“Will it get back to 65%? I think there's -- for that to happen, we'll have to see either further cost reductions on the input side between freight and logistics, which we are beginning to see.”

In context

“could get back to long term? And related to that, what are your expectations, your plans for growing OpEx? I assume you want to drive some degree of leverage in definitive gross margin. Any thoughts you can share? The OpEx growth this quarter, I think, was 4% or 5%. It strikes me as a little bit high. But any thoughts in terms of what your thoughts are going forward? Richard Herren: Sure. Let me take the gross margin piece of that first. There's a couple of moving parts, as you know, Paul, inside the gross margins. One is the backlog, some of which is still sitting at pre-price-increase levels. We'll get that shipped out as we work our way through that part of the backlog. Obviously, that'll be a tailwind. The increasing component of software built into our revenues will be a tailwind. Will it get back to 65%? I think there's -- for that to happen, we'll have to see either further cost reductions on the input side between freight and logistics, which we are beginning to see. While they're up year-on-year, sequentially, we're beginning to see some signs of easing in freight and logistic costs as well, but we'll have to see that. And we'll have to see a further reduction in component cost and/or a price increase. So I think it's -- without giving you a quantified number, I think there's a number of moving parts inside there. More tailwinds as we look ahead than there are headwinds on that. On the OpEx side, the part of what you see in this quarter, of course, is that the normalization of our bonus plans, last year, bonus plan obviously didn't pay out so well, as we go into this year, and you normalize that, that's part of the OpEx growth. We did have a slightly bigger than normal annual merit increase cycle. That's driving some of the OpEx growth as well. I th”