Good morning. My name is Shelby and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome you to Optical Cable Corporation's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Mr. Hoffman, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, and good morning, and thank you for joining us for Optical Cable Corporation's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 conference call. By this time, everyone should have a copy of the earnings press release issued earlier today. You can also visit www.occfiber.com for a copy. On the call with us today are Neil Wilkin, President and Chief Executive Officer of OCC and Tracy Smith, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The actual future results of Optical Cable Corporation may differ materially due to a number of factors and risks, including, but not limited to, those factors referenced in the forward-looking statements section of this morning's press release. These cautionary statements apply to the contents of the internet webcast on www.occfiber.com, as well as today's call. With that, I'll turn the call over to Neil Wilkin. Neil, please begin.

Thank you, Spencer, and good morning, everyone. I will begin the call today with a few opening remarks. Tracy will then review the fourth quarter and full year results for the three month and 12 month periods ended October 31st, 2024 in some additional detail. After Tracy's remarks, we will answer as many of your questions as we can. As is our normal practice, we will only take questions from analysts and institutional investors during the Q&A session. However, as always, we also offer other shareholders the opportunity to submit questions in advance of our earnings call. Instructions regarding such submissions are included in our press release announcing the date and time of our call. Entering 2024, OCC's net sales were challenged by industry-wide macroeconomic pressures, which began towards the end of fiscal year 2023 and became more persistent during the year. These pressures impacted many of our targeted markets, particularly our enterprise markets and certain of our specialty markets, including the wireless carrier market. I'm pleased to share that as we ended fiscal 2024 and look forward to 2025 and beyond, the sun is starting to peak through. While OCC's net sales for fiscal year 2024 decreased 7.6% to $66.7 million compared to 2023, weakness across our industry has begun to subside. Thanks to strong execution of our growth strategies and our deeply entrenched market position, OCC has experienced a relatively low decline in revenues during this period compared to some of our peers. At the same time, we believe we have also been able to position OCC to capitalize on the opportunities ahead and we are ready to hit the ground running in the new year. For the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024, OCC achieved growth across all key measures. Net sales, gross profit, gross profit margin,…

Thank you, Neil. Consolidated net sales for fiscal 2024 were $66.7 million, a decrease of 7.6% compared to $72.2 million for fiscal 2023, with sales decreases experienced in both the company's enterprise and specialty markets, including the wireless carrier market. Our net sales were negatively impacted by industry-wide macroeconomic pressures in fiscal year 2024, which began to impact the company's net sales during fiscal year 2023 and continued through the third quarter of fiscal 2024. Consolidated net sales for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024 increased 12.4% to $19.5 million compared to $17.3 million for the same period last year. OCC experienced increases in net sales in both its enterprise and specialty markets. As Neil mentioned, our quarterly net sales sequentially increased 20.1% during the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024 compared to the third quarter. We achieved higher sequential net sales each quarter since the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 and we believe opportunities to improve net sales will continue during fiscal year 2025 compared to fiscal year 2024. Turning to gross profit. Gross profit was $18.2 million in fiscal 2024, a decrease of 18.3% compared to $22.3 million in fiscal 2023. Gross profit margin was 27.3% in fiscal 2024 compared to 30.9% in fiscal 2023. Gross profit margin for fiscal 2024 was impacted by lower production volumes, resulting in fixed charges being spread over lower net sales as well as decreased plant efficiency as lower production volumes impacted the flow of products through our manufacturing facilities, both of which were effective operating leverage. The variability of our gross profit margin in any quarter also reflects changes in product mix. Our gross profit increased 68.6% to $6.5 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024 compared to $3.9 million for the same period last year, as a result…

Thank you, Tracy. And now if any analysts or institutional investors have any questions, we're happy to answer them. Shelby, if you could please indicate the instructions to our participants to call in any questions they may have. I would appreciate it. Again, we are only taking live questions from analysts and institutional investors.

[Operator Instructions] And I'm showing we have no questions in the queue at this time.

Thank you, Shelby. Spencer, I know we have at least one question submitted by an individual investor in advance. If you don't mind reading that, we're happy to respond.

We do. Thanks, Neil. We have one question. And that is, given that we are already more than halfway through Q1, could management please comment on current trading and whether it expects typical seasonality patterns in 2025?

Sure. So as we've talked about in our filings previously and continue to say, we do experience seasonality in our industry. While it's not always the case, generally, we think of seasonality. [Technical Difficulty]

We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please remain on the line. And pardon the interruption, the line is connected. Please continue with your conference.

Okay. Thank you, Shelby. For some reason, we got disconnected. So I'm not sure where we left off, Spencer, I heard the question. Was my answer complete or is there anything I need to continue?

It didn't complete. Maybe we can tee it up, and I'll ask the question again, and we can jump back into it. So the question for everybody was, given that we are already more than halfway through Q1, could management please comment on current trading and whether it expects typical seasonality pattern in 2025?

Of course. So, we can't forecast exactly what's going to happen in 2025. But typically, the first half of our fiscal year tend to be a little lower than the second half of our fiscal years. And various things can affect that during the year based on order volume or certain orders from customers, but typically, that's how we see our seasonality.

Thank you, Neil. That was the only question.

Okay. Well, I'm sorry for the listeners for the interruption, not sure what happened. In any event, I would like to thank everyone for listening to our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 conference call today. As always, we appreciate your time and your investment and interest in Optical Cable Corporation. We at OCC, hope you and your families have a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year. And again thank you.

The conference has concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.