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Research Frontiers Incorporated (REFR)

Q3 2018 Earnings Call· Sun, Nov 11, 2018

$0.96

+0.55%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Research Frontiers Investor Conference Call to discuss the Third Quarter of 2018 Results and Recent Developments. During today’s presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode and following the presentation the conference will be opened up for questions [Operator Instructions] This conference is being recorded today. A replay of this conference call will be available starting later today in the Investors section of Research Frontiers website at www.smartglass.com and will be available for replay for the next 90 days. Safe Harbor announcements. Please note that some of the comments made today may contain forward-looking information. The words expects, anticipate, plans, forecasts and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions that are part of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements reflect the Company’s current beliefs and a number of important factors could cause actual results for future periods to differ materially from those expressed. Significant factors that could cause results to differ from those anticipated are described in our filings with the SEC. Research Frontiers undertakes no obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements to reflect new events or uncertainties. The Company will be answering many of the questions that were emailed to it prior to this conference call, either in their presentation or as part of the Q&A session at the end. In some cases, the Company has responded directly to email questions prior to this call or will do so afterwards, in order to answer more questions of general interest to shareholders on this call. [Operator Instructions] Also we ask that you keep your question brief in the interest of time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joseph Harary, President and Chief Executive Officer of Research Frontiers. Please go ahead, sir.

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Thank you, Erica and good afternoon, everyone. Joining me today is Seth Van Voorhees, he is our CFO and President of our VariGuard division. There are two areas that we have been giving our investors some guidance on when it comes to revenues. The first is helping them back out non-recurring items from prior period so investors can better see the current level of activity via licensees from the sale of products using our technology. Also in 2018, a new revenue recognition standard sometimes referred to ASC-606 came into effect, which changes the allocation of how our royalty income is recognized. Along the same lines, we’ve also been giving investor’s guidance to better understand reported revenues by helping them understand what fee income would have been under the original ASC-605 revenue recognition standard, so you can compare apples-to-apples. So let’s get into the numbers. When you adjust to the new accounting standard, and also back out non-recurring fee income from prior periods, fee income for the first nine months of this year would have been up over $115,000 or about 9.5% from the same period last year. When doing the same comparison for the third quarter of this year with the third quarter of last year, fee income would have been up 11.6%. So compared to last year, this year our fee income is up between 9.5% and 11.6% depending on whether you’re looking at the three or nine month accounting periods. Also when we look at sequential quarterly revenue by comparing this quarter to the prior quarter of this year, fee income was up 10.7%. If the same revenue recognition accounting standard as last year was in effect, fee income for the third quarter of this year would have been up 19% from the second quarter of this year.…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Michael Kay from Kay Associates. Please state your question.

Michael Kay

Analyst

Hello, Joe. Hello.

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Hey, Mike.

Michael Kay

Analyst

I was wondering…

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Hey, Mike. Sorry, you caught me seeping a couple of coffee. I’m sorry.

Michael Kay

Analyst

Okay. At the sunvisors I know Vision Systems was working very hard. And I think that would be a big seller that people could incorporate in their cars. So when do you think that would be online commercially?

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Yes. So now in the last couple of aircraft shows, that’s a great question. The last couple of aircraft shows, we’ve seen the sunvisor product much more prominently displayed. And remember in the aircraft market you’re talking about retrofitting existing aircraft with the sunvisor. More recently you’ve seen as I mentioned SPD moving to the driver's compartment of trains and that's also acting as a sunvisors. So visor is now also being deployed in the train market, as well as the aircraft market. And what you're seeing also is kind of two different variants of the sunvisor that is making its way into the world. If you look at some of the videos that are out there on our technology, for example, Continental Automotive has an excellent video with the Ford. That is completely outfitted with SPD SmartGlass all around to all the windows. And in their windshield there’s a built-in sunvisor with multi-segments that can detect where on the horizon the sun is and only block out those areas that you need to block in order to prevent the glare from hitting your eye without reducing your visibility. So you have that as -- by far that’s not the only example of this. McLaren [ph] has come out with SPDs product in their cars because the McLaren is lower volume obviously, but it shows that one way to deploy this in the automotive market is building the sunvisor right in between the glass of the windshield and it’s a great way to do this. And if you look at a lot of the electric vehicle makers out there, for example, Tesla, they try themselves on having very few buttons and things protruding on the inside of their car is very [Indiscernible] and having a sunvisor built-in to the windshield makes perfect sense to that type of design choices. And then moving to the aftermarket, all of the kind of preliminary development work that’s been going on in the aircrafts and train market certainly is beneficial to the automotive market as well. So, and we are…

Michael Kay

Analyst

And if there’s any news in terms of progress with Panasonic and the signage that they have been interested in?

Joseph Harary

Analyst

I think that you will see – the short answer to your question is yes, there's been progress in Asia, there’s been progress in Europe, and I think in the coming year you’re going to start to see some more visibility with this at some very high-profile places in the United States as well, so, yes.

Michael Kay

Analyst

Okay. Thank you very much. And I think the – in terms of fee -- revenue it seems there’s sustenance of upward momentum. I hope it continues?

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Yes. We’re working hard to do that, Michael. Thank you for the question.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Ishfaque Farouk from Westpark Capital. Please state your question.

Ishfaque Farouk

Analyst

Hi. Good afternoon.

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Hey, Ishfaque, how are you?

Ishfaque Farouk

Analyst

I’m good. Just one quick from me. In terms of the -- you mentioned the railroad, can you give me a sense for what dollar value the railway market might have in terms of potential on a fee income basis going forward?

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Let me answer your question a different way. At our presentation that one of our very strong licensees in the rail market that happens also to be in the bus and aircraft market in Europe gave me. There’s a projected revenue graph for 2019 and by far the largest segment dwarfing everything else that they were doing was rail. So it could be a very significant market. To give you maybe a little bit of color. So again, two kind of things that are going on in the rail market. Couple of examples that the depressive step on is the Rocky Mountaineer, Luxury Train, we have this very high-end train as it goes from five-star hotel to five-star hotel with magnificent panoramic views of the mountains and things. And you have the Shiki-shima train which is very similar thing of it as a luxury crew ship on rails. And that’s one market where we’ve been deployed. And then you have the other two public announcements that came out. One was both actually from Vision Systems that came out at the Inter-train show. One was a bullet train for the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the other was very large commuter train line in another part of the world. And once you get in one of these things you get in all of them. So it’s – that’s why for the last two conference call I’ve been talking about the train market because we have very, very good visibility on where that can go.

Ishfaque Farouk

Analyst

All right. Thank you very much.

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Thank you, Ishfaque.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Tom Mccarthy from Raymond James. Please state your question.

Q - Tom Mccarthy

Analyst

Hi, Joe.

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Tom, how are you?

Q - Tom Mccarthy

Analyst

Good, good. Please address the Marine market in terms of current use and also near and medium term likely possibilities?

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Okay. So the Marine market is something that goes hand-in-hand with the aircraft market, matter of fact, if you look at who’s been designing the yachts, it’s typically the same companies that are designing the beautiful interiors of aircraft. So companies like, Lufthansa Technik has been in the Marine market, companies like BMW and Mercedes-Benz Style, Gordon Wagner led the design of the Silverado Marine yacht which is starting to hit bigger volumes and uses a lot of our glass. And then you have a megayacht market which is quite significant. You don't really read about it too much because sometimes the Russian oligarchs that are building these yachts, so we don’t want a lot of publicity, but these things are amazing, amazing yacht. And then if you go more towards the high volume more predictable part of the Marine market, you’re talking about crew ships. And one of the things that I think is significant for crew ship is the width of the glass there is fairly significant, and because of that the width of the glass being significant. The fact that we're now moving into an era with wider film is very significant. And our licensees that are supplying the crew ship market are quite excited about the advent of the water film and there’s been some fairly large purchase orders placed for that.

Q - Tom Mccarthy

Analyst

Is spiking crews is one of those customers?

Joseph Harary

Analyst

I’m sorry.

Q - Tom Mccarthy

Analyst

Yes. There was a talk before about them what’s the status there?

Joseph Harary

Analyst

They’ve successfully tested the concept of SPD for certain -- I’ll call them architectural side windows on the crew ships because the one meter width was all that was available when that test started. The 1.3 to 1.5 meter widths from Gauzy will certainly beautifully address their needs in that market.

Q - Tom Mccarthy

Analyst

Okay.

Joseph Harary

Analyst

So I think you’ll see some triggers being pulled.

Q - Tom Mccarthy

Analyst

Thank you, Joe.

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Thanks Tom.

Operator

Operator

Our next question -- [Operator Instructions]. At this time we have no further questions.

Joseph Harary

Analyst

Great. Well, I think we answer the lot of the questions that we email to us and I appreciate the time that people took to send us those questions so that we could cover more grounds today. As you can see we’ve been quite busy in all of the markets. And from what we see in the pipeline after a slow but firm initial startup period, the next several years should be great once for us in the automotive market. This growth in automotive will be enhanced by new regulations limiting CO2 emissions in cars, the shift towards electric vehicles, the rise of autonomously driven cars, the need to create an open-air feeling in the roofs of coops and the strength of the premium market and new model introductions. As we announced yesterday next week I'll be presenting these topics and the target markets for SPD in the automotive industry as a featured speaker at the largest automotive glass conference in Europe. And there are other activities going on in Europe next week as well which are quite exciting that I'll be participating at. And our calendar of events is quite full for the remainder of this year and already well through the next year. I’m sure that all of our investors on this call will be pleased to hear about these things. The visibility of SmartGlass led by Research Frontiers in our licensees is an all-time high. You’ve seen some of this activity over the past two months, some of this is public and some of going on at development centers and test tracks by major vehicle manufacturers in the automotive, train and aircraft industries. Some licensees such as American Glass Products in South America has also become very visible with SPD for the very first time. Their focus…

Operator

Operator

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for attending.