Vincent Arnone
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright
Thank you, Devin. Good morning, and I want to thank everyone for joining us on the call today. 2019 was a challenging year for our company, driven primarily by ongoing delays in closing new APC business awards. And these delays are continuing into the first quarter of 2020. Our 2019 financial results were a direct reflection of these delays. We recognize that we are fortunate that the effects of these delays have been mitigated by the cost savings generated via the domestic and international restructuring efforts that we implemented over these past 4 years. In 2020, to address our immediate issues, we are engaging in the following activities. For all near-term business development opportunities for our APC or our FUEL CHEM business segments, we are engaging a multi-disciplined team: sales, sales engineering, engineering, contract administration and legal and finance, when applicable, to review and act upon the identified customer-driven criteria for success on a project-by-project basis. This team is meeting on a weekly basis. While we have engaged in these practices previously, this new effort has an increased sense of urgency, greater depth of participation and involves the office of the CEO. Operationally, on a global basis, we are going to make specific modifications to better address the needs of the customers that we are serving and the markets that we are competing in today. Of utmost importance are the steps that we will take to ensure product cost competitiveness and product feature diversity. To that end, we will make the necessary investments in personnel and technology improvements to create best-in-class supply chain functionality in our company, which we deem critical to our future success. And finally, in terms of our SG&A costs, we have taken significant strides to better align our cost structure to meet the level of business generated by our markets today while maintaining the ability to deliver all of our products and technologies to the markets we serve. This has allowed us to continue to invest in our future in the form of our water treatment initiative. However, we can and we must do more. Fuel Tech's senior leadership and Board of Directors are working collaboratively to this end. At our recent board meeting, our Board of Directors accepted the leadership team's offer to voluntarily reduce the base salary of all officers of the company by 10% effective March 1 of this year. Moreover, each nonemployee member of the Board of Directors reduced their base director fee by 10% effective as of the same date. These reductions will be in effect until it becomes apparent that the company's financial condition has improved and is sustainable. In the aggregate, these initiatives are expected to produce annualized cost savings of approximately $300,000. Additionally, the Fuel Tech team will be reviewing all functional areas for further cost reduction in 2020. We continue to monitor our liquidity needs with rigor and believe our current cash position, combined with the cash flow expected to be generated from operations, are adequate to fund the planned operations of the company for the next 12 months, even in a worst-case scenario. We believe that the actions noted previously will also establish a basis for material improvement in our financial performance as we move through 2020 and beyond. For our APC business specifically, at present, we are pursuing a global sales pipeline of $75 million to $100 million that is heavily weighted towards the U.S. and Europe. The scope of this work is primarily for our SCR, ULTRA, SNCR and FGC offerings. Of this sales pipeline amount, which includes all potential projects over a 3- to 5-year time horizon, we are currently in various stages of negotiation with several clients for approximately $15 million to $20 million in new work that we expect will be awarded before the end of the second quarter or shortly thereafter, and we expect to win some portion of this new work. Regarding the finalization of prior restructuring activities. The wind-down of our China operation is substantially completed and has resulted in the removal of approximately $2 million in annual operating losses, the full benefit of which we are realizing in 2020. We are also in the process of repatriating the cash we collected from our outstanding China receivables in 2019. Our outstanding accounts receivable balance in China at December 31, 2019, was $2.7 million, which was a reduction of $3 million from the prior year-end, reflecting $3 million in cash collections during the year. Since the close of 2019, we have collected an additional $300,000. As of this date, we are experiencing minimal impact from the coronavirus on our operations. However, we are watching this development very closely. The actions being taken by governmental bodies on a global basis are fluid, and we are assessing our position on this matter on a daily basis. While we have closed our Beijing office and are no longer originating project work from Beijing, our European office is located just outside of Milan in Italy, and we are watching the development of our project activity in the European market as a whole. The health and safety of our employee team and our client base remain our primary concern. Now let's move on to a further overview of the business as a whole. Our FUEL CHEM business generated revenues of $3.2 million in the fourth quarter with a gross margin of 48%. FUEL CHEM was impacted by unplanned customer unit outages, warmer-than-normal weather and the continued trend towards the reduction in electricity demand from coal-fired combustion units, driven by the availability of low-cost natural gas units and renewable energy sources in many regions of the country. These same factors have impacted the first 2 months of this year. However, commencing in March, we have returned to a more normalized run rate for our current customer base. Domestically, we are following 2 opportunities that would expand our FUEL CHEM customer base: one with an existing customer on coal-fired units; and the other with a new customer that provides energy from renewable fuel. The existing customer has 2 coal-fired units in the east that are looking to convert their fuel source to a lower ranked coal later in this year. In 2019, we installed FUEL CHEM on 2 coal-fired units at a different site for this same customer as they have converted the fuel source for these units as well. These pockets of opportunity are arising as the U.S. utility sector adjusts their asset base to accommodate their desired future mix of power generation in terms of fuel source. And we expect that we may see additional such opportunities as we move through 2020 and beyond. Additionally, we are working with a renewable energy provider that has 2 wood-burning biomass units in the U.S. that are having severe slagging and fouling issues. And we believe that these units will likely have FUEL CHEM systems installed in 2020, one as soon as the end of the second quarter. I'll report further on these opportunities as we move through the year. However, we are pleased to see additional opportunities for our FUEL CHEM business. We are continuing to pursue opportunities for additional FUEL CHEM applications in geographies outside of the U.S. This includes biomass and municipal solid waste in Europe; in Southeast Asia, via our partner, Amazon Papyrus, for the pulp and paper industry, where we are using our RECOVERY CHEM program; and in other Southeast Asian countries, where coal is a primary source of fuel, power demand and related pricing is high and where slagging and fouling is an issue. As we noted in last quarter's call, in the fall of 2019, we met with our partner in Mexico to discuss how Fuel Tech solutions can help them to burn high sulfur fuel oil in a cleaner and more efficient manner. The drivers for the potential business are twofold. First, the IMO or the International Maritime Organization, effective as of January 1, 2020, began to enforce new emission standards designed to significantly curb pollution produced by the world's shipping industry. It is no longer allowing ships to use heavy sulfur fuel oil as a source of fuel. Mexico had been selling the majority of their heavy sulfur fuel oil for use in maritime transport and is now going to have a glut of this fuel. Second, Mexico's current government is supporting the use of all indigenous resources to generate power as opposed to encouraging an increased reliance on foreign sources, such as natural gas from the U.S. As of this date, we have finalized a new agreement with our local partner, which will cover the implementation of our technology throughout Mexico. However, development within the Mexican government to support the burning of the high sulfur fuel oil has been slow. We still believe that this opportunity for our FUEL CHEM program can be used to mitigate pollutants generated from the burning of high sulfur fuel oil is potentially significant. And we will continue to monitor it closely. With respect to our global APC operations, despite our delay in order activity, we firmly believe that our near-term project landscape of opportunity remains active and viable. As I noted earlier, we are in discussions with several potential clients for near-term awards. Our primary focus is to establish a growing backlog throughout 2020 and utilize the operating leverage we have created to trend towards profitability. SCR and ULTRA for natural gas applications in industrial markets continue to provide our best business opportunity. We continue to see a steady flow of new small to medium gas turbine or combined cycle plant projects, such as the combined heat and power upgrades at universities and large medical complexes and new opportunities in the oil and gas segment. We will continue to support and partner with small turbine suppliers and suppliers of internal combustion engines for stationary deployment and exploit the development of plug-and-play, small-engine SCR solutions for this distributed power generation market. We are also continuing to pursue opportunities in the steel industry, which, notwithstanding current market -- stock market gyrations, is benefiting from favorable overall economic conditions. As always, we are monitoring activities at the state level, where new environmental guidelines are being considered and established that will require expedited implementation schedules to install best available retrofit control technology on certain sources of emissions. In Europe, we continue to see rising interest in both ULTRA and SCR technologies, along with requirements for SNCR technology for certain applications as well. We are confident in the opportunities that this market is offering, stemming from BREF, which is the best available reference technology guidelines that were issued in August of 2017 that have compliance timelines through 2020 and beyond. While we are tracking APC opportunities in other geographies, as we have noted in prior conference calls, in particular in India, Southeast Asia and South Africa, the opportunities we are tracking have a longer-term time horizon to realization. We will continue to monitor progress in these markets via our business relationships, and we will report on progress from time to time. Today, the U.S. and European markets are providing us with the largest opportunity landscape, and we will dedicate our resources towards winning this work. Regarding our Dissolved Gas Infusion business, I am very pleased to share 2 significant developments since our last conference call. First, on the business development side, we expect to commence an on-site demonstration of our water technology at a pulp and paper facility in the Midwest no later than early in the second quarter of this year. We have targeted this industry as one that can benefit from this technology, and our demonstration will focus on improving the plant's wastewater treatment efficiency and treatment capacity while still maintaining permit requirements. As our understanding of the market application for this technology has evolved, so too has our approach to advancing its growth. To that end, in 2019, we engaged subject matter experts to assist us in identifying and diagnosing areas where our DGI technology could be helpful. That investment led to this current opportunity, and we believe that there will be more to follow here in the near term. We are also in conversations with several other potential customers across a variety of industries other than pulp and paper, such as oil and gas, chemical and biogas generation. And second, during the first quarter of 2020, the company filed a provisional patent application to protect certain enhancements to the DGI technology that improve its performance as we look to use DGI to displace competing technology directly or provide cost-effective augmentation to a range of environmental treatment processes with an eye toward greener solutions. Before closing, I'd like to comment on our SG&A expenses as we look to enter 2020 -- or move through 2020. Our annual SG&A in 2019 was $7.2 million, which was a decrease of $1.4 million from 2018. Excluding China, SG&A in 2019 was $15.5 million. For 2020, we are targeting total SG&A cost to range between $13 million and $13.5 million, reflecting the impact of total cost savings derived from the wind-down of our China operations, our previous restructuring efforts, the aforementioned salary reductions and lower director fees and other planned actions. This further improvement in our cost structure will provide the additional resilience that we need to stabilize our financial performance in 2020 and position ourselves for a return to profitability and then growth. In closing, I want to thank you once again for your ongoing interest in Fuel Tech. Despite the challenges that impacted our business in 2019, there is cause for optimism as we move further into 2020. We continue to have a strong financial foundation with total cash of $13.5 million and no debt. We are engaging in actions to ensure that our infrastructure spending is aligned with business generation. We eliminated the risk of loss that existed from the wind down of our China business, and we look to repatriate cash in 2020 and the future. We see expansion opportunities for our FUEL CHEM business and are confident that we will add new coal- and biomass-fired units to our customer base in 2020. We firmly believe in the viability of our APC business with the expectation of having near-term awards before the end of the second quarter or shortly thereafter. Our DGI business is beginning to develop more rapidly from both business development and technical aspects. And we look forward to commencing our first demonstration shortly. And finally, I have an immense belief in the will and commitment of the Fuel Tech team. We are disappointed with our past year performance and are motivated to ensure financial sustainability and ultimately a growth platform for our stakeholders. I'll now turn things over to Jim Pach for a discussion of our financial results. As many of you know, last week, we disclosed that tomorrow is Jim's last day here at Fuel Tech as he is leaving to pursue an excellent career opportunity. Jim has played an integral role at Fuel Tech over the last several years. We thank him for his contributions, and we wish him all the best in the future endeavors. I also want to welcome Ellen Albrecht to her new role as acting Treasurer and Controller and Principal Financial Officer of the company. Ellen has been with Fuel Tech for almost 24 years, serving in various capacities, most recently as Vice President, Operations, Planning and Control since May of 2012. Ellen has previously served as the company's acting Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer and Corporate Controller, among other roles. She brings a welcome familiarity to our business and culture. And we expect a seamless transition of responsibilities here in the near term. With that, I'll turn things over to Jim. Go ahead, Jim.