Earnings Labs

Neonode Inc. (NEON)

Q1 2022 Earnings Call· Thu, May 12, 2022

$1.63

-1.52%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Neonode's First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Urban Forssell, Neonode's CEO. Urban, please go ahead and start the conference.

Urban Forssell

Analyst

Welcome, and thank you for joining us. In today's call, we will review our first quarter 2022 financial results and provide a corporate update. Our update will include details about our business strategies, customer activities and other items of interest. Joining me on today's call is our CFO, Fredrik Nihlen. Fredrik will present the financial results of the company for the first quarter of 2022. After this, I will come back and comment on overall strategies, customer activities and other operational topics. Before we proceed with the main part of the presentation, I'd like to read the following legal disclaimer. This presentation contains and the related oral and written statements on Neonode Inc. and its management may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include information about current expectations, strategy, plans, potential financial performance or future events. They may also include statements about market opportunity and sales growth, financial results, use of cash, product development and introductions, regulatory matters and sales efforts. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions, expectations, information available to the company and its management, and involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the company's actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. These uncertainties and risks include, but not limited to: our ability to secure financing we needed on acceptable terms; risks related to new product development; our ability to protect our intellectual property; our ability to compete; general economic conditions, including, as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic or geopolitical conflict such as the war in Ukraine; as well as other risks outlined in the filings of the company with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended including the sections entitled risk factors and management discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations. Prospective investors are advised to carefully consider these various risks, uncertainties and other factors. Any forward-looking statements included in this presentation are made as of today's date. The company and its management undertakes no duty to update or revise forward-looking statements. This presentation has been prepared by the company based on its own information as well as information from public sources. Certain of the information contained herein may be derived from information provided by industry sources. The company believes such information is accurate and that the sources from which it has been obtained are reliable. However, the company has not independently verified such information and cannot guarantee the accuracy of such information. Thank you. At this point, I would like to turn the call over to Fredrik, who will review the financial results for the first quarter. Fredrik, please go ahead.

Fredrik Nihlen

Analyst

Thank you, Urban. You can find our first quarter 2022 earnings and 10-Q with the details of financial performance during the first quarter of 2022 available for download from the Investors section on our website, neonode.com. In the interest of time, I will only summarize the key comments here. Our total revenues for the first quarter of 2022 reached $1.3 million. That is a decrease of 21% compared to the same period in 2021. License revenues for the first quarter of 2022 was $1.1 million compared to $1.3 million for the same period in 2021. The decrease is primarily the result of component shortages within the printer and automotive markets related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which, in turn, impacted our license revenues for the first quarter of 2022. Product revenues for the first quarter 2022 was $147,000, an increase of 20% compared to the previous quarter. In the first half of 2021, we saw an increase in the product sales. In the second half of 2021 and continuing into the first quarter 2022, our sales were negatively impacted due to COVID-19-driven lockdowns in Asia. Our elevator and kiosks customers in Asia have been first adopters of our contactless touch technology and as expected, most of our initial TSM sales are related to retrofit solutions technology and are more limited. New customer equipment launches can take 6 to 18 months or even longer before a customer is ready to begin mass production. Our gross margin of products were 65% for the first quarter of 2022, which is an increase of 41 percentage points compared to the same period last year. If we look at the gross profit and gross margin only for TSMs and adjust for the onetime effects, we can see a positive trend for the gross margin with 62%…

Urban Forssell

Analyst

Thank you, Fredrik. And at this point, I would like to go into our strategy and business update. Our vision is to transform the way humans interact with machines. And we strive for this by offering innovative touch, contactless touch, gesture sensing and scene analysis solutions. Our business model rests on 2 pillars: technology licensing and product sales. We combine this based on nonrecurring engineering services. Our licensing offers are for our technology platforms, zForce and MultiSensing. And our product offers currently are our touch center modules, or TSMs, as we also call them short. The new strategy we launched in 2020 is 100% focused on business to business and on revitalizing and growing our licensing business in parallel to growing our products business. In our product business, we mainly target customers in the elevator and interactive kiosk segments. We also see potential and are working with some customers in the industrial and automation, digital signage and medical equipment segments. Our licensing business has historically been focused around e-reader, printer and automotive customers. And currently, the main license revenues from legacy customers comes from printer manufacturers and automotive Tier 1s. Going forward, we see the largest potential to grow in the Automotive segment, but we also believe we can grow significantly in the Military & Avionics and the industrial automation segments. And potential, in retail segments, is also apparent with our MultiSensing software, as I will describe in more detail later. zForce is a technology platform that comprises IP-related optics, electronics, software and algorithms for advanced IR-based touch, gesture sensing and object detection features. The zForce platform is well proven. We have sold over 85 million zForce licenses to customers worldwide in the last 10 years. And we continue to sell every month a number of licenses to existing customers.…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question will come from Jesper Von Koch with Redeye.

Jesper Von Koch

Analyst

So let's start with products. So for products, you have 3 major ongoing projects that we view as the main revenue drivers for 2022. So 7-Eleven, the elevator OEM and the Japanese sushi chain. Could you elaborate on the progress of the these?

Urban Forssell

Analyst

Yes. First of all, I'm not sure I fully agree that these 3 projects are the main revenue drivers this year, but they are indeed significant wins for us, and we are very happy with them. We have with -- starting with that elevator company, we made an announcement in the fourth quarter. I believe it was about an elevator our OEM deciding to use our TSMs and our contactless touch solution in their new elevators. They have already developed solutions. They have started in a smaller scale to launch it in the market. They are slowly also opening up the curtain when marketing is publicly and showing commercials. And our local people in that market have shared pictures of that, and I'm sure we will continue that rollout. And I have no information suggesting that they had second thoughts, so the rollout is continuing. It's looking good. Also, the feedback we have from 7-Eleven Japan is very, very positive. They clearly have the ambition to roll this out in a bigger scale across their stores in Japan. Personally, today, I'm missing like day fresh updates regarding this -- the pace of that rollout, but we have no information suggesting that they are backing away. Regarding the sushi chain. One of Japan's major sushi chains have already installed in all their self-service kiosks in all restaurants across Japan the contactless touch interface so that you can reserve a table, and you can also preorder food outside of the main restaurant area using their self-service kiosks. They are sitting there in public and being used every day. We are working with other quick service restaurant chains in Japan and also in other countries. And we hope that this will be like a snowball effect when other chains see what this first chain is now doing and how well the solutions work.

Jesper Von Koch

Analyst

All right. So in light of all the uncertainty factors playing an important role at the moment, what's your view on a potential ramp-up of revenues during 2022?

Urban Forssell

Analyst

It's apparent that we, indirectly, is -- we are under pressure due to COVID pandemic lockdowns and also, to some extent, the strain of supply chains for semiconductors. We have seen this from some of our licensing customers in automotive, and we are also seeing this from some of our product customer. And it's like indirect effects. So it's a little bit slowing us down and probably taking a little bit of the edge out of our growth this year. But overall, it's not a significant problem or risk. It's a little bit slowing us down. That's our feeling. Overall, the trend is positive. And our own suppliers -- remember, our licensing customers buy special circuits, ASICs from Texas Instruments, which they use to realize the touch features that they are using in their printers and automotive and similar. TI is also a little bit under pressure, but they have confirmed to us that the situation is under control. All of our customers will get all of the ASICs they need for their production. So it's a tough situation for many, but we and our partners, we are actively working to mitigate any problems or risks that this causes.

Jesper Von Koch

Analyst

Okay. Good. And so my last question. Like -- since the Q4 report, you haven't announced any major customer deals. You talked a little bit about it, but how do you experience the underlying customer activity and interest?

Urban Forssell

Analyst

We are very positive still. Of course, we are also working hard to actually -- to realize new business wins with customers around the world. We have actually a very broad and deep pipeline, and we have shared some insights into that pipeline today. We expect during this year actually that we're going to get positive feedback from several of these customers that we have indicated here and projects we have indicated here during this call from automotive OEMs, Tier 1s and also elevator and kiosk companies. So we are actually very encouraged by that development still, although we also would like to see a faster pickup of the sales revenues, definitely, with sales volumes.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from Valter Lindhagen with Pareto.

Valter Lindhagen

Analyst

My first question is regarding your input costs. So a hot topic right now among manufacturing companies is increased input costs. I wonder, how much you've been affected? And how -- kind of what's your ability to raise prices? Are you able to do that instantly when you experience increased costs? Or will there be a lag there?

Urban Forssell

Analyst

So for our own production of TSMs in Pronode Technologies, we actually have, from last year, secured a significant component stock. And also in the cases where we have more recently bought additional components, we didn't experience any major cost increases. So for that reason, our own situation is sort of stable. Nevertheless, we have reviewed and updated our pricing strategy and also improved on our margins in products business over the last 18 months. So hence, the good margins that Fredrik talked about in his presentation earlier during the call. In other cases, we are fully aware that raw materials and components can drive costs up, and this is a little bit, perhaps, slowing down some of our kiosks and elevator customers, but it's not stopping them completely. And I cannot comment on and I don't know about the magnitude of their challenges with the cost increases and the possibility of doing increased prices of their products. But it's like an indirect effect or a risk for us, not really a direct issue for me or Pronode Technologies.

Valter Lindhagen

Analyst

All right. And then just another question related to the gross margin there. As you mentioned, you showed on one slide that you have had to constantly improve the gross margin for, I mean, quarter-over-quarter for more than a year. Could you just remind us a little bit what has been driving this development?

Urban Forssell

Analyst

Yes. I will let Fredrik answer this.

Fredrik Nihlen

Analyst

Yes. So during the years, we have looked into the costs that we have had, and we have also increased the price list. So we have -- as you can see in the presentation, we have a table showing you the onetime effects. And the onetime effects, obviously, [indiscernible] moving down. And now we can see a more stable gross margin, and it's relatively well.

Urban Forssell

Analyst

So Fredrik means that in the report, there are further details included that explains the onetime effects. And some of them were taken already before and not in this quarter, but in the fourth quarter last year and even earlier than that. Going forward now, we think that we have actually cleaned up the books and taking out a lot of these onetime effects, and we will see like a more stable situation going forward.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This concludes today's Q&A. I will now turn the call back over to our presenters for any additional or closing remarks.

Urban Forssell

Analyst

We just wanted to thank you for taking the time to join this call, and we wish you a good day. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's event. You may now disconnect.