could continue to impact global currency exchange rates, commodity prices, trade and movement of resources, which may adversely affect the ability of our customers and potential customers to incur the capital expenditures necessary to purchase our products and services.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, or similar global health concerns, has negatively impacted and could continue to negatively impact our operations, supply chain and customer base.
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely restricted the level of economic activity around the world, which may impact demand for our products. Our operations and supply chains for certain of our products or services have been and could continue to be negatively impacted by the regional or global outbreak of illnesses, including COVID-19. The impact of COVID-19, including changes in consumer behavior, pandemic fears, and market downturns as well as restrictions on business and individual activities has created significant volatility in the global economy and led to reduced economic activity. There have been extraordinary actions taken by federal, state, and local public health and governmental authorities to contain the spread of COVID-19 and although many restrictions that were in place have eased in many localities, some areas that had previously eased restrictions have reverted to more stringent limitations in light of the emergence of new strains of COVID-19. There remains significant uncertainty concerning the magnitude of the impact and the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. The extent that our operations will continue to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic will depend on future developments, including any new potential waves of the virus, new strains of the virus, and the success of vaccination programs, all of which are highly uncertain and cannot be accurately predicted.
Sales of our equipment are primarily dependent on our customers’ upgrade and capacity expansion plans and whether our customers select our equipment.
We have no control over our customers’ upgrade and capacity expansion plans, and we cannot be sure they will select, or continue to select, our equipment when they upgrade or expand their capacity. The sales cycle for our equipment systems can be a year or longer, involving individuals from many different areas of Intevac and numerous product presentations and demonstrations for our prospective customers. Our sales process also commonly includes production of samples and customization of our products. We do not typically enter into long-term contracts with our customers, and until an order is actually submitted by a customer there is no binding commitment to purchase our systems. In some cases, orders are also subject to customer acceptance or other criteria even in the case of a binding agreement.
Sales of new manufacturing systems are also dependent on obsolescence and replacement of the installed base of our customers’ existing equipment with newer, more capable equipment. If upgrades are developed that extend the useful life of the installed base of systems, then we tend to sell more upgrade products and fewer new systems, which can significantly reduce total revenue.
Our 200 Lean HDD customers also experience competition from companies that produce alternative storage technologies like flash memory, which offer smaller size, lower power consumption and more rugged designs. These storage technologies are being used increasingly in enterprise applications and smaller form factors such as tablets, smart-phones, ultra-books, and notebook PCs instead of hard disk drives. Tablet computing devices and smart-phones have never contained, nor are they likely in the future to contain, a disk drive. Products using alternative technologies, such as flash memory, optical storage and other storage technologies are becoming increasingly common and could become a significant source of competition to particular applications of the products of our 200 Lean HDD customers, which could adversely affect our results of operations. If alternative technologies, such as flash memory, replace hard disk drives as a significant method of digital storage, then demand for our hard disk manufacturing products would decrease.
We operate in an intensely competitive marketplace, and our competitors have greater resources than we do.
In the market for our disk sputtering systems, we experience competition primarily from Canon Anelva, which has sold a substantial number of systems worldwide. Some of our competitors have substantially greater financial, technical, marketing, manufacturing and other resources than we do, especially in the DCP equipment market. Our competitors may develop enhancements to, or future generations of, competitive products that offer superior price or performance features, and new competitors may enter our markets and develop such enhanced products. Moreover, competition for our customers is intense, and our competitors have historically offered substantial pricing concessions and incentives to attract our customers or retain their existing customers.
We are exposed to risks associated with a highly concentrated customer base.
Historically, a significant portion of our revenue in any particular period has been attributable to sales of our disk sputtering systems to a limited number of customers. Our reliance on sales to relatively few customers has increased with the disposition of our Photonics business, and we expect that sales of our products to relatively few customers will continue to account for a high percentage of our revenues in the foreseeable future. This concentration of customers, when combined with changes in the customers’ specific capacity plans and market share shifts can lead to extreme variability in our revenue and financial results from period to period.
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