Data I/O - Earnings Call - Q2 2025

Executive Summary

• Bookings inflected: Q2 bookings rose to $5.8M from $4.6M in Q1 (+~$1.2M) as auto EV demand in China offset tariff-driven CapEx delays; backlog ended at $2.8M and includes a 10-system UFS 4.0 order (> $1.4M) slated for 2H delivery.
• Revenue of $5.95M grew 17% y/y but fell 3.7% q/q; gross margin compressed to 49.8% on lower-options system mix and prototype costs; GAAP EPS was ($0.08) vs ($0.09) y/y and ($0.04) in Q1.
• Non-GAAP lens: ~$480k one-time platform/IT/leadership costs in Q2 drove Adjusted EBITDA to ($0.44M); excluding these, AEBITDA would have been +$0.04M and operating loss would improve from ($0.84M) to ($0.36M).
• Catalysts into 2H: first UFS 4.0 win in China; multiple product launches (LumenX-M8/FCIII-M4 rolling into broader roadmap), six large trade shows, and management-identified ~$512k annual IT savings underway; management expects a broader product mix and improved margins in 2H while noting some CFO transition “double spend” in Q3/Q4.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

• What Went Well

  • Bookings momentum returned: Q2 bookings climbed to $5.8M (from $4.6M in Q1) despite tariff uncertainty; automotive represented 66% with Asia/China strength, and backlog ended at $2.8M with 10 PSV systems (> $1.4M) for 2H delivery.
  • Strategic UFS 4.0 milestone and EV win: Data I/O received its first UFS 4.0 order and booked 10 systems with LumenX heads for a leading China EV supplier after demonstrating improved UFS capabilities.
  • Cash and cost actions: Cash was ~$10.0M at Q2-end with no debt, while management is executing IT and cost initiatives that target ~$512k of annualized savings, roughly half implemented by Q2.

• What Went Wrong

  • Margin pressure: Gross margin fell to 49.8% vs 51.6% in Q1 and 54.5% y/y, driven by a low-options mix on shipped systems and prototype/V1 reskin costs not tied to revenue.
  • One-time costs weighed on profitability: ~$480k non-recurring platform, IT, and leadership transition expenses pushed operating loss to ($0.84M) and Adjusted EBITDA to ($0.44M).
  • Demand uncertainty ex-Asia: Europe and the Americas remained pressured by tariff/trade uncertainty, with Korea notably stalling CapEx versus initial expectations.

Transcript

Speaker 5

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Data I/O Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Mr. Jordan Darrow, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Speaker 3

Thank you, operator, and welcome to the Data I/O Corporation's Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. With me today are the company's President and CEO, Bill Wentworth, and Interim Chief Financial Officer, Todd Henn. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that statements made in this conference call concerning future events, results from operations, financial positions, markets, economic conditions, supply chain expectations, estimated impact of tax and other regulatory reform, product releases, new industry participants, and any other statements that may be construed as a prediction of future performance or events, are forward-looking statements which involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements.

These factors also include uncertainties as the impact of global and geopolitical events, international tariff and trade regulations, order levels for the company, and the activity level of the automotive and semiconductor industry overall, ability to record revenues based on the timing of product deliveries and installations, market acceptance of new products, changes in economic conditions and market demand, part shortages, pricing, and other activities by competitors, and other risks, including those described from time to time in the company's filings on Forms 10-K and 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in our press releases, and other communications. The company may also reference GAAP and non-GAAP financial performance measures, including one-time items, which are intended to provide listeners with a means to better understand the company's performance. The accuracy and completeness of all discussions on this call, including forward-looking statements, should not be unduly relied upon.

Data I/O is under no duty to update any forward-looking statements. I'd like to turn the call over to Bill Wentworth, President and CEO of Data I/O.

Speaker 5

Thank you, Jordan, for that introduction. I also want to thank the people that have made the call and took out the time to listen to what we're going to talk about today. As you can see, if anybody's seen the report, bookings were up sequentially from Q4, Q1, Q2, Q4, Q6, and Q2, Q5, Q8, respectively. That's obviously been a focus for us, to get that booking number going in the right direction. It still hasn't settled in the backlog number. I see that in the second half, and I'll talk a little bit more about that and why. The large system order reflects our commitment to our core programming platform. The new Universal Platform will be rolling out between now and the end of the year. The reason for this investment is the complexity of programming technology, especially in memory, has gotten a lot more difficult.

The commitment to that is we need to have a platform that can actually handle these new technologies and the complexity that come with them and the changing standards that really almost change almost annually at this point, at least every two years. This complexity has driven the need to obviously invest in our core platform, which we are doing, and that order reflected that commitment because one of those technologies was UFS flash memory. Both UFS and NVMe, which are two technologies we are focused on, not the only ones, but certainly two of the core because they have the most complexity, have annual CAGRs between now and 2030 of 14%. That is twice the semiconductor market.

There is a very good reason to be focusing in on these technologies, but also advance our platform in general for the wide range of products that we have to serve and eventually end up on one platform, which is our ultimate goal of sometime the end of 2026, beginning of 2027, which will also help reduce a significant amount of technical debt the company's been carrying from the past. Second half, I can tell you the product mix looks better. We'll get into the margin discussion later and also look forward to any Q&A around that because I'm sure there'll be some very pointed questions around margin, which I totally understand and we're well aware of it. We have six major events between September and November. This is all around our new product roadmap, but the products are actually going to be introduced at these shows.

These are six of the largest shows in their territory, from China to Germany, which is Productronica. India now has Productronica because their tech market has grown significantly. This is the first time we'll be showing at that event with our new products. China has their show in October, and there's a spattering of other events as well. In Mexico, Guadalajara, they have their largest event in September as well. This should really pick up, significantly increase the lead generation that we'll be doing. These are big announcements that really drive a lot of value and understanding about where Data I/O is going with its technology and its roadmap overall. These are roadmaps that were not just done in a vacuum.

They were done with sharing data with our semiconductor partners, which we established better, more significant partnerships in the first quarter of this year, which really helps us really look out 10 to 15 years about where we need to be. The technology is not going to slow down. We have to be able to accept and be able to have room in our fabric of our platform to be able to absorb these new technologies, which we will have. Everything from a milestone perspective is on track, which is great. It's a little tight, that always happens, but we look really good for these launches for the second half. What else would I like to say? Now it's the product roadmap. Let's see. I think that's it for right now. I will now turn over to Todd Henn for our financial section, but really look forward to the Q&A.

We have plenty to talk about, and I'm excited to talk about it. Look forward to your questions. All right, Todd.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Bill, and good day to everyone. It's a pleasure to speak with all of you today. In my remarks, I will address our recent financial performance in more detail. My comments today will focus on key points of interest for the second quarter of 2025, recent trends, and our outlook for the second half of the year. Net sales in the second quarter of 2025 were $5.0 million, down from $6.2 million in the first quarter of 2025, and up from $5.1 million in the second quarter of 2024. First quarter of 2025 revenues were elevated due to the completion of a large order received in the first quarter of 2024. We were also awarded a large order toward the end of the second quarter of 2025, which is expected to be shipped and recognized as revenue in the second half of the year.

Automotive electronics, as a primary business segment, represented 66% of second quarter of 2025 bookings compared to 59% for all of 2024. Asia, led by China, has been relatively strong, particularly within the EV sector of automotive electronics. Europe and the Americas continue to be pressured by pent-up capital equipment spending due to tariff and trade uncertainties. Despite this headwind, consumable adapters and services provide a stable base of recurring revenue, which represents 50% of total revenue in the second quarter. Moving on to new bookings, the first two months of the second quarter carried forward similar activity from the first quarter order activity, which were impacted by the aforementioned tariff uncertainties. Conditions improved in June, as evidenced by the large order we announced, and have continued to remain active in the third quarter to date, even though certain of the international trade negotiations remain an issue.

Second quarter of 2025 bookings were $5.8 million, up from $4.6 million in the first quarter of 2025 and $5.6 million in the second quarter of 2024. Backlog as of June 30, 2025 was $2.8 million, down $200,000 from March 31, 2025. Gross margin as a percentage of sales was 49.8% in the second quarter of 2025, as compared to 51.6% in the first quarter of 2025 and 54.5% in the prior year period. A lower margin product mix and configuration of automated systems driven by a large customer order led to reduced margins. Direct material costs remain steady and consistent with prior periods. Ongoing supply chain planning and other actions have been mitigating the impact of new tariffs, trade, and inflationary pressures, including shifting material sourcing and product manufacturing.

While our top-line performance was affected by tariff and trade negotiation pressures, we really have not been meaningfully impacted on the manufacturing side due to earlier mitigation and workaround strategies that are possible given our diversified supply chain and manufacturing operations in the U.S. and China. More recently, we are seeing some smaller items creeping in, like, for example, aluminum, that have been hit with higher tariffs in certain parts of the world. We are not an aluminum buyer directly, but there is a small % of that metal in some of our system parts we purchase. We are taking steps to avoid this increase in price and note that it is currently in a very small and limited amount within our overall cost of goods sold.

Operating expenses for the second quarter of 2025 were $3.8 million, up from $3.6 million in the first quarter of 2025 and $3.3 million in the prior year period. Second quarter of 2025 spending included approximately $480,000 in one-time expenses, which are part of the company's investments in the core programming platform and information systems, as well as for leadership and other human resources transition requirements. While savings from prior improvements in operations and more recent investments are expected to continue to positively influence financial performance, the one-time spending items are being brought to light to provide transparency into what we are doing and where we believe we'd be under normal conditions. For comparison purposes, the first quarter operating expenses included annual spending on public company costs pertaining to audits, regulatory fees, and NASDAQ fees of approximately $300,000.

The additional one-time spending in the second quarter of 2025 put us into a loss on operating income, net income, and adjusted EBITDA basis. That said, in looking into cash flow on the balance sheet, we used a very small amount of cash in the quarter, primarily for investments, as we've touched upon during the call, and for the other one-time spending purposes. I'd like to provide additional color and perspective on these one-time items. We're making investments as well as critical enhancements to our technology platform and putting in place a roadmap for the future. These investments are one-time in nature, which amounted to approximately $165,000 in the second quarter of 2025. We also made the important decision to invest in the establishment of two other key functional areas: one, our new sales and marketing strategies, and two, the framework for ongoing growth and future business line expansion.

Additional one-time expenses included costs related to HR and the CFO transition, for which we spent about $145,000 in the second quarter of 2025. We expect to make an announcement of a permanent CFO in the third quarter of 2025, but I'll remain on board for a brief period of time to ensure a smooth transition. Therefore, we expect some double spending in the third quarter of 2025 and possibly the fourth quarter of 2025 on the CFO transition. One-time expenses in the second quarter of 2025 for technology and IT-related growth initiatives amounted to $170,000. Total one-time investments and expenses in the second quarter of 2025 were approximately $480,000, which reduced our profits, adjusted EBITDA, and cash in the period.

Backing out one-time expenses in the second quarter of 2025 would have left us with an operating loss of $364,000 versus the reported second quarter operating loss of $844,000 and the second quarter of 2024 operating loss of $566,000. Again, backing out one-time expenses, adjusted EBITDA would have been $43,000 versus the reported adjusted EBITDA loss of $437,000 and positive adjusted EBITDA of $3,000 in the prior year period. Working within this framework, it would seem that our cash balance absent the one-time expenses would have been approximately $480,000 higher or nearly $10.5 million as of June 30, 2025, versus the reported amount of $10 million at the end of June 2025 and $10.3 million as of December 31, 2024.

Based on this analysis, we can see that our financial performance and cash management reflect an improved cost structure and effective handling of our inventory and other short-term assets, all while we invested for more productive operations and future growth and scaling of the business. Data I/O's networking capital of over $15.6 million as of June 30, 2025, was slightly lower than $16.1 million at the end of last year, largely reflecting one-time spending through the first half of the year, which also included public company and other annual costs paid in the first quarter of 2025. Finally, the company continues to have no debt. This concludes my remarks for the second quarter of 2025. Operator, would you please start the Q&A portion of the call?

Speaker 4

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we'll begin the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star and then one using a touch-tone telephone. To withdraw your questions, you may press star and two. If you are using a speakerphone, we do ask that you please pick up the handset prior to pressing the keys to ensure the best sound quality. Once again, that is star and then one to join the question queue. Our first question today comes from David Marsh from Singular Research. Please go ahead with your question.

Hey, thanks, guys, for taking the questions. I just wanted to start out, if I could, a quick housekeeping question. With regards to the $480,000, Todd, can you tell me how that hits the P&L, in terms of SG&A, R&D, how it might hit the P&L, and how we could think about that going forward, in particular, around the kind of double counting you were saying for CFO services in the back half of the year?

Speaker 2

Yeah, it really, David, it hits multiple areas. I mean, primarily the area it's going to hit is going to be the G&A category because that's where the IT spending goes. That's where the finance spending goes. That's where HR goes. A majority of that is going to be on the G&A line.

Some of the consulting is in there.

Some of it's in, and also the executive, there's some consulting in our Executive group, and that's also in the same line item.

I would expect to kind of run out by the end of the year. With the savings that we're seeing across, we did a lot of IT discovery in our infrastructure, and there was a lot of discovery to be done there. We identified all the spend. One of the consultants I brought in is going through each vendor. We've already identified about $512,000 worth of spend reduction in our IT annually. We're probably about halfway to that number already implemented. I expect the rest of that to be done definitely before year-end for sure. I can't tell you exactly when because some of it's got a lot of complexity to it. We're trying to move as much as we can to the cloud, get more stuff off-prem, which then enhances our security. We'll end up with far better infrastructure, far secure infrastructure, and half the price.

I think it's been a great exercise for sure. I would expect the consultants that do run up to about, annualized, if I use the number, some of them have increased because of the work that they're doing specifically in IT. That's going to more than the paper itself. Probably about an annualized spend around $500,000, maybe a little bit more. There's a couple of people that we've extended that were supposed to retire, I convinced to stay on board because of their 30 years of knowledge, and they've been super helpful in defining our new programming platform and looking at being more vertically integrated, which is one of our new growth strategies that we've now identified in Q2 and will be moving forward in the second half. That's also expanding into services, which I've talked to some of the shareholders about.

Sorry for that long-winded answer, but I just want to get all that out there.

Speaker 5

No, that's really helpful. I appreciate that. I appreciate that color and detail. Hey, Bill, I guess I kind of want to dial in here a little bit on the UFS flash. You had a lot of commentary, obviously, in the press release about it. Obviously, great news on these new orders. This is a part of the business that's been kind of challenged with kind of lower yield rates historically. Could you just talk about what Data I/O can do differently that might produce some better yield rates? Could you talk a little bit more about the map?

Thanks for the layup. I appreciate that. UFS, when LumenX was first introduced, it was really introduced as a product, not a platform. Through my discovery process, and this actually goes back to Q4, I identified some of the technology gaps that were in the platform itself, and they were not small. I came back and started the year with a vengeance and just challenged the entire engineering team to say, look, we just need to reset here completely on LumenX. That is what we've done. We brought in some outside consultants. There were some one-time charges in Q1 too that we didn't get a chance to talk about, which I wish we did, and we'd give some reasons and more color for those numbers. The investment here, Dave, is going to do exactly that, is get our yields. We need to be at 99.8 or 99.9%.

That's the typical yield for memory devices. That has been ever since flash came out. UFS, you have to picture it almost like a hard drive. It's got multiple layers, just like hard drive platters, and it's also a small part of what's inside the memory that directs to each one of those slivers of wafer or memory section to basically land the data. It's like a mini hard drive in a way, but it just does it through flash cells and a small instruction code. That's why they have these, what they call protocols. These handshake protocols have only been present in UFS. They're not even in eMMC. eMMC is just a large piece of memory. That's it. UFS is a completely different animal, and so much more difficult. If you don't pre-plan in your architecture for this technology, there's no way you get there.

We had to invest in some bench equipment to help us actually drive the ability for the engineers to actually identify why it was not working, why we were not getting those yields. When I went to Asia in December, it was chaos there. It was because driven by UFS, the yield, the log files, the yields were all over the place. It would bounce, each site would bounce around from failure rates, and nobody knew why. When I came back from that trip, and then I dove into the platform to find out why, it was evident as to why that happened. We've been working since January. When John Duffy, who took over our hardware department in January, I said, "John, welcome to Data I/O, and you need to design a new platform." It was a pretty big introduction.

He's done a phenomenal job of getting the engineers rallied around this. I will tell you, testing on a certain contact that we're trying, and it's an older contact technology, socket technology, but we've honed in some of the parameters of it. We're seeing 100% yield right now at test. It's a small sample size, so we're not ready to say we've won the war because we haven't. There's still a ways to go. There are still some intermittent issues that are happening, but we have line of sight. We also are trying other socketing technology that I believe will actually offer better contacting capability. The next most important thing to our platform is the ability to contact the device. If you can't make that 100% perfect, it's very difficult to drive good yields. It just is.

It's one of the reasons why we're looking at being more vertically integrated around socketing and getting into that market. It's not a bad market. It's $7 billion. It wouldn't be bad for Data I/O to enter that market to get a little sliver. It's a larger market. It can increase our overall revenue over time. The margins are pretty solid. Sorry for that long-winded answer, but that is our primary focus is yield.

Got it. If I could just sneak one last one in here before I yield. Just, you know, gross margin, this is kind of a low watermark for the last couple of years that we've seen for the company. Can you just kind of, you know, obviously, Todd, I caught your comments on mix, but maybe you could just give a little bit more color on that and kind of just what the expectations are, you know, maybe for the back half of the year if you have any of that available.

I do. Actually, another layup. Thank you. That order came in June, and we were actually able to ship a few systems out before the end of the quarter. There will be six of them. That came from one of our larger customers. The I/Os or the options, I would say, they do not put a lot of them in. They do load up on the programmers. That was one of the reasons why we had to conquer this 4.0, because it was part of that order, because they were putting LumenX heads in the systems. Not as much as we would like, but enough.

They were the smaller systems, less I/Os, and you have six of them in the mix with a 7,000, a couple of 3,500s. It is going to end up putting a lot of pressure on that because the mix was just so pointed in one direction. That is definitely going to drive down. The second half, we have a very broad mix of products on the system side. 3,000s, 5,000s, 7,000s all look very similar, equal weighted in Q3 and Q4. Certainly with the manual launches, we should get a lot more conversations around systems as we drive more value into the product line. We also do not have any revenue in the second half for any of the manual system launches. I will tell you, from the early demos and conversations we have had with customers, they are literally waiting for that product to come out to buy.

I think we have already got like 15 manual systems. Not a ton of money, but that will start to really build out. We have a lot of low-hanging fruit with our system customers over the 500 systems that have been delivered over the last 10 years. Every one of those customers could at least buy two of these manual systems. We really expect that to drive a lot more conversation with customers, but also get us more exposure into what they are thinking and where their businesses are going also for 2026. That is the reason for the depressed margin. We also had some additional costs and cost of materials with prototyping for V1, reskinning V0. That had a little impact on the margin as well because those costs were not connected to any specific revenue, just added costs to the supply side. I hope that answers your question.

Yep, very helpful. Hey, thanks, guys. I'm going to yield the floor.

Okay.

Speaker 4

Our next question comes from Casey Ryan from West Park Capital. Please go ahead with your question.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for the update. Real quickly, I think we've talked in the past about wanting to expand beyond automotive, and I know that this takes time.

Oh, yeah.

Would you be happy to give us sort of a qualitative view of how it's going, expanding and getting into new customers, right, and talking to people who maybe knew you but hadn't chosen you in the past? That certainly feels like a big expansion area, right, long term.

Right, right. No, it's a good question. Unfortunately, right now, I would say the new conversations are really going to be driven by the lead generation from the six shows we have coming up in the second half. Right now, I wouldn't say that we're not out there selling, but certainly, we have these new product launches coming up and that we know is going to drive more value to customers than new customers. We're kind of in that in-between moment. Certainly, on the customer side, yes, automotive continues to be big because it's been very large. When you have these trail headwinds, as an example, our South Korea rep was one of our largest revenue-producing reps. At this point last year, they had acquired. When they forecasted for 2025, certainly, tariffs wasn't in the discussion at that time in December of forecasting.

They were earmarked for $3.5 million of revenue. They've done zero. A lot has been tariff-driven because in Korea, the customers we have there are tariff-affected. Their volumes slow down, and they just put CapEx on hold. That's been a direct impact to our revenue for the first half. We would have a far better first half if that had not occurred. March, April, and May were scary months. That's the best I could say. June was outstanding. We unlocked some of that CapEx spend that was out there. Again, it ended up being mostly automotive. We went from 59% or 58% to 66%. That's not the direction I want to go in.

We definitely want to be more diverse in our domains that we serve because that obviously makes the revenue more stable and not as impactful if you have an industry event like we have had in automotive, which really started to affect the numbers early last year. Absolutely, and as a continued focus, Monty and the sales team are all over that. We are changing almost monthly kind of our strategy. It's getting better and better as we fine-tune it. We're definitely being far more consultative. We came up with additional sales strategies that are going to help that. On top of it, with the investment in IT infrastructure, mostly on the application side, we're adopting Salesforce Service Cloud. It's a great application. It ties directly into CRM, but it also will allow us to get the field service team to also be revenue generating.

That group should generate revenue through doing milk runs, health checks, going in and talking to the operators, offering training, but also identifying things that they may not know about our product line where they could get more throughput, better productivity, other programs, software that can help them identify issues if they have any, like really drive a lot more value. We're going to initiate that even before the implementation of Service Cloud, which should be about 12 weeks. I want to get at least the last two months fully under Salesforce Service Cloud. We're going to start those milk runs this quarter, probably September. It's after the summer season. Everybody's back into full work form. After Labor Day, we'll probably start those. We're identifying exactly the regions. We've got the team to go out.

We're arming them with iPads so they can document all the data and enter it directly into Salesforce. When Salesforce Service Cloud comes online, that data will already be in there. There's not a whole lot of data we'll be able to pull from the old system because of the way it was configured, but we'll be pulling over the meaningful data. There's a total focus around enhancing our existing customer relationships. A lot of this comes from contract manufacturers. Contract manufacturers have, as a service provider, have diversity built into their customer base already. We had a couple of machines go out to Jayville end of last quarter, one going out this quarter. When they use these machines in some of the plants that are somewhat universal in the markets they serve, some will be dedicated to automotive. That was where one of these systems went.

Because of the reason that, one, it's a platform they designed into their build plan. Once you set that in automotive, you can't make changes. You're in. One is more of one of the facilities that does a broad range of products. We are even managing that to that level within the EMS world because you have to set up by domain based on compliance programs, regulation, things like that. It's very much a focus. I do not like being focused. I learned a very hard lesson back in 2001 of being too focused on a domain, which was networking and telco back in early 2001. It was devastating to the entire industry. One of the things, even as a board member, I identified is this is something that has to be changed.

Really, right. Okay, good. That's actually a very helpful overview.

We just can't get out of automotive's way. They like us.

You're just too popular. Understood.

Yes, I guess so.

The bookings growth was really good, right? Quarter over quarter, I think 26%. I mean, which is a big number off small numbers. I understand that. Do you feel like we could continue to see bookings at this level, or is it reasonable to think that bookings could actually keep rising as we move through the year?

Oh, yeah.

What would you recommend?

They should, and they will. I mean, we're rolling out new products. The good thing about the booking numbers, and systems are a little more challenging. Depending on the system type, the fact that they were 5,000s actually was a good thing because we could build them faster. They're easier machines to make. China, I mean, the order was in China. The Shanghai facility built them and delivered them. That was a unique situation. That's why we would focus so hard on getting over this UFS, not only just to complement or be able to show that we can actually do this and be able to get high yields on UFS technology because there are multiple protocols out there. The sweet spot right now for UFS is 3.1 and about 128 gigabytes. There's already 256s out there. There's 512s coming and one terabyte is coming in 2027.

The unique thing about this is we were able to book and ship within the quarter, a decent amount of those systems to help the quarter. That was the big help there.

Okay. All right. Terrific. Sort of getting to the gross margins, I guess I'm a little less concerned about it, but, yeah, quarter to quarter. Tell me about the spread of the margins across your product. How wide of a spread do we have to think about in terms of mix? I mean, are some at 70% and some at 30%, or is everyone kind of in this 45%?

No, it's a good question. I asked, the board asked that question yesterday. We need to do a little bit more homework on that so we can identify. One of the things that manufacturing implemented at the beginning of the year is that we didn't do a good job of true cost accounting at the labor level to really understand what our margins are product to product. I had Duane Sterling-Jones as our VP of Manufacturing. It's awesome what he does. He's been here for 30 years, and he's been crying for this opportunity to be able to track the data as we build. They've been doing that, and we'll start to be able to do true, we are doing true activity-based accounting on manufacturing because we understand the exact margins of those products.

Manual systems are going to have a much, like sockets, very similar margin to sockets, maybe even more. As we build leverage on the platform, we can also increase our pricing. That increase in pricing, as I looked at how we price things, we tend to mark up the things we don't make pretty high. I don't think we mark up our core platform and where we invest our capital high enough. We're going to start breaking some of this stuff out, just especially internally, so that where we're spending the money accurately shows the generation of revenue and the gross margin contribution to the company. When I talk about investing in the core, people will get excited because they'll see the real value that we drive by making those investments in what we do, which is building programmers, not handlers.

The PSV line is kind of aged at this point. It's been over 10 years, around 10 years since the first PSV was announced. We are looking at new automation designs now, and we'll start hopefully a project plan by Q1. We're going to simplify the systems, and by simplification, it actually leads to a much lower cost. We'll have increased margins. We're also looking at the market a little differently than putting everything in one platform and one machine. We'll still make probably the 7,000. We'll do some advances on it, change the smack head, so we'll increase speed and UPH. When you have a large system that moves in multiple directions, they just will tend to break down more. You know, we try to give customers the right information on what to maintain, but they don't always do it.

By going to a single gantry and a very high-speed pickhead, we can get probably a lot, probably a 50% increase in throughput in a machine that's far less to build and far simpler to manage. It has a smaller footprint. These are just design thoughts, but definitely doable. What it does is it should increase uptime for our customers, but also lower maintenance costs and higher throughput. That's a pretty large value that they get there. The second part of that will be breaking off some of the I/Os and putting that in a separate system, meaning marking and tape and rail. Tape and rail will still be able to go tape to tape or tray to tape in the programming platform, automation platform. There's a real need for a system that just does those services complementary to programming, but also individually in their supply chain.

I think we could put a package of two systems that marry up to each other that provide customers a wider variability to manage their supply chain. Like if they had parts that came in and some of them were bent in the reels, they could run vision inspection on that machine and not do programming. I think it expands our market as well in automation in general. The whole purpose is on the programming side, but you know, why not have a machine that's universal, that's got a good price point that you can do other services on it? The programming houses will love it. The contract manufacturers will love it because they can build that into their supply chain.

If you would like to ask a question, please press star and then one. You can press star and two. Our next question comes from George Marema from Peritoneal Ventures. Please go ahead with your question.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Bill.

Hey, George. How are you?

I'm well. First, I just want to say I'm absolutely thrilled with the team's energy and the big positive cultural shift going on there. It's like an entrepreneurial startup, and I'm just thrilled about this.

It is. I will tell you, I changed the work-from-home policy a few weeks ago. Not everybody loved it. I will tell you, in the last four weeks, it's amazing the amount of collaboration we have now. I've got the software team in here all together. They're here on fixed days. You can see the collaboration growing, which will just extend into the value that we'll be driving in the second half. Some of the software team came out and fixed the old product. When we get this thing out there, it is the amount of value that it's going to give our customers. I was just blown away when they did the demo last week. It's pretty special what's going on in the building right now.

That's great to hear. A couple of questions. One is on this $1.4 million EV order from China. What kind of penetration does this represent into this company, does it meet all their needs, and what does this replace that they were using?

It didn't replace. Obviously, the Chinese EV market is doing very well inside of China and also outside of China, where they don't have massive tariffs put on their cars and can actually sell them. That is, they were an existing customer, already had 20 systems. This was adding to their demand, so an existing customer. That's why the configuration was what we expected from them and price point we kind of knew. It was a great order to overcome. The UFS technology is something that they already use. That was 4.0 because they were going to make a new investment, and those systems are on a product that's going to adopt the 4.0 protocols. Like I said earlier, the 3.1 is the sweet spot today. They use that in our systems for that as well and have been dealing with the yield this year.

It's why they were like, look, we're not going to place an order unless you can show us you can conquer this. We did, and we got the order. The engineers worked literally 24/7 for eight weeks. It was hardcore, and they accomplished a phenomenal goal, which also gave them all the hope that we know we can conquer the 3.1. All our competitors are having the same problems. Once we solve this yield issue, I believe this pent-up demand in the sweet spot right now. I can't say that confirmatory, with 100% confidence. It's just a feeling. I think customers have also held back in general offline programming until this problem can be resolved, and they're just managing through. They can get enough yield to build the products, but if I was them, I wouldn't be happy either.

We're giving them a lot of hope that we, not hope, just we've shown them that we can fix this. We're pretty close on three, I would say we're probably four to six weeks. Again, that's just the range, and it may be eight, but we will get 3.1 solved by the end of this quarter.

If you get that solved and then the 4.0, can you sort of describe the best you can what kind of dollar market opportunity does that represent for you guys if you solve these problems? Also, does the profile of this solution have the same type of recurring adapter revenue, or is it less or more or about the same?

Oh, no. It would be the same adapter revenue and all that. Yeah, none of that changes. If anything, they probably would increase, obviously, as they move into more of using UFS across their entire platform. I'll tell you, it's not just Asia. It's Korea. It's Europe. There's not much UFS, believe it or not. Not a ton in Mexico, but it's coming. As more and more adoption of the UFS and NVMe too, which is something we haven't talked about before, it is a technology that also is growing at 14% CAGR. Ironically, the bench equipment was already here to start working on it. It was just never implemented. It's hard for me to put in dollars because, again, if I look at the Korea customers, they bought 7,000s. They didn't buy 5,000s. They would load up because they're using a ton, especially in consumer, some in automotive.

In the consumer side, you're driving large, large volumes of UFS. In Korea, they would configure those systems with pretty much all LumenX, no flash core. It's hard for me to give you a very direct answer because it's literally region by region. It's also market by market. Does that make sense?

Suffice to say, it's a large opportunity, though. Yeah.

Of course. It's like I said, 14% is twice the overall semiconductor demand. It would be crazy not to conquer this. It's where literally a significant amount of our engineering time is being spent right now. We've really dumped a lot of the programs that were in the business in Q4, pretty much all of them, because one, it wasn't investing in the core, and it wasn't solving the problem. What I found was, and as a board member, I just became recently aware of the UFS, but until you get under the covers, you don't really know what's going on. They could flash up a bunch of reports that say we solved this, we solved that. In reality, a lot of it was not solved. It's not because they were kind of guessing as to where they should focus to solve.

I will tell you from my experience of being intimately involved in this right now that it's literally four or five areas of our technology and our automation, and socketing is a huge part of this, right? Contacting the device. Also, the LumenX platform is eight sites. Eight sites was okay with eMMC, not okay with UFS. By the new platform, it goes down to four sites, which gives us much more power to every pin on the device, which you need to access multiple of these pins because you're dealing with such complexity in the device itself. We can solve it with what we refer to now as M8, but M4 will definitely be, which gets launched in November. We've been able to do some pretty special things even on the existing platform, like 4.0, which has fairly complex communication handshake needs.

I will say from 3.1 to 4.0, the suppliers themselves have gotten better because even some of them implement these protocols in variable different ways. That's the other complexity. It's not the same across all the silicon providers. Some are really good at it, like Micron. I won't call out the ones that don't do a great job, but there are some that it's a bigger area of gray. You have to have the right bench equipment to do that and to identify that and understand it. The team is learning a lot. I think through these challenges, we're going to up our ante in these consortiums. We're actually going to be a real member of these different committees. We'll have representation at those large committee meetings when they start talking about the protocols and stuff. We're ahead of this all the time in the future.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we've reached the end of the question and answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing remarks.

I just want to thank everybody for taking the time to listen to our spiel. We're very, very excited about where we're going. The team is as energetic as ever. I think it seems to be increasing week after week. We've got some people that retired, and I put them on contract because of their knowledge. Now they're thinking, "I don't know if I want to retire." I'm like, "Sorry." No, kidding. I mean, love to keep them around. These are people with 20, 25, 30 years of experience. That's one of the other things that we're really going to start to drive in our customer presentations is, "Why do you choose Data I/O?" I can tell you, Duane Jones has been here for 30 years. That's 10 years longer than Deddy Pragg, one of our competitors, has even been alive.

To not promote that, to educate the knowledge base that's in this building, it just needed to be unlocked. That's what we're doing. I think it's obviously helping us solve these complex problems and get to where we need to go. It's also driven a lot of excitement. The collaboration, like I said, we've got some interns in here now that are learning, and they're loving doing the business. They're learning what they're learning they love. Some of our best hardware engineers were those very interns, you know, five years ago. I just think as we build more and more knowledge, we need to be viewed as the experts in this space. That's what we're doing. I want to thank everybody. It was definitely a hard quarter. This was not easy. The first two months were ugly, and we had a great close to the quarter.

My goal was to get through the first half a little unscathed, I guess, and not too many scars, because I know the second half is going to be better. Thanks, everyone.

Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we'll conclude today's conference call and presentation. We do thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your line.