RELATED PARTY TRANSACTIONS

12 Months Ended

Oct. 31, 2019

RELATED PARTY TRANSACTIONS [Abstract]

RELATED PARTY TRANSACTIONS

NOTE 17 - RELATED PARTY TRANSACTIONS

On January 20, 2018, Photronics, Inc. entered into a four-year consulting agreement with DEMA Associates, LLC, for $0.4 million per year. Two members of our board of directors, including the chairman, and a member of the chairman’s immediate family, are members of DEMA Associates, LLC. We incurred expenses for services provided by this entity of $0.4 million and $0.3 million in fiscal years 2019 and 2018, respectively.

In July 2016, we entered into a contract for information technology services with a parent entity for which members of our board of directors served as the executive chairman of the board and a director of a wholly owned subsidiary of that entity. In fiscal year 2018, we incurred expenses for services provided by the parent entity of $0.1 million during the period in which our board members served on the board of directors of this entity and, in fiscal year 2017, we incurred expenses of $0.5 million with the parent entity.

An officer of our company is related to an individual in a position of authority at one of our largest customers. We recorded revenue from this customer of $87.0 million, $78.4 million and $73.6 million, in fiscal years 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively. As of October 31, 2019 and October 31, 2018, we had accounts receivable of $22.2 million and $23.5 million, respectively, from this customer.

We purchase photomask blanks from an entity of which a former officer of ours is a significant shareholder. The Company purchased $4.5 million of photomask blanks from this entity during the period in 2017 when the former officer was employed by us.

We believe that the terms of our transactions with the related parties described above were negotiated at arm’s length and were no less favorable to us than terms we could have obtained from unrelated third parties.