Neonode Inc. Q1 2023 Earnings Call

Speaker 1: Certain of the information contained herein may be derived from information provided by industry sources. The company believes such information is accurate and that the sources from which it has been obtained are reliable. However, the company has not independently verified such information and cannot guarantee the accuracy of such information.

Speaker 1: After which, I will give the word to Fredrik who will go through the Q1 financial results.

Speaker 1: After his presentation I will come back and share some brief business updates and after this we go to the Q&A which Jesper will lead.

Speaker 1: Summary of key points for Q1. Our licensing revenues were stable in the first quarter and we conclude by this that the worldwide semiconductor supply shortage situation has begun to improve. Several of our customers have been hampered by lack of semiconductors and other supply issues during the last two years and this situation is now starting to improve. Also our printer and automotive customers sales have stabilized. So in turn our license volumes and our license revenues are on a good level and stable compared to previous quarters. Product sales in Q1 was below our targets. We regret it but that's just a fact. So we've had a slow start of the year and we see in many markets that indeed after the Christmas holidays and the Chinese New Year in many markets the businesses were slow. And in our case also.

Speaker 1: Q1 product sales is held back by the fact that some of our key customers stocked up a lot of products in the end of last year. So they were sitting on high inventory levels after the fourth quarter of last year.

Speaker 1: Third point, we continue to execute on our strategy and the focus is to establish beach heads in the key segments that we have identified. I will elaborate more on that later.

Speaker 1: So, no major deviation or change in strategy, we continue to execute on our strategy and the plans we have laid for the year.

Speaker 1: We are recruiting currently to add talent and experience to our sales and engineering teams. And I'm glad to say that the market for recruiting new talent is quite good right now, both in Sweden and also internationally.

Speaker 1: So we have made some strong recruitments recently that we are very glad to.

Speaker 2: Thank you Urban. I will do a summary of the financial results in this presentation. You can find more details in our 10Q and earnings release. Total revenues for Q1 2023 reached 1.3 million that is a decrease of 5% compared to the same period last year.

Speaker 2: So, license revenue reached 1.1 million that is an increase of 4% compared to last year.

Speaker 2: As Urban said the issue with CME conductor shortages within for our customers within automotive and printer has been improved and so has our revenues. Revenue from products was 0.1 million a decrease of 31% year on year. Q1 is a slow peer for us but we are also the customers we have also stocked up as.

Speaker 2: million in Q1 2023. It's an increase of 5% compared to the same period last year.

Speaker 2: It is mainly an increase in professional fees.

Speaker 2: Net cash burn for operating activities in Q1 2023 decreased with 25% and reached 1.7 million.

Speaker 2: It is a combination of that we have bought less.

Speaker 2: components and is offset by higher accounts receivable due to the timing of customer payments.

Speaker 2: So as of 31st of March, 2023 we have quite a good cash and accounts receivable balance of 22.9 million. With an increase of 6.7 million from year end 2022 and as we disclosed in the last slide

Speaker 2: the previous earnings call we used ATM in January .

Speaker 2: And with that I will leave the word back to you Urban. Thank you Fredrik and of course as usual you find our detailed earnings.

Speaker 1: release on our website and also through the EDGAR system at the SAC.

Speaker 3: Excuse me.

Speaker 1: Next, a brief business update.

Speaker 1: Next a brief business update and in

Speaker 1: In passing, I will just mention that our vision is to transform the way humans and machines interact.

Speaker 1: We do this by licensing technology and selling sensor products. In our licensing business, we focus on printer customers and automotive customers. In our products business, we focus on elevator and interactive kiosk customers.

Speaker 1: Our key application areas that we work in...

Speaker 1: Our key application areas that we work in, they are mainly driver and in-cabin monitoring.

Speaker 1: We also work on object detection, in particular application for head-up displays where we can prove

Speaker 1: that our solution to

Speaker 1: detect objects sitting on top of the head-up display is very efficient, also cost-efficient and in general a good alternative for OEMs.

Speaker 1: scaling up now and putting more emphasis on head-up displays. We also continue to work on touch and gesture sensing and right now a lot of focus is on rugged touch applications where customers have special requirements for their touch features.

and for instance require that the users can operate these using gloves, even thick working gloves or similar. In our products business we mainly talk about contactless touch today and this comes in our case in two flavors.

touch on displays in front of keypads, keyboards, etc. and the other one we call holographic touch. So making holographic display images interactive. And for this, our sensor products are ideal. Also here, and I will show an example soon, we work on Ragged Touch.

and yester something.

So, what we can summarize regarding applications is that NeoNode continues to work a lot in the human interaction area, HMI, but also in the last year as we have mentioned in several earnest calls before. We also work heavily now in machine perception.

So camera-based software solutions to detect and track humans in video streams.

and this underpins of course driver and monitoring offer driver and in-cabin monitoring offering that we have.

And speaking of this, we are increasing our focus on this. We have great feedback from several customers. We are currently working with a major OEM and we hope that we can present important news there later this year.

And we also have relations and ongoing work together with a couple of Tier 1 suppliers.

What we focus on and what we can offer that may stand out from competition is a very scalable and flexible software platform that really targets on the scalability of these features in the vehicles.

The first and also the current wave of RFQs coming out focus on driver monitoring and indeed we can solve that problem very efficiently as well. But right now the strength in our offering is a lot that it scales well to other types of in-cabin monitoring applications.

and the requirements that follow from them. They can be safety features or other types of features that the OEM customers or the Tier 1 customers want to realize and for this our software platform is ideal.

So a lot of focus here and going forward we will increase efforts in marketing, sales and also engineering in this area for sure.

I mentioned before about Rugged Touch. Here's an example of a recent product launch by Strucktab. A Swedish company doing taximeters.

We have been working with them before, but end of last year they launched a new product line for taxi meters, sort of state of the art, works really, really well and it incorporates our infrared touch technology for their products here.

well received and we have a good cooperation with STRUCTUB and we hope to scale this up also going forward.

And just one example about contactless touch and that this is

spreading slowly but steadily. Here is an example of a recent implementation at Clerijs luxury hotel in London. Super nice hotels that you now can operate without touching anything. So you can go to your desired floor by the wave of the hand or the finger.

So please go there and also check for our marketing communication around this. There are some very nice pictures and content around this as well.

and speaking of marketing

Speaking of marketing, I want to...

just illustrate by this little picture. This is a snapshot from our so-called Imagine video and you find it on our YouTube channel. You see the link at the bottom of the picture. But we continue to do a lot in digital marketing, different types of campaigns and social media and other channels but also content production.

both still media and live media in terms of videos and interviews and similar.

So, a lot of focus is being put into this and we continue to scale up and invest in our marketing activities. Compared to say two years ago, we are also much more active in physical events.

And of course, it has to do with travel restrictions and lockdowns being lifted, for instance in China but also in other parts of the world.

So in Q1 we visited a number of different events, both in Asia, Europe and North America. And of course, we visited a number of different events, both in Asia, Europe and North America.

Here is an example where we use our sector-based marketing approach. So the events that we are targeting, of course, are closely related to our key segments that we want to penetrate.

elevator interactive kiosks for our products business and alternative events and maybe some other electronics events for licensing.

In Q2 we have a number of events coming up in June and for the second half of the year we also have a number of events and we have already

started to prepare for the CES show and the NRF show in January over in the US. So if you have a chance, please come and visit us at these events and we will be happy to introduce you to our technology and to our company.

And with this, we are quickly at the bottom of the presentation and I thank you for your attention and I invite Jesper up for a short Q&A session.

Perfect. Thank you so much for that presentation. And so we move into the Q&A. And first, regarding your, you say that you're now working with an OEM that you can't really mention by name.

it's been going on for several years as you know but nowadays the trend of software defined vehicles and also the vehicle manufacturers wanting to have control over the software features in the vehicle is very apparent. So in this case it seems...

that this group, it's a group of companies, they have chosen to separate the hardware sourcing and they have a special idea for the hardware and then now they're looking for software content and seems to be quite happy with our offering.

So in this case, yes, we are working directly, but of course in other cases it will go through the tier 1 supplier and indeed we have also some interesting discussions on the tier 1 side here and for us being a small company it would be great to team up with one or two of the tier 1s because obviously

They have better relations and they have also resources to support different customers in parallel. And is it any specific market of the OEMs or so on that you target? Yes it is. I will not disclose it here but we have a...

specific plan and a target that we continue to follow and work on this. I can share being headquartered here in Stockholm, Sweden, of course, we looked primarily in Europe in the first place and maybe second North America and Asia third.

So that gives you some idea where we are working. Alright. And then if you could just give an update on some of your largest accounts in the product business, where they're at and what we should expect.

Yeah, so the products business is probably something completely different from the licensing business as we have tried to explain in previous earnings calls and so on.

We are here working with just a large number of customers and we sell a standard product.

Of course we are working to win bigger and bigger orders, but at this point even if the customer can be a very very large customer, we get fairly small or medium sized order volumes from them.

So that means that in several cases ROLLA is ongoing or has been ongoing for a while but it's sort of they move slowly, slowly but steadily you can say. So what can be expected is that this trend continues that slowly but steadily we increase this business.

quarter by quarter, year by year. But we cannot expect, and you should not expect either, that there will be this one or two that will totally change everything. Although you can hope for that. We see in practice more that it's going to be more hard work.

put the bricks on top and eventually you have built actually quite nice house. So we are still building this and we think we're on the right track but of course we want to push this and accelerate and that's why we are making some different adjustments to the organization, to the strategy and we continue to push in our marketing.

And remember, we also work a lot with partners and a lot of the marketing that we do is through partners or with partners. But it can probably never be enough, so we continue to push, push, push.

Alright, I don't have any more questions for today, so that concludes today's presentation.