Earnings Labs

Atomera Incorporated (ATOM)

Q3 2020 Earnings Call· Sat, Oct 31, 2020

$7.26

-4.91%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Atomera Third Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] This event is being recorded and will be available for replay for approximately one week. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mike Bishop. Please go ahead.

Mike Bishop

Analyst

Thank you, and good afternoon. I am Mike Bishop with the company’s Investor Relations. Joining me on today’s call is Scott Bibaud, Atomera’s President and CEO; and Frank Laurencio, Atomera’s CFO. If you are joining by telephone, please go to the Events and Presentation section of our Investor Relations page. On our website to follow a slide presentation that accompanies our remarks. The presentation will remain available on our website after the call. After prepared comments by Scott and Frank, we will open up the call for your questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during today’s call we will make forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, whether in prepared remarks or during the Q&A session are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties are detailed in the Risk Factors section of our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifically in the company’s prospective supplement filed with the SEC on September 2, 2020. Except as otherwise required by federal securities laws Atomera disclaims any obligation to update or make revisions to such forward-looking statements contained herein or elsewhere to reflect changes in expectations with regards to those events, conditions and circumstances. Also, please note that during this call, we will be discussing non-GAAP financial measures as defined by SEC Regulation G reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in today’s press release, which is posted on our website. Now I would like to turn the call over to our President and CEO, Scott Bibaud. Go ahead, Scott.

Scott Bibaud

Analyst

Thanks, Mike. Welcome to our Q3 Update Call. Atomera continues to make excellent progress on customer and R&D developments despite the continued drag from coronavirus restrictions. Today, seven months after the pandemic shutdown began our work with customers continues with wafer runs test results reviews and detailed technical meetings. Still, this is the customer facilities have not restarted for the most part, this is not heard our relationship since our team primarily does engineering design simulation and analysis that can be shared with customers remotely. We still have access to specialized tools and facilities as needed under socially distance conditions. All of our customer fabs are still in full operation our programs, which were launched before the coronavirus shutdown have not been affected and we are successfully starting new runs during the shutdown. The semiconductor industry, if anything has accelerated over the last few months, making our prospective customers financially capable of even more expensive R&D work. The pipeline chart shown here is intended to give investors an idea of our progress with customers. This quarter our chart does show a downward tick, but it should not be construed as bad news. In Q1 of this year, one of our customers who had two projects underway decided to branch one project into two becoming the first customer to have three engagements active with Atomera. Recently they decided to consolidate back those two programs into a single one to focus efforts on getting to market more quickly. From our side, we view this as a positive development, since the basis of the decision was to get to production sooner, a stance we are 100% aligned with. The remainder of our customers also continue to move forward. Indeed, since several of our existing customers have multiple engagements underway we now have 25…

Frank Laurencio

Analyst

Thank you, Scott. At the close of the market today, we issued a press release announcing our third quarter 2020 results. This slide shows our summary financial results and I will now review them in more detail. Our GAAP net loss for the three months ended September 30, 2020 was $3.6 million or $0.19 per share compared to a loss of $3.1 million also $0.19 per share in the third quarter of 2019. The larger net loss in Q3 2020 was due to an increase in GAAP operating expenses of $354,000 from $3.2 million in Q3 2019 to $3.6 million last quarter, combined with $50,000 less of gross margin. We did not recognize any revenue in Q3 2020, while in Q3 2019, we had $254,000 of revenue. Net loss per share was unchanged due to an increase in weighted average shares outstanding from $16.6 million in Q3 2019 to $19.3 million in Q3 2020, which offset our higher net loss. Our press release and this slide contain a reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP results. As has generally been the case for Atomera, the biggest difference between our GAAP and non-GAAP expenses is stock compensation, which is a non-cash item and was $829,000 in Q2 2020 compared to $798,000 in Q2 2019. Since stock compensation expense did not change significantly between the periods, the factors affecting GAAP and non-GAAP expenses are basically the same. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter was a loss of $2.7 million compared to a loss of $2.4 million in Q3 2019, reflecting the same factors I discussed about our GAAP results. Non-GAAP research and development expense was $1.7 million in Q3 2020 compared to $1.5 million in Q3 2019, reflecting an increase in engineering headcount and higher outsourced fabrication and test spending. Non-GAAP G&A…

Scott Bibaud

Analyst

Thanks, Frank. As you’ve heard in this call, while the Corona viruses cause some minor delays our business has continued to advance in our efforts that customers are being rewarded. Our hard work in MST SP, RSSOI, JDA show excellent promise for early breakthrough and our new MST CAD and 300 millimeter tool capability gives us the ability to get customers through the integration process and to market more quickly than ever before. The technical breakthroughs enabled by our Quantum engineering achievements continue to gain notoriety in the industry and we are building on their success. Inside Atomera, both our management and engineering teams are optimistic, count on us to continue building on the results achieved up to today and I look forward to sharing the results of those efforts with you in the future. Operator, we will now take questions.

Operator

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Cody Acree with Loop Capital. Your line is open.

Cody Acree

Analyst

Thank you very much for taking my questions. Guys, I guess just one point of clarification, Scott, you said – Frank, I’m sorry, excuse me, your cash generation from the ATM thus far was – what was the number?

Frank Laurencio

Analyst

It was $8.5 million in Q3 and $13.5 million total through today.

Cody Acree

Analyst

$13.5 million. All right, thank you very much. And I guess, Scott, just as you look at your various customers, I know that you’re guiding to zero revenue this quarter because of that single customer in that single program that you don’t have a lot of visibility to closure too. But could you just talk about your visibility with your remaining engagement base. How are those progressing, what is stalled because of COVID and I guess, just any remaining visibility will be helpful.

Scott Bibaud

Analyst

Yes, we continue to have the customers in the pipeline and we continue to move forward with them. I think that I disclosed, pretty much all of the slowdown that we see that can be attributed to COVID any other delays really are just kind of the normal operating business of running wafer runs that take a long time getting results, analyzing those results and turning them around. And so we continue to be optimistic about a few of our customers that we think we’ll get into license opportunities with, hopefully, in the near term. But we don’t have much more visibility we can provide on that right now.

Cody Acree

Analyst

Great, thank you. And lastly the 8-K and fire, you said you can know what that was – what impact that may or may not have. Was that fire in the fab that you doing work in.

Scott Bibaud

Analyst

Yes, so the fire was in a facility that has multiple fabs in which we were involved. So the fire happened late last week, we haven’t gotten official word from ACAM on the impact to us or when they’re going to be. So I think they would have probably closed on all of their fabs and then we aren’t sure when they’re going to start up. The fact that were affected and what the impact will be to our set of wafers that were scheduled to come out sometime next year – in the first half of next year based on that, but hopefully, we’ll be learning about that in the next week or so.

Cody Acree

Analyst

All right, great, thanks guys.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And I show no further questions. I’ll now turn the call over to Mr. Bibaud for closing comments.

Scott Bibaud

Analyst

Thank you all for attending today’s presentation. We’re very pleased to be able to share with you some of the excitement we are feeling inside Atomera. Don’t forget to check out our new website www.atomera.com, where you can look for news, articles and blog posts to keep you up to date on our progress and you can just check out the great new explanations of all of our technology that we’ve been able to put in there. Should you have additional questions, please call Mike Bishop, and we’ll be happy to follow-up. We look forward to seeing some of you during our scheduled marketing activities such as the Craig-Hallum Alpha Select Conference on November 17. And we thank you again for your support and look forward to our next update call.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day