Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Tom Gunderson with Piper Jaffray.
Tom Gunderson – Piper Jaffray
For my two questions, one would be, Euan, six units shipped, we’ve got a tough economy out there, these are profit centers for hospitals. Our eyeball on this would have been that there was somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 or 16 units that were aged long enough that could have been activated. What do you think is going on in the market out there that only six in a quarter are being activated, when the need seems so great?
Euan Thomson
I think it was 8 units shipped, as I recall, and six completed installation. I think that generally demand is high. The trouble is that we only have relatively small numbers involved right now, and I think what you’re seeing there will still be quarterly fluctuations. The overall trend as we’ve gone through the year is we had to build out the non-contingent element of our backlog. In our original installations at times during the year, we’ve been fairly open about. We certainly had more systems, and because of the environmental changes that took place, we had to remove those from our installation program, but I think we’re coming through that now. We’re seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. It will obviously take a while for those systems that we brought into backlog in Q4 to push their way all the way to revenue, but these quarterly fluctuations will really always be there. They are just dependent on so many factors as Bob indicated, things changing on the permitting line for a particular site, delays in construction, changes in personnel?there’re just so many factors out of our control. What we will be doing, though, as I mentioned in my script is we are definitively investing in this area, both to speed up the installation process and to give ourselves a better handle on exactly when these systems will go in, and the people that I talked about bringing into the Accuray team are really people who will take over after the sale is completed, start to build a relationship not just with the doctor who is interested in buying but with the facilities team at a hospital that is responsible for completing the construction program, and I think in that way, we’ll definitely be able to have better visibility, and I hope and believe that we’ll also be able to decrease the time that our systems sit in non-contingent backlog.
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