A Message From our President & CEO Regarding COVID-19
To all of our customers and channel partners, we are taking the opportunity to provide this update amid the coronavirus challenges the world is facing. The health and well-being of our team is of paramount concern and we continue to take all necessary precautions as we provide you with service, support and new products.
As you may be aware, we are headquartered in Redmond Washington (USA) with significant operations in China and Germany. We employ nearly 100 people and have distributed functions to support our customer base that is 92% outside of the USA. The situation remains highly fluid and changeable, but our multi-sourced supply chain has been experiencing only minor impact from global business interruption thus far. We have been open and working in China for over one month, and have remained open continuously in the United States and Germany. We are building and shipping products, and we are receiving and fulfilling new systems orders. Our global manufacturing team has done an excellent job under difficult circumstances to keep your supply chains open and functioning.
At Data I/O, we consistently invest in our team and our technologies. Our business processes have been established to effectively manage a globally distributed company. This is useful under normal circumstances and game changing under the present travel restrictions and remote work environment. In response to the current situation, we have moved as many employees to remote work as possible, while retaining the necessary teams of manufacturing professionals onsite at our facilities.
We have strong collaboration tools across every function in the company: sales, marketing, manufacturing, engineering and finance. Our service and support infrastructure is distributed globally, and is equipped to work remotely. Many of our customers have requested visits move to ‘virtual’ from face to face for the next several weeks, and we are supporting these requests. Many customers are also increasing their use of our remote diagnostic capabilities on our automated systems. This eliminates a personal visit, and can often resolve problems. Engineering, which is 40% of the company, has a common platform for development processes, and workflow management accessible online from any office worldwide. We also have device support capability on three continents to better support your ongoing requests. This commitment to global support is a key reason why many of you purchase from Data I/O and why we have been honored to receive the Service Excellence for Device Programming over the past two years.
Data I/O is also committed to maintaining our solid financial position, throughout crisis situations and business cycles. For 2019, we ended the year with $13.9 million in cash on our balance sheet, and no debt. We have ample liquidity to maintain our commitments to customers worldwide, while we continue to invest in R/D to provide you with ever better products, device support and services. Since you are buying systems with 5-10 year lifetimes, it is critical to have a supplier that will be with you over that time.
No organization is 100% prepared for what the world is facing now, but our multiyear focus on teamwork and collaboration, continuous investment in tools for remote work, and distributed leadership has helped us greatly meet the current challenges facing all of us.
Thank you again for placing your trust in Data I/O.
Anthony Ambrose
President and CEO