Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to the Ideal Power Third Quarter 2023 Results Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the end of management's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jeff Christensen. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Ideal Power's third quarter 2023 conference call. With me on the call are Dan Brdar, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Tim Burns, Chief Financial Officer. Ideal Power's third quarter 2023 financial results press release is available on the company's Web site at idealpower.com. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on the call and webcasts, including those regarding future financial results and industry perspectives are forward-looking and maybe subject to a number of risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the call. Please refer to the company's SEC filings for a list of associated risks, and we would also refer you to the company's website for more supporting industry information. Now, I'll turn the call over to Ideal Power’s President and CEO, Dan Brdar. Dan?

Thank you, Jeff. Good morning, everyone. And welcome to our third quarter 2023 financial results conference call. I'll update you on our progress since the start of the third quarter, including the successful completion of all of our 2023 milestones to date, as well as our priorities for the balance of the year to commercialize our B-TRAN semiconductor technology. Then Tim Burns, our CFO, will take you through the numbers after which we'll take your questions. The third quarter and all of 2023 showed continued excellent progress and continued execution against our published milestones focused on our transition from a technology development company to a commercial company. We're stacking sequential quarters of some of the most significant accomplishments in the company's history. This quarter, we accomplished several key advances that underscored the technical and commercial progress of our B-TRAN commercialization roadmap. We're thrilled about our momentum and recent success in six major areas. First, we successfully completed Phase 1 and secured Phase 2 of our development program with a top 10 global automaker. Second, we added the SymCool IQ Intelligent Power module, our second commercial product to our commercial product offerings. Third, we completed shipments to all the large companies in our customer test and evaluation program, and recently added a global power conversion supplier to the program. Fourth, in response to customer requests, we're providing volume quotes through large test and evaluation program participants. Participants in the program have expanded their plans for B-TRAN to include additional applications. Fifth, we delivered hundreds of tested and packaged B-TRAN devices with diversified technologies to complete our work under the NAVSEA solid state circuit breaker program. And sixth, we began discussions with potential distributors for our SymCool and SymCool IQ power modules. We're actively engaged with most multiple customers in each of…

Thank you, Dan. I will review the third quarter 2023 financial results. We recorded minimal development revenue for the third quarter. Development revenue in the fourth quarter is expected from the Phase 2 work under our development agreement with a top 10 global automaker. Operating expenses were $2.8 million in the third quarter of 2023 compared to $1.8 million in the third quarter of 2022, driven primarily by higher research and development expenses. We completed our work with our development foundry partners in the third quarter and started several wafer runs with our qualified high volume production foundry. We also started our qualification run with a second high volume production foundry. Operating expenses were also impacted by higher personnel costs as we added headcount over the last year and reflected higher stock based compensation expense on performance stock units and new hire grants. We continue to expect some quarter-to-quarter variability in operating expenses, particularly our research and development spending due to the timing of semiconductor fabrication runs and other development activities and hiring, as well as the potential impact of future government funding. We expect to keep general and administrative expenses relatively flat in the fourth quarter, excluding the impact of stock based compensation expense despite the impact of inflation on the cost of services. Sales and marketing spending is expected to continue to increase modestly in coming quarters due to hiring and costs associated with commercialization efforts, including new product launches. Net loss in the third quarter of 2023 was $2.7 million compared to $1.7 million in the third quarter of 2022. Third quarter 2023 cash burn was $1.9 million on the lower end of our guidance of $1.9 million to $2.1 million as we continue to manage expenses prudently and aggressively. Cash burn in the first nine months…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is coming from David Williams with The Benchmark Company.

Just congrats on the progress here. You've made tremendous strides and continue to put forth a lot of really nice progress. And so, I guess, my first question is just around the test and evaluation program participants, and you talked about some of the high volume quotes and expanding their plans for B-TRAN. Just any additional commentary there that help maybe give us a little more color on what that could mean and maybe the magnitude of what they're talking about?

So we have some very large companies in that program. So these are multibillion dollar companies. We've already started getting requests for multi-year high volume quotes. And while they initially had -- a lot of these companies had initial interest in specific application, they've really expanded to start thinking about different ways they could use the technology, different applications in their product portfolio, they could take advantage of the benefits of B-TRAN. So it's really become some pretty good commercial discussions on not only the initial opportunity that they were looking at but also expanding into other areas.

And just kind of thinking about from a design perspective. What are you finding -- maybe are there challenges or hurdles and can this be a socket-for-socket replacement against other competing technologies? Or is there a pretty heavy lift in terms of the design that's required in order for it to use B-TRAN versus maybe just a standardized MOSFET or IGBT or other technology?

Well, for any new semiconductor, if it brings some significant change in performance, you're going to want to do a redesign of your OEM product to get all the benefits out of it. So for example, if you got half the losses your thermal management system is going to look very different. So the plug and play route really would leave an awful lot of advantages on the table. And what we're finding really is it's really more just an education, getting them up to speed on the technology, getting them to understand how it operates, so that they can think about how they extract the full value of the performance potential for their OEM products.

And then maybe just lastly for me on the -- if you kind of think about your bill material content in the circuit breaker or maybe even the auto inverter. Can you give us kind of a size of what you think that could be once we go into the market? Just kind of curious what your total BOM -- potentially be there?

What we understand from going through the Navy project and working with some of the folks that are actually doing circuit breaker -- solid state circuit breaker designs, the semiconductor portion of it, it's about 30% of the BOM cost of the circuit breaker. So it's fairly substantial.

For some perspective there, the market itself for solid state switching market is over $9 billion annual market, so it's pretty large market.

Your next question is coming from Jeff Grampp with Alliance Global Partners.

I'm curious to -- if you guys could touch on your ability to handle additional companies in the test and evaluation program. It sounds like there's a lot of applications, a lot of demand. Obviously, it takes some internal resources to manage that. So just kind of wondering how full your plate is right now and then how you guys are thinking about, I guess, properly resourcing that team to handle the [inbounds] that you might have?

Yes, it is a balancing act. Part of what we're doing is we're kind of prioritizing the companies that come into that program. You can spend as much time on four guys working out of the garage as you do with a multibillion dollar company bringing into a new technology. So we're really prioritizing first where there's opportunities for higher volume. It drives us to create a lot of really good material, technical material for those customers that then we can reuse. So as part of why we focused on getting a couple in each segment and as we work with them and develop the material they need for training, for support, for doing circuit analysis and so forth, it creates a lot of material that we can use over and over again, and we'll add a couple of people to that upfront team as we go here. In fact, we're looking for a couple of people right now as more and more people come into the program. But getting through those first couple of customers in each of those segments really helps us create a lot of material that we'll get a lot of reuse out of.

And my follow-up is regarding the Phase 2 kind of timeline and milestones. You mentioned, Dan, I think you said three of the five, another one you think is pretty close. Can you shed a little bit more light on what kind of the remaining hurdles are to get through Phase 2, is it too simple to think of those kind of linearly in terms of three to five and four to five or some of these maybe shorter or longer milestones to get through?

I think we've got pretty clear line of sight to get through the milestones here. But the one we've got coming up here in a couple of weeks, we've got really all the material that's just about ready to send off to them as part of what we want to provide for that milestone, some of them are things like we had to submit our auto certification testing plan. It's a rather detailed plan of all the that we're going to have done at a third party to meet automotive qualification. Now we have to wait to get feedback. The initial feedback is that it looks pretty thorough but there might be some comments that might drive some little changes. So for us, it's really been pretty straightforward with the things that we need to deliver. We don't see any hurdles there in terms of getting through the last couple of them.

Your next question is coming from Brian Dobson with Chardan Capital Markets.

Do you think you could give us a little bit of color on what you're hearing from key industrial contacts as far as adoption rates and timetables there, you'd mentioned that industrial would lead the first wave of adoption?

So for us, the most immediate opportunity is solid state circuit breakers, that's because of the timing of the launch of our SymCool product and the interest that that product had garnered because of our program with the Navy. So as we look at that opportunity, I would say that is furthest along and that could -- we should here in the near term, have initial sales and then again ramping in the second half of 2024. Right behind that is that SymCool IQ product, the intelligent power module that's really targeting more renewables, energy storage, UPS applications, et cetera. Those conversations, I would say, are just probably a few months behind, just as the product is, the SymCool product, just because of the timing of the launch of that product. But we expect similar traction as we get a little bit further along with the companies in our test evaluation program that are focused in those areas.

And as you expand beyond industrial and into automotive, do you anticipate that the margin on your product will remain roughly the same or will it vary by segment and volume? How do you contemplate that going forward?

Yes, we think it could vary significantly customer-to-customer, opportunity-to-opportunity. But what we've looked at in terms of our business model is really at scale getting to about 50% gross margins from product sales. And then as we look out and you talked about automotive, those automotive companies may very well want a second source. We would be potentially interested in outsourcing the manufacturing in terms of licensing to a another large semiconductor company, so that they could secure a second source that's much larger than us. And if we have those opportunities that licensing revenue would obviously be pretty much 100% gross margin. So we could be incrementally better than 50% as we add more and more licensing to the mix.

I will now turn this call back to Jeff Christensen to read questions submitted through the webcast.

Thank you, Kelly. Our first question for the team is, you recently now had a press release that B-TRAN outperformed the specs that you previously provided. How would you compare B-TRAN to competitors, including silicon and silicon carbide solutions?

If you look at, for example, a bidirectional switch that’s made today based on silicon devices, IGBTs and diodes. If you look for really high performance IGBTs and diodes that system may have 2.5 to 3 volts of drop, we're 5 times better than that. We're less than -- we actually have depending on how we configure the device itself, we can be less than half of a volt, so big impact. If you look at silicon carbide, silicon carbide, the advantage silicon carbide brings is the ability to go to higher temperature and faster switching, which we're finding is important in some applications. But if you look at the vast majority of high power semiconductor applications, silicon carbide is still just a small percentage of it. And part of it is because of the cost of the technology, it just isn't -- there's isn’t enough performance improvement to justify its cost. So we're finding that we don't see much yet in the way of new solutions for bidirectional switching. So we think we've got something that is really game changing in terms of the level of performance that it can bring without having to incur some of the high costs of some of the more exotic materials that people have been pursuing for quite some time now.

And we have several questions in the queue here. And if you have a question click on the ask a question button and we’ll be happy to address it. Based on recent articles in EE Power and Electronics Weekly, it appears that likely that SymCool has distinct advantages with a high demand to it. How are you positioning the company to make sure you can manage that demand and the expectations and satisfy these big customers?

It's part of why we're actually in the process now of qualifying a second wafer fabricator. It's getting a wafer fabrication process tested, validated and ready to scale up, takes quite a bit of time. It can take as long as a year easily to get through that process, which is why once we got the first one done, we didn't just say, okay, we're good for now. We said, well, we really need to get a second one going here, which is why we've pursued the arrangement with the fab in Europe. So we want to make sure that as we come into 2024, we have plenty of capacity. So we're not trying to ramp one facility rapidly but can actually spread that out between the two facilities, it gives us the ability to manage the supply chain a little bit better, it keeps the fab from being in a sort of a crisis situation where they're trying to ramp faster than they're comfortable with, with a new product and allows us to make sure we've got a good any flow of wafers we can use for a variety of applications. The nice thing about our technology and what we're doing is whether the wafers are going to be used in an application like electric vehicles or solid state circuit breakers or solar or energy storage, the dies that are getting made are all exactly the same. So we actually have the ability to scale this pretty conservatively, because we don't have to forecast where the dies are going to go, we don't have to forecast which mix we're going to need based on the applications and which one ramps first. So we think we've got a pretty robust way to ramp this up now once we get the second wafer fabricator through qualification.

To clarify, the company did state that if you could comment on it, the company did state that they expect revenue, commercial product revenue in the back half of 2023? And also if you could talk about the ramp and the timing of that ramp, any more color on that, and the industries, markets that will be -- how the markets will roll out as you expect?

So first in terms of revenue. So we will have obviously, development revenue from the Phase 2 of the program with top 10 automaker here in the fourth quarter. In terms of the SymCool fabrication, that's in fabrication now and it's looking like we may have devices available prior to year end for commercial sales. So we'll have to see the exact timing on those sales. That product will be the first to ramp. Again, we've said given the design cycles and evaluation cycles of some of these companies, we're looking at really modest volume for the first several months and then really ramping in the second half of 2024. So we do expect sales in the near term. But again, it will be modest in the first half and really start ramping in the second half. And then the SymCool IQ product is roughly several months, let's say, just to be conservative, say about six months behind in terms of expectations for that product, in terms of initial sales and also the sales ramp. So if you look at that, that's probably more of a first half 2025 ramp for the SymCool IQ product.

How many B-TRAN devices have been shipped to the evaluation partners? And any comment about -- any more comment about pricing, margins and how do we think about that?

So several hundred tested B-TRAN devices have been shipped to potential customers. We're not going to go down and provide a specific quantity shipped each quarter, each year, but it's several hundreds devices and we have wafer runs going now that will produce many, many hundreds of devices here for really to support things like the SymCool build and also Phase 2 development agreement. In terms of pricing, so we're not going to go out there and put the price of B-TRAN as X, because that's just going to kill us from negotiating standpoint. Each opportunity is different, the size of each opportunity is different, the importance of each opportunity is different and all those things will be considered when we're pricing the product. If you look at a B-TRAN die or die in general, I mean, it's tens of dollars. If you're looking at a IGBT power module that would compete with a SymCool or SymCool IQ, you can be talking $200, $300. So we'll be market competitive in terms of pricing, but we're not going to disclose our pricing because that would hurt us in negotiations with companies when we are at the point where we have commercial agreement for large volumes. But for perspective $200 to $300 module price and again [Indiscernible] higher tens of dollars, so if you look at it that way. And then margins, we said at volume 50% it's our target for gross margins absent the benefit of licensing, and licensing will be incremental to that 50% target.

Thank you. It looks like all the questions we have. Dan, do you have any closing remarks?

No, I just want to thank everybody for joining our call today. We made great progress on our path to commercialize our technology and our talented team is on track for a very successful 2023 and 2024. And we look forward to some commercial announcements in advance of our next update call, and we'll continue to actively share our story with the investment community. Operator, you may end the call.

Certainly. Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. All parties may disconnect at this time. Have a great day.