Old interview Dec 2020
Capacity
i'm sure when you're having these conversations you start talking about capacity and what kind of production runs you might need. Are you able to discuss what kind of production numbers or minimum production numbers you're looking at.
Tom: yeah well let's just say that the capital that we've planned to be installed over the next 4 years is sufficient to meet our expectations for unit volumes which we've told our shareholders is going to equate to revenues in the area of 250 million by 2024-2025.
Price Points And Margin
let's talk about price points and margin, not that you're going to give away your price points or margin but i don't have a sense yet of light bar how expensive of a component is that ballpark and can it be produced at a really good profit margin.
Tom: well the way that we've set up the joint venture is that each party is contributing components at an agreed price which is is supposed to be close to our cost so that we can actually have the joint venture company be the the profit center. When you're talking about the gross margin it really does depend on the application because there are some really high value added applications that aren't as price sensitive as the transceiver market for example but so we're going to be in this trade-off between how high we want the margins in the joint venture to be versus what kind of cost savings we want to provide to our customers especially in the transceiver market. We believe that we can bring profitability back to transceiver module manufacturers who are are largely operating without any profit margin today. We can bring profitability back and still make 40-50 gross margin on it which is entirely respectable in that kind of operation.