Anthony Ambrose
Analyst · Lake Street. Please go ahead
Well, thank you very much, Jordan. I’ll begin my formal remarks by addressing some corporate governance matters. And then we’ll move on to commenting about 2020 Q2 and recent developments, and then I’ll turn it over to Joel for details on the numbers. On corporate governance matters, our annual meeting was held on May 18 at our corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. For this year’s event, due to the COVID-19 challenges, we made our information available via Internet delivery, and the process worked extremely well with excellent shareholder participation. All of our proposals received affirmation from shareholders, including the election of directors, ratification of independent auditors and say-on-pay provisions for our executive officers. I’d also like to comment on a few of the SEC’s recent announcements. On July 22, the SEC adopted new rules pertaining to proxy advisory firm disclosures. These rulings seek to provide an improved framework for transparency pertaining to institutional proxy voting practices, and we applaud the SEC for ushering in such advancements. We worked with NASDAQ and let them know how we felt about the current situation on proposals and are happy with the new rules. There’s also a proposed rule change from the SEC for modifying which investment firms must file 13F ownership data. The proposal is to change from $100 million in assets under management to $3.5 billion as the threshold for these firms required to file quarterly 13F reports. This would limit transparency of investment firm ownership in our opinion. The proposal remains under review but, if passed, would work against all public companies and, particularly, smaller public companies since a smaller stock, such as Data I/O, typically have a shareholder base represented by investment firms managing under USD 3.5 billion. Moving on to the second quarter ending June 30. Challenging conditions for us, for society and all companies continued from the first quarter. We’re grateful for the health of our staff, our customers, our partners and their families and appreciate the sacrifices made by many health care professionals and first responders around the world. To reiterate, we remain committed to our priorities amid COVID-19, which are: number one, keeping our people and their families safe; number two, keeping our facilities safe and secure; number three, serving our customers, with COVID-19-related customers as our top priority. Further, as I noted in last quarter’s call, we believe our business and operational strategies have proven helpful as we manage the effects of the pandemic. Under the circumstances, during the better part of the past 6 months, global commerce has been anything but predictable. In addition to COVID-19, there have been increased trade and geopolitical tensions. Expectations in general have been then reduced, and our performance in the second quarter reflected those reduced business conditions. As an essential supplier to the medical and aerospace industries, Data I/O has remained open for business in China, the United States and Germany. Within our markets, we have seen recovery in China and some encouraging signs in EMEA. Southeast Asia and the Americas are lagging in terms of recovery from COVID-19. Overall progress is happening in fits and starts, and this is impacting capital equipment markets all over the world. During the second quarter, COVID-19 negatively affected many of our customers in our business. Capacity-related purchases were being deferred, while new technology-related purchases and process improvements continue. We saw many automotive manufacturing facilities temporarily closing in the second quarter, delaying equipment and consumable purchases. Within automotive, the market for electric vehicles has been emerging to complement our strength in ADAS and infotainment market segments. In the second quarter, we shipped the PSV7000 unit for use in a major European OEM’s electrification program. We also had other competitive automotive system wins in Asia and Latin America and additional UFS programming purchases. While the traditional automotive capital market has been challenging, we experienced pockets of strength within the broader industrial and IoT electronics market as well as from other sectors. We gained a significant new IoT customer in Asia in the second quarter, and we’re pleased to have reached the milestone of deploying our 300th PSV unit during the second quarter. This is a major milestone for that program. Our SentriX initiatives saw continued progress with our channel partners in the second quarter. For a programming center partner, we won a significant opportunity in utilities and smart metering. On the semiconductor side, Cypress and Infineon Technologies Company announced in July the production availability of its PSoC 64 Standard Secure Amazon Web Services microcontroller. This MCU provides secure IoT device management that enables OEMs to safely deploy applications and handle data at scale. We’ve been a partner of Cypress for a couple of years on the PSoC program and are very excited about this announcement. These are just a couple of the highlights in our SentriX ecosystem in Q2 and illustrate its growing presence. The basic tenets of our success over the years have been well and continue to be rooted in our technology and prudent financial planning with realistic expectations. Data I/O has built a sustainable and resilient business to withstand down periods, such as the one we’re in, and then to flourish from a proven operational leverage as conditions improve. The last market cycle upswing for Data I/O was based on our capital equipment and consumable business lines, whereas the next cycle upswing will also include and benefit from our SentriX platform. At the end of the second quarter, we had $13.3 million in cash and no debt. This provides us with ample liquidity so that we may be flexible in these challenging times and remain committed to our long-term growth objectives. With that, I will turn it over to Joel Hatlen, our Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. Joel?