Abinand Rangesh
Analyst · Clear Harbor Asset Management. Please go ahead
Thank you, Jack. Welcome to Tecogen’s First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. Today’s agenda, I will start out with a progress update. In the last call, I laid out both a short- and medium-term plan. In the short term, we are focused on stabilizing the business, in particular with regards to cash. We are also building out the sales and distribution channels, so the revenue can grow. I’d like to start with this update and then cover the 2021 – I mean, 2023 results. Although we saw a decline at the end of 2022, I am happy to note that our Q1 2023 revenue was 35% higher than Q4 2022. I expect revenue for every subsequent quarter from this point forward to be better than the last. We have successfully integrated the service contracts we acquired from Aegis and are now starting to derive revenue from them. The sales team has been working diligently to expand the sales pipeline. We have added nearly 35% more deals into the sales pipeline than in Q4. Although not yet in our backlog, we have also been working on some larger projects that cumulatively make up more than 20 units. We are optimistic these will close and ship later in the year. Our cash position remained stable. We finished the quarter with $1.6 million. Our cash position today is over $2 million. We also expect further cash to free up as inventory levels reduce when we ship more units in Q2 and Q3. Lastly, we are still owed $1.8 million in NYSERDA rebates, which we expect to collect over the upcoming quarters. Lastly, we are working on obtaining the first purchase orders for the air-cooled chiller. Although our typical sales cycle is greater than a year, during the last investor update call, I had set a target of the first purchase order by August. We are well on our way to achieving that. Before I move on to results, I know some investors have asked about the ransomware attack the company experienced two weeks ago. We caught it quickly, and we’re able to restore all files from backup. The attack happened on Friday the 28, and we were fully operational on Monday. Our key systems are on the cloud, so we’re unaffected. Our cybersecurity vendor doesn’t believe any files were copied from the network, but we have provided all employees identity theft insurance just in case. I’d like to do a quick recap of our products and our business model before Roger reviews the results. We have three value propositions for end customers. The first is power generation and resiliency. This is electrical cogeneration for energy savings and in some cases, for backup power in the event of a blackout. We use a natural gas engine to generate electricity and use the engine heat to produce hot water for the building. We are twice as efficient as an equivalent fossil fuel power plant as we are able to use the heat, so we have a much lower greenhouse gas footprint. The second is our clean cooling products. These products generate chilled water and hot water simultaneously in applications that require climate control, such as health care, CEA, et cetera. We are the cheapest source of producing cooling and humidity control. Typically, the highest cooling load occurs in summertime when natural gas prices are lowest. So we also offer customers substantial energy savings. In addition to energy savings, our chillers require little to no electricity to operate, so are ideal for applications where utilities are unable to supply sufficient power. As with electrical cogeneration, our greenhouse gas footprint is cleaner than an equivalent electric chiller and boiler combination since most fossil fuel power plants are not utilizing the waste. Both our electrical cogeneration and clean cooling products benefit from a 40% investment tax credit that reduces the payback substantially. Our last value proposition to customers is our long-term service and asset management services. Our service centers provide end-to-end maintenance and allow customers to maximize their energy savings. Our typical maintenance contracts run for longer than ten years, and we also provide ancillary services to maintain balanced supply. This is an area that our strategy will focus heavily on. We plan to increase the range of services that we offer and also increase the number of sites that we service. We have three revenue segments. Our product revenue consists of sales of cogeneration units, microgrid systems and chillers to a range of markets and customers. Our services revenue primarily consists of our contracted operations and maintenance services. Our energy production revenue stream is from energy sales, including sales of electricity and thermal energy produced by our equipment on-site at customer facilities. I have also had some questions from investors on our business model. So I would like to highlight some key points of the way we operate. When we look at the core of our business, we make money by selling product and then obtaining cash flow for many years as a result of the service contracts that are sold with the unit. Over time, this makes the business significantly more valuable. This is the reason that we took on additional service contracts from Aegis and plan to keep expanding the service business as much as possible. At this point, I would like to hand over to Roger to talk about the Q1 2023 results.