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Teledyne Technologies Incorporated (TDY)

Q2 2009 Earnings Call· Wed, Jan 28, 2009

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to LeCroy Corporation’s second quarter fiscal 2009 financial results conference call. Today’s call is being recorded. There will be an opportunity for questions and comments after the prepared remarks. (Operator Instructions). At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I’d like to turn the call over to Mr. David Calusdian of Sharon Merrill Associates. Thank you, Sir. You may begin.

David Calusdian

Management

Good morning, everyone, and welcome. In connection with this conference call LeCroy wishes to take advantage of the safe harbour provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 with respect of statements that may be deemed to be forward-looking under the act. All such forward-looking statements are only estimates of future results and there can be no assurance that actual results will not differ materially from these expectations. Information on all of the potential factors that could affect LeCroy Corporation’s business are described in the company’s reports on file with the Securities Exchange Commission as well as in this morning’s press release. Any forward-looking statements only represent the company’s views as of today, January 28, 2009. While LeCroy may choose to update these forward-looking statements at a later date, the company specifically disclaims any duty to do so. On the call with me this morning are LeCroy’s president and chief executive officer, Tom Reslewic, and vice president and chief financial officer, Sean O’Connor. I’ll now turn the call over to Tom.

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone. We’re glad you could join us today. I’ll start things off with our second quarter highlights and then Sean will take you through the financials. After that I’ll return with some colour on the order trends, the product road map, the new business pipeline, as well as our guidance and outlook. At that point we’ll turn it over for questions. As you saw in our news release this morning, we wrote off $105.8 million in goodwill this quarter. As with other companies that have made acquisitions in the past few years, external market conditions triggered the impairment of our goodwill on our balance sheet associated with our two protocol acquisitions, CATC and Catalyst. Having to take a charge like this is enormously disappointing to us, as is the downturn in the public equity markets that lead to the write-off in the first place. As a non-cash charge, however, it has no impact on our liquidity and our ability to generate cash going forward. Nor does it affect our banking relationships, how we’re running the business, or our ability to capitalize on growth opportunities and execute on our product road map. LeCroy actually performed quite well in the second quarter despite seeing signs of softening in the demand environment starting in mid to late November. Now we all know what’s happened to the economy since then. Everything you’ve been reading in the newspapers is consistent with what we’re now seeing in our orders and the implications for Q3 and Q4 fiscal 2009 are not encouraging. Before going back to the outlook let me briefly take you through the second quarter business highlights. Our oscilloscope business turned in a solid quarter with orders for scope units the highest in the company’s history. In fact, on a…

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Okay. Thank you, Sean. I’ll pick up here with a little bit more colour on the business starting with the oscilloscope products. We’re certainly in the midst of a recession and some complicated balance sheet moves, but it’s also true that we’re in the midst of the most ambitious product roll-out campaign in LeCroy’s history. Q2 was a very strong quarter for scopes. Despite the slowdown in the economy in November and December, oscilloscope unit sales were up more than 20% compared to last year. It was a record quarter for oscilloscope units at LeCroy. As I mentioned, orders for the new WaveAce in Europe drove a lot of this growth in units. We entered the low-cost space with some uncertainty about future developments in this market, but we are very pleased with our results to date. We’re developing a strong third-party distribution channel primarily to sell our low-end product lines starting with the WaveSurfer and the WaveJet. Adding the WaveAce has given our distributors a sub-$1000 product to sell for the first time and this has greatly improved their effectiveness in the market. In addition, by opening up a presence for LeCroy in the low-cost market, WaveAce enables us to put a great new product in the hands of engineers, students, and others involved at levels of the design process where brand familiarity and loyalty are typically created, not just in Europe but in the rest of the markets around the world. So if you look at the scope market overall, the segment that’s been affected the most by the economic slowdown is the mid range of the market, our WaveRunners and WavePros. Our WavePro 7 series launched in Q1 with great customer feedback, very strong initial sales pipeline, a lot of orders and so forth. While the sales…

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll now be conducting a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from John Harmon – Needham & Co. John Harmon – Needham & Co.: Hi. Good morning. Tom, just first of all clarification. I think in your remarks you, I’m talking about the product line that you said you exited. You almost, it sounded like you started to say scope, but then you said a protocol analyzer. It was a protocol analyzer, right?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Actually, two products. We eliminated one protocol program and we eliminated a development effort and some products in optical, a part of our sampling scope product line. So yes, some optical products we have exited were in the scope line. John Harmon – Needham & Co.: Okay. Thank you. And just curious, I mean, you said your new high-end oscilloscope ATI is selling well. Could there have been enough demand for oscilloscopes with bandwidth greater than 18 GHz out there?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. In fact, you know, we’ve launched a product line with bandwidths that ranged, in this high-end product line the product line has bandwidths from 4 to 30 GHz. But we haven’t really been able to show or ship the 30 GHz products at this point. We expect to do that maybe as soon as in the next couple of weeks we expect to be able to show those products for the first time. Most of the demand that we’re seeing and the early orders are all in what I would consider the sweet spot of the high end at 13 and 16 GHz with some interest around 20 GHz as well. But really it’s been the 13 and 16 GHz products that have generated the most interest and that happens to be a bandwidth space where we’re not first. Our competitors have products in those spaces. So we’re pretty confident that many of the traditional LeCroy advantages play very well, particularly when we can now offer signal acquisition capabilities for signals that require bandwidths up in the 13 and 16 GHz range. And I just want to clarify, too, I think there are very good signs in the early orders for these high-end products. But we really didn’t, these are not super high-volume products. We really did not count on a huge number of these things on a per-quarter basis. Surprisingly, early in this third quarter, we’ve already booked more orders for this WaveMaster 8 Zi than we would have initially expected in a full quarter. So that’s really great. The other side of that, though, is that the mid-range products, you know, you really need the mid-range products to provide a very, very steady base business that your high-end products can sit up on top of. It’s that base business from the mid-range products that just seems to be taking much more of a beating in the demand environment. John Harmon – Needham & Co.: Thank you. And just finally, remind us about in general how long your technology cycles for oscilloscopes are. In other words, how long in general does it take for a newly introduced technology like your Apollo chip set to proliferate from a high end towards more mid-range and [inaudible] oscilloscopes?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

All right. So just take the page right out of history. The last time we launched a chip set like Apollo was 2002. That chip set was called Genie, in fact. We started working on the Genie chip set in 1999. It took us three years from the time we started working on the chip set to deploy. We deployed it at the highest end of the product line and only at the highest end of the product line. That Genie chip set today powers today’s WaveRunner, which is the highest volume and most profitable product line in LeCroy’s entire portfolio. So here we are six years after launch and almost 10 years after we started the development program and the devices from the Genie chip set are really driving the mid-range of our product line. So I think that gives you a sensation. We’ve been working on this Apollo chip set for a couple of years. We’re now seeing the chip set deployed in the WaveMasters and the WavePros, and there’s no doubt in my mind that this chip set and its variance and its children will populate mid-range and high-end LeCroy scopes for quite some time to come. John Harmon – Needham & Co.: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Mike Crawford – B. Riley and Company. Michael Crawford – B. Riley and Company: Thanks. Now I understand, I know your protocol business has gross margins closer to 80%. Where would you expect the scope margins to trend given the better cost structure you have with your new products?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Yeah, I think, to clarify, the product margins in the protocol business are closer to 80%, but the overall gross margin in that business sits more like in the mid-70s. And the scope business has been sitting in the low 50s, but I expect that will just continue to tick up. I would think that, I need a normal demand environment first of all. I need the demand environment to be somewhat consistent with what we’ve seen in the last couple of quarters and certainly maybe not such the currency headwinds. But on a comparable basis to where we were I think there’s five full points of margin to be gained in the scope business as a function of the new product structure and our overall product mix. I think we could get closer to 60%. There are a couple of asterisk on that. So for example, if the WaveAce product line, which is at the low end of our product line, has a pretty different cost structure. We don’t spend the same in R&D, we don’t spend the same in selling, our gross margins there are net of selling costs effectively because we sell through buy-and-sell distributor channels. If that product were to really take off and substantially change the mix structure in our business that would have a very positive effect on gross margin dollars and on revenue growth. But it would certainly take it the other way in terms of gross margin percentage. So all things being equal, I’d say our gross margin percentage is going to eek up a fair amount due to the new products, but there is that asterisk on substantial change if the WaveAce product line at the low end suddenly becomes more successful than we thought. Michael Crawford – B. Riley and Company: Right. So, two kind of points sprout out of that regarding what are you looking for in WaveAce say in, maybe not in 2009, but in 2010 if that were a more normalized environment.

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Well, I think again the answer to that is it depends. We’ve got, we’ve already got what we’re originally looking for. Which is we’re not looking t make a major play in the economy space. We don’t really feel that’s the main element of our strategy. What we wanted to do in the economy segment is to provide just enough economy products so that our third party distribution partners have a broad enough product portfolio to make them feel comfortable. So the distributors that we’ve worked with really like our WaveJet and WaveSurfer, but they sit at pretty much the high end of a distributor’s product line. These distributors like to have products that reach all the way down to this thousand dollar and below price point. so we wanted to make sure that we had an offering that really gave the distributors a feeling that they could really be a full scope product line distributor with us. That’s why we embarked on the WaveAce program and that’s worked very well. The volumes are already starting to look like they could be higher than we expected. And we’re really in the beginning of our WaveAce product development. Today we have just a number of two-channel products over several bandwidths. There’s quite a healthy road map in front of us for what we want to do with the WaveAce. I think it’s a little too early to call it. I think that the good news is we are not depending on big volumes from the WaveAce. We’re kind of getting what we wanted and I think there’s nothing but upside there. We’re kind of new to this space as well, so I think we’re going to learn a lot from our distributors and from the run rates and from the customers who tell us how to enhance and improve the features of our WaveAce. I kind of see it as a work in progress. It’s certainly going to be hard for me to tell how the current demand environment will alter those expectations. But I’d say that we have a good road map that we plan to pursue and in a year from now I think we’ll be a lot smarter on the WaveAce and we’ll know a lot more about what our real possibilities in this space might look like. Michael Crawford – B. Riley and Company: Okay. Great. And final question is, in an environment where LeCroy’s business is down 10% to 20% is that an environment where you think you’re going to be taking market share in the test-and-measurement industry? I’m wondering what your outlook is for the whole environment and, in that regard, I think [Deniner] reported the other day that the tectronics business was down kind of mid-single digits I think last quarter right?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Yeah. I thought they said the high-single digits in the scope business in the December quarter. That doesn’t tell me very much about what’s going to happen in the upcoming quarter because from our perspective on a local currency basis our scope business was actually up 6% in the December quarter and just about flat on a net of exchange rates. But I really do not see the December quarter finish as very indicative of what’s in front of us from a demand perspective. You may remember from hearing me speak on this matter before, I’m reasonably conservative and even a bit concerned that the demand environment in the next couple of quarters could be rather difficult. I think that we’ve said 10% to 20%; I don’t know exactly where we’ll land across that spectrum. I’d sure love to land at the not-so-bad end of that spectrum. We’re prepared for a lot worse. And also I think the other thing that’s important is to really look at the segments that we’re in. Our business is really very focused on three segments: data storage, computers and consumer electronics type accounts, and the automotive electronics business. That automotive electronics business is largely centred in Europe, which performed very, very well in 2008. But I expect that the Europeans will now get on their new business plans for 2009 that will be a little bit more conservative. I would say certainly in all of these major segments, which I think make up a very, very large chunk of the scope market, there’s no doubt in my mind that when I look at the product portfolio that we have and the reception that we’re getting from customers I would really believe that we’re going to take share in the places where we play. The government and military applications space is not a huge business for LeCroy. It’s probably about 13% or 14% of our business overall this past quarter. I think other players with a larger percentage in government and military, I might do a little bit better there because I think that segment seems to initially be a little bit more insulated from some of the problems in anything sort of in the flow of chips from chip makers to computer makers to consumer electronics device makers. Michael Crawford – B. Riley and Company: Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: Yeah. Good morning. A few questions, actually. The first one is, you mentioned that you did some share buy backs. What is the average price for the shares that you purchased during the quarter? Sean B. O’Connor: It was $6.04, Ajit. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: Yet how could you, I’m just looking at your stock price during that quarter and how could it, I mean, did you do everything in the first week? Sean B. O’Connor: It was very early in the quarter, yes. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: Okay. The second question, I’m just looking at your financial liquidity, especially given the kind of guidance you’ve provided right now with the low to middle single-digit operating margins. Your overall cash position right now is about $9 million and then the debt is $70.9 million. Two questions regarding that. One is that the charges that you took, I know that in your [inaudible] that you had I think a covenant for the total net worth. Is that impacted at all by this or was that only tangible? I haven’t had a chance to go through the document itself. Over and beyond that, you know, with this drop in your revenue and the cash [inaudible] that you’re seeing right now, how would you prioritize the users of cash flows or the EBIDTA that you’d be getting and what is going to happen in terms of your debt schedule in terms of repayment? Can you, have you renegotiated it? Are you in discussions on that? Some colour there would be helpful. Sean B. O’Connor: Sure. With regard to the first question, the goodwill impairment charge did not count against the net worth…

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Yeah. Actually, I would say that for the most part where we feel we’re in very good shape with the distributors. So we don’t finance or carry any of the distributors inventory. All of the inventory distributors is purchased on conventional terms. We haven’t had to do anything about that at this point. in fact, our business has been running relatively smoothly on the distribution side, particularly in Europe where typically the distribution orders are occurring at the beginnings of quarters, not the ends of quarters. So we feel like our distributors have been very responsible in terms of how much inventory they’ve taken and we’ve been very careful to make sure that they don’t have too much. It’s all been done on a conventional buy-sell basis. So it hasn’t been a working capital drain on us at all from the inventory side. We have some situations in Asia where the receivables have gotten a little bit long due to the erosion in some of the end markets there, but we don’t have anything that’s really out of the ordinary in that respect. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: And what percentage of your overall revenue right now is through distribution?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

It’s still relatively low. It’s probably somewhere in the 15% to 20% range. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: And the vast majority of that is on traditional terms. It’s bought the moment it’s received, I mean, on regular terms, right? Sean B. O’Connor: Yeah. A hundred percent. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: A hundred percent? Sean B. O’Connor: Yeah. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: Okay. Got it. Thank you so much.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). Your next question comes from Brian Riley – B. Riley and Company. Brian Riley – B. Riley and Company: Hey, guys. A couple questions. Can you talk about working capital and where in this environment ideally that would sit? In other words, how much money is in working capital that you can pull out of the business?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

I would say that the largest near-term opportunity is in the inventory and that’s largely within our control. So we don’t feel that the environment per se is causing us any particular issues there. I’ll kind of give you the broad picture in terms of the strategy and then I’ll let Sean take you through some of the details of the numbers. The inventory has really been a function of two things right now. The first is we’ve had a wave of three relatively significant new product launches. New product launches in terms of platforms. So the new WavePro platform, the new WaveMaster platform, the WaveAce platform, and all these things while we’ve kept supporting the customers with the Legacy platforms and haven’t discontinued any of our older products, that’s put significant uptick in terms of demo inventory for the sales force demonstration as well as production oriented inventory. Our production plans, as we stated to launch these products our production plans and sales plans for the December quarter as well as the March quarter were significantly higher than what we’re expecting to experience now. So that’s caused a little bit of a swell in inventory as well. At the point we’re at now we feel like we’re really in a position to start letting that inventory work itself down. We’re pulling back a lot of the demos. We’re not starting to make some moves on the Legacy products. So all those things that are starting to give us an opportunity to probably yank, I would say, $7 million or $8 million out of the inventory over the next couple quarters and maybe as much as $10 million over the next year. A/R is a little different. I think A/R will tend to come back in as well. I don’t…

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

When you say cuts you’re talking about the moves that we’ve made on all the expenses? Brian Riley – B. Riley and Company: Yeah. Write offs and that.

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Okay. I think that we felt that we wanted to be on the conservative side. We wanted to be comfortable that we could maintain not just the break-even point but generate enough operating income to cover all of our debt services and steer clear of any covenant issues and so forth. Even if the business were to drop not 20% off of our plans but 20% off of the baseline run rate, which was $40 million. We believe that we’ve set ourselves up to run in the very low 30s if necessary and probably even $30 million a quarter if we had to and still be safe in all operating dimensions. We’ve made a lot of adjustments in our personnel. A lot of the actions that we’ve taken have been in the areas of compensation reduction and discretionary expense reductions. So those things don’t impact programs quite as much. We did do our across the board 10% reduction in headcount and so that has a little bit more bearing. But I think if I look at the R&G programs that are in place and all the projects I still feel very good about executing our road map in the near term. We were very careful not to take out some key chip developments. So we expect that whether it’s a year, year and a half, two years, however many quarters it takes before we’re back into an up cycle, we want to be hitting that up cycle with next generation of products and that requires technology development. So we did not take out some rather expensive programs in chip developments. Those are really expensive. You could imagine saying, oh, we’d rather lose less jobs and defer big chip developments, but that would be a real mistake for the company. So…

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Yeah. We completely understand your views there and it’s something that we take seriously. I want to make one remark on the bonds because I think we have not really said anything definitively about that. We see these bonds as extremely attractive from a pricing perspective. We really would love to be in a position to be pursuing them a bit more. Our priorities, though, are very clear and they have been for some time. To me the absolute first priority is to be confident of where this top line is going to settle out. I do believe that it will, what seems murky and unclear right now will reveal itself over the next, whether it’s six weeks, eight weeks, or 13 weeks, I’m not sure, but I do not believe a quarter from now that the outlook will be as uncertain. It might be lower. It might not be a pleasant place from a demand environment. But I think it will be a bit more clear. Once we have a clear sensation of the top line and we understand how our cost structures map into that and we get a very, very clear bead on our cash generation, then I think it’s quite appropriate for us to start asking the questions about how do we capitalize on opportunities to strengthen our overall position by looking at these discounted bonds or by looking at the inexpensive shares. We’re all over that, but we really want to make sure that we keep our priorities straight and make sure that we have taken care of the primary function, which is to make sure that the business can remain profitable under all circumstances. That requires a bit more clarity on where the top line is going to settle out. I appreciate your patience in us kind of getting through that first piece before we attack the second one.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from John Harmon – Needham & Co. John Harmon – Needham & Co.: Hi. In that same vein I’d like to harp on the bonds a little bit more, please. More referring to Ajit’s question. Clearly your stock is in a different place than it was a quarter ago. But at least at that time how did you make the decision to do buybacks versus buying back these bonds at a discount? Certainly we’re in an environment where investors are very sensitive to credit related issues. Would it be likely that you would be more likely to buy back bonds versus share buybacks in the future?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Yes. The answer to that is yes. We see the bonds as a more attractive and even more appropriate thing to do with excess cash that’s generated beyond immediate needs. So I think we’re all on the same page there. We see a real opportunity to reduce the leverage by capitalizing on the market situation. I just reiterate as I have many times that priority one is making sure that we’re cash generative under all circumstances and that our liquidity is safe. Our priority two is to go look at those bonds. John Harmon – Needham & Co.: Okay. Now that that’s settle a more product related question. A while ago you gave three drivers for the protocol business and you said it was up 20% in the quarter. In prior calls you’ve been saying that the final adopt standards have been holding the business back. That probably didn’t change in the last quarter, so what works in the quarter that drove growth in protocol?

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Yeah. I think we have a bit of a saw tooth going on in protocol. So it’s far more useful to look at protocol over a longer trend than just quarter to quarter because we have some effects quarter to quarter that are based on things like customers’ adoption of new platforms and products that we’ve released. So we released towards the end of the summer quarter both new products in the USB 3.0 as well as in the storage market. I think we had some customer hold off in the first quarter waiting for some of those new products to get to market and have software releases that they could evaluate and fully understand. Of course, a lot of that stuff did happen and it drove some of the adoption in the second quarter. So we’ve got this choppiness that’s related somewhat to us rolling out new products and software releases and so forth. The scope business is such that the product development cycles and the market conditions are such that you can time your product launches and we usually try to time them around the beginnings of quarters and things like that. The protocol business with four and five months product development cycles you can’t have a 90-day window or interval with which you can launch products. So we get a little bit of that choppiness. I wouldn’t say that there’s any magic elixir that we took that made us go up 20% in the second quarter. It’s kind of what got held back in Q1 got made up for in q2. John Harmon – Needham & Co.: That helps. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: Just looking at your tax rate, it’s been quite volatile recently. I think you’ve had some of these R&D credits and the changes in geography. But it’s come down from the very high 30s on an average basis to the low 30s. Can you help us think about what a tax rate would be like over the next couple of quarters and potentially into next year as well what we should be considering? Sean B. O’Connor: Sure. So currently we’ve seen a lot of talk in Washington about making the R&D credit permanent. That kind of does a number on a lot of companies’ effective tax rate. But we are modelling today at a 30% rate and we think that is the go-forward rate at this point. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: And the charges that you took in this particular quarter, do they help your tax rate for the next couple of quarters to be substantially lower than 30? Sean B. O’Connor: No. We essentially set up deferred tax, we take the deferred tax impact of those in the quarter that it happens. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: Got it. And then just looking at competitive dynamics. You’ve talked about how you’ve made some tremendous progress in terms of new products and the traction you’re getting, but in terms of competitive response what are you seeing out of your two largest competitors on the oscilloscope side? The pricing environment, I think you talked about why your gross margin is not necessarily to do with pricing the other factors at play, but whether that is something that could potentially see some pressure if you see the slowdown continue. And then also from an MNA perspective right now, just given the current scale of your business, the current scale of your competitors, whether it’s something that you can still be active on or the fact that your stock price and leverage on your balance sheet is sort of limiting some of those options right now.

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Okay. So I’ll start with the competitive dynamic first and then touch base and move on to the MNA point second. We have two very strong and worthy competitors in the market. Their competitive dynamics are on an ongoing basis everybody, somebody innovates in a new area, pushes ahead, brings out a new capability and the other guys need to react and try to address those capabilities with customers. In general, all of the competitors do a good job at that. I think what’s different today is that for the past two or three years we haven’t really been in the high end of the market with our end game. We haven’t really had the current generation of silicon to really be able to stand up and compete nose to nose with our top competitors. I think that’s the difference today. The idea that somehow we’ve now done something that our competitors can’t respond to or won’t respond to, I don’t tend to look at it that way. I think that we’ve just really given ourselves an opportunity to play at the high end and bring traditional LeCroy advantages in wave shape analysis and deep analysis tools that customers have long liked into those particular segments of the market up at the high end. Competitors do what you would expect; they look at their own products, they try to position what they consider to be their best features against ours, and this is a standard process that goes around and around. The difference is that in the world of 13, 16, 20 GHz, the high-end serial data signals that count, we are in the game and have a real good opportunity to play and win. And I think that’s really the difference there. The long-term competitive dynamic remains somewhat constant in this business and I’m just glad to be part of it up here with high bandwidth. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: And no one has competed on prices yet as far as that goes, right? It’s all on differentiation of the product.

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Yeah. You know, I’ve really been answering the pricing question for many, many years in really the good up cycle times as well as the down cycle times. To say that the business is not price competitive would be incorrect. We do battle on price. But at the end of the day we all have relatively high gross margin products. We are all trying to differentiate technically. We are each trying to figure out the one special thing that the customer needs to do more than anything else and figure out which key feature or capability of ours or the other guy’s product is the best fit. So the battles, while the purchasing department likes to get a discount and likes to participate in the process, the technical buyers and users have tremendous amounts of control over what gets selected because they’re the guys with the big problem that’s trying to get solved. That means the battle is still primarily one of technical differentiation, not pricing. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: Got it. And then the MNA.

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Yeah, I think MNA is one of those things that’s kind of hard to speculate in the hypothetical. There’s no situation where the phone would ring and somebody would say there’s this company that is a very good fit for your thing here or they’re interested in your piece of business for this or that. There’s no phone call that you would turn away by saying sorry, the balance sheet isn’t right, or sorry, the share prices isn’t right or the demand environment isn’t right. So I think you can’t generalize these things. You have to talk to people that bring opportunities forward. you have to look around and see what’s available that might make your business or somebody else’s business work a little bit better. Having said that in general, you’re right. At this point in time we’re really trying to focus on making sure that our core business operates successfully in this environment. We have a couple of very interesting organic developments under way that are about to actually bear fruit relatively in the near future, things that we haven’t been into before that could be quite interesting. We’re tending right now to drive more organic things and to focus on our core business and profitability and liquidity. But we just never say never to any opportunities that may come along. Ajit Pai – Thomas Weisel Partners: Got it. Thank you so much.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing comments.

Thomas H. Reslewic

Management

Okay. Great. Thanks, everyone, for listening. We appreciate your interest in LeCroy this morning and we’ll look forward to speaking to you again when we announce our third quarter results in April. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s conference call. Thank you for joining us.