Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1512467
56 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2023 finding qualified candidates to fill open positions. A significant percentage of our employee pool today has 25-year or greater tenure and that experience is hard to replace when they eventually retire. Cascade has recently had success with a high school intern program, and we hope to expand this program for addi- tional new employees. We also regularly host high school and community col- lege-level student visits to our factory to encourage interest in the EMS provider industry. Finally, Cascade has partici- pated in several collaborations with our local chamber of commerce, as well as with city, county, and state government officials and other technology companies in our local area on programs that attract qualified workers to increase the avail- able engineering talent pool in our local area. We see this as helping to overcome the biggest hurdle in our growth plans. What's your perspective on buying capital equipment with cash vs. financing? We prefer to invest in new equipment using capital equipment loans to keep the cash freed up for working capital. We believe this is the right philosophy for an engineering services business that typically can have peaks and val- leys in revenue. We are careful to continu- ally invest in new equipment where we have a guaranteed payback in increased efficiency and production capacity. Is inventory management and/or supply chain tying up capital you would otherwise use for capital investments? We view them separately in some sense. Inven- tory management is done using our working capital. Capital investment comes from either our savings or from equipment loans. In cases where inventory gets tied up for months due to various delays, that does impact our working capital, and we must manage through it. Also, not all projects tie up inventory as some cus- tomers request fully kitted assemblies where they provide all the parts. Is the CHIPS Act trickling down to you yet? No, unfortunately, but Cascade has been advo- cating for government incentives in the form of an R&D tax credit to revitalize the full U.S.- based technology process, not just IC devel- opment by itself. Keeping our leading-edge silicon technology within the U.S. is impor- tant, but to be competitive, chips need assem- bled PCBs, power supplies, cooling, box build enclosures, and soware from U.S. companies. A silicon chip cannot function without the tens, if not hundreds, of components around it, the circuit board beneath it, or the soware stack that runs it. Semiconductor companies, too, cannot exist in a vacuum and must rely on an entire technology ecosystem. So, in addition to supporting the federal gov- ernment's efforts to reinvest aggressively in American semiconductor companies offering President and CEO Shantanu Gupta remains active at the state and local level to emphasize the need to foster the semiconductor-related supply chain. Shantanu was part of Oregon's Semiconductor Task Force in response to the CHIPS Act.