Paul Travers
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Andrew. Hello everyone, and thank you all for joining our call today to discuss the company's second quarter 2018 financial results and business outlook for 2018. It is a very exciting time at Vuzix as we are on the forefront of the multibillion dollar augmented reality revolution being talked about in almost every business sector. For Vuzix customer adoption and large scale conversions are gaining further momentum and we expect this trend to continue to accelerate. At the same time we are well positioned for the generally expected widespread consumer adoption of augmented reality and more specifically augmented reality Smart Glasses that is also right around the corner introducing an entirely new category of devices like AR Smart Glasses for deployment within enterprise requires developing entirely new ecosystems that takes coordination between software developers, hardware manufacturers, finance, IT and HR departments, the end user and right up through to entire supply chains. It has been years in the making, but Vuzix is successfully navigating this maze and it is showing by many measures including growing revenues from our few million annually to now with revenue in its second quarter 2018 than in all 2016. Yes, it is still modest just yet but we have built the technology infrastructure and ecosystem to deliver so much more in the coming months and years. Now that the groundwork has been laid capitalizing on the effort is becoming much especially with the end results being driven by ROIs and positive customer feedback. As a result we are seeing that the shift towards Smart Glass is becoming a standard in enterprise as well on it's way. Today, analyst after analyst is forecasting that the enterprise AR Smart Glasses market will represent millions of the unit sales annually within the next few years which translates into a total addressable market of billions of dollars in enterprise Smart Glasses alone. And in a recent study our OEM partner Toshiba found that 83% of industrial enterprise customers were interested in deploying Smart Glasses within their operations over the next three years versus just the 2% currently. If you look across just a select group of key enterprise market verticals, such as Field Service manufacturing, inspection and logistics, Vuzix has customers and exposure to all of them. One of the most exciting market verticals today for Vuzix customer deployments is Field Service. Field Service typically involves a see-what-I-see application that could deliver expert knowledge from the office remotely to a technician in the field. When see-what-I-see applications are delivered through to a hands-free pair of Smart glasses technicians in the field are almost instantly more productive because they can work with both hands and simultaneously have access to the information and expertise they need to solve their problems efficiently. In this type of application, a single use of Smart glasses in the field can save tens of thousands of dollars for our customers, especially if their key equipment failures can be remedied faster or avoided altogether. And we have seen some workers view themselves as supercharged or enhanced within their industry as these workers can now leverage this access to expert knowledge that was previously unavailable to them from the worksite. Knowledge, where and when you need it is a powerful tool. On the consumer side, Google and Apple are bringing AR experiences to the masses through their ARKit and ARCore or less extensions. And as a result consumers are being "trained" to accept in use AR in the daily lives. This change is happening at an astounding rate with an estimated 800 million smart phones being enabled to support AR by the end of 2018. That said, consumption of AR through a smart phone is frankly unnatural and can be physically hazardous as well. We have all heard the stories of Pokémon GO users walking off cliffs or into traffic while staring at their phones pointed down the street. The industry is rightfully concluding that the ideal form factor to consume AR is through a pair of Smart glasses that people would actually want to wear. Doing so is one of the biggest challenges to bringing AR to the masses today. This is where Vuzix is going to shine I'll have more on that in a bit. Enterprise space is where the first wave of adoption is occurring for Augmented Reality Smart glasses and this is the first place where Vuzix is driving sales. Our enterprise business continues to expand as seen by M300 revenue growth in the second quarter increasing over 300% year-over-year. The other great news here is that these expanding sales are being driven by repeat customer orders with customers from 2017 accounting for more than 50% of our 2018 M300 Smart glasses sales through June. New enterprise Smart glasses business continues to expand also, as our last 12-month pilot program customer count now exceeds 850. As a reminder, our pilot program count is for direct Vuzix customers. And that there are also a large number of Vuzix integration partners and value-added resellers that are growing their own installed base of pilots. So we believe the total number of pilots are significantly greater as some of our resellers have dozens or in some cases hundreds of active power programs of their own. Inflexion point in enterprise adoption we feel is finally at hand as can be seen by our growing revenues, new pilot programs and conversions of pilots to productive rollouts. Last month we announced our largest M300 order to date to one of our European VIPs. This roughly $1 million follow-on order for M300 Smart glasses will fulfill a number of this customers conversions from pilot to productive rollouts. This account is a great example of the typical Vuzix to the IP/value added reseller customer that has 100s of active enterprise pilot programs that they are overseeing as part of their _____. During the second quarter we also expanded production and shipments to Toshiba of the co branded Toshiba AR100 powered by Vuzix Smart glasses. As I mentioned earlier, Toshiba is just getting started and are already excited at the opportunities in front of them together with Vuzix. Toshiba has also teamed up with Microsoft and now the Vuzix AR100 alongside Toshiba's dynaEdge computer is Microsoft Azure IOT certified to deliver cognitive services and machine learning capabilities. The AR100 dynaEdge is also off to a great start with multiple industry awards including Editor's Choice from a UK reseller and more. We expect to continue to see meaningful growth from Toshiba moving forward. The story over the first half of 2018 from a revenue perspective has really been about our enterprise business driven by our work horse M300 as well as initial contributions from or Toshiba cobranded AR100 being sold into the marketplace by Toshiba. For the second half of 2018 our business will continue to grow with these offerings and expand further as will be in the pick-up, the marketing and sales activities around Vuzix Blade. We are seeing growing demand for the Blade from our developer community which includes B2C facing applications, strategic partners and general application developers and is by far the largest we have seen for any Vuzix product in recent memory. We have a fairly significant backlog of orders and efforts around the Vuzix Blade volume production and commercial launch are just starting to ramp. We have completed SEC and EU certification towards the end of the second quarter and we have successfully launched the Blade Developer Center and released the Blade Edge software for developers. The Blade Developer Center is by far the most advanced tools set Vuzix has put in place prior to an actual product launch to support the developer community. The Developer Center allows our Blade developers to start developing their applications immediately even without a physical unit in hand. In addition to the Developers Center over the last quarter Vuzix has put in place a Tier 2 developer support structure that better allows our developers and key partners to access Vuzix's engineers for complex technical support. Although we had good overall second quarter revenue results, we did not get as many blades out of the factory toward this quarter as we had hoped for on our first quarter conference call. This was primarily due to supply issues with an offshore battery supplier and the time required for a more solid software release. We feel that since the blade is such a significant product for both us and the industry that shouldn’t be fully released until it is ready. Today new products often don’t get a second chance, so we want this right. It is interesting to understand the many use cases people are considering for the blade, although I'm sure that gaming will be fun, watching whales jump out of the floor is not the focus for the blade. Developers that placed Blade Edge orders are focused on a wide variety of applications ranging from the more traditional enterprise use cases to B2C applications and to an array of consumer applications. There is a long list but to give you an idea, some interesting areas include, low vision assist, hearing impaired support, equipment monitoring, facial recognition, drone control, insurance adjusters, inspections, sports and fitness, social media and much, much more. The amazing point here is the developers are not seeing the blade as a toy, but more so as a tool. But you can bet it will be fun to play with soon. It was truly quite amazing the level of interest in creative ideas the blade and its user friendly form factor is garnering. The full blade commercial launch is right around the corner, so you will see building marketing activities starting shortly. Our team of software engineers are working diligently to complete the immigration of the blade, mobile phone Companion app for android and iOS. This as well as the built in applications, sensors, cameras, wireless and AI concierge services, elects in more, social media and entertainment apps all which we expect to be available in parallel with the Blade's commercial release will enable impair your android or iOS smart phone to the Blade. The Blade Companion app is the center point for managing the interface and connectivity from the Blade to the user found. As such the Companion app provides as simple and easy gateway to control the relay of information and the sharing of data between a users Blade, Smart glasses and their Smart classes and their Smart firm. Some of you on this call may have had an opportunity to try the blade on, beauty options, explore the widget and in some cases take a picture or record some video and so already realized the amazing performance the Blade has in such a fashion forward form factor. For those who haven’t all the positive press the Blade has gotten since CES and at Mobile World Congress should help you to understand why Vuzix and our developer partners are so excited about our waveguide based Blade Smart Glasses which is a great segue to discuss the waveguide activities of Vuzix. As you all know, there is ongoing significant interest from a number of Tier 1 companies regarding Vuzix waveguides. We are presently moving forward with a number of them that have placed Blade Edge developer unit orders in addition to having purchased and received stacks of standard waveguides and display engines from Vuzix for their internal testing and validation. And in some cases Vuzix is working on full custom solutions that fulfill the needs of their finished products. To date we have received very positive feedback from these customers as they continue their development efforts with Vuzix. Vuzix expects to continue to demonstrate that we are leaders in wearable display space with solutions that are cracking the code with true usability and at the same time wear ability. Q2 has been a quarter of refocusing some of our operations with the express goal of realigning or efforts to better support our VIPs and value-added resellers to more efficiently accelerate conversions of their enterprise pilots into deployments and to better focus on manufacturing and supply chain operations. From a customer centric perspective, the company is investing in additional sales engineers and brought on a third-party frontline technical support provider to better support our developers, resellers and customers across North America and Europe. Our sales organization is also now not only leaner but more highly focused on our existing customers needs as we continue to leverage more than 250 value-added resellers and over 80 VIP partners that are informing customers selling their applications alongside Vuzix Smart Glass. We are also having myself and others in management reengage with select customers and VIPs regarding their challenges with the goal of focusing on ways that Vuzix can help grow their enterprise businesses. From an internal operations perspective, Zach Stone was promoted to Vice President of Operations in early June. On the engineering side Shane Porzio was promoted to Vice President of Engineering as our Engineering Department has been growing and has numerous active programs. R&D also now has a larger responsibility of supporting sales via sales engineers and supporting partners with Tier 2 technical support that is comprised of a team of experienced and talented hardware and software engineers. Both individuals are extremely talented and well-qualified for these expanded roles. These efforts are all contributing to improving our ability to consistently deliver volume production of our products and are helping our customers convert from pilots to productive rollouts. Our underlying business at Vuzix continues to evolve, grow, and mature. Even more important, Vuzix is more diversified with our product portfolio today than at any time in our company's history. I'd now like to pass the call over to Grant, so he can walk through our second quarter financial results. Grant?