Lee-Lean Shu
Analyst · Cowen. Please go ahead
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us to review our fiscal fourth quarter and the full year 2022 financial results. Our fourth quarter revenue grew year-over-year by 14%. And for the full fiscal year 2022, revenue increased by 20%. The growth in the quarter was due to new projects, expanded business in all categories and the price increase effective in December 2021. Gross margin improved in the fourth quarter by 840 basis points year-over-year, reflecting a more attractive mix of higher-margin product sales and our ability to manage supply chain challenges and increased costs. As a result, we lowered our operating loss year-over-year by 19%. We ended the year with $44 million cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. Our biggest use of cash remains R&D. The R&D budget and ongoing software development are two large funding projects, one is a software project, the upcoming launch of Version 2 of the Gemini-I compiler stack. The second is a major hardware project, representing the most significant portion of the R&D budget, the design of Gemini-II that we intended to complete by calendar year-end. We will incur a onetime loss charge when we pay that. Other than that, our R&D budget will remain at the current run rate for the foreseeable future due to the ongoing need for software development and our commitment to continuously advancing the hardware platform. We are on track to release Version 2 of the compiler stack in July which will be entirely Python enabled for coding algorithms, application and libraries. This is exciting because our team will be armed with the tools to increase our Gemini-I customer engagement across the various markets we are pursuing. GSI has a highly talented software team that has achieved impressive outcomes in several competitions. This team is a valuable resource as the software is a crucial component to produce success in this market. And one of the reasons we commit a significant portion of our R&D budget to it. The GSI software team has been especially effective and efficient in their work on several high-profile content, which resulted in the first place wins in two challenges. We took one of the top spots in the Billion-Scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Challenge and improved our technology to perform on par with category leaders in AI. In addition to the great PR, the biggest benefit of this contest is how it rates GSI’s profile in key market sectors such as with the U.S. and the military and defense agencies and other government agencies and organizations related to defense and security. Recently, we announced our first greater win in the MAFAT Challenge for the human and object taking categories. GSI load software and algorithms that could most successfully, as judged by speed and accuracy automatically detect, classify and track humans. And differentiate between males and females plus identify objects of interest such as weapons, like a rifle, pistol or knife that the person might be carrying. Our software was the fastest and most accurate in performing at various distance and under diverse lighting conditions using image from real-time HD video sourced from moving to one. This capability has many applications in large global security market. The MAFAT Challenge gives GSI a high-profile exposure to the leading agency in the Israeli and American military and the defense organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense and the new agency, the Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directory. Using our contacts from the military and defense business, we are working aggressively to pursue the additional opportunities as the most challenge win may offer. In fiscal year 2022, we also had wins in other challenges. GSI was among the Billion-Scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Challenge leader. We proved that APU technology and software could perform on par with the prominent industry leaders in EMEA. In addition to the industry exposure, participating in this contest also teach us a lot about how we need to work on and how we can improve our performance. Our first quest win in the MAFAT challenge resulted in several valuable benefits to GSI. First was our POC with Elta, which is funding a SAR image processing as a relation system on APU technology. Second is the exclusive perpetual license of the FASTA algorithm. The Elta will allow GSI to sell as a SAR system product containing these algorithms. We plan to go after the entire SAR market with this product. The third benefit is Elta is credit to deploy decisive volume, assuming that the POC is successful. In fiscal year 2022, we increased the customer engagement for the APU and made contact into new market segments. We are in the early stage of working with numerous POCs and expect to further our engagement with the certain version of our competitors. In fiscal year 2023, we plan to launch our OpenSearch platform on AWS marketplaces with the software starting to select sector search. Our OpenSearch software platform is particularly good at market model search that can search with multiple inputs like image, text, voice, et cetera. We are working with our partners to build a software platform that performs multi-model and multilingual factor search with hardware accelerations based on the APU in AWS OpenSearch. The software platform called [indiscernible] conference in June being held in Berlin, Germany. We have the servers in place and now building the website with the goal of having the OpenSearch platform available for client use by the third quarter of calendar 2022. Ideally, we are targeting a fully functioning platform, where clients can download the platform and work independently of our support to the process. Another important goal will be the new version of the competitor and then using the same product data center to allow customers to work with the APU more easily. This will enable us to build a funnel of cost and move towards building the future revenue stream for the APU. The U.S. team has been working on the design of Gemini-II and finalized the layout for taking out the chip. We are very excited about how Gemini-II could deliver. Gemini-II could attend our addressable market with a simple dramatically intense performance and much lower cost. We have a great team, and I appreciate their dedication and hard work. We are aligned from our goal for this year and have a lot of motivation to achieve them. I thank all the GSI shareholders for the support and I value the contribution from that many of you made the feedback and input as the CEO and the shareholders and determined to make the AV successful. Now I will hand the call over to Didier, who will discuss our business performance further. Please go ahead, Didier.