Greetings, welcome to The ExOne Company first quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question- and- answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Ms. Monica Gould, investor relations for The ExOne Company. Thank you. You may begin. Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. ExOne released results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2021 yesterday after market close. If you did not receive a copy of our earnings press release, you may obtain it from the investor relations section of our website at investor.exone.com. With me on today's call are John Hartner, Chief Executive Officer, and Douglas Zemba, Chief Financial Officer. This call is being webcast and will be archived on the investor relations section of ExOne's website. Before I turn the call over to John, I'd like to note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements, and as such, is subject to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties include those risk factors discussed in the most recent reports on Form 10-Q and 10-K filed by the company, as well as those discussed in the press release. Any forward-looking statements that are made on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events. In addition to U.S. GAAP reporting, ExOne reports certain financial measures that do not conform to generally accepted accounting principles. We believe these non-GAAP measures enhance the understanding of our performance. Reconciliations between these GAAP and non-GAAP measures are included in the tables found in the press release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to John. Thank you, Monica. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our first quarter 2021 earnings call. We're pleased to report record levels of both recurring revenue and machine order backlog in the first quarter, which shows the strength of our product offerings, our adoption model, and our forward momentum. As forecasted last quarter, we expected a soft start to the year. Our first quarter results reflected difficult operating environments that continue to persist as a result of COVID-19. We are seeing signs of an economic rebound, particularly in the U.S. market, where we saw a higher concentration of sales and backlog growth during the first quarter. We recorded first quarter revenues of $13 million, reflecting a slight decrease from a record first quarter performance in 2020. The decline was driven by COVID-related installation disruptions, especially in Asia. Our first quarter revenue was helped by strong growth in recurring revenue, led by an increase in revenue from funded research and development services. These services were largely in support of future production metal equipment sales opportunities. Aftermarket revenue associated with our global installed base of printers grew. From a geographical perspective, Q1 was driven by a 40% year-over-year and 12% sequential increase in the Americas region, reflecting the secular trend towards reshoring manufacturing in a more distributed supply chain. This is a trend we expect to continue and to spread to other regions as they emerge from the pandemic. Recurring revenue rose 7% sequentially and 15% year-over-year to $8.1 million in Q1, demonstrating success from our strategic initiatives in this area, particularly the strength of the ExOne production adoption model. We achieved a record backlog of $47.8 million, representing 41% year-over-year growth. During Q1, we further expanded our liquidity to a total of $137 million as of March 31st, through an underwritten public offering. This strengthened balance sheet will enable us to prudently invest to drive growth, including expanding our highly differentiated production adoption model, enhancing capabilities across geographies, and qualifying additional materials to further expand our leadership position in binder jetting. Also, we will continue to invest in external strategic opportunities, such as our partnership with Rapidia, which resulted in our new Metal Designlab for the office. Additionally, our organic investment will primarily support increased demand for our production-ready metal 3D printers. To that end, we are increasing our investment in the ExOne team. In all, we plan to increase our global workforce by approximately 15% during 2021, with several goals in mind: to support a shift in manufacturing mix to a higher percentage of metal units, to accelerate production of metal printers, helping to more quickly convert backlog to revenue. To meet the growing customer demands. Through the end of April, we added 30 people, bringing us 2/3 of the way to our goal. These hires are targeted towards bringing new talent into our technology development, manufacturing, and customer-facing teams. Now I'd like to turn to some recent highlights. During the quarter, we launched the ExOne Metal Designlab through an exclusive partnership with Rapidia. This has diversified and strengthened our metal portfolio beyond binder jetting to include our first office-friendly bound metal offering. We remain on track to begin shipping the Metal Designlab in Q2. This new printer has received an outstanding reception, including at the recent AMUG 2021, the first in-person trade event our company has attended in about a year. There is little doubt that our printer was the star of this respected 3D printing event. This new product is so differentiated in its capabilities, it helped attract a raft of new sales channel partners to the ExOne family in North America. We've already received our first order commitments and expect sales of this print today, parts tomorrow system to ramp nicely. Meanwhile, ExOne's leadership in binder jetting materials only continues to strengthen. Manufacturers are truly excited about our recent announcement that reactive materials such as aluminum and titanium will be printable on a controlled atmosphere model of our X1 160Pro, the market's largest metal binder jetting platform, to be shipped in 2022. We have major brands lined up for these products and are excited to get them to the market quickly. Subsequent to quarter end, we also announced that we acquired the assets of Freshmade 3D, an Ohio-based startup with a patented method of creating durable AMClad tooling out of sand forms 3D printed on ExOne sand printers. This transaction strengthens our position as a provider of large format 3D-printed tooling for industrial applications. We plan to scale up this process for a global aerospace customer who intends to use this tooling for composite layups of their parts. This is an ideal solution for companies looking to shorten supply chains and produce tooling and final products locally. Freshmade 3D's patented method often eliminates weeks or months of time spending waiting for conventional tooling and typically offers a 30%-50% cost savings for our customers. AMClad, which is also being used for art, design, and other architectural applications, reveals the great diversity of binder jetting for many innovative manufacturing approaches. Through our production adoption model, we have so many innovative new binder jetting applications on the horizon. I encourage you to look at our case studies in our investor presentation, which includes our work with Celwise. Celwise is a Swedish startup that has developed a method to transform wood pulp into water-resistant plastic-like products that are expected to disrupt the plastics industry by replacing single-use plastics. Manufacturing these renewable and biodegradable products are enabled by ExOne's metal printing technology to print a series of porous metal tools that help form the end products. As I mentioned, we also continue to expand our sales and distribution capability. In North America, we added four new partners with 60 offices across the U.S. and Canada. These partners will sell the Metal Designlab as well as the Innovent+, which remains the world's most installed metal binder jetting system, as well as ancillary equipment such as the X1F advanced furnace and consumables. Last week, we also announced continued sales network expansion in Asia. General Integration Technology, GIT, in Taiwan and Aurora 3D in China are now authorized channel partners to sell ExOne industrial solutions. With these additions, ExOne has doubled its representation in Greater China over the past year and brings the total number of sales partners in the APAC region to 12. In conclusion, we remain extremely optimistic about the increased traction we are seeing in our business and the long-term fundamentals and global growth of additive manufacturing. We continue to believe that our strong backlog and pipeline visibility supports our anticipated 15%-25% year-over-year revenue growth. We look forward to entering the post-pandemic period with new tailwinds as manufacturers look to de-risk supply chains and improve the sustainability of their products with new designs that require our industrial 3D printing solutions to execute. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Doug, who will provide details about our financial results and outlook. Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. For the first quarter, we are pleased to have achieved record quarterly recurring revenue of $8.1 million, up 15% year-over-year, and record contractual backlog of $47.8 million, an increase of 41% year-on-year. These first quarter highlights were offset by the challenges we faced in execution given the influence of COVID-19 on the global operating environment, which delayed revenue recognition on systems transactions until installation and customer acceptance protocols are 100% complete to future periods. As John stated, we are affirming our 2021 full year revenue growth expectations of 15%-25%, driven by our record backlog, market response to our new product launches, and improving macroeconomic conditions, particularly in the U.S. market, which generated a higher concentration of sales and contract activity in the first quarter. First quarter revenue totaled $13 million, which represented a modest decline on a year-on-year basis from a record first quarter in 2020, largely due to installation disruptions related to COVID-19. Despite these challenges, we continue to be encouraged by the growth in our recurring revenue, which rose 7% sequentially, and as I mentioned, 15% year-over-year to $8.1 million. The growth in our recurring revenue was driven by an increase in revenue from funded research and development contracts and higher aftermarket service revenues associated with the growth in our global installed base of 3D printing machines. The increase in our funded research and development efforts was largely driven by a new statement of work that commenced in the fourth quarter of 2020 for a new healthcare application. As we have mentioned previously, these types of arrangements are critical to our production adoption model strategy and serve as the launching pad for future acquisitions of systems by customers. As it relates to recurring revenue as a group, which includes our global service bureau operations, consumable material and aftermarket products, and funded research and development contracts, growing this pool of revenue has been an area of strategic focus for us as it provides stability to the business during periods of economic volatility, as we saw in our first quarter. Moving over to systems, due to a decrease in volumes, which I will comment on in a moment, 3D printing machine revenue declined to $4.9 million in the first quarter of 2021, compared to $6.3 million in the first quarter of 2020. This was offset by a favorable mix of systems sold, particularly in metal systems, which included a greater concentration of our X1 25Pro printer. Revenue for both of our product groups continues to be impacted by COVID-19, including disruptions to domestic and international shipping and travel, in addition to lingering negative macroeconomic effects. Let's move to machine unit sales for the period. As a reminder, our direct machines print components such as metal and ceramic parts for industrial and other applications and include our Innovent, M-Flex, and X1 25Pro platforms. Soon we will add to this group our X1 160Pro platform, the industry's largest metal 3D printer, as well as our recently announced InnoventPro and our office-friendly Metal Designlab printer. Our indirect machines print tools such as sand cores and molds and include our S-Print, S-Max, and S-Max Pro platforms. Our indirect machines are our larger footprint systems and typically generate a higher average sales value. As we have mentioned, our direct machine sales have historically leaned heavily to our Innovent platform, which is a lower priced entry-level binder jet metal system. However, a higher concentration of our 25 Pro platform has increased the average sales value of our direct units, and we expect this trend to continue in 2021 following our 160 Pro system introduction. We recognized revenue from seven machines in the first quarter compared to 14 in Q1 of 2020. Those seven machines consisted of three indirect and four direct printing machines. Persistent COVID-19 disruptions that we have faced for four rolling quarters at this point were the primary driver for our lower system units recognized and system revenue dollars for our first quarter of 2021 compared to 2020. Asia-Pacific and European lockdown conditions in the most recent three-month period provided significant barriers to completion of system installations at customer sites. In particular, beginning in 2020 and continuing through Q1 2021, executing on systems installations in China has been a challenge. However, we are starting to see recent improvements within this region and expect to turn the corner and finalize certain delayed executions during our next two quarters as conditions continue to lift globally. Despite the operational challenges we faced in this area in our first quarter, product demand for systems, which I will touch on in a moment, has never been stronger. Shifting to margins, for the first quarter 2021, we recorded gross margin of 15.4% compared to 27.1% in the first quarter of 2020. The decrease was primarily due to the continued impact of operating inefficiencies and challenges driven by the COVID-19 operating environment, including unfavorable product warranty experience. As we have spoken to previously, we continue to experience a below standard contribution margin on X1 25Pro system sales, which we expect to see improvement on during our second half. These factors, plus poor leverage of our fixed cost base on the lower systems revenue figure, contributed to the low margin result, which we ultimately expect to stabilize throughout the year, particularly in our second half in meeting our growth forecast for full year 2021. Long term, we continue to have a high degree of confidence that with operational improvements and scale, we are capable of generating consistent gross profit margins at the 40% level. For the first quarter, our total operating expenses decreased slightly to $8.5 million compared to the prior year period, excluding the Q1 2020 gain related to the sale leaseback of our European headquarters and operating facility. Research and development expenses were $2.6 million, compared to $2.5 million in the first quarter of 2020. This increase was due to slightly higher material costs associated with systems and materials development of binder jetting technology. As John mentioned, we continue to focus our attention in materials development on high-value metal and ceramic applications, including aluminum, titanium, and silicon carbide, among others. High-value applications are a key driver for our future success, as these solutions are highly sought out by customers and the total cost of ownership associated with emerging technology is less sensitive in these areas. We believe we have a significant first-mover advantage for binder jetting technology in this area based on our industry-leading portfolio of material capabilities. Selling, General & Administrative expenses were $5.9 million, compared to $6.2 million for the first quarter of 2020. The decrease was primarily due to lower employee and travel-related expenses as a result of COVID-19 and a net recovery for bad debts for Q1 2021, offset by slightly higher consulting and professional fees between the periods. As we indicated on our fourth quarter call, we expect to increase our OPEX spending this year by approximately 20%-25%. This increase is targeted in two primary areas. First, an acceleration in research and development spending targeted principally at material printing developments. Second, further investment in our commercial operations, primarily focused on expanding our global reach in specific geographies and managing customer application development through our production adoption model. Given the significant rise in awareness and interest in binder jetting technologies evidenced over the past year, we believe these near-term investments are prudent to support not just our 2021 plans, but to set us up for a high degree of success for 2022 and beyond. Given our recent capital transactions, which I will address shortly, we believe that we are well-positioned to make these investments in 2021 to accelerate our growth rate on a multi-year basis. Turning to backlog. As a reminder, our backlog includes firmly committed orders received from our machine and recurring revenue customers. It also includes our machine maintenance contracts as well as the non-cancellable portion of our operating lease agreements. Additionally, backlog includes orders for our global metal and sand service bureaus and other contractual services, including funded research and development. We ended the first quarter with a record backlog of $47.8 million, an increase of 41% as compared to $33.8 million at the end of the first quarter of last year. Our first quarter backlog includes machine orders totaling $30.5 million, representing 45 total units, nearly all of which we expect to recognize during 2021. Moving to the balance sheet. Cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash as of March 31st, 2021 increased to $138.3 million from $50.2 million at December 31st, 2020. The sequential increase was driven by cash inflows from financing activities of $95.3 million, mostly as a result of an underwritten public offering of common stock completed in February 2021. Offsetting this were cash outflows from operations to $5.9 million, mostly due to the widening net loss net of non-cash items for the period and net cash outflows from working capital changes driven by an increase in inventories to support expanded contractual backlog, offset by cash inflows from customers based on timing of payments. Our cash capital expenditures for the first quarter were limited to approximately $1 million, which were focused on our existing operations and strategic asset acquisition and deployment. Looking ahead, we expect our remaining 2021 capital expenditures to be in the range of $2.5 million-$3.5 million. In summary, despite the challenging operating environment we faced throughout 2020 and during our 2021 first quarter, we are excited at the prospects for our growth given rapidly improving market conditions, particularly in the U.S. market, our expanded and industry-leading product portfolio, and the clear progress we are seeing in executing on our key strategies, all with the backdrop of record customer demand for our technology. That concludes our prepared remarks, and we would now be happy to take your questions. Thank you. At this time we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you'd like to ask a question please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment it may be necessary to pick up your handsets before pressing the star. Our first question comes from the line of Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners. Please proceed with your question. Great. Thanks so much. Great backlog. Let's start with that. You mentioned that you have $30.5 million in systems backlog. Can you break that down in direct versus indirect? You called out Asia in terms of installation disruption. Can you also maybe highlight how many systems are for Asia-based customers that you're having trouble recognizing? Sure, Brian. Hey, it's Doug. Good morning. In terms of the breakup between metal and sand, it's a pretty even split as of the end of the quarter. We've obviously seen a pretty big uptick in our business on a percentage basis for metal demand versus sand. The growth rate in metal is obviously something that we're keeping a close eye on. It's been improving ever since last year's product introductions and some of the improvements that we've made relative to the single alloy printing process. Specific to the Asia question, we had at the end of March, specifically eight units in China, representative of around $6 million of revenue, that we were still working on. These are examples of systems that are physically sitting in China. We're working through the process. Nearly all cash collected in advance of shipping those units. Again, we expect to recognize over the next couple quarters. Great. That's helpful. Maybe if you can talk about the warranty expenses. I believe if I understand it accurately, you can't get the proper people there to fix any issues with parts, so it's causing a lot of waste. Are these restrictions, I think you talked about easing and when do you think, seeing where COVID-related restrictions are being lifted right now, at least in the U.S. and other places as well, when do you see this easing? Is it the third quarter? Are you starting to see it in the second quarter already? I'm just trying to understand that, and then I have one last question. Morning, Brian. John here. As far as global kind of impressions of what's happening from a COVID standpoint, certainly the U.S. is far ahead, and not just from ability to travel, but also customers' mindset. As far as the rest of the world, it is fairly limited. Even in North America, getting to Canada has some restrictions right now. We're hoping and seeing that the changes are happening in the U.S. It will be followed fairly quickly through the next few quarters in Europe and in most of Asia. That really will help us from a standpoint of getting these highly complicated systems accepted and having folks that are able to travel into, we just talked about China, which is one of our major places to get travel into. On warranty, Doug, do you want to I think for the third consecutive quarter now, we've sort of pointed this out, as a disruption to our margin performance. We've actually seen improvement over the last three quarters to the point where in Q1 2021, this was less of an impact than the last two sequential quarters. Again, really the impacts that you're seeing here, it's a few things. Number one, we had physical delivery in the early part of 2020 of some new products, the X1 25Pro and our new entry machine for sand, the S-Max Pro. When we go into lockdown phase sort of globally in that March, April timeframe in 2020, a lot of customers out in the field sort of shut down their machines or shut down their facilities for a period of time. In the second half of 2020, even through today, we're still seeing inconsistency in how customers are operating their equipment and sort of the slow restart that took place in the second half of 2020. Our machines run best when they're running consistently and in a precise way. Our ability to sort of manage those situations has been a bit constrained, in getting customers back up and running to the point that they want to perform at. We are seeing signs that as the economy has started to come back up, as customers are running their machines more consistently and more fluidly, and as some of the travel restrictions are lifted in some geographies, that things are getting better. I would expect Q2 to still have some challenges in it as we continue to emerge. I don't know that we've gotten substantially better as we sit here today than where we were at March. Certainly in the second half of the year, as you continue to see the trends move forward in terms of a lockdown lift and other restrictions come lifted with sort of vaccine proliferation, we expect that things are going to get better and that we'll be able to support customers more hands-on and certainly get out and see more machines that we've been missing for quite some time. Great. Lastly, then I'll get back in the queue. On the global supply chain issues, are there any issues with shortages of any of the components or any of the materials you need to source? Brian, this is John. Certainly, we're keeping a close eye on that. Luckily, in some ways, we've got relatively long lead times on our systems. We're able to satisfy demand in our systems business through this year. We are keeping a very close eye, particularly on the electronic side of this. The only other thing I'd mention is we have seen some disruptions on some of the consumable side relevant to having to source in different places and some inflation that we had not seen before. We've been able to manage it. We expect to continue to manage it. That's probably the one that obviously, that inventory turns much faster. It's critical we stay in front of that and keep our customers running. That's been something we've managed, I think, well. We will continue to stay vigilant on this, and our team talks about it on a weekly basis right now. Great. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sarkis Sherbetchyan with B. Riley Securities. Please proceed with your question. Good morning, and thank you for taking my question here. John and Doug, just wanted to touch a little bit more on the sales outlook. You're reaffirming here the 15%-25% year-on-year growth. I just wanted to see if you can maybe address the expected cadence of deliveries and also the recurring revenue flow-through. Obviously, you have pretty easy comps here in Q2, and I would argue for the fourth quarter. Just wanted to see if this is more of a back-half-weighted growth scenario or any kind of color you can provide there. Thank you. Sure. This is John. I'll just get started. Doug can talk about the quarter flow. From my standpoint, we're just seeing the U.S. open and the optimism that customers are talking to us about relevant to their capital purchases throughout this year. Not just the backlog we have, not just the refreshed product line, but really looking forward in the pipeline and the confidence we're seeing from customers. Attraction to this point of the supply chain has been disrupted, let's make it more regionally, more locally, and leverage the capability of additive. For all those reasons, we feel confident in that 15%-25% growth. Relevant to quarters, Doug, do you want to comment on it? We're certainly not, in any respects, chasing demand. Demand is pent up in an incredibly strong way as we continue to see a lot of interest in the metal product. Certainly as things start to open up, particularly in the U.S. market, we're seeing excess demand for emerging technologies, particularly the binder jetting printers that we manufacture and sell. Under normal conditions, if you went back in our history, you'd see that we've generally been a stronger second half company than a first half company. In fact, our percentages have ranged somewhere between, let's say, 30%-40% first half, and then the remainder in the second half. Usually, we've struck gold in our fourth quarters, mostly based on that we were following the CapEx cycle of our customers in terms of somebody plans in the fall, they lob orders in in the spring, and then you deliver and install in the successive fall or successive winter. Right now, I would say we're pretty much off of that schedule, and it's going to take a little while to unwind the backlog that we've built up relative to the average age of the backlog has gotten a bit older as we've just been stuck getting to certain systems that are either out in the field or certainly have been delivered and are under order. I would expect we're going to see some volatility in terms of how we recognize over the remainder of the year. I think you could see a bit more balance in Q2, three, and four, based on how our operating plans play out for the remainder of the year, just given the upsized backlog and where we know that the machines are, both geographically and what the scheduling is for the rest of the year. 2022 and beyond, I think we perhaps could see a reversion back to that CapEx cycle, albeit, as you can see, we're starting to grow the recurring revenue pool, and it's becoming more and more of a higher percentage of the total revenues of the company. That's much more stable, and you see that that has now grown for three consecutive quarters, or excuse me, four consecutive quarters over time, and it's starting to exceed $8 million per Q. Great. Thanks for that color. Just touching on the recurring revenues pool, do you think this kind of level is something that's sustainable and would keep growing from this point forward? As you mentioned, the increased interest, and obviously, it's a precursor to some of these potential customers buying system sales. Any comments you can give on your expected growth in that pool of business? Yeah. Recurring's been a part of the strategy for the last few years, and it's really gratifying to see it grow, and consistently grow. We think the levels we're at now will remain, and it's not going to be one of these things like capital equipment that goes up and down. It's going to consistently grow. We anticipate that we can continue to add resources that will allow that growth. I think one of the really exciting parts of recurring is the funded R&D. This is where Asking customers to go on the journey of the production adoption model with them and do a lot of materials and process development to ensure success once these high production machines are delivered to their facilities. Those revenues and those shared R&D contracts basically help us move our technology forward, add new materials, add new processes, tackle new geometries that we may not have been able to do before. It really is something that helps not just the recurring, which is going to stay consistent and grow slowly, but actually helps our machine business in the long run. Thanks for that. One final one from me, related really to the gross margin profile. Just want to get a sense for when margins start to trough out and recover. It sounded like you think the second quarter is going to look more or less the same as the first quarter. Just wanted to see if there's some additional color on what the evolution looks like as 2021 progresses. Certainly, it sounds like as you sell more units or deliver more units, we may see the incrementals as your fixed cost gets absorbed. Just wanted to get a sense for, was the first quarter a trough or should we expect a different kind of evolution? Thank you. Yeah. This is Doug. I certainly expect that Q1 for us was the trough. I think that the second quarter, the two factors I would look at are better leverage. I think we have a much better opportunity to post a higher revenue number, certainly than what we posted in Q1, driven by the systems opportunities, which is totally contingent on the backlog and being able to go out and execute. That leverage alone will drive up margin for the company as a whole. The second piece is that we still see the influence of some of the lower returns on the 25 Pros that we've talked about the last couple quarters as we get out from underneath sort of the first block order that we manufactured and built. We should be able to deliver the remainder of those systems predominantly in Q2, maybe a few that trickle into the second half of the year. For the most part, that impact, we should start to see a turnaround beginning in the second half of the year. I would say that the second half of the year certainly looks favorable as compared to the first, as we head into 2022 is when I think you'll start to see a more normalized return. Thank you. I'll hop back in the queue. Thank you. Our next question comes in of Jed Dorsheimer with Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your question. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess, first, just want to jump into the added headcount and the OpEx. Just wondering, it sounds like the vast majority is split between R&D and SG&A. Is there any that's going to be attached to COGS in terms of operationals? Yeah. Jed, I'll get us started. With this increased demand, which we see continuing for our metal systems and really positive acceptance of what our new products are and the broad range of materials, a lot of that, as you're right, I would say about half of it comes into technology development. The other half is really split between some elements of SG&A and COGS, because we are expanding capacity within our U.S. side to build additional systems for our metal products. I would say half is technology R&D, and then the other half is split between SG&A and COGS. That's really helpful. If I look at, and I'm assuming, obviously, you've done this analysis in terms of how to break the logjam on conversion from backlog into revenues and some of these new hires to do that. Have you come up with how suboptimal the business is operating as a function of the things that are out of your control in terms of COVID? I'm just wondering, do you see the business operating at 50% of, as you think through these adds, is that the unlocking feature that you see? Then I guess just cadence would be a second component to that question, assuming that new hires are going to have a, I'm not sure what the expectation is, a three-month or a six-month kind of ramp before they get into stride. It would seem that this year is a full year of an investment. Right. I would basically say that right now, part of this is the age of our backlog and the inability to travel is one of our key issues from an efficiency standpoint. Again, the ramp we're seeing on metal systems is what we're investing in. The new talent will have some time to move up the chain as far as experience level and ability to contribute. We talked before about this investment. It is a year of investment. We see a significant portion of this backlog converting this year that we've already put on the books. There's great optimism for the future years. In some ways, I've talked about the investment, as you said, for a multi-year sort of opportunity that's in front of us. 2022 through 2025 are going to be fantastic growth opportunities for us, and what we're doing is putting in the right people to ensure we capture more than our fair share of that opportunity. I'll just add to that, Jed, that when I look across some of the strategic resources that we're bringing into the company, geographically have been positioned and picked because of emerging trends that we're seeing in terms of where demand is ultimately going to float for the company for both metal and sand products, but certainly for metal products. That said, an offshoot of that has been that we've brought in resources so that we could physically attain access to some of the equipment that's been lingering in terms of getting backlog to turn over a bit quicker. We've also instituted other tools and had to change our approach in terms of having more remote capabilities and partnering with others to make this process work smoother going into the future. Not saying that we're going to go down into another lockdown period like this, but we've certainly gotten smarter throughout this process. The Asia question has been the most difficult one for us to answer, particularly in China, where again, we had this hang-up. We believe that our results would have looked much differently over the second half of 2020, as well as the first half of 2021, had we been able to execute on those transactions, would have resulted in higher revenue figures and certainly a better leverage in terms of margin. That's helpful. One last question for me, just 30,000 or maybe 40,000-ft perspective, John. If we look at the manufacturing base, moving to additive has a clear value proposition in terms of waste throughput, et cetera. Some of that value with the larger manufacturers, I think the Pareto law holds true that 80% of the manufactured products are done by 20% of the companies. A lot of the processes now are going to be on fully depreciated equipment. The challenge is bringing in a new process, you have to be even more efficient because it's not equal playing in terms of CapEx. How is that changing so that you see moving from a missionary sort of pilot or single to maybe multiple single-digit unit sales to getting that leverage point, where you get real commitment and adoption? Jed, that's a great question. It's a bit of a challenge the industry's been going through for a while. One of the things that are really changed since, let's say, the last few years, obviously, the attention and the ability for companies like us to deliver at volume, highly complex additive manufacturing metal parts. We're kind of opening an opportunity that maybe wasn't there a few years ago. I think at the same time, the decision makers and the customers are saying, we have other reasons to consider additive, whether that is because of supply chain disruptions, and if you can't get the part, you better find another way, and that's one thing that's opening up opportunities. As well as the customer's requirements, let's say, for mileage standards or frankly, even for them to compete with some of their new competitors, they need to do things that are lightweight, new designs that are frankly impossible in traditional, maybe fully depreciated equipment. That's where we come in. We take part of the challenge to continue to drive down cost of ownership, and we do that in conjunction with our customers in these production adoption models. We're looking for every way to continue to drive down the cost of ownership while still delivering a huge value when it comes to innovative designs and productivity of their product. The last thing I'd say on that is, we are also stepping back, and we had a slide in the deck related to sustainability. Beyond the pure dollars and cents, the price per pound for stainless steel powder, we're looking at what is the impact on sustainability, the carbon impact, and we've joined the Additive Manufacturer Green Trade Association, and we're funding right now projects that allow us to truly understand the difference between conventional and additive from a carbon footprint, as well as distributed manufacturing and optimized designs of those additive parts. It's all part of the overall cost of ownership, and I think there is a window opened right now where customers are thinking more broadly and willing to take the risk to move to additive. It's a pretty exciting time, and that's going to continue for the next few years, I think for sure. That's helpful. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Martin Yang with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question. Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I want to ask again about the execution challenge in China, because it seems a little counterintuitive, given the country is fully opened up. Can you maybe talk about what's the hang-up there? Is it more customer specific as opposed to macro related? A follow-up on that, was more local hiring part of the solution to solve the challenge? From our perspective, one thing to keep in mind is that we don't have a physical business in China. We do have individuals on the ground who are capable of maintaining and supporting customers in that country. We don't have a physical operation, which does present a bit of a challenge. Our Asia hub is based out of Japan, and given travel restrictions, it's been quite difficult to get foreigners into China to work on systems. For those that are based out of that region, there are significant quarantining and other disruptions, too, when you go and try and do work. Not just external into China, but moving from province to province is also a challenge. These are not all centrally located in one particular spot. They're spread out in different areas, just maneuvering around and working with the customers who have had their own situations in terms of restrictions and lockdown has been a significant challenge. We're not looking at that as substantially open. Again, if we had our preference, we would have had ExOne engineers, who are predominantly based either in the United States or Germany, physically traveling and working on systems alongside customers to ensure a smooth transition to operation. Unfortunately, we've had to manage that almost exclusively remotely with the limited headcount that we actually do have within the region. Oh, thank you. One more question from me. Given those challenges, and you maintain the full year guidance, do you have a different view on what's driving the full year guidance geographically? Maybe has the mix changed in your mind? I would say geographically, no. We expect the ability to open up in regions like Asia and Europe to happen in the second half. We do expect our ability to execute customer acceptances in the second half will be much better. Frankly, starting in the second quarter, even. As far as opportunities, as far as new bookings, certainly the U.S. is really strong right now, and we are seeing that lead the way. Likewise, we expect Europe and Asia will continue to follow that trend, and from a booking standpoint, open up more. Even this morning, I had some conversations with Asia, and there's new optimism across some of the regions and new orders coming in, which is a really positive thing. I think that would say geographically, certainly this year will be more U.S. or Americas focused. It will move back to the same. I don't know whether our opportunities are more probably in the long run, more of a 40/40/20 around the world or in that kind of range. Yeah, our general splits throughout history have been fairly balanced between the different regions, Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pac. We've trended because of the volatility of the results from one period to the next. You've seen disparity in how that split's worked out. In general, over longer periods of time, you've seen it fairly balanced between those regions. When I look at what we expect for 2021, certainly Americas is bringing up a larger percentage given the recent contract wins, given the recent performance, certainly in the first quarter and what we anticipate for the remainder of this year. When you look at it from a product perspective, we had anticipated that 2021 was going to be we were going to continue to see the trend that started to develop in 2020, where metal starts to make up a greater percentage of our revenues as a portfolio. Historically, we had been maybe an 80%-20% sand to metal company. Last year, we saw that trend shift more towards 70/30 sand to metal, and now we're starting to see it go even beyond that. The metal demand is quite strong. That started in the Americas, but it's starting to spread a bit globally. That gives you a little bit of a perspective as to what the splits look like as we look for the full year 2021 performance. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Noelle Dilts with Stifel. Please proceed with your question. Hi, guys. Thanks. A lot of good questions so far, so just one from me. I was hoping you could just speak to what you're seeing and how you're thinking about M&A and partnerships at this time. Maybe you could kind of speak to your pipeline and potential for additional partnerships for M&A this year. Thanks. Good morning, Noelle. Thanks for the question. Yeah, I would say we obviously have some small examples here in the first quarter, second quarter, which has started. With our strong business base and growing business base, our global infrastructure and the strong balance sheet we now have, I feel like it's perfect time for us to look for opportunities that might fit our strategy. What does that mean? It means it's got to be metal-oriented. It's got to be industrial as opposed to being all things to all people. We've seen some opportunities come up already. The Metal Designlab with Rapidia has been really positive, and it really will be a great product for us over time. Freshmade, this is leveraging our sand printing business and tooling opportunities around the world and getting us into some new markets there. We're going to use those guideposts, and we're open to, and frankly, in some ways because of our momentum in the marketplace, I think we're becoming a little bit of having an opportunity where companies are coming to us and wanting to be part of the train that we're on. Most of these will be small to medium-sized opportunities. That's where we think we can be most effective in executing our strategy. Again, the examples you have so far are good examples, but we have some other ones that could be part of the opportunity set in the future. We're going to be prudent about it. It definitely is a way for us to grow. We have a great base. We have a strong balance sheet, and we're going to approach it in a prudent fashion, but in an opportunistic fashion. Great. Thanks, John. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question and answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Hartner for any final comments. Okay. Thank you all for your time today and for your interest in our vision towards sustainable manufacturing without limitations. Thanks to our global team, our partners, and our customers, and we look forward to updating you on our progress after our next quarter. So long. Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.