Georges Karam
Analyst · ROTH
Thank you, David. Good morning to everyone. We announced this morning that Sequans has taken a proactive approach to reduce its debt by 50% through its strategic asset reallocation of its Bitcoin treasury. We remain fully committed to our Bitcoin treasury strategy, which we continue to believe will deliver meaningful long-term value for our shareholders. This is why we executed our major financing deal in July as the starting foundation of our Bitcoin strategy. As you know, the financing deal included both equity and convertible debt components that introduced approximately 50% leverage into our treasury structure. Initially, we thought the shares would appreciate following the deal announcement and the debt would convert due to share price appreciation. While there is no urgency for us as we are not paying interest on the debt for the first 12 months, we have chosen to act proactively given current digital asset treasury market conditions. With many of our peers currently trading significantly below an mNAV of 1. We find ourselves constrained by the lack of available options to meaningfully advance our treasury strategy at this time. Thus, we have opted to move forward and negotiate with our debt holder to reduce our debt exposure and provide us with greater flexibility moving forward. As a result, we announced today that we are reducing by half our convertible debt via a tactical sale of a portion of our Bitcoin holdings. We undertook this action for the following reasons: First, it has lowered our debt-to-NAV ratio closer to the 35% range, a more appropriate level while still maintaining decent leverage on the remaining portion of the convertible debt. This puts us in a better position for issuing preferred shares in the future. Second, we have reduced some of the debt covenant constraints, increasing our ability to use all of the treasury tools at our disposal, including buying back ADS and executing on the ATM based on market conditions. With respect to our ADS buyback program, factoring in the current valuation, selling Bitcoin on a tactical basis makes sense in this environment to fund the repurchase of our ADS, which are trading at a significant discount to our Bitcoin net value plus our net cash. Note that our current valuation does not reflect the value-creating opportunities we believe are available to us through our IoT business, which I will discuss shortly. And lastly, we have freed up some of the Bitcoin we hold, enabling us to generate some yield with minimum risk. Such yield can be deployed to buy Bitcoin. So to summarize this move -- to summarize, this move was undertaken to unlock shareholder value and put us in a better position to execute on our treasury strategy. We intend to continue to follow a disciplined and opportunistic approach to Bitcoin accumulation. We'll be patient with market conditions, but we remain proactive. Ongoing Bitcoin purchases could be funded by issuance of debt, equity or preferred as well as IoT business monetization and operating cash flow. We have the tools or option in place to execute the strategy. An ATM, which provides us with the option that when our share price is much higher than where it is today, we'll be able to execute opportunistically on our Bitcoin accumulation strategy in an accretive manner. We have also an ADS buyback program in place, which has been approved by the Board. And given the current share price, we'll execute on this as soon as we are able to. We have reduced our debt exposure, which affords us the option to consider other new instruments like preferred shares in the future. Returning to my earlier point about the large valuation discrepancy in our shares, I wanted to stress that our current net equivalent cash position that includes equivalent cash of Bitcoin net asset value minus debt is above $170 million. This is approximately $12 per outstanding ADS. You can see the deep discount our shares are trading at on this basis alone. This ignores any IoT business value we are creating and expect to create in the future. It also ignores the leverage we can create with our Bitcoin treasury strategy. While Bitcoin treasury companies as a whole may be in a transition phase that has affected current equity valuations, we continue to be fully committed to the Bitcoin treasury strategy we have initiated and are exploring all opportunities to unlock shareholder value through our Bitcoin treasury alongside our IoT operations. Our goal remains to create long-term value to our shareholders. As for our IoT business itself, it's moving in the right direction. Our pipeline remains healthy, representing about $550 million in a potential 3 years product revenue across our 4G and RF product lines. In Q3, we won 6 new projects, and I'm pleased to announce that around $300 million of this pipeline are design win projects, a 20% increase versus our last reported figure. Some of the design win projects are in mass production phase currently generating revenue and others are under development by our customers with revenue potential in 2026 and beyond. Our execution remains focused on increasing the design win pipeline, but more importantly, on helping our customers with projects not yet in production, finishing the development and certification of their products and turning them to revenue-generating design wins. In Q3, 3 design win projects transitioned to production. In Q4, we expect to add 5 more, positioning us to enter 2026 with over 45% of our design win projects in production and generating revenue. This aligns with the target we set at the beginning of 2025 and represents a more than 2x improvement of this key business metric. We anticipate this positive trend to continue into the first half of 2026, supporting our revenue growth in the second half of 2026. Our design win projects span multiple verticals. Tracking, fleet management and smart metering remain the strongest verticals for us with good presence in security and e-health and medical. Looking at smart metering, we are now shipping product for 3 projects of Honeywell and 2 of Itron and should have 2 new metering customers ramping early 2026. In fleet management, Geotab is ramping, and we will have another customer ramping in early 2026. We continue to have strong business with AsiaTEL, a channel partner addressing auto tracking and other vertical applications. Now I will briefly review the third quarter business and discuss our fourth quarter outlook. Let me start by highlighting that Q3 was the first quarter without any remaining revenue -- revenue recognition tailwind from the Qualcomm deal closed last year. While this has an optical impact on the licensing and services revenue component, it does not affect cash flow. Q3 product revenue was impacted by minor delays as some customer projects shifted their ramp-up scheduled to Q4. While this has postponed our expected Q3 revenue growth, we remain confident that the ramp will materialize in Q4 as planned. In addition, we faced some late production challenges with our OSAT partner and revenue fell short of our target due to substrate availability issue. The impact was around $1 million in Q3. Substrate lead times became extended last quarter due to industry demand from AI leaders. We mitigated this by working with suppliers and anticipating orders. However, our execution timing was right on the edge of the quarter end. This ended up delaying some of our shipments by a couple of weeks. However, this issue is now under control for our fourth quarter shipments. Given our Q4 visibility, our current Q4 view is that product revenue will exceed $6 million with around $1 million incremental revenue of services and IP licensing. We aim to finish the Q4 with revenue above $7 million by adding the 2 components. On the product development front, we launched our 4G Cat1 bis worldwide SKU module and have made very good progress on our 5G IoT. In this regard, I'm pleased to announce that we have just taped out our 5G eRedCap test chip as planned. This is a major milestone in our 5G IoT project. This program will enable us to sample our third generation of IoT chips supporting 5G eRedCap late 2026. This is an extremely advanced technology that we believe has significant value. In summary, our 4G IoT business will grow and generate positive cash flow in 2026, becoming a profitable business line for us with the potential to grow further in 2027 by around 50% year-over-year. This business is helping to fund our ongoing investment in 5G R&D, which can start generating product revenue in 2027 and licensing revenue in 2026. We expect the IP created with this 5G investment could result in strategic deals with significant near-term value creation as we have successfully demonstrated in the past with 4G. More generally, we have launched new IP initiatives and announced a portfolio of IP that we are willing to license. We have done a few licensing deals in the past, but here, we are shifting from an opportunistic approach to a proactive go-to-market strategy, maximizing our customer reach and accelerating the monetization of our IP portfolio, all without additional investment. Currently, we have several opportunities under discussion, and we hope to conclude a few of them in the coming quarters. We believe services and IP licensing should contribute high-margin revenue in 2026. We further expect longer-term product revenue strength based on current design wins and order backlog of 4G chips and module and radio transceivers. Considering the $300 million product design win pipeline, we currently have in hand and factoring that we will enter 2026 with 45% of the design win projects generating revenue, this could generate [ $45 million ] average annual product revenue over the coming 3 years. This doesn't include the growing number of projects that are expected to enter into production in 2026, the new projects we are working on to win or IP licensing and services contribution. On the operating expense front, our goal is to limit cash burn in 2026 in order to reach breakeven in Q4. To support this, we are implementing a 20% cost reduction program across functions while safeguarding core innovation. This approach provides downside protection and preserves flexibility to scale up if upside revenue opportunities materialize. I will now take a moment to discuss some of the IoT-related strategic alternatives we are currently evaluating. Since launching our Bitcoin treasury, we have been actively reassessing how best to position our IoT business to ensure shareholders benefit from its full value potential. Our Board is currently evaluating a range of strategic alternatives we have. While several options being explored, I can share that we are in serious discussions regarding a few strategic partnership opportunities for our IoT business. The objective is to accelerate the path to breakeven, enhance the business overall value and strengthen its cash flow generating capability. I will now turn the call over to Deborah to review the third quarter 2025 preliminary financial results in greater detail. Deborah?