RE:RE:Steve Harpur Zoom call todayHello Ciao. The Zoom call was useful in providing additional details regarding several prior announcements and news releases.
The loss of the third party source supplied raw materials should have dropped the gross sales by over $500,000, albeit these would have earned a much lower gross margin %. To see the new sales team generate sufficient new sales volume to completely offset this known reduction is indeed very good news, especially as they were able to do so with higher gross margin product. As Mr. Hapur confirmed. the goal is now to ramp up the gross sales volume at these higher gross margin %, and is focusing capital expenditures to increase production capacity to support top line sales growth. He is prioritizing lines where there is already existing, production capacity constrained demand.
Mr. Hapur also addressed the question of the impact of Mr. Trump's threatened tariffs on sales volumes to the US. I would have added the observation that the US is asking Canada to address mutual boarder security issues which, under rthe Trudeau open border everyone is welcome in Canada regime of the past 9 years, have become untenable. Simple negotiation tactic - fix the problem you have caused or we will implement tariffs we don't actually want between two friendly and mutually interested trading partners.
The "domestic waste mining" business unit is an interesting perspective. As Mr. Harpur has previously explained, if there was a inexpensive source of "clean" glass, the Pozglass plant would be a much simpler project to implement. What he went to some pains to explain, the need to have a processing capability to take raw recycled "unclean" glass and remove all foreign and unwanted impurities makes the process flow more challenging and therefore capital expensive. I do hope PLAN is successful in its application for funding from the BC Manufacturing Expansion Fund. A positive announcement that confirms 50% of the expected cost would be a huge win for the Company and the Kamloops community - adding additional local and sustainable employment.