Greetings, and welcome to the Balchem Corporation Q4 2022 financial results call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Martin Bengtsson, Chief Financial Officer for Balchem. Thank you. You may begin.
Thank you, Melissa, and good morning, everyone. Just for clarity, this is the Q1 conference call and not the Q4 . Thank you, everyone, for joining our conference call this morning to discuss the results of Balchem Corporation for the quarter ending March 31, 2022. My name's Martin Bengtsson, Chief Financial Officer, and hosting this call with me is Ted Harris, our Chairman, CEO, and President. Following the advice of our counsel, auditors, and the FCC, at this time, I would like to read our forward-looking statement. This release does contain or likely will contain forward-looking statements which reflect Balchem's expectation or belief concerning future events that involve risks and uncertainties.
We can give no assurance that the expectations reflected in forward-looking statements will prove correct, and various factors could cause results to differ materially from our expectations, including risks and factors identified in Balchem's Form 10-K. Forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. I will now turn the call over to Ted Harris, our Chairman, CEO, and President.
Thanks, Martin. Good morning, and welcome to our conference call. This morning, we reported very strong Q1 results, with strong revenue and earnings growth. Our revenues of $228.9 million were up 23.3%, and our adjusted earnings from operations were $44.6 million, up 19.4% versus the prior year quarter. Our Q1 net income of $28.9 million, an increase of 23.6%, resulted in earnings per share of $0.89 on a GAAP basis. On an adjusted basis, our Q1 non-GAAP net earnings were $33.4 million or $1.03 per share, an increase of 17.3%. Cash from operations was $7 million for the Q1 of 2022.
Overall, a great start to 2022 with performance that highlights the strength and resilience of our business model, particularly given the inflationary and supply chain challenges the markets have been facing. The demand for our products remains strong, and servicing this demand through these macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges is a top priority. Before passing the call back to Martin to cover the detailed financial results by segment, I would like to spend some additional time talking about the extraordinary inflationary and supply chain challenges our company is currently facing and some of the actions we have been taking to address the challenges. The macroeconomic and geopolitical environment that we are working within today is truly unprecedented.
We are experiencing significant supply chain disruptions in the form of raw material shortages, logistics delays, long lead times on parts and equipment, and of course, significant inflationary pressures on most, if not all, of our input costs. In the Q1 of 2022, we experienced year-over-year inflation of approximately $28 million, and subsequently, from the Q4 of last year, another $9 million of inflationary headwinds. While it is obviously very difficult to predict what will transpire moving forward, given all of the current market volatility, we expect inflationary headwinds to continue at least through the next few quarters. We are pleased with the pricing actions we have taken thus far and believe ultimately that we will be able to recapture the majority of these higher costs over time.
In many areas, we have moved from annual or quarterly pricing actions to taking monthly and even weekly, in some cases, pricing actions to add increased flexibility for us to respond to changes in our input costs. This is a dynamic environment, and we have needed increased pricing flexibility to respond accordingly. We were pleased to have realized margin improvement in Q1 of 2022 sequentially versus Q4 of 2021 based on our pricing actions. We have yet to see material demand destruction as a result of the cost increases that we have passed on to date. Our customers are, in turn, raising prices. We are working closely with our customers to together combat these inflationary challenges, and we will continue to do so while watching demand indicators closely.
While price is a critical response lever to offset the inflationary pressures we are facing, we are also working hard throughout our supply chain to address the broader supply chain challenges. As you know, our company is primarily a North American-focused company with approximately 78% of our revenues coming from products sold in North America, with the overwhelming majority, near 90% of those North American sales, coming from products manufactured in North America with raw materials sourced in North America. While we aspire to become more international over time, this aspect to our business has been and will continue to be helpful as we manage these global supply chain challenges.
When and where possible, we are actively working to build inventories of both finished goods and raw materials to build buffer, qualifying alternate suppliers to expand sources of key raw materials, partnering with third-party logistics providers to ensure dedicated service for certain routes, and adding new production capacity like we have done for our plant nutrition and food encapsulation businesses to add both needed capacity but also supply chain redundancy. We are pleased with our response to these challenges to date and certainly the performance of the company in this environment. It is a challenging operating environment, and we remain prudently cautious about our outlook for the coming quarters from a supply chain disruption and inflationary pressure perspective. Once again, the demand for our products remains strong, and servicing this demand through these macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges is a top priority.
Before I hand the call back over to Martin, I would like to let you know that last week on Earth Day, we released our 2021 sustainability report, which captures the company's commitment to managing our environmental, social, and governance performance. Balchem's sustainability initiatives are fully integrated into our business strategies and are critical to our vision of making the world a healthier place. We have taken meaningful steps toward advancing diversity, inclusion, and belonging at Balchem and remain committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture in which everyone feels welcomed, valued, and appreciated while inspiring our external stakeholders to share our vision.
Our sustainability report demonstrates the company's continuing promise to provide our employees, customers, shareholders, and the communities within which we operate with information on Balchem's sustainability initiatives and include their progress on our 2030 goals and strategies for both emissions and water usage reduction by 25%. I would encourage you to go to balchem.com to read the report to get a broader perspective on all of the great work we are doing. With that, I will now turn the call back over to Martin to go through the detailed results for each of our segments.
Thank you, Ted. We delivered overall strong financial results in a challenging environment. Our Q1 net sales of $228.9 million were 23.3% higher than the prior year's comparable quarter. We delivered double-digit sales growth in all three segments, Human Nutrition & Health, Animal Nutrition & Health, and Specialty Products. The growth was driven both by increased volumes and increased average selling prices as we continue to recapture higher input costs by raising prices in this inflationary environment. Our Q1 consolidated gross margin dollars of $71.5 million were up $12.8 million or 21.8% compared to the prior year.
Our gross margin percent was 31.2% of sales, down 39 basis points compared to 31.6% in the Q1 of 2021, and up 110 basis points sequentially versus the Q4 of 2021. Input cost inflation continues to be significant. While we started to see signs of slowing inflationary pressures in the later part of Q4 last year, we have since seen a further acceleration of rising input costs in the Q1 of 2022 compared to the Q4 of 2021, due at least in part to the geopolitical environment. We've been fairly successful so far in raising average selling prices to help offset the inflationary pressures, but it continues to have a dilutive impact on margins.
Consolidated operating expenses for the Q1 of 2022 were $33.2 million, as compared with $28.2 million in the prior year. The increase was principally due to certain higher compensation-related costs and an increase in outside services. GAAP earnings from operations for the Q1 were $38.3 million, an increase of 25.4% compared to the prior year quarter. On an adjusted basis, as detailed in our earnings release this morning, non-GAAP earnings from operations of $44.6 million were up 19.4% compared to the prior year. Record adjusted EBITDA of $53.6 million was $7.9 million or 17.2% above the Q1 of 2021.
Interest expense for the Q1 of 2022 was half a million dollars, and our net debt was $64.1 million, with an overall leverage ratio on a net debt basis of 0.3. The company's effective tax rates for the Q1 of 2022 and 2021 were 23.1% and 21.9% respectively. The increase in the effective tax rate was primarily due to a reduction in certain tax credits and increased international income subject to higher foreign tax rates. Consolidated net income closed the quarter at $28.9 million, up 23.6% from the prior year. This quarterly net income translated into diluted net earnings per share of $0.89 for the current year, an increase of $0.17 or 24.3% from last year's comparable quarter.
On an adjusted basis, our Q1 adjusted net earnings were $33.4 million or $1.03 per diluted share, up 17.3% compared with the prior year quarter. Cash flows from operations were $7 million for the Q1 of 2022, compared with $40.6 million in the prior year comparable period. The decrease in cash flows from operations was primarily driven by changes in working capital and the timing of increased sales, restocking of inventory, and payments to suppliers. We expect these timing impacts to be less impactful on a full year basis, and we expect to continue to generate strong cash flows overall.
As we look at it from a segment perspective, for the quarter, our Human Nutrition & Health segment generated record quarterly sales of $122.4 million, an increase of 17.2% from the prior year. The increase was primarily driven by strong sales growth within food and beverage markets and higher sales of chelated minerals as a result of both higher volumes and higher selling prices. Our Human Nutrition & Health segment also delivered record quarterly earnings from operations of $20.3 million, an increase of $0.6 million, or 3.1% compared to the prior year, primarily due to the aforementioned higher sales, partially offset by higher manufacturing input costs and distribution costs, along with increased compensation-related costs within operating expenses.
Excluding the effect of non-cash expense associated with amortization of acquired intangible assets of $4 million, adjusted earnings from operations for this segment were $24.3 million, an increase of 1% compared to the prior year quarter. Our Animal Nutrition and Health segment generated record quarterly sales of $69.3 million, an increase of 35.6% compared to the prior year. The increase in sales was primarily the result of higher sales in both the monogastric and ruminant species markets, partially offset by an unfavorable impact related to changes in foreign currency exchange rates, negatively impacting growth by $1.1 million or 2.2%.
These higher sales were driven both by higher volumes, primarily of feed-grade choline, ReaShure, our encapsulated choline product, AminoShure-XM, our encapsulated methionine product, and offerings for the companion animal market, and higher average selling prices across most of our product offerings. Animal Nutrition & Health delivered record earnings from operations of $11.3 million, an increase of 123.9% from the prior year quarter, primarily due to the aforementioned higher sales, partially offset by increased manufacturing input costs and distribution costs due to inflation and higher compensation-related costs within operating expenses. Excluding the effect of non-cash expense associated with amortization of acquired intangible assets of $0.1 million, adjusted earnings from operations for this segment were $11.5 million, an increase of 119.8% compared to the prior year quarter.
Our Specialty Products segment delivered quarterly sales of $33.3 million, an increase of 19% compared to the prior year quarter. The increase was primarily due to higher sales of products in both the plant nutrition business and the medical device sterilization market, partially offset by an unfavorable impact related to changes in foreign currency exchange rates, negatively impacting the growth by 1.8%. These higher sales were driven by both volume growth, particularly with our plant nutrition business, and higher selling prices. The Specialty Products segment had Q1 earnings from operations of $7.8 million, an increase of 8% compared to the prior year. The increase was primarily due to higher sales, partially offset by increases in manufacturing input costs and distribution costs, and higher compensation-related costs within operating expenses.
Excluding the effect of non-cash expense associated with amortization of intangible assets of $1.1 million, Q1 adjusted earnings from operations for this segment were $8.9 million, an increase of 3%. Now, I'm gonna turn the call back over to Ted for some closing remarks.
Thanks, Martin. We are extremely pleased with Balchem's financial results reported earlier this morning and a strong start to 2022. We delivered all-time record revenues with revenue growth in all three of our business segments, not only versus the prior year's quarter, but also sequentially versus the Q4 of 2021. We also delivered strong earnings growth despite the extraordinary inflationary environment we are operating within, showing the resilience of our business and our ability to recover the cost increases through pricing. That being said, the markets continue to be very volatile and disruptions to global supply chains continue to make it extremely difficult to operate effectively and efficiently. Our employees continue to do an exemplary job in finding creative solutions to challenges never seen before.
I would like to once again take this opportunity to thank all of our employees for the incredible work they do for our company, our customers, and our key stakeholders. I would now like to hand the call back over to Martin, who will open up the call for questions. Martin?
Thank you, Ted. This now concludes the formal portion of the conference. At this point, we will open up the conference call for questions.
Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. Our first question comes from the line of Bob Labick with CJS Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Good morning. Thanks for taking the question.
Hey, Bob.
Good morning, Bob.
Hi. Obviously, you're operating well through a ton of macro volatility, and you outlined that very well. Congratulations on making it look easy. I wanted to maybe just shift the focus a little and just ask, what are the biggest areas that you're focused on that are under your control when you're not blocking and tackling and like reworking the business to get through this volatility? What do you have your eyes set on for the biggest kind of internal goals for 2022?
Bob, you know, thank you for the comments and the comments specifically around making it look easy. I just wanna make it clear that it really isn't easy. It's pretty tough out there with all these supply chain challenges and inflationary challenges. I do feel good about how the company has responded and how we're managing through it. You know, I think that the things that we can control, by and large, are our strategic growth initiatives. We continue to set our eyes on achieving those milestones. When I think about, you know, our business segments in H&H, it's about driving awareness of the benefits of choline and building science around that, building our marketing programs that we've talked about in the past.
You know, those are all largely within our control. Now that, again, I don't think we can officially say that the pandemic is behind us, but we're back investing in doing the scientific studies that we took a bit of a pause from early in 2022, early in the pandemic. You know, we're back making those happen. Those are the types of actions that will ultimately drive the prolific growth in our minerals and nutrients business that we believe is there. So that's within our control, and we continue to drive those actions. You know, focusing on building our R&D pipeline of products, whether it's in Human Nutrition & Health or Animal Nutrition & Health or even plant nutrition.
You know, we're I would say, you know, very much back on track relative to all of those kinds of investments, and those are within our control. The Curemark delivery system, we continue to work on our manufacturing preparedness for ultimately and hopefully the launch of that product. We're working hard there. That's within our control and feel good about that. You know, if I think about Animal Nutrition & Health, you know, there's still a significant opportunity for us to drive penetration of our flagship product, ReaShure, our rumen-protected or encapsulated choline and trying to drive the increased penetration of not only the U.S. cow population, but the European.
Further penetration of the market with our AminoShure-XM product, I think is clearly, you know, in our control and something that, you know, largely we can continue to focus on. Plant nutrition, it's similar. We've been driving, you know, very strong double-digit growth in that business for some years. Q1 was a continuation of that. Launching new products there, driving geographic expansion and, you know, driving adoption of our products in a broader group of crops is, again, all within our control.
You know, we really do believe that the growth initiatives that we've talked about as a company for quite some time are still available to us, still largely within our control, and that's where we focus you know much of our resources. You know, you're bringing up a really good point, you know. How do you not get completely 100% distracted by all of the macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges that are out there? I feel like we're doing a pretty good job of that. You know, we're obviously having to dedicate significant resources to dealing with all those challenges.
As we said in the press release, and I'll say it now, you know, I feel really good about our Q1 results. Particularly in light of the challenges that we face from a financial perspective, but also from a progress on our strategic initiatives perspective. We do continue to make progress in those areas we can control. Little bit of a long-winded answer to your question, but very, very relevant for everything that the company is facing, and certainly we're not alone there.
Yeah, no, super answer, and thank you for all of that. It's appreciated. Shifting to the balance sheet, maybe give us. I noticed, you know, maybe a little acceleration of the repurchase in the quarter. Talk about capital allocation. I know you always look for acquisitions. It's been tough of late given the volatility in the market and then valuations and things like that. Maybe an update on kind of expectations for capital allocation given the strength of the balance sheet.
Yeah. Absolutely, Bob. This is Martin. Fundamentally nothing has changed in our capital allocation strategy in terms of focusing, you know, primarily on our organic growth first, right? R&D and so on and so forth, and paying our dividend, as you've seen over the last decade, and us sort of committing to that one and continuing to grow that one. We've been paying down debt. To your comment on whether we've accelerated our repurchases of shares, I would say, as we've said in the past, when we repurchase shares, it's really for anti-dilutive purposes of equity programs, just to try to keep the share count relatively flat over time, and that we're not necessarily venturing off on any larger share repurchases programs as a strategy, and that is still our strategy.
In this case, that happened a little bit earlier in the year than some other years, but fundamentally it's just kind of to offset the dilutive impacts of other programs to our share counts. That's really what you've seen out there. From an M&A perspective, it continues to be very active. We have been active despite the fact that nothing has closed over the last two years, as you've noticed. We have been participating in a lot of processes and evaluating targets. We continue to do that, and it is, you know, very active at the moment as well. It's just very hard to predict whether you're gonna close on any transactions or not.
We keep, you know, participating and identifying the right targets, but you also wanna make sure that you're very disciplined in your evaluation of purchase price and risk so that you don't make any mistakes that you regret later, and we continue to maintain that discipline.
Okay, super. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Bob.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Raghuram Selvaraju with H.C. Wainwright & Co. Please proceed with your question.
Thanks very much for taking my questions, and, congrats on solid performance under challenging conditions as always.
Thank you.
Firstly, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you think the tipping point might lie with respect to seeing some kind of price elasticity of demand, given the current inflationary environment and the fact that, you know, those pressures don't appear likely to abate anytime soon. Is there a tipping point? And if so, you know, where might you expect to see it, both from a temporal perspective and with regard to, you know, actual percentage increases in pricing?
Yeah. You know, obviously, again, a very relevant question given what we're facing. In the prepared comments, you heard me say that we have not seen any material demand destruction yet. That's absolutely the case. Given a furthering of inflationary pressures and a continuation of inflationary pressures, you know, we need to obviously be cognizant of getting to a point where you might see some demand destruction. Again, just to be clear, we have not seen that to date. The area that we feel is an area maybe that we'll see it first and maybe we've seen some signs of it would be, I think, in our ruminant business within animal nutrition.
The dairy industry where our products are not necessarily designated as essential nutrients. They have a clear value proposition, a return on investment that very much holds true today relative to a return on investment, but you know, can be taken out at the discretion of the dairy farmer. If dairy prices come down and margins of the dairy farmers get squeezed heavily and overall inflationary pressures continue, we think that would be one area that we would see some demand destruction. I think from a positivity perspective there, the value proposition is real, and we do feel that would be a temporary demand destruction.
That is probably the first area that we have concern about, and so we're watching that carefully. If we peel the onion back a little bit on the margins of our portfolio of products, we've seen more margin deterioration in that business because we've been a bit cautious about that. It's quite different than the rest of our animal nutrition business where choline, our primary product, is designated as an essential nutrient. So we don't feel as though today choline would be taken out of companion animal or pet food formulations because it is an essential nutrient. Our customers in those spaces are by and large raising prices.
You know, do we think that there is some point at some time where consumers may start buying less pet food or treats or things like that? That could possibly happen or certainly transition to lower cost products. But again, we're not there. It's very, very hard to judge at what point you would get there. Our primary concern is really around the ruminant business, which again, is a relatively modest part of our overall portfolio. We have not seen any signs of demand destruction in our minerals and nutrients business. But at some point, as the consumers start to respond by taking fewer supplements, that could possibly happen. But again, we're not seeing that.
It's really difficult to tell at what point we get there. Again, as I said in the prepared remarks, you know, we're working closely with our customers. We're watching market indicators to see early signs of those types of things, and we're not there yet. We need to watch it closely.
That's very helpful. Two other quick areas of interest for me. One is, you know, when we look at the overall geopolitical environment and potential interest reemerging in boosting domestic oil production, do you think that this might signal down the road a return to, you know, fracking rates of years gone by and potentially increase demand, industrial demand for choline use? Also I was wondering if within Human Nutrition & Health, you're thinking about the possibility of moving into higher margin areas such as medical foods to complement your existing ingredients business.
Let me tackle the oil and gas question first. You know, first of all, in Q1 of this year, so the current quarter that we're talking about, our oil and gas volume was up 62%. You know, we are seeing growth in that business. Now, quickly, it's important to say that's from a very low base, and the overall contribution of that business is still quite small. We are seeing logical growth in that business based on the increased rig count that we are seeing there. You know, the overall rig count still is, you know, a fraction of what it once was, at its peak. We believe that the fracking activity will, you know, methodically, you know, continue to grow.
Likely we will see a continuing tailwind in that business throughout the year. We do think that things have fundamentally changed in that business that our business will never grow back to the $100 million business that it was in 2014. You know, could it double from where it is today? You know, we do think that that's possible because, you know, choline does bring an important benefit to certain fracking fluids. We believe that we will see some growth. Again, there have been fundamental changes. There's increased recycling of fluids in the process that already have chlorides, and there's a bit of a less need for choline.
We really don't think it's the same market today, but we're gonna continue to see some nice tailwind, albeit pretty small, from that business with increased fracking in this country. That's the answer to the oil and gas. In Human Nutrition & Health, I think this is a very interesting comment. You know, we just had our strategic plan session with our board a few weeks ago and spent some time talking about this very topic, Raghuram, around medical foods and maybe, you know, higher margin applications.
We really do. If you can kind of think of, you know, three joining circles and you have the food business, you have the nutrition business, and then you have an emerging opportunity in pharmaceutical that certainly Curemark is part of, but we have some other opportunities as well. There are some very interesting overlapping areas. You have the fortified food space where we really do have interesting technology, both from a nutrition perspective and a food perspective, where we can take advantage of those fortified food opportunities, nutritional beverage opportunities. We are seeing nice gains there and opportunities. Not what we would like it to be yet. There's a significant addressable market that we have to go after.
There's also that same overlap between the nutrition circle, if you have that thought in your head, and that pharmaceutical area, which is really more medical foods. We do believe also we have some unique capabilities there to take advantage of that and see that as the trends move more toward personalized nutrition, that will be a growing space and an opportunity that we can focus on. You know, we did make that investment a couple years ago in SNP, which is really a DNA diagnostic company that is focused on identifying essentially DNA errors in people around that impact their absorption and metabolism of certain nutrients that ultimately will lead to an individualized medical food or, you know, supplement regimen.
We really feel like being part of that investment and kind of on the ground floor there, I think is an important growth opportunity for us to go after just that market that you highlight. Yes, we do feel like there's an opportunity. We don't have a whole lot of business there today, but we've got capabilities and we're focused on it.
Lastly, just for Martin, I was just wondering if you could give us some guidance regarding expectations around effective tax rate, and if that 23.1% rate is what we should be expecting for the remainder of this year. Thank you.
Yeah. I think that's a, not a bad estimate. It may be a, you know, little bit higher, a little bit below, but it's a good estimate to use for the full year as well.
Thank you.
Thanks, Raghuram.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Mitra Ramgopal with Sidoti. Please proceed with your question.
Yes. Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking the questions. First, congrats on the nice job you have done in terms of being able to combat this environment, and the success you've had with implementing price increases. I was just curious if you have more flexibility on that front as the year progresses, or is this, you know, if things do get worse, you probably have to kind of eat some of that.
Thanks Mitra for your comments. You know, we feel like at this point in time, we have restructured how we do pricing to provide us the flexibility that we need. As I talked about, you know, even in some cases, it's not a significant part of our portfolio, we've moved to weekly pricing. Which, you know, is just a long way from anywhere we've ever been. And we've gone from kind of a norm, maybe not even a, you know, contractual situation, but an, you know, a normal operating situation of annual pricing increases to monthly price increases, which was a huge shift.
I feel really good about the flexibility that we now have to be able to respond monthly in most cases to weekly in some cases. Maybe the longest we really have is quarterly. I think that we're well-positioned from a pricing perspective to kind of recover the costs as needed. Obviously what we really need is a slowing of the inflationary pressures, as the you know increased rate of cost diminishes, will start to catch up and that's what we're looking forward to.
Yeah, no, that's great. Just on the Specialty Products segment. I know you had highlighted the plant nutrition business, seemed like, you know, based on what we saw in Q4 versus this quarter, it's obviously had a nice uptick. Just curious what might be driving that.
Plant nutrition, it you know, really has been a business now for the last you know, two and a half years, I wanna say. You know, we have been growing that business at, you know, 20%-30% annually, which you know, we feel really good about. It has been a combination of introducing new products to the market, geographic expansion, and just expanding the number of crops and types of crops that we've been on. We've accomplished that through some additional investments in agronomists selling our products, as well as some marketing expertise.
Part of it is certainly, you know, us executing our strategic plan to add those agronomists to target those geographies, to invest in new product development, to launch those products and so forth. We really feel like we've got a very good product line that is differentiated, that works well. You know, it's a matter of driving the market penetration. For the last few years, we've had better weather conditions, I would say, than we did in the previous three years. While certainly California is not out of the drought, the winter snow has helped. That hasn't been as big of a negative on that business in the last few years as maybe it was prior to that.
I think by and large, it really has been the actions that we have taken that have driven that significant double-digit growth. It's, you know, still a very small product line across our company, but we're excited about the growth potential of it.
Okay. No, that's great. Finally, just curious in terms of SG&A leverage. I know one thing you've talked about in the past is ideally liking, you know, return back to the office, so to speak. Wondering if you're starting to incur some incremental expenses as a result of that starting to happen more and more.
Yeah. Mitra, Mark, Jan, Dave, we are starting to see that. If you look at our OpEx as a percentage of sales is still very low as we're obviously growing the sales a lot. The percentage can maybe be a little bit misleading. If you look at the actual spend, it's gone up a little bit, really driven by two things. It's primarily actually compensation driven as we've made further investments into our sales and marketing and R&D capabilities, and hired people to enable us to drive that growth. That's the bigger chunk of it. We are seeing the discretionary spend gradually coming back in, you know, in terms of increased traveling, going out there to see the customers.
Also, the outside spend, as some of the research trials that have been on hold are now kicking in again and starting up together with universities, et cetera. Also a little bit more of the typical sales conferences, trade shows, et cetera, that we see sort of gradually coming back in. It's, I would say, when we look at the spend today, it does feel like we're emerging into sort of the post-pandemic kind of spend level again as opposed to the pandemic-reduced spend level.
Okay, that's great. Thanks again for taking the questions.
Thanks, Mitra.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Harris for any final comments.
Thanks, Melissa. Once again, thank you very much for joining our call today. We really appreciate your support as well as your time today, and we look forward to reporting out our Q2 2022 results in July. In the meantime, we will be presenting at the H.C. Wainwright Conference on May 23rd, as well as the Sidoti Conference on June 16th, and potentially some others. Stay tuned for press releases about those. Thank you again for joining us today. We really appreciate it.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.