue growth, it seems CapEx is coming down. So something is working right there. Can you sort of explain that?

Yes. I think we've mentioned previously, George, that we've got capacity, and we're also, as Craig mentioned, being reimbursed for program-specific equipment. So the combination of those 2 things, we're monitoring it closely, but our intent is to have less CapEx this year and see some revenue growth.

Okay. And do you expect that to continue in fiscal '23? Was it too early to count?

That's too far, George. I mean typically, we're spending $8 million to $10 million per fiscal year in CapEx. And my expectation is that it would return to something close to that in the next fiscal year.

Okay. And then just to understand the (inaudible) in this quarter, we think (inaudible) what have they been in the past few quarters in the last 3 or 4 quarters?

Not that high. That was one of the reasons why we disclosed the year-over-year change is that this quarter in particular was significantly higher than even some of the sequential quarters that we've just gone through.

Is it right that it was roughly $20 million, and it's roughly $10 million higher than a year ago?

No. Let me -- it's roughly -- it is $10 million higher than it was a year ago. And any one particular quarter, we'll have $5 million to $10 million.

Okay. Can you say just how much it was this quarter, so we can understand that?

Just over $15 million.

Okay. So if we sort of normalize for that, it means that there were -- we can see sort of the production delays and issues with being able to produce as we back that out.

Yes.

Our next question comes from Sheldon Grodsky with Grodsky Associates.

I have a few questions, but there'll be quickies. When do you expect your legal expenses to disappear if they ever will regarding the inventory issue.

We have no comment on that.

Okay. Great. Okay. I noticed that your average shares outstanding went down for the quarter. Is that just because the stock price went down? Or did you buy back any shares?

We did not buy back any shares.

Okay. There was a big jump in inventories, I guess, probably because you were able to get something, but are you hoarding any inventory at this point...

No, do you want to buy some? Be happy to sell it to you. We are not hoarding. This is all a result of being able to get all but one part and then we can't build the product and all the rest of those parts sit there unused.

That is a bad reason for having that. And one more question. When your customer reimburses you for the equipment? Is it going to be his equipment or your equipment when the project is done?

It will be his equipment when the project is done, but historically by the time the project is done, the equipment is all used up anyway.

And that does conclude the question-and-answer session. I'll now turn the conference back over to you.

Okay. Thanks again, everybody, for participating in today's call. Brett and I look forward to talking to you again next quarter. Bye.

Well, thank you. And that does conclude today's conference. We do thank you for your participation. Have an excellent day.