Hey, hey, everyone, this is Colin Rusch. I lead Oppenheimer's Sustainable Growth and Resource Optimization practice. I'm very pleased to join to be joined by Ronen Faier, the CFO of SolarEdge. He's been doing this for way too long.
Thank you.
Congratulations on surviving, my friend.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, yeah, We wanna get through a bunch of material here, and I apologize for the late start, everybody.
Sure.
Ronen, can you talk a little bit about the demand fundamentals that you're seeing right now? Let's start with, with Europe, and then go to the U.S., because I know that's been of deep concern.
Yeah, definitely. First of all, happy to be here, as always, and we, we, we, too, do it for a very long time, so, appreciate you getting older with me. With regards to the demand picture that we see, I, I think that there's a little bit of disconnect between what we see in the channels to the demand picture that we see, and I think that it's, it's a good way to start. What we continue to see in Europe is a very strong demand, where the underlying demand for our products in particular, and solar in general, is very strong.
We do see a period where everyone thought, or at least everyone in the industry thought at the beginning of the year, that Europe is going to grow this year by maybe 50% or 60%, given the high electricity prices, the war in Ukraine, and a lot of concerns about the electricity availability. Situation and reality was that actually the winter was not so bad, and at the same time, electricity prices were able to go down a little bit due to the fact that other gas sources were found. The result is that instead of growing 50%, 60%, Europe is growing only 40%, 30%-40% year-over-year. Depends on the country, of course. Europe is made up of many countries, and therefore, we still see very strong underlying demand.
For the last quarter, for example, we get from our channels and distributors, what we call point-of-sale data, that is showing how much they're selling out of the channels. We're talking about record-high numbers, that, that we haven't seen before, that in some cases, even for our products, are close to 100% just to compare it to about a quarter ago. The underlying demand is very strong, although not as strong as everyone thought.
Mm-hmm.
I, I guess we'll talk about channels in the next questions. When we move from Europe to the United States, we see a little bit of a different picture. Because in the U.S., the combination of high interest rates, a market that is very much concentrated towards loans, and the fact that the electricity prices did not go up so much, created a situation where we see a demand or a market that is either not growing or maybe even declining. As such, we do see that the underlying demand, for example, in the first half of the year, is actually smaller than the demand that we saw in the second half of last year. We do not see any drivers like in Europe, where electricity prices are still high and interest rates are low, to actually change the situation for at least upcoming quarters.
We see very different picture, very strong Europe, very moderate-to-slow U.S., and rest of the world is many countries, but I would say that it's mixed. In some cases we see European, in some cases we see kind of, US, similar policies. I would say that it's mostly mixed. I'm not sure that there is one single direction that I can point out to.
Okay, that's, that's incredibly helpful. You know, I, I think as, as we think about this, you know, the, the underlying demand, the sell-through is, is one piece of it. The second thing is around how people are managing working capital, right?
Mm-hmm.
That's obviously been a, a big change. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing on that, particularly as component availability improves and, you know, we kinda move towards just-in-time delivery on a bunch of these elements?
Sure. I think that that's, that's a real story, at least for us, of what we see in Europe right now. We need to understand that we see a little bit of two contradicting phenomenons. On one hand, in Europe, we see demand that is still strong, but a little bit smaller than everyone expected to see. At the same time, we do see that product availability has improved dramatically over the last few months, and by the way, not just for us, it's mostly for solar modules. The situation just in, let's say, Q4 2022, was that a very severe demand, or shortage of supply to meet demand, created a situation where every distributor laid their hands on whatever piece of equipment that they could get.
It means that on modules, a lot of distributors went into either purchase agreements that are of a longer term, at relevant, relatively higher prices. When it comes to inverters, sometimes some of the players needed to take Chinese inverters that are usually not selling outside of China, simply in order to fulfill demand. The result was that everyone was stocking, knowing that, first of all, they're going to see very strong demand, and they will not see sufficient supply. Somewhere in April, May, the situation changed, because again, the milder winter changed a little bit the demand picture, and the fact that the U.S. is not growing, created, at least for modules, situation where modules are coming to Europe, where the demand is still there.
At the same time, component availability for companies like us or some of our competitors, got a little bit better, and therefore, you saw a much more stable supply. The result was that now there are a lot of products in the channel, and at the same time, supply for new product is very short. The main issue is actually the story of the modules, because some of the Chinese module manufacturers that needs to make their factory work on all the time, because they have very high fixed costs, are continuing to ship products into Europe, but now they're reducing prices substantially.
We see a situation where the majority, if not all of the distributors across Europe, are holding very large amount of modules that were purchased in prices that are sometimes double than the prices that they pay today for new modules. At the same time, there is a constant flow of modules going into Europe. Since modules are usually the most expensive part of the installation, what we see is that now everyone, as you've mentioned before, is much more conscious to working capital. The first thing that they do is that they try sometimes to pay a little bit later or to ask, ask for extended terms.
The second thing the distributors are doing is, since they can rely better on our supply right now, instead of holding three months or sometimes even four months of inventory, let's say at the end of Q4, at the end of Q2, we saw an average two months of inventory of our product in the channel, and now they're even sometimes reduced to five or four weeks. This creates a situation where on one hand you see amazing demand, but at the same time, since the inventory is still being cleared from the channel, going to lower levels, the orders to us or other companies is not happening. The one last thing that you see here is also that you see a little bit of smaller, shrinking portfolio sizes in some of the distributors.
Therefore, you see that some of the Chinese companies that sold inverter into the channels, maybe they still have a little bit of residual inverters there, but once the distributors are getting enough supply from the known products, they're actually getting rid of this inventory, and only then they start ordering from fewer amount of inverter makers in order to make sure that they're holding three or four inverter companies in their portfolio.
That, that's super helpful, and, and this is, you know, maybe a question around some of the history, 'cause you've gone through a number of cycles, right? You know,
Yeah
Whether it's with, you know, subsidy changes in certain regions, you know, a migration from demand from this region to that region. I guess as, as you look across kind of some of the historical analogies that you've seen in this industry, this feels different to me a little bit in terms of this, you know, the, the volume of working capital, you know, and, and folks getting down to the, the, you know, four or five weeks is not much inventory...
Mm
To be dealing with in terms of, you know, you know, doing that. Is there another time where you've seen this happen? And if so, how did it play out afterwards? 'Cause it feels a little bit like people are getting a little overaggressive on the working capital at this point, to me.
I first of all agree with you, I would say that we haven't seen anything like it before. I think that the two new characteristics of the phenomena that we see right now is, first of all, the speed in which everything happened. I would say that, if you'd asked me six weeks ago, we saw a little bit of a different picture. It seems that the speed of the happening, especially once module prices started to drop significantly, this is the last three weeks, something that moved the entire market into a real fear of, you know, "What I'm going to do with so much inventory at high prices that I'm holding?" This is something that changed very dramatically. We've never seen such a big move from oversupply, over-demand to an extreme oversupply.
We need to remember that we used to see, as you mentioned before, for example, policy changes in the past that changes market characteristics, but usually these policy changes happen with enough notice that everyone got ready for it. Now, everyone was taken by surprise, first of all, by the lower growth, still by the way, 30%-40% growth, but also how fast the availability of products are there. I think that these are the differences. The similarities, for us at least, and, as you mentioned, I see at least... I've seen at least three cycles like this, is that we need to be very careful as a company when selling into this kind of a market. Because when everything is growing, usually the distributor's working capital is based on vendor's credit. I give them credit of, let's say, 60 days.
They collect after 30 days, and they use this money in order to pay me while increasing the volumes. Usually, once you start to see a deceleration, either the customers are not able to pay on time or at all, then the distributors are going into cash distress and may sometimes even go bankrupt. Therefore, it not only requires you to sell a little bit more because of the dynamic, but also, if you're a prudent management, trying to make sure that you're not writing off bad debts later on, you need to be much more selective in the inventories that you send, even when you have orders coming in.
How is that playing out for you right now? Like, how, how much more protection do you feel like you need, and how are you managing pricing around some of those dynamics to, to make sure that you don't end up with a working capital issue and you're not extending too much credit? Also, if you're providing those sorts of working capital arrangements to folks, you have to get paid for it in some capacity, right?
Mm-hmm.
I'm understanding how, how you, you know, how you balance all of that out.
Sure. So I'll start maybe by, by saying that in general, the, the interesting thing is that we do not see pricing pressure. It is coming both from the fact that on one hand, we're considered as a premium product, and most of the price wars that you see among inverters will be among the more commoditized products, like the string inverters, mostly Chinese in the channels.
Mm.
Actually, another phenomena that we see, and we hear like a lot about it, is that the pricing pressure on us is smaller because once the inverter is down by 50%, and sorry, the module price goes down by 50%, and this is the most expensive part, and let's say that it's down $0.17, nobody's really pushing on inverter pricing to go down $0.01-$0.02 per watt. This is one thing that we see around pricing. Around arrangement with customers, again, it's a very customer-specific, and it's very, I would say, region-specific in, so to say, because in general, we usually sell to very large distributors, and we don't work with the smaller customers.
The fear of bankruptcy, bankruptcy may be a little bit lower for our in our case. What we do here is that we keep very constant discussions with our distributors, try to understand what is the real problem that they have, and then trying to help them with the real problems. For example, in some cases, yes, we extend the terms, and you can see it in our DSO, that went up from 114 days, which already reflects something that happened before, into 126 days. That's exactly the case. In some cases, by the way, we find that we're charging interest on lower payment term, slower payment terms, because today there is a cost of money, and I do not want to find myself being a bank.
Mm-hmm.
In some cases, we are trying to help our distributors by, for example, if they have local inventory issues, by expediting other products. For example, we know that some of them sometimes have more batteries, and if they have more batteries, the only way to help them really get working capital is to expedite the shipments of inverters, so they can actually sell the batteries together with the inverter. Every inverter in Germany, or 80% of them, are going out.
Mm
With two batteries, where the cost is, of the batteries is about four or five times the cost of the inverter. I think it's a combination of understanding what is the reason for the cash shortages, trying to accommodate a little bit, while not being a bank, because we're not financing companies. Also find, I would call it, kind of a tailored solution for our customers, to make sure that eventually we help them where it really is painful for them.
Okay, that's, that's super helpful. I guess talking about competition, right? You started to address it a little bit. You know, there's a lot of discussion around Tesla getting into the market and string inverters, you know, low cost with the different brands, you know, coming into the market.
Mm.
Some of the other elements of other optimizers in the market. You know, I guess, what can you say about the competitive dynamics, whether it's from China or Tesla or other folks, and, and what you're seeing and hearing from your customers at this point?
I think that there, there's, again, clear distinction between the U.S. and Europe in that case. I'm starting from the U.S. because I think that the Tesla offering is mostly concentrated in this market. Here, first of all, you know, everyone talks about the competition in inverters. I must say that the Tesla competition is very much very much pronounced on batteries, actually, because-
Yeah
Tesla is the only company that can really enjoy today the IRA, 45X credits related to, to batteries, because they have manufacturing in the U.S. I think that in batteries, we do see the competition of Tesla very pronounced. They're very active, selling batteries, prices are going down, which we expected to happen, but they can actually do it much faster than anyone else. I think that we do see, I'm not sure if I'm happy or not, but we see a lot of SolarEdge inverters installed with Tesla batteries. We're happy about the inverters. We're not as happy as me seeing the batteries, especially that we believe that our DC architecture is very much fitting, those kind of installations, but that's a fact.
Mm.
On the inverter side, we see it a little bit less. One, one reason being that, we're usually selling to the larger... First of all, we have a higher portion of our sales going to the TPOs, and in TPOs, usually they have buckets. They have the MLPE bucket, the string bucket. I think that Tesla is mostly displacing product on the string. I would assume that Tesla is going a little bit more to the long-tail installers rather than the large ones.
Mm.
Because, you know, stickiness, because of the monitoring, but also because for a small installer, that's a way to be differentiated, to say that he's selling Tesla. It's a new weapon that he usually didn't have before.
Mm-hmm.
Therefore, since we're not very strong there, we do not see a lot of impact happening there. When it comes to, of course, let's not forget Enphase, which is an amazingly good competitor in the United States. I think that here the dynamics are virtually the same as they were. You know, they're a smart, aggressive company with a great product. We're smart, aggressive, with equally or better product, but here I think,
Mm
It's more of a dynamic that relates to our starters. In Europe, it's a little bit of a different situation, because in Europe-
Mm
first of all, there is no need for MLPE on the rooftop. By definition, the built-in duopoly that existed in the U.S. does not exist, and competition was always Chinese versus European versus MLPE.
Mm.
What we hear from our customers is that they have two kinds of offering. The first one is what they call premium. Premium will be always MLPE. In most cases, it's us alone. In the Netherlands, it will be us and Enphase. In France, it will be Enphase and us.
Mm.
We do see that they have this premium offering, and then they have the economy product offering, which will usually be comprised of one European, be it SMA or maybe.
Mm
Fronius, and two or three Chinese. The first thing that we see is that most of the competition among inverters is actually happening there, happening among themselves. What we see is that, first of all, there is a shrinkage in the number of companies on this tier that are the no-name Chinese. We see much more fierce competition between the components, the companies themselves in this tier.
Mm
And we see very less pressure going to us. I'm not sure that we're completely immune. If the prices will go down dramatically in the economy tier, maybe the premium will have to go down, but this is not something that we see right now. I think that when we talk to our customers, and this is a lesson that we learned in. the Intersolar trade show in Germany is that they still very much appreciate the additional capabilities, technological capabilities that we have related, especially to the varying tariffs and the dynamic tariffs that we see in Europe.
In, in full honesty, you know, it's, it's always been a more competitive market than it is in the U.S., but we feel that here, actually, the competition is not strengthening for us at least, and it's most happening in the other layers. We need to make sure that we're not, you know, sleeping while something is changing. Right now, we do not see a major change there.
Okay. That's, that's incredibly helpful. I guess the, the next set of questions is really around the energy storage product, right? You mentioned Tesla being, you know, very competitive in the U.S. You know, certainly we're seeing more and more markets that batteries just make sense, you know, because of some of the, the restrictions as well as just the energy prices. I guess, how can you, you know, characterize and, and, you know, tell us what the right buckets are to think about the different end markets in terms of what's driving the sale of the, the batteries, and, and how you guys think about those, you know, targeted end markets and the different tiers of, you know, places where those batteries are getting sold?
Sure. first of all, again, it's an economic discussion.
Mm-hmm.
You know, most people, Years ago, people used to buy a battery in order to make sure that they have backup in case of wildfires or, or storms. This is not the case anymore. In the majority of the geographies to which we're selling, other than in South Africa, the main driver is economy, and that means that the price of battery, together coupled with price of energy, coupled with regulations that are not allowing to push electricity to the grid, are determining what's going to be the situation. What we see today is that with the exception of California, with NEM 3.0 not yet playing a very big part of it, the U.S. is not a very interesting battery market because prices are too high, electricity prices are too low, and other than in California, you can push electricity to the grid in reasonable prices.
There is a marginal effect that can actually increase a little bit the ROI, but it's not as big. In Europe, it's sometimes impossible to be profitable on a system without a battery, because in Germany, for example, you're not allowed to push electricity to the grid in most cases, and because of the dynamic tariff changes, you, you play with the battery as a tool to stabilize your demand and supply. While in the U.S. we see today an attachment rate of low single digit, in Germany, we see 60%, 70% attachment rates to our batteries, to our inverters. Places like U.K., Austria, Switzerland, we see high 50s. Italy, there was this whole story about policy that changed, but we saw very nice attach rate.
Mm.
This was mostly economics. There are now, another question that comes, and I think it relates to your second half, when, when you look at other markets and how do we approach them, we need to understand that the battery market is also very competitive because the batteries are mostly commoditized in many senses. Electrons are all are all born the same. Here we have a major technological difference, which is the DC-coupled battery. In the interest of time, I won't tell too much about it. Everyone can, can learn about it in YouTube or something.
Mm-hmm.
The idea is that you can actually get more than 10% more energy by using our technology, by saving some, some conversions, and this is something that very well resonates. We see, for example, that in Europe, in Germany, for example, we compete well against BYD batteries or against names that you don't even know, Chinese batteries...
Mm
Simply because of the fact that the technological advantage is clear, and the installers know how to sell it, and we work on it. For the U.S., we're working on it right now for California.
Mm.
We're explaining to installers how to sell the battery solution and everything around it, and this is the selling sales pitch. I think that for us, the way to sell batteries into a market is to understand the market dynamics, and to see what are the technological advantages that we have compared to the other smaller, cheaper, or different batteries that allows us to grow so much. Lastly, by the way, we're an open garden. If you want to take our inverter and install it with any other batteries, we're open for this. You'll decide whatever is good for you.
I guess you, you mentioned having an estimator tool that you're, you're working with, with some of those installers or potentially rolling that out. How important is the software ecosystem around the the sales process, you know, for you guys in terms of being able to move product into the channel?
It's incredibly important, and this is why we put a lot of effort for digitization, because first of all, many people that put solar system on the rooftop do not know what is going to be the, the result eventually. There are so many changing factors and, and so much lack of knowledge, that sometimes even, by the way, the installers themselves do not know how to explain. What we actually did over the last few years is that we developed our own software tools that allow salespeople and that allow installers or TPOs to go to the kitchen table and to very easily exercise what are the results of putting storage, either by doing very quick design, using our Designer tool, which is very much equivalent to PVsyst or Aurora.
This reduces cost also for the installers, so they're encouraged to use our products. It also helped to sharpen a little bit the dilemmas. For example, in California, if you have a battery that you can manage the energy flow, that you can sell to the utility in September after sundown, this is where you make the money or not. You can have a lot of scenarios that you can play with, and I think that as the sale become a little bit more economic, in a sense, it's more about what is ROI? The ability to be very sharp in what is, what are the needles that are moving, and to provide a software that is designated to actually show how to best design the system, is something that's very important.
This is why we put huge amount of effort in, in building these tools, and by the way, later on, building installation tools for the installers to make the installation much faster, because it's also important for cost for them. Then, by the way, how to make sure that when you're comparing what you expected to what the result is, how you can basically see if you get what you wanted, and what do you need to refine there? It's a huge effort, and it's the biggest one that we do right now.
Excellent. you know, I wanna shift gears a little bit onto the manufacturing side. Both on, on U.S. manufacturing with your, your CMs, but also Sella two. Why don't we start with the U.S. in terms of, you know, how
Mm
You're ramping up capacity, how you expect that to play out, and balancing the global footprint of resources that you have to serve your different end markets. Would love to, to, you know, you've, you've provided some guidance around units, you know, for the balance of this year, but wanna think about the, not only those units, but the decision-making around how to scale up and at what cadence.
Sure. The first one, by the way, is related to clarity. We do not have yet clarity whether our optimizers will get the additional $0.045 under 45X or not, and this is something that, that's very important. Therefore, as a company, the first thing that we decided to do is to go on the fastest time to market, which means to make inverters with the contract manufacturers, because we know that contract manufacturer will do it the quickest, plus we're getting for sure the $0.065.
Mm.
This is what we actually did. We started manufacturing with the contract manufacturers. First boards are actually coming out of the SMT machines. By the end of Q3, we will ship immaterial amount of inverters, and as we said, at least 30,000 inverters in Q4, and this is an amount that is going to grow in the next year. Now comes how do, or where do we move from here? Here, the idea is very simple. Once we get the clarifications whether optimizers can be made in the U.S., we intend to build our own factory, because we want eventually to serve all of the US market from the U.S., and we expect that the US market will go back to growth.
Eventually making products yourself, and we see it in Sella one, is cheaper and more productive than doing it with anyone else. The decision-making was, first of all, start with the CM, get the clarifications. Already we're in the final selection of site to manufacture our products. We already have a design team that is starting to work on this. We've already ordered machines in order to fit this, and once we have the clarification, we decide, do we build an inverter factory, inverter and optimizer factory? We move very quickly to make sure that by the end of 2024, we already have products coming out from these new factories. This is on the U.S.
What we're also doing, is that we're looking now at our entire footprint around the world, and we say, "What do we need to optimize?" Today, we do Hungary, China, Vietnam, Israel, U.S., Mexico. We need to decide what products we need to do, where to do them, and at what pace, and by the way, how to build excess capacity, because in the past, we were always chasing with capacity. Now, it's the first time that we actually have the ability to have a little bit of spare capacity.
Mm-hmm.
This is with regards to optimizers and inverters.
Then on, on Sella two, can you give us an update on where you're at with that in terms of equipment, you know, ramp up yields, you know, cadence of, of throughput, and how to think about how that, that carries forward over the next several quarters?
Sure. First of all, factory is up and running. We ship products to customers from Sella two. A chemistry or a battery factory is something that is very much different than a regular assembly factory.
Mm.
This is something that we learned over time, because not only that you need to have the process, you need to actually master various elements within the process. It's like baking a cake. You get the recipe, two ovens will yield different cakes.
Mm.
You need to learn how your oven is baking in this sense, and this is what we actually do. In Sella one, we started ramping up late last year. By the way, we already started to ship late last year, products to customers.
Mm.
In the first quarter, we simply worked on the recipe, and we very much refining, you know, higher temperature, a little bit lower, this pressure, that pressure, this, how fast the, the, the battery and anode and cathode reels are moving. We've, we've done this. This was done in Q1. This is the time where yield was the high, was the lower, meaning that we threw a lot of material, and we had a lot of-
Mm
Costs. In the second quarter, what we started to do, we have a stabilized process, now we start making the cells. We started to, first of all, build capacity for cells that are sold to other customers outside of our solar industry.
Mm.
We also started to make the cells that will go into our RSS battery. It's a different form factor, and in addition, we moved from first shift to second shift, and then third shift. By the end of this year, we should be at the run rate of about 1.7 GW, which is, after yield of machinery, what you can get out of a 2 GW factory. We are increasing it already to a larger number. It's very small investment, because the building is already there, and I believe that, at least for the next two to 2.5 years, the entire capacity that we will need can come from Sella two, not only on the solar side, but also on the other businesses that we're building that are yielding a nice amount of sales.
Excellent. I wanna be a little attentive to time. We've just got a couple minutes-
Sure
Left here. Can, can you just talk about some of the key areas of investment on the R&D side? You know, you guys have always been, you know, astute with where you're spending your money on that, that, that effort. Just wanna get an air, you know, a sense of what you're spending time on.
Four major areas. First one, first, we are related to solar. First one, next generation. 4th-generation inverter already being tested in our labs. 5th-generation optimizer already being designed and built in our labs. And of course, the idea is to come with every product being able to be at a higher power capacity, lower cost, in order to reduce cost per watt. That's the first thing. Second thing is always cost reduction. It's the first time after three years that we do not need to work all the time on changing components, we can do cost reductions. That's the second area. Third area around solar is actually more products that are related to our bidirectional EV charger, our second-generation battery.
All of our, we call it ancillary products, that eventually make the SolarEdge Home, which is the total offering that we have. At the same time, we have all of the areas that are not just solar, they're all connected, by the way, to energy. This will be, first of all, our trackers. Again, they're not part of the large amount of revenues right now, but we are developing trackers for various applications. It's an a company that we acquired about one year, two years ago. Very nicely growing. We do a lot of work there. Second is on software. As we mentioned before, selling tools, designing tools, connection... connectivity tools, and a lot of what we call energy management tools to be able to connect to other elements.
The next one is actually in our companies like Hark, where we acquired, and now we're taking their tools that were developed for smaller scale and make them bigger for other scales. I think that it's a multiple streams that are moving from core products, ancillary products, cost reduction, and the future, because in order to sell more inverters two years from now, you need to make more software today.
Okay. I- I wanna sneak one last one in here. We may have run a little bit over-
Sure.
You generate a lot of cash. Can you talk about where you're gonna spend it? You know, obviously, you've got a big cash balance. You could buy back stock, you know, other areas.
Mm.
Just if you could go quickly through your priorities for cash deployment.
Sure. First of all, by the way, just to be transparent, last quarter, we didn't generate cash, but you're, you're right in general, that we do create cash, generally from our business. That, by the way, this is something that will increase much more into the second quarter because some of the extended terms and inventory build-out...
Mm
Will go in. Here, our first priority still remains, organic growth.
Mm.
I think that, you know, as long as we know how to generate more shareholder value by increasing our portfolio of products, making them much more sophisticated, and be faster to market with some product that we know that all the industry is going to, that's the most important part that we see today, and this is where we will put the majority of our efforts. We're not yet in a position that we feel that we do not know what to do with the money, and therefore, we need to return it to the investors, because that means that we do not know where growth and some of the growth engines are. We're not there yet. I would say that maybe we're not acquiring companies as quickly as we would like to.
We're very cautious on, on making these movements, but I think that this is something that will grow over time. I, I will say that we will need to be intellectually honest, you know, asking once in a while, "Do we still believe that we know how to, to generate this value by more acquisitions? Or is it something that we maybe hope for, but we're not able to do, and therefore, maybe something like returning capital is the right, the right way to look at it?" Right now, I must say that based on the pipeline that we see and based on the plans at least that we have on our strategy, strategy side, I don't see share purchasing happening in the very near future.
Excellent. Well, Ronan, thank you for your patience with the late start. Thanks everybody for tuning in.
Always happy to be here.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's always a pleasure, my friend. Thank you so much. We'll talk to everyone soon.
Thank you, have a good evening.
Take care, yeah.
Thanks again, everyone. Bye-bye.
Yeah, thanks. Bye-bye.