Paul Travers
Analyst · Craig-Hallum
Thank you, Ed. Hello everyone and welcome to the Vuzix's Q1 conference call. Over the last 3 years, Vuzix has made good progress in growing our business and expanding our foundation, with full year revenue growth almost quadrupling, rising from $2.1 million in 2016 to $8.1 million in 2018, as sales of our enterprise AR Smart Glasses have steadily risen year-over-year. Consistent with the indication we provided on our March conference call, our Q1 results were admittedly soft. And I'm pleased to report that this softness is now behind us, as Q2 revenue bookings through the first week of May are off to a solid start and already exceed the Q1 revenue total. It is taking more time than most expected, but we are witnessing firsthand an accelerating shift in the enterprise smart glasses market in terms of investment and commitment of resources, from chip suppliers like Qualcomm, to supply partners like Verizon and Eaton, to Fortune 500 global leaders across multiple industries that have trialed and are now starting to move to broader deployment of smart glasses. The inflection point for this industry is rapidly approaching. The payback numbers are very compelling. Avoiding just one trip by connecting a remote worker, instead of sending a skilled worker, delivers an immediate ROI, not only from the cost and time associated with travel, but more importantly, the lost production value, which can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Equipping remote workers with smart glasses and connected devices facilitate the retention and transfer of knowledge, supports faster on-boarding, saves money, improves worker operations and safety and drives efficiency. In the warehouse, picking can be 60% faster and more accurate at the same time. The list goes on and on. It should come as no surprise that recent studies have indicated that 90% of enterprise companies plan on implementing AR Smart Glasses in their operations over the next 3 years. Virtually, every forecaster agrees that the industry usage numbers will get substantially larger over the next few years and that's just on the enterprise side alone. Expectations of millions of units and billions of dollars of sales will be up for grabs for the players with the broadest and most competitive set of solutions. We have worked long and hard to get Vuzix optimally positioned for this approaching tidal wave and we intend to be the lead rider on it. As previously announced, and also discussed on our last call, Vuzix has entered into a 3-year master reseller agreement with Verizon, whereby Verizon, their affiliates and sub-resellers will now resell Vuzix's M300XL Smart Glasses and M-Series related accessories, the Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses and Vuzix Remote Assist, our new remote support video application. Since then, the wheels have been turning. We have spent time at Verizon's headquarters in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, going over the marketing strategy and gaining an understanding of Verizon's extensive sales team structure. We've also completed most of the necessary plumbing needed to hit the ground running with Verizon's enterprise sales team, beginning here in the second quarter. This includes their customer ordering system, Verizon's mobile device management for Vuzix's Smart Glasses and preparation of various sales and marketing materials. Our sales and marketing team has concurrently had deep-dive training sessions with the Verizon enterprise sales teams. They will be selling to their 3,000 largest B2B enterprise customers during the initial phase of this program. I'm pleased to report that we've already had introductory meetings with and seen solid product interest from a number of their largest industrial customers. The second phase of the program will expand to cover all of Verizon's more than 10,000 B2B enterprise customers and include small-and medium-sized businesses. Finally, as new Vuzix products become available in the market, we expect to update our contract with Verizon to accommodate additional products that can be sold by Verizon to their enterprise customers. Verizon will also be working with some of Vuzix's software partners to add to their ecosystem and offer cookie-cutter solutions to their customers. A week ago, we announced a major joint development agreement with Eaton Crouse-Hinds for a new line of ATEX-certified Vuzix Smart Glasses that specifically work in harsh and hazardous environments. These co-branded smart glasses will be sold directly by the Crouse-Hinds sales and marketing team and its resellers, as well as by the Vuzix sales and marketing team. It's important to note that the market opportunity for intrinsically safe smart glasses is quite significant, and today one with price points much higher than conventional smart glasses. Although, we just announced the joint development agreement effort in April, much of the work to bring this product to market has already been completed. We expect volume production to commence in August and to begin selling harsh and hazardous intrinsically safe smart glasses based on our M-Series smart glasses to customers in the September time frame. Earlier this week, Vuzix and Eaton Crouse-Hinds attended the 50th Annual Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, which presented an outstanding opportunity to introduce our co-branded intrinsically safe smart glasses to a universe of players in the oil and gas space. The Eaton booth, which prominently featured our solution, was filled with excitement and customer interest. We are already seeing demand indications of need from some of the largest energy firms in the world. What is great about having a partner like Eaton Crouse-Hinds is that most of the companies that visited the booth at this event were already industrial customers of Eaton. Eaton is a trusted partner for these firms and now their thousands of salespeople have another product to sell that has been specifically designed for Eaton in harsh, hazardous environments. Moreover, our customers and developers that have manufacturing or field service operations with exposure to harsh and hazardous environments is already extensive. These companies are well aware of Vuzix and now our two firms will be jointly delivering a co-branded smart glasses solution to these existing customers. For Eaton, this relationship represents a move into wearables and an opportunity to provide a new cutting-edge solution together with Vuzix for their global customer base. For Vuzix, this relationship represents an opportunity to partner with a Tier 1 leader in the space and deliver a new product across an entirely new segment of the market that was previously unaddressable by us. The importance of our relationships with Verizon and Eaton can't be underestimated. There's going to be a significant increase in the number of sales personnel that will be marketing and selling Vuzix products. This increase comes at 0 additional cost, other than partner margins for Vuzix and substantially adds to the broad ecosystem already in place, consisting of our numerous value-added resellers and VIPs, Dynabook sales team and many other companies with whom we have struck partnerships. Beyond Eaton and Verizon, we are seeing broad enterprise demand for smart glasses continue to build and our VIP partners are continuing to win larger follow-on orders as they remain bullish on the current business they see at hand in 2019 and beyond. We are also making significant progress with some of our largest enterprise customers with expectations for larger scale deployments as we move into the fall. Similarly, with several pharmaceutical companies with whom our sales engineers have remained closely engaged with our internal early development efforts and they are planning for global deployment of our glasses throughout the next 6 to 12 months. These firms operate dozens of facilities around the world and represent unit demands in the thousands. We look forward to providing further updates about them on future calls and frankly, they just represent the tip of the iceberg. At the same time, we continue to forge additional relationships. Over the last 30 days, we've added two additional platform partners that have decided to expand their business focus beyond tablets and computers and into smart glasses. Our new partners VSee Lab and SightCall collectively bring with them more than 1,200 customers across enterprise and telemedicine. VSee Lab is a San Jose-based video telehealth company that provides a HIPAA-compliant video telehealth and telemedicine videoconferencing solution that is used by more than 1,000 telemedicine companies, operating all over the globe. Using the Vuzix M300 and Blade, VSee can deliver telehealth smart glasses applications, ranging from remote training on imaging technology to telesurgery to AR-enhanced video visits. SightCall is a San Francisco-based global leader in remote visual support with operations in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Singapore and more than 200 enterprise customers, including many Fortune 500 companies. They will be introducing our M-300XL glasses to their field service customer base. Our product represents a natural fit with their field service solution and by leveraging their proprietary global cloud communication platform, SightCall will bring a robust enterprise-grade see-what-I-see video solution to their customers. The Blade continues to pick up steam. We have been continuing to improve production and yields and by the end of the first quarter, our production rates finally allowed us to catch up with the immediate demand. As we touched upon during the last conference call, we've been focused on removing manufacturing bottlenecks and adding second generation production equipment into the mix, to not only attain the highest quality waveguides, but also increase volumes. Our manufacturing capacity under our current production configuration has now reached the point where not only are the Vuzix Blade orders being shipped same or next day, but we are now able to respond to RFPs and RFQs for larger volume orders. Vuzix Blade software development continues to progress nicely, as new functionality and features are being added to each Blade OS update and consumer-friendly applications, such as Google Assistant, sports, weather, news and Yelp have been added to the Vuzix app store. With these recent consumer-friendly additions, Vuzix has begun focusing on getting further review units to media and social media influencers for review. It's great to see the Blade ecosystem of features and applications continue to broaden. On the wireless carrier front alone, we are actively engaged with multiple telco giants across U.S., Europe and Korea and have shared our 3-year waveguide-based smart glasses product road map with these carriers under NDAs. The coming wave of 5G support is going to change significantly what can be done over a wireless network and the advantages this will give smart glasses and our plans to employ it in our product road map is not lost in these carriers. We're excited about these relationships, as well as the speed at which they are developing. Elsewhere, many of our enterprise customers are asking to see the Blade come with a safety glasses certification, which would expand the demand case for this product everywhere, from factory floors, to usage in the field. We're just completing the testing of this and should have a formal announcement out shortly. Having Z87.1 safety glasses certification for Blade should open up many more industrial application areas for the Blade. In March, Foxconn-owned Dynabook, formally Toshiba Client Solutions, placed a $1 million follow-on order for their Windows-based AR Smart Glasses, built and powered by Vuzix. It's taken some time, but it's great to receive another purchase order from them and we expect this program to continue to expand. Earlier this year, Dynabook upgraded its AR software to include voice commands, enhanced camera capabilities, a video collaboration call log and a customizable splash screen and more recently they announced availability of Ubimax Frontline application suite with their AR Smart Glasses solution. Other OEM opportunities are steadily emerging. After delivering a prototype commercial aviation waveguide-based head-mounted display system to a global Tier1 aerospace firm in Q4, we have received a follow-on order for a modified version of this prototype, based on their feedback. We will book some revenue for this in Q2 and expect to deliver this product in Q3, with the ultimate goal of being a multiyear production program with this company. Elsewhere, we've been asked to bid on five other RFQs for customized waveguide-based programs with companies that serve the defense, commercial aviation and automotive industries. These waveguide-based engineering projects could generate significant engineering fees in the millions for Vuzix over the next 12 to 18 months, with some starting very soon. Should full deployments of products follow, the revenue potential would be very substantial, ultimately dwarfing their engineering revenue potential. Separately, we've been making new inroads into police and first responder markets, some of which we hope to disclose in the upcoming couple of months. This is another market vertical that could bring substantial revenue for Vuzix. I would like to now pass the call over to Grant, so he can walk through our first quarter financial results. Grant?