Neonode Inc (NEON) 2021 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Hello, everyone. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Neonode's First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session with the company's covering analysts. (Operator Instructions)

At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to David Brunton, Neonode's Head of Corporate Investor Relations. David, please go ahead and start the conference.

Welcome, and thank you for joining us. On today's call, we will review our first quarter 2021 financial results and provide a corporate update. Our update will include details of customer activities, technology developments and other items of interest.

On today's call is our CEO, Dr. Urban Forssell; CFO, Maria Ek. And also joining on us today are our regional sales Vice Presidents, Anthony Uhrick, managing the Americas; Johan Swartz managing Asia and Pacific; and Jonas Wærn, Managing Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Before turning the call over to Urban, I would like to make the following remarks concerning forward-looking statements. All statements on this conference call other than historical facts are forward-looking statements. These words, anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, tend will, guides, confidence, targets, projects and other similar expressions typically are used to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements do not guarantee the future performance that may involve or be subject to the risks, uncertainties and other factors that may affect Neonode's business, financial position and other operating results, which include, but are not limited to, the risk factors and other qualifications contained in Neonode's annual report on 10-K, quarterly reports on 10-Q and other reports filed by Neonode with the SEC to which your attention is directed. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expected or implied by these forward-looking statements. Neonode expressly disclaims any intent or obligations to update these forward-looking statements.

At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Urban. Urban, please go ahead.

Thank you, David, and welcome, everyone. To begin with, I'd like to summarize the key messages in our presentation today. First, we continue to execute on our strategies and build our business pipeline. The demand for contactless-touch solutions continues to increase, giving us an enormous market opportunity to integrate Neonode technology into new and retrofitted equipment, for instance, in elevators and interactive kiosks. We also see significant interest in our zForce and multisensing technologies from customers in the military and avionics and automotive segments. To be able to capitalize on more of these opportunities, we continue to strengthen our sales marketing, engineering teams in Sweden and internationally.

And building on the last point here, let me next introduce our new sales organization. To increase our customer focus and support further growth, we are migrating from our global business area structure that we introduced last year over to a regional sales organization, where Anthony Uhrick, who joined the company last month, will lead our sales work in the Americas; Jonas Wærn, who previously led the business area HMI Solutions, he will lead our sales work in EMEA; and Johan Swartz, who previously led the business area HMI Products, he will lead our sales work in APAC. These 3 gentlemen will all report directly to me. So we are then showing here the top level of our org chart for the sales work with the 3 gentlemen here that you will hear more from later in this call.

And it's now my pleasure to introduce the full team on today's call. Besides myself and David that you already met, we have Maria Ek, our CFO. She will, right after this, take us through the first quarter financials. After this, we will hear more from Anthony Uhrick, Jonas Wærn and Johan Swartz, who are our VP Sales for the different regions. We include here pictures of everyone on the call. And we will, in later calls, update this, and we will also include further information and bio. Today, I will refer you to our website for more information and the bio for the speakers.

So next, we will go to the financial update. I leave the word to Maria Ek, our CFO.

Thank you, Urban. You can find our first quarter earnings release and 10-Q available for download from the Investors section of our new website at neonode.com.

So to give you an update of the quarter. Our total revenues were up by 29% compared to the fourth quarter previous year and reached $1.7 million. Our gross margin was down by 14% from previous year's first quarter to 83%, and I'll come back to that later. As we are continuing to invest in sales, marketing and product development, our operating expenses were up by 29% from the first quarter 2020 to $3.0 million.

Revenues. Revenue from our HMI Solutions business area were $1.3 million, which is an increase by 10% compared to the first quarter 2020. The major part of the revenues from this business area is license revenues from our existing printer and automotive customers. We believe this business is still rebounding from the pandemic-related slowdown in the first half of 2020.

Revenue from our HMI Products business area were $0.4 million, which is an increase by 227% compared to the first quarter 2020. The increase is a result of growing deployment of contactless-touch solutions, mainly in Asia, and mostly driven by our partner network. A major part of revenues from our HMI Products business area is not surprisingly product sales, but we have also had some nonrecurring engineering projects, NRE projects.

Our total gross margin for the first quarter 2021 was 83% compared to 97% for the same quarter 2020. The decrease is related to higher product sales with lower margins. The gross margin for our HMI Solutions business area was 100% for the first quarter of 2021 as well as 2020, as there were little or no NRE revenues in both of the quarters.

The gross margin for our HMI Products business area was 24% for the first quarter 2021 compared to 62% for the first quarter previous year where we did some changes to our inventory reserves. The margin for this first quarter was depressed by low-margin AirBar sales. The margin for touch sensor module sales alone was 27% for the quarter.

Operating expenses for the first quarter 2021 was $3.0 million, which is an increase by 29% from the same quarter last year but a decrease by 9% from the previous quarter. Operating loss for the first quarter 2021 was $1.6 million, which is an increase by 50% from the same quarter 2020, but in line with the previous quarter. The net loss was $1.6 million or $0.14 per share for the first quarter 2021 compared to a net loss of $1.0 million or $0.11 per share for the same quarter previous year.

Net cash used in operating activities during the first quarter 2021 was $2.0 million compared to $1.0 million in the first quarter 2020. The increase from the previous year was primarily the result of a higher net loss and increased inventory to secure our future deliveries.

On May 10, we filed a shelf registration and entered into a $25 million ATM agreement. This allows us to strengthen our balance sheet at a low cost and with minimum dilution, if and when we find it necessary.

And now I hand it over to Urban.

Thank you, Maria. At this point, we would like to give you an update on our strategy and business. I will start with some general remarks before handing over to Anthony, Jonas and Johan.

Neonode is a value-driven company. Everything we do and every decision we take is based on our core values: one team with purpose, customer focus and make tomorrow better. Fully in line with this, we have and we are taking measures to streamline and improve on our internal organization and growth focus.

Last year, we established this business area organization with 3 separate business areas separated by the business model they use, i.e., technology licensing for HMI Solutions, product sales for HMI Products and software licensing for Remote Sensing Solutions; and the markets they address, military and avionics, industrial, elevators, interactive kiosks and automotive.

This business area organization gave us a good positive boost last year, but we are not satisfied and think we can improve and do more with the IP know-how and resources we have. Hence, we are migrating to a different organization where we have a much clearer focus on our core business and on our customers in key market segments that we are addressing, especially elevators and interactive kiosks.

As before, we are using and building on our existing IP portfolio and know-how, and we are exploring every day new and better ways to leverage this to bring value to our customers, for instance, in the form of contactless-touch solutions for which our zForce technology and our touch sensor modules are perfect fits. Going forward, we will maintain our focus on elevators and interactive kiosks, but we are also addressing customers in military and avionics, industrial and automotive.

We are rebuilding our business inside out, starting with contactless-touch solutions for elevators and kiosks and then adding further types of applications and market segments. So what I wanted to show with that picture -- I need to go back, excuse me. There's an animation here showing the main focus, contactless touch, elevators and kiosks. This is where we have a clear and dominating focus and the resource spend in Neonode since -- actually since last year. We are making this even more clear now. This is not saying that other areas have no focus or no resources, but the changes we are making is really to increase the push here with our contactless-touch business for elevators and kiosks.

And in terms of organization, we have already presented our new regional sales organization, here shown in the green boxes. We are doing similar adjustments to our internal engineering organization, here represented by the blue boxes. And we are constantly reviewing and updating our business and technology partnerships for efficiency and [simple efficacy].

Zooming out, and this will be my final slide at this point, we feel that we are on the right track and we have a really positive momentum in a lot of things we do, business development, new product development, innovation and also NRE projects with customers. The demand for our contactless-touch solutions is increasing, and our product sales is ramping up. This is what we mean by saying we are building our business pipeline.

Some of these processes take time. There are certain lead times in the sales and then in the testing and evaluation phases. And in many cases, we are having customers that want to do pilot runs and small installations first. We are all motivated by the success we are having here, and we see that we are really on the right track.

Even long term, we are also optimistic about our licensing business, and we think that this will be a nice complement to the products business to have further and new licensing customers that give us recurring revenues as the legacy customers we have in automotive and printers and e-readers, for instance, they continue to bring good revenues with high margin to the company.

And we have an excellent team, and we continue to add talent and experience to that team. And speaking of talent, it's now my pleasure to introduce Anthony Uhrick and have him introduce himself and also our business in the Americas.

Tony, please go ahead.

Thank you, Urban. So a little bit about me. I'm new to the company, but I'm not new to the industry. This is a market I'm very familiar with. And in fact, I've been in the touchscreen industry for over 20 years. I've worked for Fortune 100 companies, such as 3M Touch and industry leaders like Planar and SMART Technologies. I've also worked for several startups, including the company based in New Zealand called NextWindow, which had a very similar optical touchscreen technology.

When I started, I was responsible for developing business in the Americas. It later became a global role. And we grew sales from just a few million dollars to almost $100 million in 6 years. That company was later sold in SMART Technologies, and then they went public.

So let's talk about what our strategy is. Our plan is to refocus the resources in the Americas and to deploy a more direct sales approach into target vertical markets. Our target accounts are known, and I've worked with many of these companies in the past. What we have that's unique and different is the ability to add in-air touch and gesture control to almost any surface. This means that we can offer touch-free, germ-free, intuitive alternative to interacting with kiosks, elevators and other public surfaces. So if you think about how many kiosks and elevators that are in the market, potential is huge.

So if we look at the market in a different way, we can divide it up into what we call retrofits. These are existing installations or new installs, which would mean a new project installation or R&D, which is working with the company to provide a new product feature. But if we look at the sales cycle or the time to market, retrofits represent a huge market opportunity and the quickest path to increase revenue. Therefore, near term, our target customer is end users who've already deployed these devices such as hotels and airlines and fast food restaurants, retail, grocery stores, medical offices and the like.

But in addition to the end users, we also intend to target the companies responsible for developing the aftermarket solutions or maintaining and installing these devices, such as solution providers and integrators and value-added resellers.

So let's take a look at the -- as an example. So a company that we're working with is MAD Elevator. They're based in Canada. They're a global company. And they produce fixtures and interiors for the elevator industry. They've developed a solution they call PHANTOM, which is designed to convert standard elevator control panels into a touch-free interface.

They have a global sales channel comprised of local and regional installers, and this provides us the direct access to these building owners and managers, designers and other key decision makers. Our plan is to leverage their industry expertise, their product knowledge, and most important, their contacts to address the early adopters with a low-risk, market-specific solution to prove out the product and to confirm the market. Now it's going to take a little bit of time to institute this strategy, but we know the market, and we know where we're going.

Back to you, Urban.

Thank you, Tony, and I will immediately hand over to Jonas Wærn, who will talk about the business in EMEA. Jonas?

Thank you, Urban. So let me walk you through the goals I have with the region, really drive successful business in the whole region, not forgetting Middle East and Africa, but make no mistake, the main focus is on the European continent. I feel very comfortable there. I lived and studied in many different countries there. I want to align the region with the corporate, the overarching Neonode mission vision: to be smart, to be intuitive and also to work multimodal. This you could see being internal goals as well as external goals.

To review how we segment, how we position ourselves and how we go to market, and I'll share some of those thoughts here with you. One of my main concerns is how can we make Neonode easier to buy from, quicker to analyze, what are existing and good opportunities and leads and what we should hold on to. Often we broaden our menu, have different types of purchase options, et cetera. So really to continuously evaluate and develop our ecosystem, much like Tony mentioned with the Americas. Who should our partners be, who are our partners currently, the ecosystem that we're building around us with value-added resellers and distributors.

Also, I remain closely analyzing the military and industrial businesses that I've worked with before. The main focus, however, is going to be on elevators and interactive kiosks segments. And the #1 priority is and will be now top line growth. Also, development of, of course, more strategic, comprehensive now and next execution plans for my region, focusing on growth. This might sound a bit silly, but sell, sell, sell is going to be key. And the people responsible and working in the EMEA region can't wait to get out there once legislation has been lifted.

So on that note, I want to share with you a few cases. Some have been mentioned before of partnerships and deep relationships and businesses that we have in the EMEA region. This is Dewhurst, a U.K.-based leading supplier of components to the global elevator market. They recently launched a contactless elevated control panel for existing or also new elevator installations. This solution that we worked with together with them is sold as HALO in Europe and was introduced in the beginning of the year.

Another example of a good partner, not only as a customer but also introducing us to a great network, is Mr. Nicolas Appert, the CEO of Merim Groupe. They're a manufacturer of kiosk solutions. And what I like with this is that these solutions are out there right now, not only selling, but being used by customers. And this specific case, if you want to buy a Burger King burger in Paris, then Merim Groupe's your answer. They also work with other QSRs in France, have piloted this contactless self-ordering system. It's a very adaptable solution, also ideal, which is big for us in retrofitting on existing kiosks.

We start to see more and more of our solutions in the field and being used and experienced by the general public. And, hey, what can be more accessible than ordering your burger. This solution is marketed and sold under the name Air-Click, and it's also started a few months ago. They have great contacts and networks in France, but also in North America. So we make sure to have a good win-win solution with our partner.

So in short for EMEA, we have delivered -- we delivered and Neonode will continue to deliver the best technology out there. We're combining direct sales with a selected few partners in making sure we find and maximize the best long-term opportunities with EMEA for Neonode. Thank you.

Thank you, Jonas. And then immediately over to Johan Swartz and the APAC business.

Thank you, Urban. So it's really nice being able to focus on my so-called home turf, the Asia Pacific region again. Having living in Japan for 15 years and work in or with East and Southeast Asia for almost 30 years, I'm really thrilled to see this region leading the migration towards contactless touch.

We have, in the past 6 months, fully executed on the strategy that we defined and presented last fall: building a solid network of distributors and value-added resellers as well as system integrators, initially targeting, as Tony mentioned, retrofit use cases for elevators and interactive kiosks.

As you may have seen from our recent press releases, this has resulted in initial deployments of several projects across the region and with public announcement by several high-profile end customers, being that we will hopefully see a substantial contribution to our revenue growth in the second half of 2021.

On the right-hand side of this slide, you can see some segments per country where we have particularly good traction. That is self-service kiosks and point-of-sales terminals in Japan as well as elevator core operational panels in South Korea, China and Southeast Asia. Therefore, one of the most important segments for us is self-service kiosks at airports, retail stores, train stations, shopping malls, et cetera.

As I mentioned already at the last earnings call, one of our closest partners is focusing on self-service kiosks application, and as name implies, they're particularly on airports and airlines. Some time ago, Japan Aerospace secured a strategic business win with a major Asian airline to retrofit existing kiosks with contactless-touch technology that was both for self-check-in and for self-baggage kiosks. The solution has now been deployed in multiple airports and discussions about the wider deployment at additional airports as well as with additional airlines has already started. Having discussions on a weekly basis with Japan Aerospace, I'm confident that they will be able to utilize a good relationship within the aviation industry to further develop and create business in this segment.

However, being part of the ITOCHU Group, one of Japan's largest trading companies, so called Sogo-Shosha, Japan Aerospace has also excellent sales channels into other industries and is engaged with several other customers in the transportation, retail and hospitality sectors and were recently, together with 1 of the top 3 kiosk manufacturers in Japan, selected by a major Japanese retail chain to retrofit on the chain's existing self-checkout kiosks. The initial deployment rollout of this solution, which, by the way, is also called Air Click, seems to be a popular name, started in mid-April in 32 stores throughout Japan and will continue to be rolled out at additional locations during the second half of 2021.

Another case I would like to emphasize is with our partner, Finetek, in South Korea that has developed contactless-touch elevator control panels that they have marketed to elevator companies in South Korea since middle of last year. Also in this case, we have an extremely close cooperation, visiting customers together more or less on a daily basis or at least my local team does since I'm currently, due to the pandemic, stuck here in Stockholm having to rely on digital communication.

Recently, we get a breakthrough with one of the major elevator companies in South Korea selected our solution. And we are now, that is Neonode and Finetek, preparing for a wide-scale rollout, which we highlighted in the press release some time ago. So far, 3 pilots have been announced at the hospital and office buildings, but more will certainly follow.

Finetek is also engaged with several other elevator companies as well as with kiosk manufacturers in South Korea. So we are truly optimistic that our business with Finetek can grow and will grow significantly also in other segments, such as retail or ordering payment systems for quick service restaurants.

Finally, let's have a look at another contactless touch use case also for elevator control panels for retrofit purpose. This solution is markedly sold and deployed by Hong Kong Productivity Council under the name of kNOw Touch, mainly in Hong Kong and Mainland China. However, Hong Kong Productivity Council has also recently developed the business model and have, in their turn, started to sublicense their solution to other companies, such as, for example, Jardine Schindler, that promote the solution with the aim of having a wider adoption in overseas markets, particularly in Southeast Asia, where they have a really, really strong presence.

So referring back to what Tony initially said here, all of those close engagements that we have had have helped us tremendously in refining and improving our solution to really make it ideal for contactless-touch implementations.

And with that, I would like to hand over the word back to Urban.

Thank you. And we are close to the end of our presentation. I just wanted to summarize the key points regarding our strategy and our business.

The first that I said upfront in the call is that we feel that we are on the right track, and we see a high and increasing demand for our contactless-touch solutions and our touch sensor modules, i.e., our -- what we call, our products business. We have strong belief in this, that it will help us grow our top line. And by this, we will also improve our bottom line.

Our focus continues to be elevators and interactive kiosks. The markets in Asia, Europe and North America are a little different. They look a little different, but there are many, here, common denominators, and both these markets are very large markets with huge installed bases of equipment and also a good, healthy growth. And in our case, we also see that we have a tremendous opportunity with retrofits that we can do rather quickly in existing equipment and we can develop, based on the retrofit solution, we can also then transfer into the new equipment part of the market. So this is where we see the biggest potential in this year, next year and probably the year after.

We are very optimistic still, and we haven't forgotten about where we come from. The last 10 years, Neonode has been focusing on technology licensing. We continue to work on this, and we continue to try to bring attention to our zForce technology that supports touch, gesture sensing and contactless-touch applications. And we are mainly targeting demand in customers in the military and avionics space, in the industrial, and then by this, we mean rugged industrial applications in plants and workshops and similar where there's a harsh environment and the operators and the users typically could have gloves or it's difficult with a traditional touch interface or if they want to do some gesture sensing, we can provide for that.

Also in automotive, as we have presented before, we continue to work on our driver and in-cabin monitoring. We have a very advanced software solution there that we have still high hopes for. We are engaged currently with several companies. And it's interesting to see how this market is developing. Those of you that have followed Neonode in the previous years, you know that we have worked a lot with touch solutions for IVI systems. We still have new requests. The solution we have in the market with 3 Tier 1s and several OEMS is very, very high performance and well received, excellent quality records. So building on that, we try to leverage this to new programs where we can license our technology.

And furthermore, there's a big interest in gesture sensing. And we have been approached in the last months by several companies asking for proposals regarding gesture sensing, both in the cabin of the car and outside. So automotive remains an important area for us.

And we feel that we are well positioned with our owners, our Board of Directors and our team here in the company. And as you have heard Tony and Jonas and Johan talk about, we also have an excellent ecosystem of partners, some are distributors. I can mention Digi-Key is one fulfillment distributors we are working with. We have several value-added resellers. We have technology partners. Some of them we have mentioned, and they are featured in the presentation today. But all this together makes us feel that we are well positioned to accelerate growth in the coming months and quarters and also capitalize on the current and future opportunities.

We are currently recruiting more engineers, for instance, and there will be high pressure on our engineering team, but we think we can overcome this, and this will be absolutely necessary for us to continue to grow. But we also have certain expansion capacity, obviously, with our partners, and that's another reason why we work with these partners that, some of them, the value-added resellers and the technology partners, they have engineering resources that contribute in the projects we are involved in.

They are also, as you know, helping us market our solutions and selling them. So we see multiple use of this ecosystem, and that's why we also set up heterogeneous ecosystem with different types of partners. And we will continue to work with them in different ways, probably in different markets as well. But we are all excited, and we look forward to the rest of this year and into next year.

So with that, I would like to thank you all for your attention, and we will move to Q&A. Dave?

I now open the call for Q&A from our covering analysts.

(Operator Instructions) We have a question from the line of Jesper Henrikson with Redeye.

Yes. My first question is to Maria. Could you explain the shelf registration and the ATM file that you have recently made with the SEC?

Yes. A shelf legislation is filed with SEC and allows (inaudible) to sell kind of preregistered securities during a 3-year period, using so-called takedown. This is one of several types of transactions, one being at-the-market offering, so-called ATM. This is an offering into the existing trading market made at the company's discretion. The company effectively sells its own shares to the bankers and into the market. This is regulatory practicing in U.S. stock markets today, and it's a flexible way to raise capital without -- sorry, with minimum market impact at a low cost and without discounts. Does that answer your question?

Yes. That's good. And so the shelf registration is that USD 100 million, and the ATM is at $25 million. How should investors interpret these numbers?

Well, none of these numbers target size for future offering, though. At this time, no decision has been taken to use this option nor to have any targets being set for the size of share issuance. We will use this facility in a careful manner and if and when market conditions are favorable. So it's a good housekeeping of the Board to be able to raise preregistered -- to raise the capital with the preregistered shares in the future.

Okay. Great. I understand that. And then also one question for Urban. Are you experiencing any global component shortage? And if so, how is this affecting your business?

We don't see any problems today with components for our products manufacturing. But we are also feeling that the risk is there. So basically, we have covered our component needs for this year and into next year. But who knows how long this current situation will stay. So right now, we are exploring alternative second and third sources from our -- some of the key components to be really prepared if this situation continues or gets worse next year. This year, it's already covered, and we have guaranteed supply of components.

Okay, great. And then one last question about the Finetek elevator partnership. Can you say anything more about like how big is it and how that's going to grow? And also how much resources are Finetek sitting in?

So I will hand that question over to Johan, who works directly with fintech on a more or less daily basis. So maybe you can address that?

Yes, certainly. I mean, let me just state like this. So both Neonode and Finetek are super serious about this, and we have -- both companies have invested considerable time and effort in order to pass a multiple number of reliability tests and fully qualify these solutions, not only with one elevator OEM but with multiple -- actually, the 2 largest elevator OEMs in South Korea. So we are super committed, and we both put in a lot of resources into this.

Then, as I mentioned, we have 3 pilot installations in hospital and office buildings and being announced by one of the elevator OEMs. And although those pilots reportedly have been received very well by people, both the users and by building owners, et cetera, and other associated stakeholders, it's kind of -- it's really difficult to predict a retrofit ratio or speed of the rollout. But I mean, what we can say is that with an installed base of more than 800,000 elevators only in South Korea by 2020, according to a research report on Statista, even a moderate retrofit ratio will result in substantial volumes. I think that's really what I can say.

The next question will come from the line of Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum Capital.

Urban, if we have 100% sell-through of the components that you've secured for next year, roughly, what would be the company's revenue?

Yes. We are ramping up our production, first of all, and also our sales. So we are targeting actually to grow by multiples and not percentages. So we are targeting very aggressive growth and also continuing in the same fashion in next year. So I won't give you any guidance to any specific numbers, but I will say that we are growing several hundred percent this year and also a similar type of numbers next year.

Great. And then given kind of the substantial pipeline of opportunities that we kind of highlighted in the prepared comments, how big of a revenue opportunity, without necessarily putting a time frame on it, whether it's 3 years or 5 years or potentially longer, how long does it take for the elevator interactive kiosk business to become a $40 million to $50 million business, if it could become that big?

We have really high hopes for this. We think we are on to something really good with these 2 segments, elevators and interactive kiosks. Both have, I would say, huge installed bases. We are close to like 20 million installed elevators in the world, and that number is growing by 1.3 million, 1.5 million elevators per year. You have a refurbishment rate on the elevator cars and the general systems of like every 10 years or something. So there's a significant aftermarket for elevators.

And what we have done with our own planning is to try to secure a certain market share and grow that market share off of that installed base and with the new equipment. We also have the retrofit play, which we can use actually several times for elevators' lifetime. So in the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years, we are really -- we are trying to grow this business, as you said, up into the several tens of million dollars for elevators and similar numbers for kiosks.

Actually, the kiosk market globally is much bigger than the elevator market, but on the other hand, it's a little bit more fragmented. You have every type of kiosks. You have ATMS. You have vending machines. You have the type of self-service kiosks we saw at airports and at fast food restaurants. So for us, I think that the realistic total addressable market in kiosk is sort of similar in size as elevators. But combined, hey, we see the huge market opportunity. We want to grow this. We are working to grow this onto the several tens of million U.S. in the next 3, 4 years.

Great. And then my last question has to do with the recent patent portfolio protection. Is there any type of updates you could share with us there?

Yes. It's a great question. And as you know, we have an agreement with a company called Aequitas Technologies, LLC. That agreement with them is public, filed as an 8-K, and it was done in 2018. They are trying to monetize Neonode's old patents, actually, 2 families that we have transferred -- assigned to them and that they are trying to monetize. And of course, if they're successful, the agreement grants us 50% of the net proceeds, less expenses. They are advancing this. And I would repeat, Neonode Inc. is not part of any litigations or any part of these processes.

Aequitas technology, LLC is running this independently from us. They have set up company that they call Neonode Smartphone LLC that's 100% owned by Aequitas Technologies, LLC and has nothing to do with us. This company has, for instance, sued Apple and Samsung in the Western District, Texas. I believe some of the proceedings of those litigations are available online or at least searchable. And we follow them as well as you do, and we find it super interesting to see how this goes. And it's a potential upside for us at the end of that process, obviously, if they do a settlement or if there is a -- in the end, the court decides in our favor, which we hope can bring some nice dollars into our balance sheet as well.

The next question will come from the line of Viktor Westman with Redeye.

I have a question for Mr. Johan Swartz. I noticed that the Japan Airlines, they are promoting this contactless solution a lot. I don't see it so much from other players. Can you tell me why not others have jumped on this bandwagon or not know about these solutions? Or have they chosen another path?

Well, I mean, if we're talking about globally, obviously, Japan Airline is not the only company focusing on contactless touch check-in kiosks. We also have announcement by Changi Airport and by Hamad Airport in Qatar. So there are certainly other players. Then I think this -- when we talk about self-check-in kiosks at airports, it's a bit of a complex setup with a combination of sometimes airlines, sometimes companies like ARINC or SITA, and sometimes the airports actually owning and controlling the various flavors of kiosks. So it's a little bit of a complicated setup. And therefore, I think, it also make things more complicated when you should progress this.

But I think I have good hopes that those initial announcement and installations will influence other airports and airlines to actually do this. And we have a lot of indications that this will happen, but it takes a little bit of time.

Okay. Good. Another question about -- in the report, you mentioned you're exploring further partnerships. Can you tell me -- are you not satisfied with your current partnerships? Or why are you exploring more partnerships? And in what areas, what kind of partnerships?

So I will step in and answer this, Viktor. This is Urban speaking. So what we refer to is related to our reorganization into regional sales structure. We have been very successful and found some very nice and active partners that have helped us a lot in Asia. But just to mention, we see that this model is good for Neonode in a global scale. And we can talk Mainland China. We can talk EMEA, and we can talk Americas. We are looking into some good value-added resellers and other types of partners in these regions. So this is one thing we do.

We also are exploring other types of technology partnerships with even competitors that have been approaching us during the winter and spring. And some of these proposals are quite interesting because if you can join forces with other companies, we can broaden our offering, we can also share some of their sales channels and the marketing resources. So actually, we are pursuing a lot of these ideas in parallel.

And our new sales organization with Tony onboard and in Jonas running EMEA and Johan continue to run APAC gives us then the bandwidth from the management team to really go after this in a more focused way because we believe in a heterogeneous approach where we do both direct sales and we do indirect sales through partners.

Okay. Got you. One last question for me about the HMI Solutions part. Can you share some other exciting areas in the military market? Besides touch displays for aircraft and vehicles, what other kind of ideas do you have here?

Well, the -- what we have identified so far is that there is a very interesting market for us and our technology with aircraft applications. And then, I mean, it's very classic. It's -- they have different types of displays and several of them or if not all of them will be touch-enabled. And our technology fits as a glove into that. Of course, there are other rugged displays used in by military army and also naval forces. And they will be then typically other types of displays or similar types of displays that you have in the aircraft.

But Jonas informed me of another project that there were more like a personal device for soldiers, where this company, or I don't know, this Department of Defense wanted to have a touch interface sort of carried by the soldier on his gear. And this is something that not many other technologies could solve. And Neonode, with our zForce technology is also a good fit there. So we believe that we have a play in the military and avionics market. And it's not only aircraft. It could be also ground vehicles, and it could be infantry, soldiers and other things.

The next question will come from the line of [Philip Schwartz with Mark Capital].

I have a question for maybe it's Maria or Urban, but I feel like the shareholders need more information on this shelf registration and also the $25 million sales agreement with B. Reilly. Is it -- should the shareholder understands that B. Reilly now are allowed to sell $25 million worth of stock at the market, in market?

Yes and no. First of all, shelf registration is a preregistration of securities, typically shares, that we can use during 3 years. We had the shelf that expired last year during the spring. And now we are setting up a new one or have set up a new one. This allows us to in the 3 period do takedowns and have direct offerings. You can do pipe deals or we can do ATMs using this shelf. So that's what Maria mentioned. The Board considers like good housekeeping to set this up. And we have no immediate plans to use the shelf like this or do a direct offering or similar. But...

And the sales agreement with B. Riley over there, what is the purpose for that? What will they do? Is it private placement? Or is it just selling in the market?

So the shelf is something Neonode set up by our own, and we have this now in place. And as soon as it's improved, we can use it. The second one is an agreement with B. Riley for an ATM. We can then, at our own discretion, decide if we're going to sell shares through B. Riley's trading desk. Those shares will be sold at market price, and we will control that sales of shares from Neonode. It's done at market price, no discounts and also a very low fee. So we think it's very favorable for investors that we have this. Maria also explained that, also in this case...

Sorry...

Yes. Please let me finish. So the Board hasn't decided to use the total available amount. But if the shelf and the ATM is approved by the SEC, we have this option. And as Maria explained, when market conditions are favorable, probably we're going to start selling some shares through B. Riley in this ATM agreement.

All right. So the selling through B. Riley is at your discretion?

Yes.

Absolutely. Yes.

If you want to buy shares, give us a call. We can give you a good price.

With that, we are showing no further audio questions at this time. Do we have any closing remarks?

Yes. Let me say a couple more words. Just to round off, I would like to direct your attention to our new website. I introduced it before, and we want to have more traffic to our new, nice-looking website, neonode.com. We are continuously adding content and updating. So please stay with us through this media and also other social media like LinkedIn and Twitter. Thank you very much, and thank you for joining today's call.

We want to thank you all for joining us for our call. Have a good day.