Hello, and welcome to Needham's nineteenth Annual Technology and Media Conference. I'm Ryan Koontz. I cover the CommTech sector here at Needham, which is comprised of broadband, networking, and cloud comms segments. Really happy to have Adtran with us today. Adtran's a leading provider of open disaggregated networking and communication solutions. We've got with us today Tom Stanton, CEO, and Uli Dopfer, CFO. Welcome, Tom and Uli. How are you? Doing good. Thanks, Ryan. Good. Excellent. Thanks for having us. Sure, sure. So if you're watching this event from our conference platform, feel free to submit questions via the browser link there. And if we have time at the end, we'll dive into Q&A from the audience. But wow, Tom, Uli, you know, what a, what a rollercoaster this has been, not just for you, but everybody. I feel like the last couple of years in the broadband space had as much cyclicality as the last couple decades in telecom. Wow! Yeah, I would agree with you. Yeah. Um- And so- So really nice to see the business stabilize and, you know, improve in its predictability. You guys have an in-line quarter and guide. You know, can you kind of communicate what you saw change over the last, say, several quarters to now, that gives you more confidence in predictability, and what you think led to the improved, you know, results in the quarter and your outlook? Yeah, to be honest with you, some of it is just, you know, time passing, and we are tracking way more closely inventory levels of different customers. Mm-hmm. A lot of the product seems to have cleared out of the various different warehouses. There's still some in there, so I don't wanna act like, it's still not impacting us. It definitely still is. But, I think the, you know, the biggest thing I can point to, and we were talking about this, earlier, is that the... If I look at push-outs, just customer moving orders- Yeah ... just, versus moving orders out, we're now actually, for the first time in a long time, seeing some customers actually move some orders in, which is really nice to see. Wow! Still, it's still segment by segment, so some are stronger than others. Mm-hmm. But it all has to do with inventory levels and kind of what's going on with the order flow and what's going on with order cancellations and order push-outs. That does seem to... like I said, I don't wanna overplay that. It is- Yeah ... definitely better than it was, you know, 4 or 5 months ago. Yeah. I think it's just been getting better since then. Great. And Uli, on the gross margin line, you guys seem like you guys have made some great progress there, you know, post-merger. And kind of walk us through where we are now on gross margins and how you think about them going forward. Yeah, I think, like you rightfully said, we made some great progress. If you look where we started early last year with the gross margin, 37% range. Now we are up to, at, north of 41. So really good progress, obviously tied to the increased, or now lower cost levels, that are just flushed out based on the semiconductor crisis. Right. So real good progress here. Obviously, it's also a matter of product and customer mix, as always, but now we have the third quarter where we are safely in the 40%, so that's, I think, very successful, and hopefully it will increase going forward as we see revenues going up and, you know, and we see some further cost optimizations in our supply chain. Great. Awesome to hear. And so, you guys are quite a ways into your merger now, and you know, it sounds, Tom, like OpEx level is not quite where you want them, but certainly, you guys made some great progress on OpEx efficiencies to get back to break even here. Yeah, we're pretty close. We still got a little bit of work to do, but let's just say we have work to do. But it's... we're pretty close. The thing, we did have a couple of things that moved against us in the last quarter. Right ... exchange rates were about half of our missed from our original target. Mm-hmm. And then we did do a site closure, which we announced, at a location in Europe. That one- Yeah ... there were some significant negotiations with unions and things to get that. At this point in time, we're complete with that, those negotiations. We won't see the full benefit at this point, but we should see next. So yeah, notwithstanding those two things, we're pretty much on track. The full, full benefit there, you think you hit by, by second half? Oh, yeah, definitely. Okay, great. Great, great. And, you know, with the, with the, you know, the efficiencies you're gaining here, are you, are you seeing an impact on your pipeline much at all, in terms of on, on the go-to-market front and, and kind of bringing the team together? Well, you know, there's two sides of that. So bringing the- Yeah ... on the bringing the team together, that is, we are seeing positive impacts there. I will tell you, you know, it's, we've had a, we've had to execute a fairly significant- Yeah ... optimization plan, and, you know, I don't know if any of them are on the call right now, but I'm very grateful to the way the team has stuck together. Yep. Our natural attrition rate is still very low. You know, the team is just... You know, especially for a team, if you think about it, this thing hit us right past the merger. So you had a bunch of, you know, two companies coming together, and then same day, right after that- Wow ... you had this guy sitting here telling you, "Hey, you got to cut your costs dramatically." And they hung together, and they have gelled well, and, yeah, so I... Right. Yeah. Can't- I have to say- How well the employee base is there. Yeah, I have to say, as weird as it may sound, you know, the difficult or challenging times last year actually helped the companies grow together, and gr- Yeah You know, glue the teams together, and because we all had one goal, right? We need to optimize our cost base, and we need to do this as quickly as possible without losing any efficiencies. Yeah, that's what crisis can do, for sure. And, it's... You guys weren't alone. It impacted a lot of companies, you know, across the sector. Well, in terms of some of the other synergies around supply chain from the merger, are you starting to see that? Where are we now? What inning are we in of efficiencies on supply chain relative to the merger? I mean, I will start, Tom, and then you please chime in. So I mean, we obviously started early on optimizing supply chain, suppliers, and so on, but we are not at the end of the road, right? You will see a bigger impact, actually, as our volumes continue to grow, and then you will see the full benefit of the two companies coming together when it comes to the gross margin and supply chain impact. Sure. Yeah. To reduce volume- I think- Yeah, kind of mass ... Let me add a little bit. I think the, you know, when we came together in their kind of different timelines, which you can think about, but when we came together and really started to look at buying together, and that was really still in the semiconductor crisis. Yeah. Sure. So we really couldn't leverage the way you normally would leverage. Mm-hmm. You know, you had people say, "If you don't pay me 30% more, I'm just not gonna ship to you." And, and you say, "Hey, but we're buying more." "Well, then it's 35% more." Right? It was just kind of a weird time, and so, you know, we've gotten through that piece. I think some of the, piece that you're seeing on the gross margin improvement is the fact that we've got to a more normalized time. It still isn't there. There's still pieces- Mm ... that we have yet to launch. We're in the midst of, right now, we're doing some EMS rationalization, just things that you really couldn't talk about a year ago, because nobody wanted to talk about it. Yeah. So there's still things that are yet to be done, that'll... You know, semiconductor's been, you know, who's gonna go negotiate with a semiconductor vendor a year ago? A year ago? No. Yeah. They're begging. Things seem to be getting better, too, notwithstanding, you know, DCI. Yeah. I'm not gonna try to get a lower price on an AI chip, but- Uh-huh ... but telecom, not a bad time, right, for- Right. Right. And then, I think we have some improvement that we can make there. Right. And how about progress on cross-selling, in terms of, you know, product- Cross-selling is. Here again, I think we're in a better space, because when people have inventory, it's hard to go in there and say, "Hey, buy this new one. Mm-hmm. But that has gotten better, and some of that has to do with the segment, different segments, so it has absolutely helped us sell stuff. Without a doubt, we won a major award in your last quarter. Yeah, I think it was last quarter. It was because we were together. That absolutely helped. Nice. And synergies within the product set. So it has helped us some in some of the larger carriers in Europe. In the US, it is really starting to gain traction. I look back now, we have 40-some-odd customers in the US that were only buying broadband from Adtran- Mm-hmm ... and are now buying optical broadband. They weren't buying ADVA legacy products before, and that's a relatively short period of time, especially if you consider the inventory level, and getting them together, and I think that, you know, what we wanted to do is get it in and established prior to BEAD funding flowing, so that we were in there- For that middle mile, yeah. Yeah. I think it's tight, but I think, you know, for the majority of it, we're in a really good position. So, that's actually tended to go together. Got it. And Tom, with regards to the U.S., you're talking about there, I mean, how would you characterize the tier ones, twos, and threes in general, in the U.S. these days? I assume, the larger you get, kind of the tougher it is this year? I think that's probably, you know. You know, I tend to think of Tier 1s as the largest carriers, regardless if they're telco carriers or cable MSO carriers. Yeah. I think that characterization actually plays on both, maybe for different reasons, but it plays- Yeah ... So, it's been a, of course, we have our Tier 1 exposure is kind of, you know, there aren't that many, right? Right. One makes a big impact, and of course, we had one- Yeah ... that had a very significant impact. But I would say, in general, those would have been down definitely on a year-over-year basis. Mm-hmm. Tier 2s are a little bit of a mixed story. What the weird thing that's going on in Tier 2s is, we tend to think, but I have tended to think about these Tier 1s and Tier 2s as being kind of fixed. The number of players doesn't change much. They're the same names over and over again. Yeah. Yeah, that is changing somewhat now, because what you have is you have these aggregators that are private equity-based, typically aggregators of Tier 3 carriers. Yeah. They're getting to be large, right? Wow. They're getting to push up into that tier two space. Yeah. So for the first time, that market's growing, and those new Tier Twos are coming in and with a mission to go expand footprint, right? That's why they've aggregated, and- Sure. More purchasing power and- Yeah, so that- Yeah ... that space, that space in itself, with these new ones, it has been... I expect it to grow. Some of the more traditional Tier Twos, I think it's hit or miss. Mm-hmm. They kind of, as you know, they tend to be cyclical. Yeah. So you're gonna be- Automatic. Automatic- Yeah, it's like- Some things. Yeah, it's gonna- Yeah ... it's gonna, it's gonna do this. Yeah. But they've been fairly stable. But I think the real growth, at least, let's say, in the near term, is gonna be that, and then to the extent that they participate in BEAD, some of the more traditional- Mm-hmm ... and then, you know, Tier Threes have been fairly solid. They're not at the 30% growth rate that we had historically seen. Yeah. But, when they came down, we were talking a few percentage, notwithstanding subscriber equipment. But, you know, on the infrastructure side, just a few percentage down, they've started to tick back up as well. We actually had a very good quarter in Tier 3s- Yeah ... from an infrastructure side. I think in the U.S., they were up, I think Tier 3s were up around 30% or so. Nice. Yeah, they seem to be hanging in there pretty well. Nice. Well, I was gonna ask, your thoughts on this, you know, you mentioned PE getting involved, and we saw T-Mobile, right, do this deal with Lumos and a PE partner. I mean, wow, that's a pretty bold bet and a pretty strong validation for this opportunity ahead, don't you think? That's a great opportunity! I mean, who wouldn't? I'm just kidding. I mean, it is a great opportunity. Yeah. But you're right, I mean, you know, especially if you're gonna come in with some size. But it's the same thing. It's the same thing that the PE guys are chasing, right? Yeah. It is, there's money to be made in broadband, and if you go in there and deploy, people are gonna... And this is, you know, just right off the bat, your success rate. There's so much of the U.S., 50% of the U.S. isn't fiber-capable. Yeah. I mean, it's nuts, right? If you go in there and you deploy fiber in a neighborhood, your take rate is fantastic. It's way more than it ever has been historically. So you wanna be first in town, and then there is a competitive fight that's happening in some of these larger cities where, you know, they understand the value of the longer term franchise of having that infrastructure in place. So I, I think it's fantastic. You know, the thing about and I, I won't even argue, I will not argue which one is better. Mm. The European market is different, and there are segments in the European market that are kind of much more centralized in the deployment. Yeah. And sometimes it takes government moves to get those to happen, right? And you typically don't see that in the U.S., right? In the U.S., it's very much competitive driven, so- Regulatory driven ... player come in here, if you remember, there was a big ISP that came in a few years back and- Mm-hmm ... and announced that they were gonna have these cities and- Oh, yeah ... the whole world moved, right? I mean, well, definitely all the US moved, and the next thing you know, you had two or three fibers going to, you know, a lot of homes. And that wouldn't have happened without that type of competition, kind of. So in the US, competition is very good, and- Yeah ... it spurs actions from pretty much all of the participants, so I think it's a good move. Yeah. Well, let's follow up on some of those government subsidies. You know, people talk about BEAD, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of layers to it ahead of that and, you know, it sounds like some, some progress, at least, on paper, in BEAD in the last few weeks, I was, was happy to see. So, any, any, any comments around the, the subsidies in the U.S., and then any update on, on Europe? Well, I think in the U.S., it's not really going far off script. Mm. You know, we've been thinking it would be end of Q4 to see anything, and then- Yeah ... 2025 is when you would still... I would say that's generally intact. Yep. You could argue how much is gonna happen in any one quarter, and I would not get into that argument. You know, some of the states, not surprising, are behind. I should say that most of the states, not surprising, are behind what, you know, some people... Let's say behind what they- where they could be. Yeah. That's not surprising. You know, I did. We had 180-some customers in here a couple of weeks ago that were almost all Tier Threes. Right. By far, the majority, I mean, like, you know, 80%-90% were planning on participating in stimulus funding. Some of them, of course, are participating in ARPA now, and will use BEAD as an augmentation to what they're doing with ARPA. Yeah. So they're definitely focused on it. You know, I've never. I've literally never seen kind of the take rate or the willingness to take rate, let's say- Yeah ...... requirements, but I think by and large, that's a minority of- Mm-hmm. And how about in Europe, Tom? How about, how about in Europe in terms of broadband, subsidies? In Europe, it is, you know, I would say the... The best thing I can say is I don't see any material plan changes. Mm-hmm. So it generally is more. Well, let's talk about the big carriers. Generally, it is country-specific, but generally, you know, they have a plan, and they're marching to a plan, and they made commitments, and they're marching to try and fulfill those commitments. You may see quarter-to-quarter variations. You may even see a year variation in total numbers, but there's typically a plan to augment that and get them back in line. So not a whole lot of change there. Yeah. Probably the thing that has been- Germany's very early still, right? Germany's still very early, yes. Mm. They're of course a significant broadband customer to us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We started shipping our flagship 6330 to them in the fourth quarter, had a very strong first quarter with them, too. You know, our European numbers were pretty good in the first quarter. So, yeah, and they're early into that. And then you have other ones where they have like we have one customer who is specifically doing a Huawei replacement that we're getting- Yeah ... going through the lab with us as we speak. We have a large multinational that just awarded us, which I don't like to talk about customers from, because I tend to get a... But a large multinational that we just exited the lab with. And all of those seem to be on track. There are some; the weirdness has been where we've had some customers... So the backdrop of all this is, in some cases, like with multinationals, it's typically a competitive scenario. They're gonna overbuild, or they're gonna try to get there first. Then you have the national carriers, who have a plan to build, and they have commitments to build and pass X number of homes. So you, you've got that mix of kind of both worlds, there. But the only thing that has varied over the last few years, there's this backdrop of, "I've got to get rid of, let's say, non-secure vendors," right? Mm. And that pressure has always been there. It kind of, you know, it kind of does this, but it's never not pressured. And in general, right now, I'd say it's still on a definitely an upward... Really since, you know, some of the stuff going on in Eastern Europe, that pressure has even gone up higher. Correct. And the way that it would manifest itself is, you know, you'd have an RFP, and an eastern vendor, either by decree or by reality, really wasn't considered in that RFP. And to the extent that they wanted to continue to buy from them, they would just pull the RFP, right? Mm. So you saw a little bit of that going on with some of the carriers. That seems to have kind of buttoned itself up a little bit, too, and you're seeing more of the carriers carry these RFPs all the way down to award and start deploying, so... But that really didn't have anything to do with target numbers, and do they think fiber to the prem is important? Are they gonna deploy fiber to the prem? Is there demand for it? That hasn't waned one bit. Yeah. So, yeah, I think it's a good market. They got inventory. I mean, they got inventory, but even that has gotten way better. It's probably less right now. Access side seems to be doing good. Yeah. The fiber to the prem side. Subscriber side in Europe seems to be doing... We still have a little bit of build-up on some of our IP products in Europe. And then optical, still got some inventory and some, some large customers. Yeah, so, so it sounds like relative to your mix forward on the year, continued strength in broadband, CPE kind of growing its way out, starting with the U.S. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. We have - you'll see some growth even in the European CPE. I'm trying to think of that. Yeah, European, let's say, customer residential, I think will start growing quicker, and then you'll see some of the business CPE follow later, where that inventory build is. Right. I think it's access infrastructure first. Mm-hmm. Subscriber, a little bumpy, but definitely getting better. Optical, you know, kind of the feeling is right now on optical, just where... I mean, I know where some of this inventory specifically is- Yeah ... our largest customers. And, there's still some inventory burning off that will happen. But, you know, probably in the next, well, this quarter, next quarter, I think we'll be, we'll be at least at the bottom of that to where you're gonna see more inflow than outflow. Yeah. If we start picking up this quarter- Yeah ... on the aggregate, which is as good as you can with a bunch of inventory. Yeah. I mean, it's very curious to me, you know, how optical and broadband, you know, we're kind of out of sync, right? Yeah. It, you know, and it. I don't think that's just... You know, I think it if you look at the market- Yeah ... you see the same kind of thing. Same thing. Ciena, Infinera- Where that hit versus access vendors, you see the same kind of thing actually happening. Mm. It's not just us. I don't know if it may have something to do with the way they do their projects, because they're typically more project-oriented. Yeah. There were some solid commitments on deliveries. I, you know, I don't know what all factors into that, but I saw... You know, we definitely saw the same thing. Yeah. I mean, optical hung in there longer, so- Yeah ... and we'll get through that cycle. It'll be interesting to see in a year. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you see those cycles really line up on almost a quarterly, if not a monthly basis. Yeah. Anyways, we're- Yeah. Let's talk about innovation a little bit. You've got a lot going on. You've got some pluggables, you've got new cloud SaaS products. You know, walk me through things you're most excited about over the next, like, 12, 18 months that you can share. Well, the coherent optics, the 100ZR, we're excited about now. We're not really shipping in mass yet, that's just getting it into full production. So we're not... We have units out into customers right now. We literally have units-- we have customers wanting to place orders for beta units to actually get them into the field and production. So, I mean, it's a Nice ... a good product. Yeah. You know, the whole thing, the whole thought about that is has got a lot to do with why the companies made sense together. I mean, if you're gonna upgrade your operator prem platform, you gotta do something with all that traffic, right? You gotta get it back to a central office. Yeah. The other way, the traditional way to do it, is to go buy a whole new box. Yep. the air conditioning associated with that box, it's really a big, it's really a big- Yeah. Big item. It's expensive. But typically, the more it weighs in totality, the more it costs you. And so it's expensive. And we really have a way to where you can just plug in an optic into a slot, and you're ready to go. Yeah. And so it's substantially easier, and it is, at this point in time, the only thing on the market that can do that. We did co-develop that with somebody- Mm-hmm ... so they have the ability to sell it, but it's a fairly, Yeah ... you know, it's a fairly, we're the only game in town type market. So we've gotta get that into production quickly. That's part of what we're doing with the whole optical piece. Do you have a shared build with that partner, too? Yes. Or you build yourself? Yes. So we... That's part of what we're just trying to do with the optical piece in general, which is one of the rationales for companies coming together was, like I said, getting ready for BEAD and making sure that we can be a one-stop shop. The thing that you'll find about with a lot of the carriers that are participating in BEAD is they, they, you know, a lot of these carriers don't have this huge back office, a whole, you know, big IT department, you know, big testing lab. You know, they really want to trust you, and, and the more they trust you, the more they give over to you. We wanted to provide them something that would fit the whole bill and allow them to come in and quickly move forward with their deployment, without doing a whole lot of interoperability testing from vendor to vendor, and all the things that go with that. Mm-hmm. So the 100ZR is just part of that piece. There's a lot of software components to that piece, too, and that seems to be going well. The other piece that's kind of the wrapper on this, at least in the US market, is Mosaic. Now, Mosaic comes in two iterations or two different. Okay ... Mosaic Cloud Platform, which is what carriers use, large carriers use, to manage and kind of orchestrate their access now. We've gone gangbusters in Europe with that platform, right? The biggest carriers that we've talked about today use Mosaic, and it is now scaled up. We have one carrier that has several million homes passed- Yeah ... and probably over 1 million, at this point, of live customers. I haven't checked that lately. That are on this product, you know, which is SDX base and then Mosaic Cloud Platform orchestrating the whole thing. So that's good, and it works, and it scales- Yeah ... which is really important, and it's way harder than most people know to get something to scale to that size. Yeah. That's going well. But then what we have developed for the US market is Mosaic One. Okay. Mosaic One is just a soup to nuts, everything you need to be able to run your network, right? It does configuration, installation, maintenance, ongoing troubleshooting, and then in-home management, and things like, you know, upgrade. It helps you figure out which customers you should be offering upgrade capabilities to or offerings to. Yeah. So it's kind of a soup to nuts piece. That was launched earlier, last year. We just recently then launched Intellifi, which is the in-home, or in-house build, in-home management piece. Great. We now have 400 semi carriers on, on Mosaic One. We just literally launched Intellifi maybe, I'm thinking, a quarter ago or something. We've got 20-something, I think 29 carriers signed up for Intellifi at this point, that are using that for their in-home management. All of this is a SaaS-based service- Mm-hmm ... and it's just different tiers that you can buy into. And here again, it's getting ready, making sure that, you know, if you're new, if you're a municipality or whatever, that you can come in, and you can take people that don't have 20 years of telecom experience, stand up a network, run that network, and get really high, you know, performance out of customer satisfaction. So, Yeah ... I think that's going good. The uptake of that has been good. Yeah. I would've loved to have had that product a year ago, just to be more entrenched. But, you know, honestly, we were trying to conquer Europe, and so, Okay ... not that it's conquered, but we're good in Europe, and- Yeah ... we have very, you know, stable and refreshing- On there. That's great. And in terms of other, other, products coming down the pipe, are you guys looking at next generation PON, things like this? It's still a little ways out, I imagine, in terms of real demand. Yeah. Yes, and we will be, I don't know if we've announced it, but we'll be trialing 50G PON this year. Yeah, but demand-wise, it, it honestly is, right now it's just- Yeah, about PFCs and things, and people wanna know you're gonna get there, but no one really wants- Yeah ... to spend the money. Yeah, 10 gig. 10 gig- 10 gig ... was a long, a long time. And like, I think we were the first ones to do a 10 gig product. This was before XGS was a thing, and yeah, it took well over five years for it to actually... closer to seven before it actually- Wow. Wow ... started keeping. So it takes a little bit of time even after you have it, but that's fine. I mean, but I don't blame them, right? Especially if you're talking about these type of platforms. Before you had bottlenecks, or you had bottlenecks in your infrastructure that would only let you get so large, and SDX removes a whole lot of those bottlenecks. Right. Like, you can upgrade a switch component or an OLT component separately and decide what speed you have to, you know, get to, or what speed you wanna get to, how much aggregation you wanna do. So when they... Now, honestly, we're selling the most of those type of platforms. Everybody's gonna move to that type of platform. Mm-hmm. Right? All the competitors are moving to that type of, you know, kind of product topology or architecture. And so, so them wanting to make sure that they can upgrade the platform to a, to a 50 gig, you know, and there we have some people talking about 100 gig. And I, you know, I'm probably like a lot of people on the call, like, what the heck are you gonna do with 50 gig? Absolutely. Some people are saying, "What the heck are you gonna do with 10 gig?" And the real answer is, I can't tell you, but I couldn't tell you what you were gonna do with 1 gig either, right? I really couldn't. But it gets utilized, it gets sucked up. If you provide bandwidth, they will come and fill it up. And so that will happen. It's absolutely gonna happen. Yeah. You can come up with use cases, but use cases are always wrong. They always end up being the wrong one. You know, 3D TV was gonna blow the top off a bandwidth requirement, and it didn't happen. Right. Right? But all of a sudden, everybody had 100 devices connected in their home, and they still had to watch TV and do homework, and, and you needed it. Mm-hmm. Your tolerance for a glitch, your tolerance for pixelization has gone to zero, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Which is good. Which is good. Which is good, right? So- Right ... so, I mean, it'll, it'll happen. It'll happen. But anyway, so yeah, same type of thing. So we'll do the normal stepwise function in the speed. But right now, a lot of the focus is around usability and uptime because this will get to be a more competitive environment. As fiber gets built, if there's only one game in town, you're stuck with them. But there will be multiple games in town over time, at least in most places. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, something that you would put up with is... you know, that thing has gotta work. You don't wanna sit there and wait three hours on the guy showing up. You don't even want the guy to show up, you know? You shouldn't have to have that, right? So, so a lot of it is around that. And then the number of people that are qualified, the number of people that have 20 years experience in telecom goes down every year. Uh-huh. And so the workforce that you're having to do what typically was complicated things is getting to be less and less and less, right? So it's not just about, workforce optimization- Um- ... it's about workforce capabilities, right? Mm. And so yeah, so there's a lot of focus on that right now, and just making it easier and faster and higher quality. Most of that's in the software domain? Most of that's in the software domain. Yeah, the hardware domain has always been there, but, you know, you know, one of our hottest products, I mean, it hasn't even been announced. It, it is announced in, in one form, but we have a product that does, you know, really deep diagnostics on fiber. Oh, right. Yeah. That just tells you exactly where you have to go to, what happened, you know, what do you need to do. It keeps you from rolling truck rolls around an entire city trying to figure out what happened. Mm. Without a doubt, the highest customer interest- Broken reflectometer, what do they call those things? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, honestly, I... I'll say yeah. But, but I'm not exactly sure, and I will- Yeah ... find out. I I realize I don't know that. I should know that. But, the highest customer excitement we've had probably since the 1148 or maybe even like in the HDSL2 days, a long time ago, right? Yeah. Really, really high interest in that product. And it's all about quality. Well, that one's about quality and cost. 'Cause it costs you a lot of money- Right ... to put a trained person to go out and figure out what the heck happened, right? Yeah. And this really does the trick. Operations, operations costs are a killer for these guys, so- Yeah, yeah, and more and more so. It's gonna be more and more so, so- That's great ... and it's gonna be a bigger part of the deal. So anyways. Shifting gears, any updates on the real estate situation? You walked through a little bit in the call. Why don't you just kind of give us an update again, what your thoughts are there latest on- Uli, you wanna, you wanna touch on that? Sure. So, as you know, we have three large buildings in Huntsville. Mm. We have one, which is the north and the south tower. This, it's actually a connected building, but it's actually two, individual buildings. We have that on the market for sale. We have had great traction, right? We have almost every week showings to interested parties from all over the place, I would say. We have currently about three parties extremely interested. And, so we are looking forward, you know, to continue the discussion with them. There's nothing signed yet or so, but, we are confident that we will make something happen second half of this year or, or maybe early next year. Because, as you know, real estate transactions with large buildings take, take time. Yeah, I bet. That's good to hear. See, any other updates around... And you guys did some automation around this German their factories. Or any updates there, Uli, you can speak to in terms of what where that is helping the business out? Yeah, I mean, the entire idea is to in-source some of the high-end products and capabilities that we had, you know, externally, and also be closer to the market. As you said, we opened up the factory last year in September, is when it went live. It's fully operational, and we are running a lot of product through this facility already. Yeah. Now, the thought around that is we did in-source some places. So BE, for instance, has Buy America requirement. Right. Yep. So, our manufacturing capability here puts us... You know, we had a competitor that announced that they shipped their first BE-compliant OLT. Yeah. I think I even said, right, "Well, we've actually shipped 1.3 million. You've always been BE. Right. Right, so, I mean, but... and there are the same type of requirements in Europe, too. So you have to have some capability to provide European content- Yeah ... to get some of the similar pieces that they have in place, too, there, too. So. Right. And following up on that, on the kind of the competitive landscape, any changes you're seeing in terms of behavior? You know, it's really Nokia in Europe and, you know, Calix over here, I imagine. It's just- It hadn't really changed. I mean, you know, we've got maybe a little bit of movement where, you know, but I'd say it's in the periphery. It's in the US, it's Calix, predominantly in the Tier three's- Yeah ... and Tier two's. Now, that Tier two space opening up, you know, because with all of this private equity coming in, will actually make that probably a more competitive space. Right. Nokia in the U.S. is pretty much Tier one, and then they have where they had Alcatel footprint that was sold. That's typically where they play. Sure. To inherit them. Excuse me, in Europe it's... Mm-hmm. I mean, a lot of folks have announced OLTs out there, but I haven't seen a whole lot of progress from the 10 new entrants. Well, it's good. It's a cool time to announce an OLT, no problem. That's, I mean... Yeah, but it's, yeah, there's this space hasn't changed. It's not that big of a market, the OLTs. No, I hope it gets to be that big. Well- I don't. Not competitively, but I hope it gets to be. I mean, I do think it's. I mean, if you're looking at growth in the telecom space, there's no way it doesn't jump up. And I'm not talking about data center interconnect. There's no way it doesn't jump up to the top of the list. I mean, just look what's going on. The world is going to go fiber. And in the U.S., which is one of the leaders, it's 50% copper. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think it's... I love the space, and I don't want anybody else in it, but I love the space. Yeah. Great. Well, any last thoughts? And we're just about out of time here, but appreciate you guys joining. No, Ryan, I appreciate it. I appreciate the invitation. Sure, anytime, and look forward to seeing you again soon. All right, take care. Thank you, Ryan. Thanks, everyone.