George LeMaitre
Analyst · Stifel. Your line is open
Rick, thanks for your question. It’s George here. And I know you’re posing your question. Hey, you beat your guidance by $600,000, but still didn’t feel as great as it could have. I think that’s the essence of the question. And I think as we were preparing for today’s call, we started trying to funnel stuff down. And I would say if we had issues in Q1, although, again, we beat our guidance. So we felt great about that. But if we had issues, I would funnel it down into three, easy to remember, Cs, if you will. The CE Mark continues – as you can hear from J.J.’s script, the CE Mark continues to dog us in that we’re very close to getting them, but we haven’t quite gotten them. COVID, I think, is still a real issue. We’re all watching what other companies are doing right now, and some companies are breaking out of it, and some companies are still mired in. I would say we felt it more strongly in Europe in Q1 than we did in the United States, but it was still a very present issue in January and February, let’s say. And then the final C, we would call – and I think we talked about this a lot on the last call, channel loading, which is in Northern Europe, in Q4, we had a lot of reps trying to win a lot of contests. And I think we talked about it before, but we did really well in Q4. We really crushed guidance. And I think it sapped away a little bit from our ability to crush guidance in Q1. So I’d like to say, maybe those are the three Cs that you’re looking for: the CE Mark, COVID and channel loading. And then I would like to suggest, as you’re looking at our guidance, there’s nothing to look at in Q2 2020. That’s a non quarter. You’ve seen that with all your companies. Everyone’s going to report sales were up 60% or 80% or whatever. I think we’re projecting sales are going to be up 55%. But you really, I think, want to know, well, what happens between Q1 and Q2, maybe that’s the new organic growth rate for us, I don’t know. And so going from Q1 to Q2, we’re up 7%. And I think it’s – you go back to those three Cs. And I think we see all of them dissipating. The CE Mark, again, we feel it’s very close. This thing is supposed to end May 25, and we think we’re going to get five more CE marks between now and then; which would get us back on track, basically. And we feel like the vaccines, particularly in the U.S. and the UK, where 64% of our sales are located in those two geographies. So you get 2/3 of your sales are in very high vaccine regions for COVID going away "for us" for sales, if you will. And then finally, channel loading, that’s going to be over. It usually is – they sell enough stuff to win the contest. They take Q1 off and then Q2, they’re back at it. And so probably the three Cs explain what happened, if you will, why we didn’t crush guidance by more than $600,000. And then maybe they also transition in explaining Q2 for you.