See the plant grow before the call says so.

You cover a sub-sector and the model has a capacity line for every name on the list. Most of that line comes from what management said on the last call, plus whatever the capex paragraph in the filing gave away. Between prints you make your channel checks, you ask a supplier whether they've heard about a new line, and now and then someone looks up the county permit file. Each of those depends on a person telling you something, and people tell you when it suits them.

So a competitor breaks ground on an extension in one quarter and the press release lands quarters later. By then the estimates were built on the old footprint, and the question you should have put to the CFO on the call went unasked because you did not know there was anything to ask. Permit lag is the polite name for it. What you want in the research file is one line that does not come from the company: a dated look at the site itself, showing that the building is bigger than it was last quarter.

The change note is that line. It does not tell you what the plant will make. It tells you the footprint changed and when we first saw it.^a

Use it as a footprint-growth data point beside guidance, permit filings and channel checks. It is one more thing to reconcile with the rest. When it disagrees with what the company said, that gap is the question for the next call. It does not change your model for you.

1. a

   Footprint, not output

   The note shows that buildings and yards changed. It does not give a line count, an output volume, a tonnage or a megawatt figure, and it cannot say what the new floor will produce.

2. b

   Not a capex confirmation

   A bigger footprint is a physical observation. It does not confirm that money was spent, by whom, or on what.

3. c

   Quarterly means the next clear pass

   The cadence is a target. It follows the next usable high-resolution pass, so a run of cloud leaves a site on a stale reading, carried forward and marked as stale.

4. d

   Resolution floor

   At 2 m a pixel is a bit over six feet across, at 0.5 m about twenty inches. A building extension or a graded yard shows. A few metres of added wall, a roof change or an interior line install does not. Small or sub-resolution changes may not register, and we say so instead of implying every site is fully covered.

5. e

   A pilot, not a product on a shelf

   We offer it as a scoped pilot on a watchlist you choose.