Will Moore
Analyst · Singular Research. Please state your question
Thanks, Atabak. I am also pleased to say Romeo Dizon our Vice President and Controller who stepped in very actively [ph] and filled the top financial role for almost a full year, will continue play a leadership role of the finance and accounting team and he will be reviewing the financial results on the call today. Now on to the second quarter, the last time we spoke at the end of the first quarter I told you how excited we all were about the business momentum. I said it was a compelling time at IRIDEX and that our commercial outlook was the most promising it's been since I've been here. Today, I am pleased to say that the commercial outlook continues to translate to sales in the field so that excitement continues to grow in the second quarter. Revenue for the quarter was $11.9 million, which is a record, and comes in at the top end of our guidance and represents a growth rate of 32% from last year. Our growth was driven by continued momentum in gaining glaucoma market share. The market has discovered the G6 platform and number speak for themselves; G6 platform revenue in the quarter increased 66% over the first quarter in 2016 so really nice sequential growth that was driven by both systems sold and probe sales. We sold 115 G6 systems in the first nine months it was on sale in 2015 another 72 in the first quarter of 2016 and 124 systems in Q2. This was clearly a great result. However, I want to be a bit cautious on the implied ramp trajectory as some of these orders were placed by distributors which will take some time to work through before we see reorders. We shipped 7,000 MP3 probes in the first nine months they were on sale in 2015, 5,000 in the first quarter of 2016 and 8,000 this quarter. In the first year since launched physicians who integrated G6 into their practice have typically using between six to eight probes per month. We're obviously very encouraged by this performance and an interesting comparison is that our MP3 probe utilization is tracking to the utilization level of the only commercialized mid step a comparable point in their launch. Overall, we remain very bullish over the prospects of our positioning in the glaucoma market. As we've discussed before, the glaucoma market is very large including $5.5 billion annually in eye drop medicines alone. So we feel like we are barely scratching the surface on this opportunity. Since poor patient compliance with their eye drop regimen is one of the factors leading to an ongoing high levels of interocular pressure or IOP our Cyclo G6 laser provides doctors and patients with a new treatment option that often reduces the need for med and is durable with lower IOPs often lasting for months or years. We're seeing the Cyclo G6 quickly gaining acceptance in creating a real potential for our G6 to become a key component in the continuum of care for glaucoma. I am mentioned that the G6 platform offers key competitive advantages unlike our competitors who tend to specialize in products that treat a particular stage of the disease our G6 platform was designed to support additional disposable probe solutions for several distinct stages of glaucoma treatment. On top of that the economics and logistics for the ophthalmologists are superior to past solutions as we only take about five minutes to perform am MP3 procedure. Physicians have adopted the MicroPulse scope collar [ph] because it is safe, minimally invasive, non-incisional and can be repeated at intervals over many years as it causes limited to damage to healthy tissue. It is also titerable to a patient's condition which is an important attribute in the area of personalized medicines. We believe these tangible reasons are deriving excitement in the glaucoma community for the G6 and are behind the remarkable sales growth. We've sold over 300 G6 lasers and shipped approximately 20,000 probes without published review clinical data on marketing muscle. Our clinical marketing initiatives are just now getting underway and their clinical presentations beginning to emerge at major meeting. There was podium presentation at American Glaucoma Society Meeting March, two presentations at ARVO in the first week of May, two more at ASCRS in New Orleans and most recently at the European Glaucoma Society in June. These presentations will most likely be followed by published papers in the coming months that we should continue fuel accelerated interest in sales. Another important differentiator that can't overemphasized compared to other therapies in the market whether it be drugs, or devices our product delivers real value to the healthcare systems and provide benefits to both physicians and patients. With the cost of glaucoma therapies increasingly straining the resource of healthcare in the U.S. and around the world our effective durable products delivered the best medicine at the lowest price helping us to become the go to choice for delivering value based medical solutions. We just started to introduce the G6 on a limited basis internationally in Europe, the Middle East, and Australia but the large developing markets like China and India represent a significant untapped opportunity for us. Needless to say we believe we're entering a new year at IRIDEX whereby the steady modest growth of past is becoming overcome by real growth dynamic and with considerably more upside on the way. However, we are facing some headwinds. Our legacy EndoProbe sales have realized some modest contractions and we believe that our MicroPulse for our retina business could grow at a faster rate. We had predicted softness in the EndoProbe business so let's focus on the MicroPulse as I think we have a good understanding of what is going on and believe that business continues to have significant upside opportunity for us. As we've analyzed the situation it is clear that the value proposition we have discussed in the past remains intact. Specifically the economic workflow benefits of MicroPulse for retina relative to the pharmacologic alternative has been more broadly understood and adopted by physicians. What is affecting our near term growth is two fold. The quality issues that we experienced last year are still fresh in the minds of some customers. While we have addressed our quality issues, we still have more work to do with our customer to give them a confident quality on a go-forward basis, and two, our sales team has been stretched given the rapid adoption of the G6 platform. While we have adjusted our compensation plans instead of our focus on both products we have greater expectations from MicroPulse for retina business. So what are we doing to support the rapid growth potential to the G6 platform and MicroPulse for retina businesses. First, we intend to modestly expand our sales teams so that we broaden our territories and improve our focus on the highest opportunity regions. As many of you that have been following us know we have a history of being a prudent company almost to a fault and have been cautious to make investments ahead of our growth. While our optimism over the past year about the G6 has transitioned to real growth and real utility in the marketplace, in order to realize our growth objectives we feel that the timing is right to expand our U.S. direct sales force from 12 to 18 reps for the next several months. We also need to make investments in our commercial operation to increase our manufacturing capacity, continue and improve our quality and to reduce to costs. We are very confident that over the medium and longer term this money is well spent and the potential for large return our investment is close to hand. These expenses will impact our P&L over the next few quarters as will need to incur some costs upfront but the revenue impact will be realized immediately. It is important to note that we're remaining consistent with our past actions and that we will plan to undertake these investments in a staged approach that minimizes disruption to the business and is predicated on the continued positive signals from the field. Now I'll turn the call over to Romeo for more financial details. Romeo?