Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator Instructions). And our first question will come from Michael Collin with Wachovia Securities.
Michael Collin
Hi good morning. Can you guys provide us with an update on the active denial system work that you spoke about a few months back? I just want to see where you stood.
Joe Caldarelli
It continues to follow the path we described a few months back, which is that our customer hopes to get some orders later this fiscal year, and there is still expectation of significant business in the 2010 to 2012 timeframe as we pointed out before. So it continues to be on track; we haven't seen any additional tangible movement recently, but there is still the indication that it should happen some time later this year.
Michael Collin
And regarding R&D do you look at a greater than 3% of sales as a more appropriate run rate going forward of your R&D spend?
Joe Caldarelli
We will probably running at a somewhat higher than expected rate long term, Mike. I don't think we will need to run quite at this rate in the long term, but I would expect us to run at a rate higher than we have historically, which as you know has been extremely low. So certainly with respect to customer-funded R&D, we will take all we can get. With respect to Company-funded R&D, I think we indicated some time ago that we expected numerically that number to get upwards the $10 million range, and I think that's still a good number for us -- per year.
Michael Collin
Great thank you.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) And our next question will come from Chris Quilty with Raymond James.
Chris Quilty
Thanks gentlemen a follow up on that R&D question. Can you just give us a sense of where exactly you're spending the money, both in terms of major programs, as well as how that money is being spent either on engineering activities or whether you're actually doing core hardware work?
Joe Caldarelli
Yeah the company funded R&D is generally focused on our commercial businesses which would be the communications and medical businesses, and there much of the effort is to continue to advance the product lines that we sell into next-generation products, more features, more performance and so on. So that's really just a product line maintenance and expansion, which includes, in some cases, some reasonably revolutionary new ideas.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
