I've got to tell you what, Jeff, if you want to sit there.
Sure.
I'll sit here.
Morning. Thank you again for joining us at the 27th Annual Needham Growth Conference. So today we're going to have a discussion with the management of 3D Systems. We have with us the company's CEO, Jeff Graves, and CFO, Jeff Creech. My name is Jim Ricchiuti, a Senior Analyst in the Equity Research Department at Needham, covering advanced industrial technology companies. So gentlemen, welcome.
Thanks, Jim.
Thank you.
So, question for Jeff Graves. So, last year at this time, we were coming off this, fair to say, a tumultuous year for the industry, the 3D printing industry. But, fair to say, 2024 was challenging in other respects, right, Jeff? How would you characterize the year for the industry and just for 3D Systems?
I'm searching for a word beyond tumultuous, Jim. It was a continuation. It was probably some of the worst six quarters that we've experienced. Nicely, the tail end of that started showing some signs of life, which were encouraging. But fundamentally, our whole industry, and certainly we were not immune from this, there was a dearth of CapEx spending by our customers, basically for capacity expansion. And it really hit us hard in terms of revenue. So everybody was in a cost savings mode. Our hard decision was we've got the broadest technology offering in the industry, and that R&D spend to stay current or advance, hopefully, on all those platforms is something you've got to maintain through the up and down times. So we try to keep a balance sheet strong enough to make sure we can always do that.
But it was a tough year, no doubt about it. We did our fair share of cost cutting. But again, we've been at this for 40 years, and we want to make sure we keep the things in place that are going to sustain our long-term growth. So that's the balance in the face of what, by all measure, was a difficult year last year.
That's really, at the crux of it, it really was just weak capital spending.
That was it, Jim. Yeah. That was it. It was just CapEx spending on the part of our customers. Nicely, we have some businesses that are less immune or are more immune from that. The orthopedic part of our healthcare business, where we're supporting necessary surgeries for customers, is a much more stable, growing business consistently year over year. Industrial and then the dental part of our healthcare business is a little bit more cyclical and capital driven. So that was a tough year last year.
We're going to get into that, but I think you touched on something probably worth talking about. You had to make some tough decisions when you're having a revenue environment, a demand environment like that. Talk to us a little bit, and Jeff, maybe you want to address this, of what you did, what you felt you needed to do on the cost side.
Sure. Well, as you're likely aware, we came out in late 2023 with some disclosure around intentions to reduce costs in the organization, which we've pursued very aggressively. We're actually quite encouraged about a lot of the decisions we made about where we were reducing costs while at the same time maintaining a very strong presence in our R&D spend. As Jeff just mentioned, that's a tough decision for us, right? A lot of companies can easily take an axe across every cost category. And we recognize that in order to stay viable and attractive, we've got to continue to make an appropriate investment in R&D. But beyond that, we took a look at our cost structure, and we determined that there were a number of areas where some cost cutting was necessary, and we pursued that rather aggressively.
Now, it was masked, unfortunately, in 2024 as a result of some other, in some cases, very unexpected cost overruns, and so what we've done is find ways and places to reduce costs appropriately and permanently, where that made sense, and then continue to stay focused on spending money where that also made sense. The Geomagic deal, which was recently announced, is going to give us yet another opportunity to take a look at making sure that we've got the right cost frame, not only to support the revenue that we have in place, but also to continue supporting our investments in R&D to make us a leader in the industry.
The idea of focusing the investment where you feel it's going to pay the most and provide the best returns. Talk to us about that from a market development standpoint and new product standpoint. Where have you tried to focus more of the efforts as we come out of this?
The areas we really believe are key to future growth and value creation. One, you can look at our business as healthcare and industrial. You can also look at it in terms of printing platforms. On the polymer side of printing, so the plastic side, which is not only good capital sales, it's also good recurring revenue sales from consumables after the sale for many years. It's been a fairly large revolution in those machines. We've gone from printing largely with lasers, which was still a very significant piece of our business, to moving now to printing with projection systems where you get area printing of parts. And the economics on those can be very attractive for customers because the throughput's very high. It also drives a lot of consumable sales because the throughput's very high. We have a biotech activity for printing human organs.
We lifted that technology and put it into industrial printers for printing large areas at high precision. So we've protected that area significantly. We feel great about it advancing polymer printing. Also, the metal printing area is going to be substantial in terms of the growth in the economy. So we continue to invest significantly in metal printing. So from an R&D standpoint, it's printing with high-resolution projection systems and metal printing are dominant in addition to materials development. And then on the sales side, which shows up in SG&A, obviously, the application engineers, we have a lot of customers that are coming in to explore new applications. So they have a part that's never been made before or never been made out of a certain material they want to explore. Is it printable? What are the economics like?
So we maintain the largest application group in the industry, over 80 engineers that are dedicated, that show up on our cost of sales, that are dedicated to new applications. And that's been one of the most encouraging things looking forward is that work has been booming. There's a lot of work.
That metric that you provided in Q3, that industrial applications group was up 26%.
26%.
So maybe for those who aren't as familiar with 3D Systems, help us understand what exactly that entails.
So I'll give you a concrete example. So in general terms, you get customers coming in saying, "Can I manufacture this part? I know what material I need to make it out of. I know the design. Is it manufacturable with 3D printing?" And so we had customers coming in. I'll give you an example, like the U.S. Navy coming in and saying, "Hey, look, this part we need for a submarine that's in dry dock. It's got a 14-month lead time, but it's made out of this alloy that's saltwater resistant and things. So can you print that? It's not the most challenging geometry, but it's never been printed.
It's been made with historical manufacturing, but a 14-month lead time with a ship in dry dock is a real problem, so we were able to turn that part around through our application engineers in the course of a week or two, and finished part met specs out of material they wanted very quickly. It's opened up a whole new avenue now, in that case, to surface ships, both the Navy and commercial application, so we had the materials technology. We had the application expertise. They brought a design.
Our guys turned it into a real part and said, "Here's a one-off part, but also here's the economics if you want to do this at scale for all the parts that are made out of this material in a battleship, in a surface warfare ship or underwater ship." So you're able to open up a whole new market that way with a lot of interested parties, both at the government level and their suppliers that support them in that activity. So it's one example I use. It wasn't the most exciting part in the world. There are a lot of customer interests in terms of exotic part designs for propulsion systems. Rocketry, heat transfer is very much in vogue now. How do you get heat out of equipment? So there's a lot of exotic parts for that need.
There's also more when you think of mundane parts that are driven by lead times, and they want insulated supply chains. They want local, shorter lead times, particularly in the aerospace and defense market, so big area of focus for those application engineers right now, a lot of work to do.
How are you thinking about the activity that you've seen in this area and being able to get a better sense as to how that could translate to systems, materials, revenue down the road? How do you track that?
So we've been asked that a lot ever since we put that metric out. When do you see the revenue from that coming? And basically, it comes in steps. So the first entry point is they come with a design they want you to demonstrate, and they'll often pay for that. It covers part of our sales cost. The next level up is they say, "Okay, you've demonstrated it. Make 10 of them. Make 100 of them, whatever it is, some limited production quantities." So we have some capacity dedicated to making parts, but it's in that vein of future sales. And then the real objective is pick your markets wisely. And then when those sales grow, you provide machines and services to that customer for the next 15 years. So if you stay on top of it, it's got that kind of legs to it.
That's the steps you go through: process demonstration with application engineers, making a few parts that you sell to the customer, and you can make some level of money at that, and then eventually selling the machines and supporting them with services in the field. So we were very encouraged to see a lot of application work going on. We would expect that to translate very quickly into part sales, if you will. But we're not a service bureau. We don't do this for anybody that comes in the door. But for bespoke parts, for driving printer sales, things like that, we do those agreements. And then the next step would be real revenue. That can take. We were asked about timing, and I think that's what you were asking, Jim, is that can take a year. It could take three years, but it depends.
If you're moving into the defense space and aerospace, where safety and flight criticality is there, it can take multiple years to get approvals from customers and from the government if necessary. Same with healthcare, but you've got other businesses where that ramp-up can take a year. The real issue has been the impediment customers have right now to capital investment, so that last step where they're buying machines has been more difficult, and it was a combination of the economy, people being uncertain about future demand, and, quite frankly, the geopolitical environment, the fact that we were facing an election with talk of tariffs, the geopolitical situation with wars. No one really knew where that was going in demand. Hopefully, that stabilizes now with the election behind us and we see demand growing on a more predictable basis.
And maybe this is actually a good point too. I was going to ask you this, but you bring it up. There has been a lot of talk about tariffs, trade restrictions. How are you guys thinking about that? Walk us through what happened the last time.
Yeah. Well, Jim, for us, the world has really changed since the last bout of tariffs that we're talking about. We have in-source manufacturing now. And I think we're about the only company in our industry that has moved aggressively to in-source manufacturing. We were virtually entirely dependent on contract manufacturing back in 2020. It was not only a supply issue for us and an exposure to tariffs because these guys outsourced their manufacturing elsewhere, but it was a lack of control of quality and delivery cycle times. So we said, "Look, that's unacceptable. We had a strong enough balance sheet. We could in-source it." And we have the good fortune of being headquartered down in South Carolina. It's a wonderful place to build stuff. So we've in-sourced virtually all of our manufacturing. We're 80%-90% in-sourced now. We make most of our products in South Carolina.
We try to source as much as we can from domestic suppliers or suppliers in preferred countries. We have minimal exposure, quite frankly, to China, whether it's in sales or supply, a little bit more in supply than sales, but we are minimizing that by design, and we are taking full control of our supply chain. It not only pays a benefit, I think, from a tariff standpoint, not that we'll be unaffected, but it does have a big benefit there. It's also much better in control of new product introduction to the market. We're no longer dependent on outside parties to do that, and it's very good from a cost standpoint and driving costs down, so from all those standpoints, I love it. We paid the price of an inventory build to do it, which we're bleeding off now as we in-sourced all of that.
But I think it'll pay big dividends for our company in the future. From a competitive standpoint, we don't compete in a lot of markets with Chinese companies, particularly. We have some limited exposure there in some of the consumer-oriented markets. But quite frankly, the markets we're most excited about in healthcare and in the more demanding industrial markets, you really don't face that kind of competition from the Chinese. So I'm excited about that. We've got more work to do to penetrate those markets, but we're moving in the right direction.
Okay. Let's talk about those markets. Roughly half of the business, industrial, half healthcare?
Right.
So both parts of the business have been affected for different reasons. But maybe talk to us about how you're seeing. You saw some signs of improvement. Talk to us about what you're seeing in both of those markets. And you can take industrial first if you'd like to.
Sure. Sure. Let's talk about industrial first. So our industrial exposure has been, and it comes out of our heritage of inventing prototype equipment and then moving into manufacturing. It's fine castings and service bureaus, things like this. Those are great markets. They're a little bit more internationally exposed. So they've suffered. They've taken a big hit during the downturn the last six quarters. What we have seen resilience in are in the more demanding markets like aerospace, semiconductor capital equipment manufacturing. We like that space very much. A lot of the AI infrastructure markets, we see real potential in growing. So if you have to talk about what we're excited about in the future, I think good stable growth in those high reliability, high demanding markets is where a big part of our future is at. So rocketry, satellites, space, defense, aerospace, those markets, and defense broadly.
AI infrastructure right now, I think, is going to have multi-year legs to it, the direction AI is headed. So I feel great about those markets. I think there's some real stability and growth coming in those. The other ones will be more cyclic in nature, really are waiting on CapEx investments. Those are the ones that are exposed to consumers and prototype building. So I like portions of our market. The other ones are waiting, and I'm hopeful about those. On the healthcare side, I divide our revenue into two pieces. The orthopedic business, where we focus on the head and face area, cranio maxillofacial for more complex work, but rebuilding bones, helping surgeons reconstruct bone structure above the neck, and then spines. So we're very big in those businesses, helping surgeons and providing printed parts into the human body. We're very good at that.
It's a good stable business, not nearly as cyclical, much more difficult to be in with the FDA regulatory environment in the EU. So we like that business very much. It's a good grower for us and good margin performance. Dentistry is the up-and-coming business in the healthcare market, which if you've been to the dentist lately, what you're hearing from your dentist is probably what I heard from mine is, "Boy, your teeth are looking a little crooked." And also, "You're probably grinding your teeth." And there's a lot of services they're trying to add on in dentistry today. And so you're seeing a digital transformation in dentistry completely. 3D printing is going to play a big part of that in the next few years. Everything from alignment of teeth, which we're very big in today, to preventing damage like night guards for grinding, to replacement and repair.
We've been in repair for a long time. We're moving into dentures right now in a big way, which we're extremely excited about because 3D printing, the dentures with the materials that we've gotten FDA approval for now, they're not only beautiful, they're very tough. We've got videos of people driving pickup trucks and throwing them against walls, and they don't fracture, which is the main failure mechanism in a denture, if you ever wondered, people dropping them from the sink, so they don't break. They're tough. They're beautiful. We're very excited about getting those to market later in the year, so I love dentistry. It's growing. It's booming. It's going to boom over the next few years. It's not quite yet, but it's getting there. Orthopedic, good stable grower for us. Industrial, some of the high-end markets I'm very excited about.
The consumer-driven ones will take a little bit of time for CapEx. Long-winded answer.
No, no. That's fine. Let's go back to dental. I think there have been questions, and the company has addressed some of these just in terms of the customer concentration. What are you seeing with the large dental aligner customer, and how do we think about that? And then the follow-up question is obviously the direct printing aspect of it.
Yes. Thanks for asking that, Jim. So we've been in the teeth straightening business, if you will, for 20 years. We helped invent that process. We have a great customer in that process, biggest one in the world. They make millions and millions of those. And we've collectively with them driven the cost down. So it has captured from the wire guys, the clear aligner business has captured market share. It's still got a lot of growth potential. And the costs have come down to be very attractive from a manufacturing standpoint. So we feel good about that. We've got a long-term contract in place with that customer for providing materials. So that's foundational to our dentistry business. There are competitors coming in that business. Undoubtedly, they're going to participate. But the next wave of technology is direct printing aligners. So today, it's an indirect method.
You 3D print a mold, and you form plastic over it to make the aligner, and that's what the consumer gets. It's great. You end up throwing the molds away when you're done. So working on things like recycling and stuff are important. But the more efficient way to do it eventually is to direct print the aligner, so 3D print. So we've got the materials and the printers coming along to do that. I get asked a lot, "Is that going to displace all of the indirect method?" My argument is no. I mean, the indirect method is so cost-effective today, it'll be a long time. It's kind of like the talk about EVs and gas-powered cars and things. There's a wave that comes, and people will look at the higher-end product, the more expensive product. It's also a good baseline.
I think indirect method will stay around for a long, long time. There'll be another level of the business that's captured by direct printing. The advantage there is it's stronger material. You can move teeth further and better in theory. It will allow it to capture yet another piece of the market from the wire frame guys. Good growth on both those technology areas. We have the current one well in hand, we're the incumbent, and the new one is coming. Our biggest customer's excited about it too, so they've made their own investments. We've got what I believe is a very compelling technology that we'll offer through them or someone else. At the end of the day, we've got a good technology coming. In addition to that, from that foundation, dentures are here now. They'll be in a bigger wave.
We announced a partnership with Glidewell, one of the biggest private dental providers in the world. We also will be selling into laboratories around the country and around Europe the ability to print those dentures so you can get them faster, less expensively, and they're beautiful and tough. So I'm excited about that. Night guards, a little bit more price competitive, but there's some compelling technology with night guards to make them comfortable and effective. And in theory, dealing more with sleep apnea. So I like being in that business if we can make that work. So we've got the materials now and the printing technology. We're exploring how to do that better. And then traditional individual tooth repair. We've got a next-gen brand of materials, one of the most respected in the industry, which we're taking to market. So I love dental in terms of growth for the future.
The orthopedic area, good solid grower, big barriers to entry in both those businesses because of the FDA, and then on the industrial side, we're headed toward the more highly regulated markets as well.
Yeah. Jeffrey, you talked about personalized healthcare and orthopedic. Just give us a sense, even if it's through the first nine months, was that a growth business?
Yes. It was a growth business. So the personalized health service stuff for us is where we deal with surgeons directly, and we help them design the surgery. We provide surgical aids, which not only can we believe induce better patient outcomes, but improve the productivity of orthopedic surgeons. And there is an economic factor to hospitals and orthopedic surgery. They like more procedures through the OR. It's more efficient. So if we can help them with planning the surgery and give them surgical aids that go in the body to help them do the surgery, it's a win all the way around. And then obviously participating in the bone repair itself, which we increasingly do. That is growing and growing. We've gotten the cost down, the efficiency, the turn time. We're actually moving now from planned surgeries to trauma.
So we're moving into the trauma field where obviously if somebody's in a terrible car accident, they have head injuries where we can produce a part. And we actually design it with the surgeon, and we produce the part, and we sell it through our channel to market, some one of the big suppliers to the surgical suite. So if we can do that within a matter of a day or two, we can capture trauma business, if you will, and help bring relief to patients in that end of things. So these are not, quite frankly, they're not heavily price-driven markets. It's much more measured on quality and delivery speed and assurance of supply because the patient needs the outcome, and the hospitals need the economics of productivity for the surgeons. So I love that business. It's going to continue to grow. It grew through all of these downturns.
It's going to continue to grow, and there's big barriers to entry for folks getting into it.
Maybe we'll close the loop on the healthcare side. Talk to us about regenerative and what the milestones investors should look for in that area.
I would love to share with you a lot of details about regenerative medicine. It is such an exciting area. We are in partnership with United Therapeutics. They're a wonderful partner, and they are the spokesman for progress on human organs. I would tell you since 2017, we've been in partnership with them to develop a printed human lung. And the technology is absolutely amazing. The materials we can now print from, which are fully biocompatible, at the precision and speed you need to print a human lung with extremely fine wall thicknesses. If you know anything about how a lung works with oxygen and carbon dioxide diffusion, the wall thicknesses in a human lung to allow that are measured in microns, which a diameter of a hair is about 100 microns. We're talking about thicknesses down in the sub-10 micron range for wall thicknesses to allow diffusion.
We can print the geometry. We can print it out of the right materials now. The next step is making sure that you can cellularize it to make it a functional lung, which is our partnership with United Therapeutics. They do marvelous work. They're making a lot of progress. Their CEO, the public statement I can repeat is two summers ago, we were at a conference out on the West Coast together, and she declared that by 2027-ish, there will be a human being walking around with a human lung based on the progress that was being made. So I'll repeat what she said back then, whether it's 2027 or it's 2028, whatever the actual time is, and they control that with working with the FDA.
There will be, I feel strongly, there will be a human being walking around with a lung that'll be on the front page of papers in this decade with the rate of progress that we're making collectively with them. We've taken that technology. I wish I could be more specific, guys. But we've taken that technology. The printer technology, I said, we've moved into our industrial side, which is great. The biological technology, we've taken into and explored other areas. We explored for a while tissue regeneration with 3D printing and things. Some of that work we've had to put on hold because of or stop altogether right now because of the downturn in the economy. We have continued doing what we call organ on a chip. It's literally printing small organs to be on a chip to test drugs, to accelerate drug development.
You make a chip that simulates a human liver or a cluster of cancer cells from a person. We can print a vascularized piece of tissue to keep that material alive to test drugs for days and weeks. We have two contracts in place with major pharma companies to demonstrate the technology. We've ramped it up. I'm not sure we're the ultimate owner of that business. It's a wholly owned business by us right now. I'm not sure we're the ultimate rightful owner of that, but we were the only people that could take the lung technology and work it into testing drugs. We've carried that for a couple of years in our R&D investment. At some point, I think the investment requirement and the scale it can be for the pharma industry will surpass what our core business can or should support.
But we've demonstrated the technology. I love what we're doing there too, again, to accelerate drug development. There's a lot of talk of AI using data from people for drug development. This is a way to generate more data and generate consistent data for AI systems to use. So it's the input to the AI analysis for drug development. I think it's going to be a wonderful technology to carry forward, whether it's us or someone else or in partnership with us.
It's exciting stuff. I wanted to turn the discussion a little bit getting back to some of the actions you alluded to having to make some harder decisions. But just talk to us about gross margins because that's an area that's been a focus. You've talked, I think, about generating gross margins in the mid-40s, maybe higher as demand recovers. But talk to us about 38%-40% in 2024. Obviously, some of that was just the impact of the top line. But how should investors be thinking about gross margins of the business?
So this one's a little bit easier to answer for me because Jeff has already revealed about 80%-85% of the response, right? We're going to achieve better, healthier gross margins largely as a result of the insourcing of production, right? As everybody here is aware, generally you outsource to somebody because they either have an expertise or a cost model that is better than the one you can do for yourself. And in the case of manufacturing, for us, that wasn't the case. We're now able to make direct decisions not only about the manufacturing and the quality of the machinery, but also in what goes into it, right? So by taking ownership of that manufacturing process, there will be some natural positive fallout related to margins.
It also gives us the opportunity to be more proactive and to have a greater sense of ownership in direct material cost, right, and so that's one of the responsibilities you assume when you bring manufacturing in-house, so we're very enthusiastic about the fact that ownership of manufacturing will result in a greater opportunity for better manufacturing margins, better gross margins. Beyond that, there were a couple of things that hit us that were headwinds this year. Absorption in our own manufacturing facilities had a negative impact on margins. Again, by bringing this manufacturing in, this is something that we're going to be able to plan for and moderate to a much greater extent, and then one of the things, and this was specifically called out in the third quarter, inventory obsolescence, right?
We suffered some margin hit as a result of obsolete inventories that accrued to us as a result of insourcing over time, right? Down south, we say that inventory obsolescence is a lot like grits with breakfast. It shows up whether you order it or not, right? And so obsolescence, especially in an industry like ours, is always going to be a topic of conversation. Our product moves fast. The way we make things changes over time. But because of that bubble that we experienced, the insourcing, we feel like our margins were, I won't say artificially, but perhaps to a much greater extent, detrimentally impacted in 2024. Does that make sense?
You alluded to Geomagic, the recent sale of that software business. You've been, over the last couple of years, reviewing the business portfolio. Where are we in that process?
It's always an ongoing, especially as broad as we are in technology. It's an ongoing process, Jim. Back in the early 20s, 2020s, we sold off things that were clearly non-core. Geomagic was a little bit closer to home, and it was a lovely business, actually, but it was reverse engineering software. So we focus on our core business is focusing on what you do with a computer model to turn into a part, not how you get that computer model done or how you get the image done. So Geomagic sat on that side of the spectrum. It was also a lovely business. So we were very opportunistic. We didn't mind owning it. But when the right buyer came along and said, "Hey, we're interested," it's often that software was sold with laser scanners.
And so a laser scanner company did much more than that, but Hexagon, wonderful company to own the business, came along and wanted to talk to us about it. We engaged in that and took a while to get to signing, but we did. And we expect that to close. Selling price is just over $120 million. And we expect it to close around the end of Q1, early Q2 in that time frame. And we're confident and we believe in its closure. We got to just work through the regulatory process, which we don't see any barriers to that now. So we're excited about that. It puts a little bit more cash on our balance sheet. We have some debt that'll come due in a couple of years that we want to be well-positioned to take care of ahead of time. So that's the path here.
Before we get to the balance sheet, of course, you're always reviewing the business, but is the bulk of that, do you think, out of the way? Or are there still things that?
Yeah, Jim, I would tell you that I think by far the bulk is out of the way. We're approached periodically about other elements of our portfolio that you go through some real thought because people see some real value in it. But with that said, I'm very happy after the Geomagic sale with what we have. Opportunistically, you always look at value creation. If there's an element or two of it that you think, "Well, it really brings more immediate value to share," we always look at. But we're getting more and more comfortable with what we own and what we want to continue investing in, Jim.
Okay, and remind us what the balance sheet looks like and what it's going to look like with, obviously, you alluded to the Geomagic sale and the plans for the convert.
Yeah, sure. So in the third quarter, we were near parity, cash to debt. We had about $190 million of cash on the balance sheet against about $211, roughly, of outstanding debt. The sale of Geomagic gives us great optionality, right? We're taking a hard look at what we're going to do over the course of the next 18 months to address our. I don't even want to call it a debt problem because that's not what it is. This is lovely debt. It's been very useful for us as an organization. But it is going to have to. It's going to require some attention on our part over the next several months. The sale of Geomagic gives us yet another option on how to deal with it, right? So the path now, it's under consideration. Will it be partially converted, partially extended?
We want to make sure that we're making good decisions at the right time, and the fortunate thing about Geo is it gives us a little more optionality in that respect.
Kind of well put, Jeff. Kind of an implied, by the way, everybody in the company is not named Jeff, but there are two of us. Implied in what Jeff just said is our intended use of cash right now on the balance sheet is to fund our organic growth and take care of our debt in some form or fashion. We've got plenty of money to do that. In terms of M&A, there's really not anything on the horizon that's critical to us. Opportunistically, there are smaller companies in our industry that are struggling with the downturn in the economy. And those assets are becoming more available over time. There's some transactions that are actually underway nicely from my standpoint. We don't need any of that to be successful.
We've got our core technologies that we can invest in and grow at a lot lower risk, frankly, and with a lot more certainty. Opportunistically, could there be an opportunity? Potentially. But we're not in a mode where we need to do some large-scale roll-up of assets in order to be successful. We just need to run our business efficiently and focus on the right markets.
We may have time for one other question from the audience. Any questions?