Tom Heckman
Analyst · Four Points Capital. Please go ahead
Sure Stan, thank you, and welcome to everybody today. I appreciate you joining this. Just as a reminder, we did file our Form 10-K yesterday evening. Hopefully, everybody has had a chance to at least look at that and kind of digest some of the MD&A in there and the numbers in that. My intention here is just to hit some of the high points and hopefully get to your questions, and I am sure you do have some questions. Overall, I would say that we had a very strong finish to 2014 compared to 2013. Although we didn’t get to the same amount of revenues, we were shy by about $400,000 at the revenue line. The last quarter of the year had $5.4 million in revenue versus $3.5 million in revenue in 2013, certainly a strong showing in the fourth quarter. And that, really what we are seeing there I believe is the impacts of all the – what I would say excitement about the body camera and the usage of that, what everybody is shared about it. Certainly, we are starting to see some results of that. RFPs have gone out, pilots, they have been done, and we are starting to see the revenues associated with that. So, we are hopeful that that trend continues. It certainly did show up in the fourth quarter and we are excited about what’s going to happen in 2015. In reality, the fourth quarter of 2014 at $5.4 million in revenue was our best quarterly revenue figure since the third quarter of 2011. So, over three years ago, it was our last quarter that was more than $5.4 million. So, we hope we have seen the trough in the economic cycle as far as our business, and we are starting to go up the hill again. It certainly looks like that based on what’s happened in the second half of 2014. We had positive EBITDA in the fourth quarter, 140 some thousand. As I recall, that’s the first time we’ve had a positive EBITDA since Q2 of 2013. And obviously, we always want to have positive EBITDA. We are there now; we hope to be able to maintain that throughout 2015. Our gross margins improved to 59%, which is almost a 10% increase from Q4 2013. So obviously, our gross margins are widening, and that’s a result basically of our newer products including the FirstVU and DVM-800 that generates wider margins for us than our legacy products. For the full year, we are 57%, which is a 1% increase over the full year 2013. So obviously, our gross margins are going in the right direction and what we said many times that our overall goal is to reach 60%, we are one point away from there. So hopefully, we will be able to get over that hump in 2015. Really, the second half of 2014, really confirmed to us that our customers are recovering from the economic downfall and the video business is strong. In fact, we believe that by and large, agencies both federal state and local are directing expenditures, CapEx expenditures towards video equipment rather than other equipments and that’s always a positive for a business. So we are excited about 2015. Looking at the SG&A expense, it increased by about $500,000 year-over-year. The primary area of increase there was our SG&A – I am sorry, our selling cost, and really what we’ve done there is develop a larger inside sales force to complement our outside sales force. I think we are up three body counts in terms of outside sales people that handle the territories. But we’ve developed a very robust inside sales group that handles outbound calls and co-calling if you will and dealing with customer orders and issues inside here that frees up our outside sales staff. So, we’ve invested in our selling, distribution model and I think we are starting to see the results of that. Year-over-year the R&D cost declined $700,000. You might think that that means we cut our R&D efforts and R&D people in-house. But that’s absolutely not what we’ve done. In fact, only a third of our employees are engineers. We’ve increased our headcount in engineering every year for the last three years. So, what really happened there was, we cut our outside contracted engineering for some software development. We actually mothballed a project, a next-generation type project for in-car video and then focused on some of the newer products which you are seeing patents being issued on, or at least patents being filed for now. So, we believe that our R&D effort is as strong as ever. We’ve just been a little more efficient in how we go about it. If you look at our effort though, we’ve really not cut R&D for a number of years, and that’s really, in my view, positive of the vision that Stan and the Board of Directors has had here, because, in the down years, when the revenues were down, we were still providing ample capital and working capital to our R&D effort, and because of that, look at what we’ve produced in the last two years. The FirstVU HD obviously is a hot item for us right now. That was introduced in late 2013, early 2014. The DVM-800 is our top selling video, in-car video system. It was introduced in late 2013. VuLink is a hot seller. We received that patent in June of last year. And that was introduced, so it’s really helping us integrate our body cameras with our in-car video, and that’s a positive step and we are seeing a lot of demand for that from our customers. We’ve also launched cloud solutions for video storage for both commercial and law enforcement. So we’ve been very active and very productive with the dollars we are spending in R&D. We currently just launched our MicroVU HD which is our new HD in-car video system, and we look to see many sales of that in 2015. That was just – actually just shipped this past week. So it’s a new product that’s out there. We are excited to see how it gets traction. Looking at the future product development, we’ve got many development projects and process, and I think you guys have seen some of the fruits of that. Just yesterday, we announced that we did get a patent issued on our Scanning LIDAR, which is the revolutionary type LIDAR system that can be used from a mobile basis. Currently, policemen have to be stationery in order to use LIDAR, and this thing will overlay on to our video systems, our in-car video systems, so that will have hands-free automatic scanning capabilities as they roll down the highway, and store it too and showing on our video system. So, it’s quite an exciting product. It’s probably not a good product for anybody that speeds out there, but it certainly is a good product for us. We also applied for a patent on the breathalyzer. That too would be an integrated device with our video systems. And what you are seeing here is a theme that we are trying to integrate many different products and technologies with our in-car video system, and I think that’s really where things are headed to the law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies don’t like to deal with various vendors. They like to deal with one vendor, a complete end-to-end solution, and we are providing that now and we are going to increase our penetration of that strong hope for us. If you look at our non-operating financial expenses for the year, we’ve talked about it before, but it’s very apparent in the financial statements. Our non-operating, and I will also add, non-cash expenses, were over $6 million in 2014, over $6 million compared to $250,000 of interest expense in 2013. So, obviously almost a $6 million, up $5 million increase year-over-year and that obviously is related to our convertible debt and the associated warrants that we did. During the year, we did two transactions, one for $2 million; one for $4 million and the accounting for those are rather punitive. Even though they are non-cash in nature, they do require the expense being hit to the P&L regardless. So, we saw roughly, $6 million in non-operating, non-cash charges to that extent. The Special Shareholders Meeting happened in 2015, February, 13th of 2015 and we do appreciate everybody on the call that helped – help make that meeting a success. But it did approve that NASDAQ capital listing which was a very important matter for us and the company and also our shareholders and by doing that it allowed the remaining $4 million of convertible debt to be converted into equity and that has been done and as soon as that NASDAQ cap vote happened and was approved, Hudson Bay who was our investor there exercised the right to convert the debt and converted all $4 million of that to equity. So, we have no convertible debt outstanding now. They also have roughly 260,000 warrants outstanding. They will pay us $7.32 a share when and if they do exercise those warrants. And I would suspect with the level of our share price now, that that would happen shortly here. So, once that happens, that means roughly $1.9 million, almost $2 million of new capital comes into the business. So, overall, we like that transactional, those financial statements that really bear that out with the non-cash charges that hit our P&L. We’re looking forward to 2015 since the debt was already converted and we believe that the warrants will likely be exercised here in the near future. But the total effects of non-cash effect should be contained within Q1. So, be on the look out and be aware that Q1 2015 will likely have sizable non-cash charges due to the conversion of the debt and exercise of the warrants. But again, it is all non-cash. If you look at our balance sheet, it remains strong. We have roughly $4.5 million in cash. That includes restricted cash of $1.5 million and the reason that includes that restricted cash is because of the NASDAQ cap approval by the – in the Special Shareholders Meeting that restriction is last and it is now fully available to us as working capital and cash. Receivables increased year-over-year by $1.2 million and that’s primarily just the increased revenue in the fourth quarter going from $3.5 million to $5.4 million in revenue, that’s roughly – almost $2 million increase in revenue in the fourth quarter and that’s the primary reason for the increase in receivables. We don’t foresee any collection issues, or any significant collection issues in that balance. Inventory increased $1.2 million year-over-year and really what that is, it’s an influx of FirstVU HD component parts. We are desperately trying to increase our supply chain productivity to get us in component parts to be able to build the units and get those out into customers’ hands. Right now, we’ve got almost 400 T&E units that have shipped, because we are not able to produce enough FirstVU HDs to meet regular order demand and T&Es. So, it’s important that we get that productivity up and that’s what you are seeing there in terms of the increased inventory. Also, you’ll see an increase in our DVM-800 inventory as well as our legacy product, the DVM-750, believe it or not, we are seeing quite a large demand for the old 750 and therefore we’ve increased our levels to meet our 2015 sales forecast those two items. From a debt perspective, we’ve already talked about the convertible debt has all been converted. So it’s gone. We have $2.5 million subordinated debt that comes due in May of this year and we are currently in negotiation to either extend convert or pay that off when it becomes due. So, we are ready to deal with that $2.5 million or whatever the holder that wants to do. The derivative valuations resulted in a $2.2 million liability on the balance sheet and really what that is, is the value of those warrants that were issued to Hudson Bay in those transactions. And again, we expect those to settle in early 2015, maybe before quarter end, it’s not probably be in Q2. And again, when that happens, it’s going to bring $1.9 million of cash into the company. So, it’s really a good event although we do have no liability on the balance sheet due to the accounting requirements of that. Here some of the matters we are dealing with in 2015. I have already mentioned the FirstVU HD, the supply chain; we are trying to increase that. We are in process of developing a second source for the PCB boards. Again, a PCB, the printed circuit boards or other major component in that item and that’s the bottleneck at the current time is getting those in commercial quantities to us. So we are developing a second source and we expect them to come online later in 2015 and help us deal with the demand its developing out there. From a litigation perspective, there is several matters I would like to touch on. If you recall, Stephen Gans, the next Director of ours, was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the company and the directors and that has been settled but no amounts paid. It’s pending court approval right now. So we expect that litigation to go away with prejudice, so it can never be brought back. We have a litigation going on with Dreg and I, in fact there is a hearing today in front of the Federal District Court Judge. We are the plaintiff in that issue and we do expect the positive resolution set thing winds down. The third thing, which was a matter of a press release, I think last week or maybe two weeks ago with Utility Associates and I will stress that there is nothing but positive news to record on the utility matter. We did finally and I think we talked about this the last quarter. We were looking forward to getting them in the court under owe to answer what their motives were, why they did this and how they get it. We’ve finally got that opportunity in early March. And we – to be real honest, we were surprised that some of the facts that came out in that hearing and because of that we’ve asked for a leave of court to amend our petition to include additional matters that we believe we were wrong on. So, we expect now some positive developments and a resolution in that matter. In fact, it’s going to – it was continued until later in February, February 21, 22 as I recall. So, stay tuned on the utility matter. You might have noticed that we did provided 2015 forecast which I think Stan may get into a little bit in more detail. But what I will say from an accounting perspective and I help generate that forecast, what we’ve done there is primarily project a recovery in our international commercial markets. The international commercial markets were quite disappointing in 2014. They were short of expectation and actually short of the prior year figures. We believe that they will come back and show substantial improvement in 2015. Law enforcement, domestic law enforcement were showing a little bit of an increase, but certainly that means that that we are leaving a lot on the table with the FirstVU. The upside of the FirstVU what might happen with the sales there could be a game changer; it could rewrite our forecast very shortly to be real honest with you. But we have not reflected that fully in our 2015 forecast. We don’t have a lot of revenue projected in that forecast from our MicroVU HD. You might recall that that was noted as a New Product of The Year at the ICP Conference. One in a string of awards we’ve won with our new products in the last couple of years. Very proud of that. We think it’s going to be a winner from a product standpoint, like I said; we just shipped our first finished commercial units this past week. So we are excited of what the MicroVU could do and we have not reflected that in the forecast as it sits today. So, with that, I’ll give it back to Stan.