Great. Well, thank you, and welcome everyone to the 21st Annual Needham Technology, Media, and Consumer Conference. I'm Ryan Koontz. I cover the broadband, optical, and space sectors here at Needham. Really excited today to be joined today by Cheri Beranek and Dan Herzog from Clearfield. Clearfield's a leading connectivity provider, helping service providers reduce a high cost associated with deploying, managing, protecting, and scaling their optical networks. Welcome, guys.
Thank you very much.
Nice to see you.
Thank you.
Let's start with, maybe just a softball first. You know, I still get questions about what exactly does Clearfield do? Let's just spend a minute there and have you explain to someone who's not familiar with the company what your products do for your customers.
Well, the fundamental thing that we do is be able to take what's called a feeder fiber. Break that down to distribution fibers. A feeder fiber, if you think of it, is a large fiber with or a large cable with lots of fiber inside of it, and then we would then protect, excuse me, and manage that fiber as it moves into smaller subset accounts, usually in increments of 12.
Yeah.
The, that, just that part of that protection is what you see all of our different enclosures, whether that's an inside plant or a central office enclosure, like a panel, or something on the outside plant, which might be a cabinet. At the end of the day, you take all of that finally arriving at the home or business, and then we have to put a connector on the end of that fiber. That connector has to be done to a level of performance to ensure there isn't something called insertion loss. We believe that we, you know, can provide the best management of anyone in the world for that matter, 'cause we're the only company that focuses exclusively on the protection of fiber.
Terminate fiber with the best in the business. Providing service providers the opportunity, broadband service providers predominantly at this point in our career, if you call it, as a business, of being able to use excuse me, that equipment to connect homes and businesses with optical fiber.
Yeah.
You know, back in, during the pandemic when, I mean, before the pandemic, we spent a lot of time communicating to people, the importance of high-speed broadband and then the importance of fiber by which to do that. Since the pandemic, it's been obvious to people that high-speed broadband is not a wish or a want, it's an absolute requirement.
Yeah.
That fiber-fed broadband is the most cost-effective means by which to do that. Clearfield, you know, is a leading provider of doing that in a different way. In t he movement of feeder fibers to distribution fibers, you know, our competitors early on, you know, felt that there was one way to do that. You know, they had built product for companies like Verizon, and then they told the rest of the service providers across the country that, you know, "If it's good enough for Verizon and AT&T, it's good enough for the rest of you.
Yeah.
We knew that not to be the case. We needed to not have the fixed bulkhead approach that Verizon was using but instead use a highly modular and scalable platform. That allows, you know, smaller service providers around the country who maybe weren't deploying in Manhattan, but instead were deploying, you know, in the wonderful Ponderosa evergreens of Colorado.
Yeah
T he glaciers, up in Alaska, that they needed a different kind of platform. We did that, with a product called the Clearview Cassette. You know, the Clearview Cassette is a modular, scalable building block. It protects fiber in increments of 12, and it allows Clearfield to compete in a different way in that we can take that building block, build it in high volume and then take that building block and put it into a different type of enclosure, allowing us to cost-effectively compete, you know, with the largest providers in the world.
Yeah, that's great. Let's shift to a summary of your recent results. You had a really nice quarter there in March, which I know is seasonally down for you typically. You saw a nice rebound. You know, what was behind the strength in your March quarter there? You know, can you walk us through some of the p uts and takes on the, on the March quarter?
Sure. You know, over the last, you know, probably, you know, 24 months. We have been recovering from the situations that were, you know, created from the pandemic and then subsequently with some changes in government funding. You know, created some challenges within the marketplace, kind of, some inventory glut and then some concerns about just general who is building and when. In March, we saw all of our different business units, you know, really just stabilize and be able to identify, you know, how are they gonna be able to, you know, create, use the product line and in what areas. The, probably the biggest strength was in community broadband.
That's the part of our business that we refer to, as companies who, you know, up to 1,000 companies across the country who typically are, you know, may have less than 50,000 subscribers.
Right.
They do that in maybe as less as 2,000 subscribers. These were the companies that were up 5% over last year. The Clearfield has, you know, taken a position of really focusing on the unserved or underserved markets. community broadband is, it's a term that we coined to really describe those telephone companies who live in the communities in which they serve. T hey're a standpoint in which they're smaller, they're typically served by a distributor. That's great. Distribution is a perfect partner, but it shouldn't be your sales arm.
Clearfield has, and I think it's the reason that we saw business up in this quarter, is we have maintained a very strong, you know, sales and application engineering presence all along over the course of the last few years to ensure that, you know, our customers had the support that they needed while they were evaluating their next step. The Clearfield has always had that really strong, what we call, you know, smart guy approach.
Where we're wanna have, the guys used to tease me about saying this, 'cause I'd say we had a high-touch sales model, and it's not that we were physically touching our customers, but that we were, you know, in presence of being able to provide them, you know, what they needed, you know, all day every day. Not necessarily always when they were buying product, but whenever they were deploying network, to be able to call us for whatever they might need.
Yep. community broadband was your strongest.
Was community broadband strongest?
contributor in the quarter?
Right. All the other segments were also in a I mean, while they were down year-over-year, we had a really amazing. If you, if you look at the quarter, you're gonna say, "It doesn't look all that strong." You know, it was actually, you know, down over last year, and I think it's important to communicate what actually the difference was. Last year in the second quarter, we had a large regional that pulled in. A significant piece of business from the second half of the year, making last year's second quarter look unusually, you know, s trong.
Yeah.
If you look at the six-month period, you see the grace of all of the different market segments rebounding. You know, over that period of time. You know, the early large regionals that I talk about last year, pulled business in. I think it's important to look at that today because many of those large regionals are the companies that are being bought by the tier ones.
Yeah.
You mind grabbing me that water?
Sure.
The, the tier ones have AT&T and Verizon have been buying the large regionals, companies like Frontier and Lumen. The large regionals have long been a Clearfield customer. We were really pleased to see during that period that our large regionals continue to be business as usual. You know, they're continuing to deploy fiber, and they were bought because they were deploying fiber.
Yeah.
The Clearfield believes our products and our markets with those customers are gonna continue to be sticky because when we worked with those customers, it wasn't because we had product, it was because our product reduced the amount of time that it took for them.
Yeah
to install the networks. They did studies in the field that showed that they could pass twice as many homes and businesses, using our product line than what they had as an incumbent. We've been, those companies have been bought because of the fiber that they're deploying, at the pace at which they're deploying, and then turning up subscribers. That's another element of why the quarter was up. The strength of the quarter is the amount of differentiation of additional products that we've been offering during that period. you know, we principally have, you know, we talked about, you know, when we started the business, having been passed homes with feeder fibers.
Right.
We're really about connecting those homes, you know, with the drop cables and the different types of solutions that physically go on the home or business.
When a customer orders a service.
Correct.
That subscriber turn-up. Our largest increasing point of business is our Home Deployment Kits. Who take all of those products that are required by which to turn up the customer, puts them all in one place to make sure that there isn't anything missing, they don't have to do another truck roll because they're you know, losing a part. Because that fiber is deployed inside, at the home, you know, in a box with a deploy reel that allows you to pull the fiber back to the terminal, it actually takes a two-man job into one. All those different elements are c raft friendliness and taking labor out of the equation.
Yeah
are why we can take something that doesn't sound all exciting and actually make it pretty sexy, in my opinion.
Love that. I think in your March quarter, you also had a really strong bookings, if I recall. You guys do disclose backlog and took a nice step up in what traditionally is a seasonally soft quarter.
Right.
I think that's why there's a lot of excitement around the business.
Yeah. No, exactly.
kind of walk us through.
Yeah
Walk us through the bookings and kinda your view of the second half. It's a pretty steep ramp on revenue.
Right. Yeah.
Maybe explain what gives you the confidence here in the balance of your fiscal year.
Right. Yeah, our booking, our book-to-bill was 1.3 in the quarter e nding in March, and typically people would say that, you know, you're right, the March quarter is typically our low point. In the work that we had done, you know, early in the year to 'Cause when we do a forecast, we're going to be able to do that from a bottoms-up approach, you know, account by account as to where. They're building. We were aware of the builds that were going on in our part, you know, to them. It's always difficult to know when those bookings are going to come in, but we were pleased that they were in the March quarter so that we could disclose those to our base business. Again, those are up across all of the market segments.
Right.
Whether it's a large regional, whether it's community broadband, or our cable business, which is actually, you know, a part of the business that I think it's overlooked but is one of the most exciting parts of the work that we do. You know, in the early days, it was the telco business that was trying to be able to recover because, you know, all they had was DSL.
Right.
They were deploying fiber, and that was an easy decision 'cause DSL couldn't compete.
Yep.
Being able to put the fiber in the ground, allowed them to reduce the cost of deployment or to reduce the cost of operating their business. It increased the amount of revenue per subscriber. The telcos were first to market to deploy fiber. When you hear all of the cable guys talking about losing subscribers.
Yeah. They're bleeding
they're losing subscribers to telcos.
Yep
losing subscribers to telcos with fiber.
Yep.
You know, our MSO business is predominantly at this point large regionals who have figured it out. You know, waiting for DOCSIS to get to a level. The next stage of performance will happen. It's not always gonna continue to get better.
Yeah.
The only fiber can get you the speed and the performance of being able to move, you know, information over glass. I mean.
Yeah
it's over the speed of light, and nothing else is gonna be able to keep up with that.
The cost of upgrading fiber is a fraction of just about any other technology out there. Once it's in the ground.
Once it's in the ground, exactly. The cable guys have been responding. We see it from the Fiber Broadband Association. They've released numbers that say up to about a third of the fiber that's being deployed right now is a second fiber in the ground. Competing for the same subscriber.
That's impressive.
The first fiber that goes in is about a 40% take rate. The second fiber increases that take rate about another 50%. Experiencing a 60%-70% take rate over two providers, which means this is a for-profit business that works.
Yep.
Once you get market dynamics of supply and demand, and you get kind of the government out of the way sometimes, you get a really nice curvature of business. We look forward to that growth i n the years ahead.
Yeah. Excellent. You raised your guide, I think, a little bit on the second on the for the full year that you beat and you won a bit. Did you beat it a little?
The just not really, just a little, within it, just a little bit in regard to earnings. I think it's most importantly to just say that we are looking at a 7%-12% increase in revenue. At midpoint it's about a 10% increase in revenue. In a general overall marketplace that is really has a lot of uncertainty, I think, in it. We've had some challenges. You look at, you know, Calix and others here domestically. That business has been a little bumpy. I think our steady growth to 10%, and we'll cross our fingers and work hard to make sure it's closer to the higher end of the guide, t he midpoint's 10%, and w e feel good about that.
Excellent. Dan, on the gross margin front, you guys have made some changes. You had a divestiture last year. Your margins sound like they're on a real nice march here. Can you kind of walk us through some of the puts and takes on the margin line?
Yeah. Absolutely. Like, last year we had a different business. It was in Finland, and a lot more commodity and a lower margin business that kinda looked like it changed the profile of Clearfield's overall margin profile, which really wasn't the case. We sold that off in November, and now you can kinda see us matching up with what we've done historically, our continuing operations. We've been in about the 32%-34% range. On our own. Now we're kind of back to that, publishing that versus some of the lower percentage that we were doing. We've built for capacity $400 million-$500 million. In the fourth quarter of our fiscal year 2022, we finished at 39.5% roughly on a $95 million run rate. We know we can get back to that. We do need to get back to higher volume.
Yeah
To make that happen, for all the investments, we don't have to put in any much more significant investments into our operations to increase our capacity. It's already there. As we increase our revenue, our gross profit percentage will incrementally crawl up towards that 39% some to cover.
Can you walk us through that fixed capital investments you've made there?
Yeah
that you're leveraging?
So, we went from, like, a 200,000 sq ft type of total operation about 500,000 sq ft. We now have a 300,000 sq ft operation in Mexico, b eautiful new building.
Yeah
that can really ramp up quite a bit. We have an additional 100,000 sq ft in our Twin Cities location as well. We can handle the size. Anytime large customers are asking, "Can you take these orders?" You know, and they're looking to vet us. You know, they wanna look at capacity, they wanna look at our balance sheet. Those types of things matter to them. We're happy with our gross profit profile now percentage profile now and just look to increase volume and have that grow, a lot of leverage there.
That's great. Really great story. Maybe while I have you, maybe talk a bit about how you're thinking about supply chain going forward here on, in, you know, in terms of any kind of critical parts you have within your own portfolio?
Supply chain. We feel pretty good about what we can control. It's what some of the things that we can't control that have the issues. Our inventory levels are good. They've come down quite a bit. You'll see some tailwinds in our gross profit because of that. As far as the parts that we can control and that we can make, we feel good about. There are some supply chain challenges out there with t he broader industry with-
With the optical fiber
ribbon cable.
ribbon fiber, right.
Ribbon cable.
Yeah. We use ribbon fiber for what are called the tails on a panel or a. You know, or a cabinet. That might be 100 ft long. Our customers are gonna use ribbon fiber in high counts for miles.
Miles. Yeah.
The challenge, of course, is that the same ribbon fiber that we're using for broadband deployment is the ribbon fiber that the large data centers are also using for their deployments. The, especially as it relates to American-made fiber, there's not a lot of cushion there, you know. Right now. Everyone is kinda doing a little bit of juggling to see if we can get the right product at the right place. It's causing optical fiber to increase in. In cost from the suppliers. It is causing our service provider customers, especially those, who are receiving BEAD awards to try to you know, structure and schedule their deployments in a measured fashion.
Got it. Yeah. Well, while we're on that topic, let's talk about BEAD. It's been a journey that we've all been on.
It has been
for many years. It seems like, there's a light at the end of the tunnel here. We're starting to see some money distributed to states. like, how would you characterize where we are today? For the industry and yourselves, and how you think this rolls out over the next, you know, 12, 24 months?
That's right. Yeah, it's been a five-year journey with no money given to service providers. I can't imagine the millions that have been spent in overhead and administration. At some point in time we're gonna ask the administration to go back and count that in those dollars.
Yeah
BEAD was originally designed to provide $42 billion for unserved and underserved homes across the country. The first two years were really about mapping. You know, a year ago we were ready to go, we had everything in place, and with the change in administration, the rules changed, and all of a sudden maps were redrawn, and now we had, you know, half as much revenue, or half as much funding, you know, by which to work with, $20 billion, and a fraction of the number of homes that were gonna be connected.
At the end of the day, we now have 338 awardees. You know, the industry is tracking them with most states, with exception of a few who have gone through the hoops to be able to identify how they're gonna fund which providers at which point in time. We're waiting for NTIA approval of those requests from each of those states. The very first 5,000 homes have been approved in Louisiana.
Wow.
We know it can happen. What we're doing, since we are the predominant supplier in so many of these rural areas, is we've tracked every one of these 338 accounts. We've identified them as, you know, red, yellow, or green.
Yep.
You know, right, they're probably a, you know, they're gonna be a LEO satellite, and our opportunity is to connect the, you know, the trunk station. All the way up to an existing customer who is gonna be able to add some subscribers that were gonna be too costly, had they been, you know, running it independently.
Yeah.
We don't see, unfortunately, there's still a lot of paperwork to do, and because the service provider wants to ensure that the fiber is there and their labor is there all at the same time, we see this revenue and activity not happening until 2027. We think it starts in a strong fashion. Grows into 2028, with 2028 and 2029 probably peaking.
Yeah
You know, rolling off from there. I think Clearfield's in an excellent place to be able to capitalize on both traditional community broadband customers, as well as some of the large regionals and the MSOs and others who you wouldn't necessarily consider rural providers, but if you look at some of those award winners, Charter as an example is one of the strongest winners.
Yep.
We're proving-
They're gonna deploy fiber.
Yeah. They know how to, we know how to deploy fiber. We're serving those communities. We think we're going to get a disproportionate share of that business.
I've also heard some excitement about, kind of the edge out from BEAD.
Yeah.
'Cause once you go deliver fiber to a community that has no broadband at all, you're gonna probably pass a lot of homes that are served by cable and can't qualify for subsidies.
Right.
You've got the fiber nearby.
Exactly, then you build from it because you've got those feeder the passing lines coming through.
Yep.
You take the edge and you build from that next stage. It reduces the cost. The deployment in BEAD actually reduces the cost of neighboring communities as well. We also think that the more wireline fiber that's out there, the more the introduction of edge computing is going to be enabled.
Right.
What I mean by edge computing is there's so much work going on. Everybody talks about, you know, AI and the data centers, but they forget about the fact that in order for us to move from training to inference, compute really needs to happen as close to the user as possible. You know, one of the things I haven't talked about in regard to our product lines is we have a very strong active cabinet business.
This is deploying powered cabinets in the field to store the electronics that are closer to the customer. In a traditional broadband deployment, those electronics have been from companies like Calix or Adtran. As we move more to edge compute, these are going to be Ciena and Cisco and being able to take the compute power and put it next to hospitals and libraries and organizations that are going to have a lot, universities that are going to have a lot of computing power required. They're gonna have the mini data center's gonna be right outside those buildings.
Yeah. For sure.
Those are gonna be cabinets, and using some of that fiber that we've deployed, for traditional broadband.
Yeah. Great. Can you remind us a little bit as well about the seasonality of your business, how you're getting into build season, how it's impacted by weather and budget cycles, and what gives you confidence in this ramp this year?
Yeah.
The next couple quarters.
Yeah, yeah. I think this, you know, I should've introduced that a little bit as we talked about the 1.3 and where we're sitting at. At the end of the March quarter. You know, traditionally the, our business is a summer build. I always say that I can't wait, I get so excited for build season, 'cause build season's typically March through October. Like, we're from Minnesota, you know, we think it's nice outside all the time. At the end of the day, you don't deploy fiber when it's, you know, when the ice is in the ground, or when it's raining and it's 40 degrees, or at least you don't deploy it as quickly or as cost-effectively.
We do at least 55% of our business in the summer months and summer quarters, which are our third and fourth quarter ending September 30th.
Yep.
This year we think it, you know, could be even disproportionately higher than that. The reason being is that there was so much uncertainty and question marks early on in the year, and even as to what the cost of petroleum was gonna be. All those things you don't think about in regard to the cost of deployment, you know, all add up. When it's, when you're using internal financing, it's one thing. When you're using external financing and you need to work with your bank about what are your gates and what, when are you gonna meet them, you know, as a result, it slowed it down, and there was a lot more planning going on, i n the winter months.
You know, summertime, we're ready to go. I think we're seeing, it's not should we deploy fiber, it's how fast can we make it happen, and how can we work with our customers to enable that?
Yeah, great. We talked a little about, you know, AI data centers and how that's impacting supply chain concerning some of your customers. How are you adapting your product lines? To go after that opportunity?
Yeah.
I know you can't say.
Yeah
some exciting new news.
Right. Yeah, well, you know, at the end of the day, whether you use fiber in a broadband deployment or you use it in a data center. It's just more in the data center. It's still the same techniques. You have, you know, I talked earlier about a feeder fiber moving to a distribution fiber. The feeder fibers coming into these data centers are huge trunk cables with thousands and thousands of cables, you know, but they all still have to be broken down into subunits, so that they can be then distributed to the individual ports in the data center.
Yeah.
It's the same technique, just a different scale. We recently announced a new product line called NOVA. NOVA is based on the same concepts that we brought to market, you know, 15 years ago of taking a modular, scalable approach all based around a cassette. Then being able to take that cassette and do it in a lot of different ways and put it into a lot of different platforms. So, I think my biggest surprise has been the receptiveness of the data center community of recognizing Clearfield as being an expert in fiber management- as being knowledgeable and superior in our termination skills. We really have received, you know, a strong open door welcoming from the data center community. We expect that we'll start to see the NOVA platform business in third and fourth quarter.
That's great. What type of customers would buy that then? Would it be traditional telcos-?
Yeah
or are they-
You know, we have two different growth initiatives for the business.
We have two pillars. The second pillar is our existing customers, who are gonna be adapting their central offices.
Yep
to become data centers.
Yep.
What we can do with the Clearview Cassette and with NOVA is we can take the new NOVA platform and move it into our existing customers' sites and make an existing central office panel more dense. You don't have to have a bigger building, you just need to be able to make the frame that you're using more dense to serve that market.
Got it.
That's the second pillar, to be able to use our existing customers and be able to help them build a data center.
Those weren't originally built to handle that.
Yeah, that's great.
scale of fiber coming in there.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
You know, but they know fiber.
Yeah
you know, they can adapt to the kind of we kind of almost call it a brownfield data center. The third pillar is to go to new customers. That have not been experienced with Clearfield before, but to be able to, demonstrate the innovation and nimbleness of Clearfield. The, you know, people may say, "Okay, you're a small company." And I'm like, "Yeah, today we are certainly not the behemoth, but you know, we have the footprint of a much larger organization." It's, we like to look at ourselves as being nimble and scalable. Our nimbleness is in the innovation upon which we can design product to meet the unique needs that aren't being served by our competitors. Y ou know, we look at it as our competitors are fabulous at mass scale.
Yeah.
You know, they're high volume, low mix manufacturers.
mainly Corning.
Corning and CommScope.
CommScope
are predominantly our competitors.
The high volume, low mix.
Yep
They do it very well.
Yep.
What we do is low volume, high mix, and we do it really well. We think of the standpoint of an opportunity that might be a $5 million or $10 million opportunity to be able to have a unique type of, let's say splice panel as an example, or a new type of panel for port density. If it's a $5 million or $10 million opportunity, that's big business for us to be able to bring it in. For our competitors, that's nuisance. Being able to innovate, and innovate so that we're lowering our customers' labor costs resonates regardless of if you are, you know, the smallest data center in the country or some of the largest.
Yeah. That's real exciting.
It is really exciting.
move, as we move toward edge compute, I've always thought the telco central office was the one place you have power, fiber access close to the customer.
Okay. Exactly.
Right?
Right. I mean, the, I always think of downtown Minneapolis. I mean, you go right by the Lumen's central office, right across the street from the Hennepin County Government Center. I mean, they just, they share a block. You can see that duplicated across the country, in central offices in every large community. You know, I was in Hawaii a couple last year, and we see the same thing in Hawaii, there are not gonna be data centers, but they are going to need to provide data center connectivity to their customers. And t o be able to get more of the artificial intelligence and the ability for that compute world. You know, we were in Hawaii, because Hawaiian Telephone is, one of the pioneers in this market.
Yeah.
Put a stake in the ground and said they were gonna be the first state to pass every home and business.
Got it.
in that entire state, and they're doing it with Clearfield cabinets and it'll be complete this fall. What they did is they did the hardest service areas first. You know, in small farms and rural communities.
Volcanic rock.
Yeah. Just their commitment to the lifestyle, the commitment to the opportunity was fabulous. When you think of Clearfield, you know, maybe you think of, you know, cows and kitchens, I don't know. I think you should really think of Clearfield as being anywhere that fiber is needed, where perhaps innovation is required to get it there.
Yeah, that's great. you know, on the some changes going on in the industry here in terms of some of the larger SPs are starting to gobble up some of the mid-size. How are you guys navigating some of the consolidation in your, in your customer base?
You know, staying very close to them. You know, we've built the company based upon, ensuring that every single customer that we had a relationship with, whether a fiduciary relationship was direct. Or through distribution, we still had that technical relationship. As our customers like Lumen or Frontier or TDS or Uniti or whoever else is out there, that's part of the means by which to, as the big guys look at acquiring their footprint as T-Mobile buys Lumos and Metronet.
Yeah.
You know, those are the customers upon which we built Clearfield. Today I would say that we're kind of in a neutral position. It's business as usual. It hasn't o pened a door, but it hasn't closed one either. We look at it as our customers are being acquired because of their fiber footprint.
Truly.
Because they know how to do fiber.
Right.
They know how to do fiber faster than the companies upon which they're being acquired from.
Yeah.
With that, I think it creates an open- door opportunity for Clearfield to grow into the national carriers. It's not that our product lines wouldn't be approved or effective or certified in a large network- 'cause we went through all the Telcordia certifications years ago.
Yep.
We couldn't play against CommScope or Corning based upon their rules. We can have an opportunity now for different types of national carrier business. You see our national carrier business has been growing incrementally, but slowly. Today we think there's an opportunity for that to grow at a more accelerated base. We just have not yet been able to prove that out.
Yeah. Great. Well, super. Any kind of final commentary? What do you think investors are missing about the Clearfield story today? That you would- relay?
Yeah I think it's fiber to anywhere, and it's fiber to anywhere. If anything I think has been demonstrated over the course of the last weeks in with the investment of NVIDIA into Corning, is that fiber is here to stay. There isn't an end to this business when every home is passed.
Sure.
It's just simply the beginning of the means by which to use that network to be able to have more and more communication shared, that fiber isn't about, the internet isn't about connecting people, it's about connecting machines so that people can have more information.
Yeah.
Clearfield is one of the providers to help make that happen. We're not at the scale of Corning and we never will be in that we are not a producer of the fiber itself. We are a means by which to get that fiber deployment done faster. There is a part of this market that absolutely needs what we're gonna be introducing.
That's great. Thanks for joining.
You're welcome.
Thanks both of you.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you very much.
Thanks.