Ronen Faier
Chief Financial Officer
Okay. So here the answer is that when you're growing, you actually usually need a little bit more working capital, because you're manufacturing, you increase inventories, then you give customer credits. And that means that you consume a little bit more of working capital. When we look at cash flow for the next three quarters, let's talk about cash flow from operations and let's also talk by the way about free cash flow, because this is a result also of capital investments. So from cash flow from operations, we expect to see actually an increase in the cash flow from operations generation. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we have generated about $41 million this quarter. We expect to see a much higher number in the fourth quarter, and numbers to continue and increase towards Q1 and Q2, simply because of the fact that we have relatively large customer balances from the quarters that we shipped and sold a little bit more. As I mentioned, we also increased a little bit payment terms for our European customers. And therefore within Q4 and Q1, we will collect relatively heavily on those. When you look at the inventory levels that we're carrying, we're carrying quite high inventory levels, because again, we were anticipating growth. And that means that we're going to start consuming this inventory over time. This will also go back to the cash. And when it comes to paying to our vendors, the fact is that this is more correlated to your manufacturing levels. So therefore, when you're manufacturing less, you're actually paying less to your payables. So that means that we expect to see an accelerating cash flow from operations within Q4 and Q1 and hopefully starting to see again growth in revenues starting to impact cash flow in Q2, but it's still supposed to be positive and of course because of the fact that we still collect and using inventory. The second part is how do we translate it to free cash flow? And here -- well, part of the activities that we're taking right now is to reduce our capital expenditures. A lot of our capital expenditures last year were aimed at increasing manufacturing capacity almost everywhere around the world. That means procurement of automatic assembly lines, that means, for example, payments for contract manufacturers to take more areas and make them suitable. This is something that, of course, right now other than the investments that we do in the U.S. manufacturing will be very much reduced. In addition to this, of course, at this time, you're investing a little bit more in areas that when you're growing, you're allowing yourself to do, like, maybe a little bit of newer labs or bigger labs. And that means that also, not only we will see higher cash flow from operations, we will see lower cash flow in investing activities. So overall, we should see an accelerating growth in cash.