Steve Humphreys
Analyst · the SEC, including the company's latest annual report on Form 10-K. Identiv assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which we speak of today. And now I'm pleased to turn the conference over to our host, CEO, Steve Humphreys, for his comments. Please go ahead, sir
All right. Thanks, Sandra. For Q2 and the rest of the year, we have 3 key business drivers, the emergence of broad-based RFID applications, the federal government and, of course, the overall economy. Now in the opening, I mentioned the drivers of RFID growth and why it's a long-term growth pattern. First, leading companies adopting second-generation applications, signaling sustained growth. Second, our position as the developer of the best high-frequency and NFC RFID devices, which we've established over many years and built defensible IP. And third, favorable market events, including the departure of one of our major competitors as well as the weakening of others. So looking forward because of the design and nature of RFID devices, we've got very good visibility. Our backlog for the second half of 2020 in RFID is already more than two-thirds of our base plan for the entire second half of the year. On top of this, we're preparing to ramp production for a customer we've been working with and design for over a year. Their volumes are ramping throughout the second half, starting in late Q2 and driving a few million dollars of additional volume in each quarter of the second half and into 2021. Now remember, our RFID devices are typically well under $1 in price. So this represents many million units in addition to the growth and volumes I mentioned above. The rapid growth curve and the need to build supply chain now for the production ramp is the reason for the project financing working capital we announced today. It's possible we could have managed the working capital from our operations. But with the economic uncertainty and the need to drive this growth with no impediments, it's responsible to make certain the capital is available with zero risk of interruption. Given the specifics of this project, we secured specific working capital financing on a very short-term basis, which we expect to be fully covered by cash flow from the project by the end of the year. The production will continue into 2021, of course, but after the initial fast ramp-up, it becomes cash positive and self-funding. Now this customer is expanding into other products, so we expect it to be another broad long-term partnership as are many of our customers. On that last topic, let me say one more thing. Our customers depend on us for confidentiality. We'll communicate everything we can to the investor community about our business and market trends, but it will always protect our customers' confidentiality. There are plenty of applications coming into the marketplace showing where it's going. And our position as the best technology provider means we're working with the highest quality technology leaders in any category. So given the confidentiality, how can you quantify the implications for our business? For this year, we've been specific about base volumes, backlog and project volumes. This hopefully gives line of sight to our RFID business nearly doubling. Now that's great, but what's the ultimate scale of the opportunity? We believe this is the sustained beginning of wide deployment of RFID and, in particular, NFC instrumented devices. So let me give you just 3 use cases so you can calibrate the longer-term potential and the volume scale. There a dozen more I could give, but these should give an idea. So the first one, since we're all more health-conscious these days, is a product we're developing together with some major theme parks. It's a temperature sensing RFID device that either can be in a wristband or stick right to the skin so they can be checked regularly and discretely and remotely. Now it might sound a little like an invasion of privacy. But if you imagine as theme parks really want to reopen, they want to assure visitors and especially families with children and may be old relatives that they're keeping them safe. So we think that, that adoption and acceptance will actually be very broad as people are returning and they're looking for ways to feel confident that they can go back to their behaviors and enjoying the activities they like. Now there are about 0.5 billion visitors annually to theme parks and these are disposable devices, so you can get a sense of the volumes. A second application is, of course, in the mobile world where NFC has been used for payments already. It's the natural sensor platform for a huge array of instrument and things around your home or anywhere you go. There are about 1.5 billion mobile devices shipped annually and as demand to instrument things in the world reps grows, the RFID potential is a multiple of this base. So a couple more use cases are some of the early ones that are now getting refined for the mass market, such as toys and sports gear. Giving physical toys a virtual identity is an obvious use case as kids increasingly play in virtual worlds and toy companies build links between their products and virtual play. The same is true for sporting goods, making the product relevant by connecting it to the digital tracking activities that everyone does is a clear use case. Now just these examples represent several billion units annually. Some will go faster and some will go slower, but the scale of the market opportunity is the point. The broad-based adoption is just starting with just tens of millions of units, but the goal we're going after is this massive RFID market opportunity. So that's RFID, which we can go into in more detail in the Q&A. Now as I mentioned in my opening, for the second quarter and second half of the year, we also see continuing growth in Thursby and smart card readers. We're seeing pipeline demand across an increasingly wide range of departments, including the Marines and the Peace Corps and were also soon to be carried in the Army and Air Force exchanges to retail stores on military facilities. We expect this demand to continue even as lockdown orders are relaxed. On the Premises side, there's near-term impact from the lockdowns, but we believe in the second half we'll see a resurgence. I already described why we expect the government fiscal year end to be stronger than ever and prospects to be good for fiscal 2021 starting in October. This trend will support our business actions across smart card readers, mobility and Premises, all of which have strong federal revenue bases. We know at least during the second quarter, we'll continue to have pressure in retail, hotels and others, but again, this is less than 10% of our Premises business more than offset by the strengths we expect in federal. Also in Premises, we see new opportunities. Physical access control and video systems are natural platforms to add health and safety to their primary roles of security. And we've all seen some of the articles about temperature sensing devices being connected to the access control systems and we're certainly evaluating some of these, but we're also being very cautious to make sure they actually work because as a trusted adviser, we need to make sure that what we deploy, especially if it's health and safety-related is 100% certain to be functioning and some of these frankly, aren't. However, they are clear ways in which our systems already can contribute. So for example, we developed a contact tracing utility for our access control system, very straightforward use case. If a company has someone who becomes contagious, they can run our utility and immediately get a report of where that person went in and out of the building when they did and everyone else who is in the same place of the building and immediately notify everybody who is in the area. They can also, of course, implement extra cleaning protocols, anything else they might deem appropriate. Again, it's not a complete solution, but it means that as people return to their offices, they can see something that their office provider, office managers are doing to try to manage the situation. And if there is some contagion or exposure that they can run it down and our systems are helping them do that. Now in this case, we developed the utility, and we've made it available as a free download to our customers to help as they go back to work. What it tells us, though, is which customers are sensitive to the issue, it gives clear candidates for future capabilities we're ready to deploy. And also, we've gotten a lot of notes of appreciation just reinforcing that customer relationship, while we're in pretty stressful times. So one last comment before I wrap up. Our independent directors are, of course, continuing to engage in discussions about strategic options for the company. Obviously, things have been affected by the economic volatility, but they're certainly still continuing their process. So to wrap up, we understand that the second quarter will be choppy and hard to predict, particularly on the Premises side. We've taken seriously from the beginning all of the primary and secondary implications of the virus and lockdowns, which has let us operate fairly seamlessly, kept our supply chains intact and kept our operations all open and we continue to treat it very seriously. Within that context though, here's how we see the second half from a growth, market risk and financial stability perspective, which we believe are probably the parameters that investors want to understand for our business going forward. So first, growth. We expect strong growth in RFID as I've described in detail. Continued growth in mobility and smart card readers, driven by specific lockdown demand by positive market trends and by our competitive advantages. We expect to resurgence in Premises, driven by a renewed focus specifically on the federal government, our expanded field teams and we believe a particularly strong federal government year end beginning of the new fiscal year. We do expect retail and hotels will remain weak, affecting our video and card business, but this will be offset by strength in our federal business. Second, market risk. We actually believe our federal government focus puts us in a much better position than some of our competitors who are exposed to small and medium businesses, many of which are under a lot of stress. We also believe that federal government will be among the first to return to full operation and will be a safe credit risk throughout. So we think we're better positioned than most in the physical security industry, many of whom have exposure to SMB and at-risk verticals. The other market risk mitigating factor is our RFID backlog and the specific committed project ramp that I talked about, both giving us visibility for the vast majority of the balance of the year. By the time we enter the second half, in fact, backlog could be close to covering our entire second half RFID plan with still more orders, of course, to come in. And third, of course, financial stability. We're continuing to tighten expenses to ensure strong operations and resiliency and to reflect our focus on the federal market, which includes our Thursby business and our RFID business. We've reinforced our bank line, accessed PPP and put in place project financing for our project-specific working capital needs. We think we'll have navigated the current pressures, invested in growth and done it without diluting our shareholders as we go into the second half. Now I know these comments have been a bit long, but hopefully they're all relevant and give you a good basis to assess our position, whatever your assumptions are about the environment ahead. So with that, let's open the discussion for questions. Operator?