Benjamin Locke
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright. Please state your question
Thanks, Abinand. Turning to slide 12, I’ll discuss what I feel important takeaways for the quarter. First, we continue to see a gradual recovery from the economic challenges due to COVID in each of our business segments. While our product sales are still down from pre-COVID levels, we are seeing backlog continue to grow up 12% from year end. Importantly, we are seeing the backlog increase in the business areas that are scalable for our clean cooling solutions with about half of the backlog in controlled environment agriculture. As I mentioned in the press release yesterday, controlled environment agriculture is a fast growing industry as a need for large volume year long growth of high value crops increases. We have demonstrated the Tecogen solution for high value crops such as cannabis, where we have over 13,000 tons of Tecochill capacity, and expect further penetration into high intensity food production, which is the main driver for the projected 19% five year CAGR growth in controlled environment agriculture. We’re also expanding our chiller sales network by adding manufacturers’ representatives and sales agents in geographies and markets where we see the most growth potential for our cooling products. These sales partners are an important way to cost effectively reach customers for our products and establish long term sales networks in new and expanding geographies. Next, our cash position remained stable with quarter end cash balance and equivalent of $3.35 million. And as Abinand mentioned, the corporate improvements we implemented during COVID continue to contribute to improve margins in both our product and service segments. These operational and manufacturing improvements are key to maintaining high margins while we meet our backlog, which is currently at 11.4 million and consists almost entirely of products. Turning to slide 13, I’d like to provide an update on our pathway to growth which I shared earlier in the year. The plan is focused on optimizing operations in our core business, expanding our Tecochill product line and market potential and taking advantage of emerging energy policies as it relate to distributed generation in micro grids. First, in addition to maintaining our core cogeneration sales, our goal is to focus on clean cooling applications where there is a simultaneous cooling and dehumidification load. This could be controlled environment agriculture as I mentioned earlier, but there are many other industries such as food processing, that have similar requirements in our candidates for our clean cooling solutions. We will continue focusing on cannabis cultivation, given the abundance of activity in that space and our already dominant position in some regional markets. And I’ve set a goal for ourselves to have at least 30% market share of cannabis cultivation in facilities over 10,000 square feet of canopy. Next, we’re making progress on the development of a hybrid drive air cooled chiller, which was fill the gap in our Tecochill offering. This will substantially expand the sales potential for Tecochill and many of our markets such as indoor cultivation and hospitals, where an air cooled chiller system is needed. Our goal is to have the hybrid drive product ready for market by late 2022 and we are currently generating interest for potential sponsors to support the effort. And lastly, we see a promising opportunity for our technology as it relates to the new U.S. vision for energy and infrastructure now that the bill is finally passed where micro grids in combination with battery and solar have compelling economics in certain geographies. Our proprietary inverter and micro grid controls are designed to manage multiple distributed energy sources whether that sources are CHP systems, battery storage, solar or any other distributed generation resource, our inverter can seamlessly integrate the sources and control the best operational strategy for integrating sources based on energy rates, time of day, and/or the fuel mix of utility. I hope to have more detail and milestones to announce as we strive to meet these goals. Our overall strategy is to grow the company in a sustainable way in areas that are consistent with the changing energy trends in national policy, and eventually scale ourselves outside of North America. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to questions.