Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk
Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk
We are exposed to financial market risks, primarily arising from the effect of interest rate fluctuations on our investment portfolio. Interest rate fluctuation may arise from changes in the market’s view of the quality of the security issuer, the overall economic outlook and the time to maturity of our portfolio. We mitigate this risk by investing only in highly rated, liquid instruments. Securities with original maturities of one year or less must be rated by two of the three industry standard rating agencies as follows: A1 by Standard & Poor’s, P1 by Moody’s and/or F-1 by Fitch. Securities with original maturities of greater than one year must be rated by two of the following industry standard rating agencies as follows: AA- by Standard & Poor’s, Aa3 by Moody’s and/or AA- by Fitch. By corporate investment policy, we limit the amount of exposure to $15.0 million or 10% of the portfolio, whichever is lower, for any single non-U.S. Government issuer. A single U.S. Agency can represent up to 25% of the portfolio. No more than 20% of the total portfolio may be invested in the securities of an industry sector, with money market fund investments evaluated separately. Our policy requires that at least 10% of the portfolio be in securities with a maturity of 90 days or less. We may make investments in time deposits, U.S. government-sponsored obligations and corporate bonds, commercial paper and notes with maturities up to 36 months. We bias our investment portfolio to shorter maturities. All of our investments are U.S. dollar denominated.
Our policy specifically prohibits trading securities for the sole purpose of realizing trading profits, however, we may liquidate a portion of our portfolio if we experience unforeseen liquidity requirements. In such a case, if the environment has been one of rising interest rates, we may experience a realized loss. Similarly, if the environment has been one of declining interest rates, we may experience a realized gain. As of December 31, 2023, we had an investment portfolio of fixed income marketable securities of $337.4 million, including cash equivalents. If market interest rates were to increase immediately and uniformly by 1.0% from the levels as of December 31, 2023, the fair value of the portfolio would decline by approximately $1.9 million. Actual results may differ materially from this sensitivity analysis.
We invoice the majority of our customers in U.S. dollars. Although the fluctuation of currency exchange rates may impact our customers, and thus indirectly impact us, we do not attempt to hedge this indirect and speculative risk, other than as noted in the paragraph below. Our overseas operations consist primarily of international business operations in France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, design centers in Bulgaria, Canada, India, and Finland and small business development offices in China, South Korea and Taiwan. We monitor our foreign currency exposure and, as disclosed below, we have entered into foreign currency forward contracts to partially mitigate the exposure in currencies where we believe this is appropriate.
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We have on occasion, entered into foreign currency forward contracts (the “Contracts”) to manage our exposure related to certain foreign currency denominated monetary assets (the “Hedging Program”) and to minimize the related impact of foreign currency fluctuations on our earnings. The hedged monetary assets primarily consisted of certain euro-denominated cash and accounts receivable balances. Contracts are typically entered into at the end of a month, with an approximately one month duration at inception. As of December 31, 2023, no Contracts were outstanding.
Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data
Refer to Item 15, “Exhibits and Financial Statement Schedules,” of this Form 10-K for required financial statements and supplementary data.
Item 9. Changes in and Disagreements with Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure
None.