Accuray's CEO Presents At Morgan Stanley Global Healthcare Conference (Transcript)

Euan Thomson

It’s a good question. Thanks, Steve. I think we have a little debate internally about how much to sort of discuss at the earnings call about the ASTRO release. And I think when we analyzed it, it has a significant impact on our financial profile as we go into this year that it was right and proper of us to do basically a full disclosure on all the financial impacts. And I will talk through that a little bit.

So on the cost side it’s clear, we have rising R&D costs, we have rising sale and marketing expense. And we wanted to give investors some clarity around the fact that we don’t expect those to stay that high sort of indefinitely. So there is actually an end point and it is this ASTRO. So that mattered to us a lot.

The other thing is that we are seeing some short term impact on revenue in this quarter. Certain customers are aware that something is coming. Very very few customers actually know that details of the technology themselves. But people know that something is brewing and there are certain customers out there who would have been taking installation this quarter. Who were saying to us, it would really be much more comfortable, we know we are going to have this technology for ten years so we will be much more comfortable knowing that we are going to get everything we want from it, and therefore we would like to see what you’re releasing at ASTRO before we take our shipment.

So with the prospect of a -- and it’s not a major impact in terms of the year but in terms of this quarter, some headwinds in terms of getting products, if at all, following by or coupled with the increasing expenses and so on. Then we felt it was best to give just complete clarity over what is going on. You know the good news is that I think as we exited there as we pointed out, we already have solid bookings even without the rollout of these new technologies. We had a third quarter of integration. At the beginning of Q1 last year we had a book to bill ratio that was predictably low as we integrated the two sales forces, down at about 0.7. But after that we rapidly recovered and we have been running sort of a double-digit book to bill ration and averaging the last three quarters at 1.12 and exiting the year at 1.15.

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