Slide 2 shows Capstone's results in the second and third quarter excluding this reserve to; highlight the 7% improvement in normal operating expenses. In January, Capstone's senior leadership went to Europe for high-level meetings with this distributor with significant shareholders and several key customers. As a result of these 3 days of meetings, I am very confident about the distributors' long-term viability. Capstone made several recommendations on how they can improve their current cost and organizational structure, and we left the meeting with the outline of a plan to get them current on their $1.9 million receivable and go-forward strategy to get additional capital into their company to support future growth.[...]
Frage: Shawn M. Severson - JMP Securities LLC, Research Division
Just a couple of things. Darren, how much of the, the customer with the bad debt expense, how much are they contributing to the revenue and the backlog? In other words, is there any real risks to a certain dollar amount in that backlog related to this customer?
Antwort: Darren R. Jamison
So that's a great question. They probably have 5 or 6 C200s in our backlog, so it's not insignificant, but it's probably 1% of our total backlog. But I can't stress enough that this was a hiccup. We saw in November not only do our DSOs stretch out substantially, our payments slowed down and some of our distributors' financing got tight in November as the European crisis kind of peaked again. December got much better for collections, and January has been the best first month of the quarter, I think, we've ever had. So I think as goes the European crisis, we're going to see some of our European distributors get whipsawed a little bit. But they've got a great bunch of projects that are already signed that we haven't seen purchase orders on yet. They've got a huge pipeline, so we do consider them a key distributor, and we're very keen on working with them in getting through this process. So I'd hope -- they've made some small payments already since December 31. We got more payments coming in planned in February and March, and again, our goal is to burn down a lot of that reserve before March 31.
Antwort: Edward I. Reich
Yes, Shawn, the reserve was a precaution just in case things go sideways. But had we truly felt at this point in time that, that debt was going to truly become a cash deal and cash bad debt, we would've taken those orders out of the backlog at the same time.
Antwort: Darren R. Jamison
Yes, and we would've written it off, not reserved it. And so I think there's a -- we were not trying to play accounting games. But you reserve something you have risk with, you write off something you're sure that is gone. And so in today's world, we want to be more transparent. We want our shareholders to understand that there is risk out there in the European market. But we feel, as a management team, very good about that. In fact, we went back as we were looking at this over the last 5 years I've been CEO, we've got over $300 million of revenue on our bad debt that we've actually written off was less than $1 million. So if you do that math, that's 0.003% in the worst economy since the great depression. So we're a little different because our distributors, our key partners, their franchisees, they're going to work very hard to hold onto to their valuable franchise that they have and they're going to make payments unless they absolutely can't. So again, we feel very good about the situation and the general bad debt as a whole.
[...]
As we look forward to Q4, we expect for management to continue to work its plan to grow the revenue, to improve gross margins and lower cash usage. I mentioned January was a great cash collection quarter for us, so hopefully that's a bellwether what the whole quarter is going to look like. We obviously expect to collect a portion of the $1.9 million from the European distributor. Obviously, we'd like to get at least half of that in the quarter if possible.
Quelle: seekingalpha.com/article/356861-capstone-turbine-s-ceo-discusses-q3-2012-results-earnings-call-transcript
Im Q4 Earnings Call im Juni dann nochmals ein kurzer Bezug zu der Sache:
Frage von Ajay Kejriwal - FBR Capital Markets & Co., Research Division:
Okay. And then maybe just -- we are almost wrapping up 1Q. Any color on the order trends? Anything you're seeing in Europe? I know Europe's a small portion for revenues outside Russia, but any color there?
Antwort von: Darren R. Jamison (Chief Executive Officer, President and Director)
Yes, let me -- I still don't want to get too much forward-looking statements on Q1, but I think it's important to note that the Europe itself, as we look at it including Russia, was up year-over-year despite the softness. That was really on the power of our Russian distributor. Europe itself, if you take out Russia, is about 16% of our revenue. We do expect that to be flat this year, but we think that we're going to get substantial growth in the rest of our market segments. So even with a flat Europe, which was 16% of our revenue last year, we expect to see 30-plus percent growth again this year. So we're monitoring the situation. We have a couple of distributors that we're monitoring very closely. A couple of them are on credit hold. But in general, we think Germany, France, the U.K. are going to perform relatively well for the year. Our concerns are more Spain, and obviously, Greece, Italy are the areas we're most concerned about.
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