Omniq Corp (OMQS) 2022 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Hello and welcome to the omniQ Corporation's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Ali, and I will be coordinating your call today. With us on the call are Mr. Shai Lustgarten, Chief Executive Officer, who will provide an operational overview; and Neev Nissenson, Chief Financial Officer, who will discuss financial results.

Today's call is being recorded, and you should have access to the company's third quarter earnings press release issued after the market closed yesterday. This information is available on the Investor Relations section of the omniQ's website at www.omniq.com.

I will now take a brief moment to read the Safe Harbor statement. During the course of this conference call, we will make certain forward-looking statements. All statements that address expectations, opinions or predictions about the future are forward-looking statements.

Although, they reflect our current expectations and are based on our best view of the industry and our current expectations and our business as we see them today, they are not a guarantee of future performance.

These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties. And since these elements can change and in certain cases are not within our control, we would ask that you consider best and interpret them in that light.

We urge you to review the company's Form 10-K and other SEC filings for a discussion of the principal risks and uncertainties that affect the company's business, and performance, and the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. omniQ undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless required by law.

Following the prepared remarks, the company will be taking questions as time permits. And now I will turn the call over to Shai Lustgarten, CEO. Mr. Lustgarten, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our Q3 and nine-month 2022 financial results. I will begin today's call with a brief discussion of the Q3 results and then give you an update on the key achievements we recognized during the quarter. I'll then turn the call over to Neev Nissenson, our Chief Financial Officer, and he will provide details of both the Q3, and nine months ended 2022.

We'll finish by giving you a clear understanding of our future focus and potential opportunities across the globe. It is my hope that after today's call, you will have an even better idea of why we are so excited about our business fundamentals going forward. To start, I'd like to thank each one of our employees across our entire company for their continued hard work and dedication to our vision and strategic plan.

I'm proud to report that Q3 revenue came in at $27 million, a record high sales number for the company, bolstered by organic growth of 32%. Our gross profit saw a 28% increase compared to the third quarter of 2021.

Importantly, our AI revenue saw an increase of 50% compared to the third quarter of 2021. This led to a $1.5 million improvement of adjusted EBITDA for the quarter. This growth was driven by strong customer demand across all our segments, which resulted in improved bottom line in the path to profitability.

During the quarter, we also announced several positive achievements, including omniQ named total solution partner for one of the largest global leaders in enterprise asset intelligence for robotics supply chain management. We announced a follow-on order for our AI based machine vision system for a major US fast-food chain with more than 800 locations and for in automotive related retailer with over 1,000 stores in the US.

We announced the receipt of an approximately $10 million purchase agreement for intelligent healthcare cards from Israel's Ministry of Health. We further announced the receipt of a purchase order to deploy our AI-machine vision solution in what is now, the 50th North American major airport using omniQ's AI product.

omniQ's healthcare product penetration success continues with having our self-service patient management kiosks featured in Israel's newest state-of-the-art emergency medical hospitals. I would like now to focus on this breakthrough into the QSR and retail sector as we consider it as a potential game-changer. Our proprietary patented AI-based machine vision technology provides accurate human-less object identification in this case, identifying car, including the color, make, and license, please.

Historically, this information is vital for security, law enforcement, automation of parking and traffic management. However, we identified that the QSR and retail sector, which have thousands of locations lacking information about their customers and their consuming habits is a significant potential market opportunity for us.

By installing our AI products in drive-throughs or the entrance of the business, the system immediately identifies and presents invaluable information about the customer. Once the customer profile is built, the business owner will know things such as when the customer last visited, what they usually order, how many times they visited in the past, are they eligible for any discounts or rewards and so on.

For the first time, we enabled the largest companies to collect and use information about customer habits that have never been able to be effectively collected until now. Thus, create automation as we replace manual processes with machine-to-machine ones, which result in significant efficiencies.

According to a study conducted by Quantum Advisors, there are approximately 200,000 quick-service restaurants in the US alone. Most are blind in knowing their customers. You can imagine now what type of potential impact this could have in the retail and restaurant sector as well as on omniQ. In addition to the QSR, other orders came from automotive retailer with over 1,000 sites.

Similar to the QSR, any car that drives into the retailer's premises is identified and immediately alerts the service provider, allowing them to know essential information on each individual customer ahead of time. This instantly shortens the turnaround and increase throughput. There are thousands of additional automotive service provider's locations in the US that we have targeted.

omniQ continues to enjoy significant growth with our long-standing Fortune 500 customers, many of whom have relied on the company for 20 plus years to handle their logistic and supply chain challenges. These long-standing relationships with a solid stability of our legacy product is the basis for one of our most significant growth engines, upgrading our Fortune 500 customer base to our AI products.

Q3 was characterized by the addition of new customers within the traffic management, public safety, retail, and restaurant sectors. Our safe city product Q Shield, announced only nine months ago is continuing to show success.

Q Shield is becoming a law enforcement platform as a crime investigation tool and real-time crime prevention tool. As we aim to do, it helps municipalities keep the resident safe, reduce time. And through our creative business model, Q Shield is offered, it increases the town's income that is now invested back into the communities.

This new initiative already has 12 cities in the US, and we continue to see a growing pipeline of cities interested in deploying Q Shield. While we do not provide guidance, demand is stronger than we had anticipated, and our team is busy executing. As noted, Q Shield's business model is based on recurring revenue steering with significantly higher margins than the current corporate average. Thus, we expect this strength to result in a positive impact to both the top and bottom lines.

Before I go further, let me now turn this over to Neev to take a deeper look into our financial results. Neev.

Yes. hello, everybody. As Shai highlighted, in Q3, omniQ reported revenue of $27 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2022. An increase of 32% from $20.5 million in the third quarter of 2021. The revenue growth is organic as we already consolidated financial statements with Dangot Computers for Q3 of 2021, as we acquired Dangot in the beginning of July.

Total operating expenses for the quarter were down 3% to $8.6 million compared with $8.9 million in the third quarter of 2021. The net loss for the quarter was $3.8 million or a loss of $0.52 per basic share compared with a loss of $5.1 million or a loss of $0.73 per basic share for the third quarter of last year, an improvement of $1.3 million in our profitability.

Adjusted EBITDA, which we adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization for the third quarter of 2022, amounted to a loss of $516,000 compared with an adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million in the third quarter of 2021. that's an [improvement] of $4.5 million in our adjusted EBITDA profitability.

Our nine-month results are impressive as well. omniQ1 reported revenue of $77.5 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2022, an increase of 45% from $53.4 million in the first nine months of 2021. The revenue increase reflects the consolidation of our financial statements with Dangot Computers, which we acquired in July 2021, as well as one-time costs.

Total operating expenses for the nine months ended September 2022 was $24.2 million compared with $19.5 million from the same period of 2021. (inaudible) with regards to spending from the consolidation with Dangot. Net Loss for the nine months ended September 30, 2022, $9.6 million or a loss of $1.29 per basic share compared with a loss of $10.8 million or a loss of $1.86 per basic share for the first nine months of last year.

Adjusted EBITDA for the nine months ended September 30, 2022, amounted to a loss of $1.5 million compared with an adjusted EBITDA loss of $3.6 million in the same period of 2021. Cash balance at September 30, 2022 was $3.8 million compared with $7 million at December 30, 2021. I would like to note that the cash improved from $2.9 million at the end of the second quarter to $3.8 million that we have for September 30, 2022.

Now back to Shai for further highlights on the strength of the business and the opportunities ahead. Shai.

Thank you Neev. To help you better understand the path of the company, I would like to remind you that 2020 was a year we focused on taking our AI-machine vision technology and making it the foundation of our next generation AI product. In 2021, we invested in making our company stronger to support our markets penetration plan. We focused more on our balance sheet, performance, and spent time successfully up listing to the NASDAQ, a significant milestone. This ensured our plans for execution for the next years ahead.

In 2022, as we continued our focus on profitability, we started executing on the significant scalability our AI products bring. This is shown by the various achievements we discussed earlier in the call. To you, I say this is just the beginning. These achievements show the potential for what lies ahead.

In addition to the obvious significance of the many wins, they are equally important as reference points. These references are what potentially allow us to capture more of the market opportunities, which we expect to focus on during the course of the next year.

With these achievements, we penetrated many new markets with our AI products. These products are all based on our single AI-machine vision technology platform. Our platform allows us to produce products that are relevant and answer the needs of them from any market.

omniQ's technology and products makes the invisible visible. Create automation by eliminating the touch of a human from any process, allowing countries, cities, schools, airports, hospitals, parking lots and enterprises to be proactive and achieve unparallel, increased productivity, security, efficiency, and stronger customer satisfaction.

omniQ's team is indeed focused in concluding 2022 as a growth year and building the path to a successful 2023. It is important to note the technology and references that we have created so far is much more than looking the year ahead.

We have a clear focus and strategic roadmap of continuing our penetration into the fastest growing markets, which we will continue to execute on. And we look forward to reporting back to you in the next quarters ahead.

Operator, I'll now turn over the call for questions.

(Operator Instructions)

Jaeson Schmidt, Lake Street.

Thanks for taking my questions. Shai, I just wanted to follow up on your prepared remarks. You mentioned that demand is stronger than anticipated. I just wanted to clarify, was that just in regards to Q Shield or across the whole company's product portfolio?

Thank you for the question, Jaeson. On the prepared remarks, yes, it was related to Q Shield's on the really strong demand that we see. But to answer your question or elaborate even further, we do see this as well the increased demand also in all of our other products and sectors we serve. So, it's the continued the growth in backlog is still happening and I would say it's across the board.

Okay. That's really helpful. And then just following up on that, a 12 cities under contract in the law enforcement space. Can you talk about how that pipeline is growing, where that pipeline sits at today?

Yes, I think we've spoke about it before that in the previous call, we had about 30 something cities in pipeline. We're seeing more than 60 cities today. Important to mention that we could have reported for Q3 even a larger amount of cities under contract. The only reason why this did not happen is because of elections. And city councils of decided to wait -- kind of all of them to wait until that ends so they can sign the contracts right after the election. So, we are expecting that continued growth in the cities to be under contract.

Okay. Great. And then just the last one for me and I'll jump back into queue. How should we think about gross margin going forward? Obviously, the continued contribution and growing contribution of AI portfolio should lift that up. But I have to imagine supply chain and some of those dynamics, inflation, et cetera, are creating some headwinds. So, any color you can provide on how we should think about gross margin here in Q4?

Yes. obviously, we started talking about it. We had several discussions about that in the previous calls as well. We explain how as designers, how as original equipment manufacturers, we can provide or seek for alternatives in case we have challenges in different components. We're still doing that, and we're still able to provide the response required in order to continue showing growth quarter-over-quarter.

And the gross margin trend is going to continue picking up going to continue growing, as we discussed before as well with the objective that we stated as well. And it's assured, I would say are more or secured because of again, the increased backlog and demand that we see in the AI products. So just to give you an illustration, in 2021, we had about $2 million of this time in backlog. While right now, we have about a little bit over $5 million already in backlog still for this year.

Okay. That's really helpful. Thanks a lot, guys.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Moran Pober, Acquisitions.com.

Hi Shai, thank you for answering my questions. So, first question is what are the AI sales in 2022 compared to 2021?

AI sales in 2022 year-to-date or better say, in Q3 is about $4 million actually compared to half of it in 2021. So basically a 100% increase.

Nice. And what's the plan for next year, like how do you see 2023?

We want to continue to keep in our objective to double that next year. So, if we saw doubling -- we'll see more than doubling ourselves this year. We'll at least see -- our objective is at least to see that doubling next year.

All right. Sounds good. Congrats. Looking forward to see that.

Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

John Ragard, Spouting Rock.

Yes, thank you. I have a couple. First one is if, Shai, that you could give us a little bit of quantification on how supply chain impacts the business and the both the revenue and cost of sales in the third quarter? Did you miss some shipments because you were short components? And were there additional costs incurred to get product to the facilities to complete things as well?

Yes. So yes, we have if I need to quantify that, we've missed probably $2 million in shipments due to different reasons in supply chain. It's -- I would say, a lack of products that some of the OEMs we work with partners, we work with had to -- are still facing challenges.

On the component level of our systems, we usually are able to meet the objectives of the deliveries as we find alternatives being designers. But some of the solutions we sell still have a part of the solution or products are of other OEMs as well.

And as a total solution provider, when we meet certain products, then that could affect the delivering that happened. Like I said, to quantify that, it would be about $2 million. So, we could have basically sold $29 million, but still happy with the fact we were able to show a record-breaking sales revenue of $27 million. That's regarding the revenue.

Regarding the gross margins, I would say about the expenses that relate to expedite deliveries, expenses that relate to unique chip shipments that you incur, because you want to make sure not only you meet the revenue objectives, but more importantly to serve you, our customers. That cost about, I would say roughly close to $600,000 or $550,000 this quarter.

So basically, you could -- this is a good question because basically, if you look at the adjusted EBITDA, you are already breaking even or a little bit already positive. But again, we'll probably need to see that next year. How do I see this going forward? I can't say we're going to finish all these challenges. But I can say that the world will be doing much better and we, as a company, are doing much better as well. And I'm hoping that we'll continue to be able to show the growth in all parameters.

Thanks. One more if I may, as it relates to Q Shield of the safe cities. What is a prudent pace at which you and your distributor can install new cities that are under contract, and continue the high quality and reliability of what you've had? We're just trying to model out the future and get a pace of how many installed and revenue-generating cities there will be as we go forward,

Our plan is to, of course, install it in as many as possible. Just to give you an illustration, if you go -- If we do install, for example, in 100 cities, then we're talking about over -- and I'd like to be conservative here, but over $20 million of revenue, recurring revenue a year, for that to mean as a thumb rule. But again, I'm trying to be conservative.

And like we mentioned, we started this initiative nine months ago only. And by now we have 12, there are probably double that amount that we're ready to sign the contracts. But like I mentioned again in the previous question asked by Jason, due to elections, this postponed that. But still we're looking forward to get this contract signed this year.

So, if you look at it as a product that just penetrated this market nine months ago, if we conclude this year with about 20 cities signed, then the path towards 100 is real quick, given all the precautions and caution in that statement.

But still, we're happy with the pace, we're happy with the deployment, we're happy with the interest. And most importantly, we're happy with the performance of Q Shield, because it's doing more than we ever expected, quicker than we ever expected. So, I hope that kind of gives you more color and answers your questions.

No, it's a big help. Thank you so much for updating us on safe cities.

Thank you. Appreciate your support.

(Operator Instructions) [ Neil Phoegens] Family Office.

Hey Shai, congratulations on the top line growth and progress on the bottom line.

Thank you.

So I wanted to go back real quick. This wasn't one of my primary questions, but I just wanted to go back and make sure I understood that you had about $600,000 of expedited shipping in Q3 expedited shipping costs. So basically, you would have been cash flow breakeven or cash flow positive on an EBITDA basis, if that was normalized. Did I hear that right?

Yes.

And are you incurring expedited shipping costs in Q4?

Less than what we saw in Q3.

Okay. All right. So, I wanted to ask a couple of questions around the October 17 news release, where you were named the total solution partner for the large gglobal long-term here Enterprise Asset Intelligence Company. I don't really understand what we're doing there. So a couple of questions.

Can you basically tell me what the combined solutions are that we're taking out to industry? And what is it that we bring to the table, and what is it that this partner of ours brings to the table to make that solution work?

Yes, of course. So, as you know, omniQ is a total solution provider to a Fortune 500 enterprises. I mean that these are some of our customers. Being a total solution provider gives you the responsibility to deploy different technologies to respond to the needs of these customers.

Basically, that is what we always call -- what we refer to as the automation of processes. And a part of automating processes in supply chain fo1r such huge organizations, a part of it today is robotics, and we all heard about that.

The largest -- I would say, robotic company in the world and also supply chain company in the world that we referred to in this PR that we partnered with, selected us to be one of their few partners that they share their robotic solutions with.

Why? Because, again, we are the face to the customer. We are the ones that respond to the largest customers in the world's needs. And what we bring to the table, again, is a total solution. But this is not only, of course, the integration of that total automation to their supply chain levels, but also, we bring to the table our unique machine vision technology.

Together with robotics, you can really aim for 100% efficiencies. And that is what makes this press release unique. Not only because we were selected due to the fact, we have unique technology that attract our customers to deploy, but also -- and they want to be part of it -- but also now that we have the total solution that can respond to additional needs with a robotics.

Okay. And if they're a global leader in this space, I assume they have a large sales team. Do we benefit from their feet on the ground, when it comes to taking these offerings that we're a big piece of, into the marketplace. So, we basically benefiting from having their people involved with selling these solutions?

Absolutely. And that always takes effect in the opportunities that were handed by their sales team. Now being partners, we're getting daily leads and opportunities that are more relevant to our technology and that come to them.

Because like you mentioned, they have huge sales team. They have huge reseller channel that they depend on and been exposed to their ecosystem being partners. Now we are getting also leads opportunities which already generates revenue.

Okay. One final quick one on this topic, Shai. So, when you look out over the next 12 months to 18 months, is the potential to expand the revenue that we're generating with this partner. Can you quantify that a little bit? I mean, what is what could this be 12 months to 18 months from now compared to what it is today in terms of revenue?

I don't know if I can really quantify. I mean, I can say that if we are seeing in supply chain, not considering, our machine vision breakthroughs that go into supply chain. If we eliminate that, for example, we're seeing in our growth in supply chain of single digits in percentages.

This capability now that we have in the partnership we created together now with our with our technology, that should bring it to higher, much higher like a double digit, so minimum 20% -- so we should at least double the growth that we're that we are witnessing on year-to-year basis from regular operation, and regular products we offer today, which is probably double in percentages the growth in that supply chain segment.

Okay. And Shai, one final question on the retail space. Sounds like one of your biggest opportunities. You mentioned that you're targeting other companies in the automotive space. if we if we kind of box off automotive and restaurants, could you share what a couple of other verticals in the retail space are that you're targeting?

Yes. Of course. As we spoke, as we mentioned during the call, we became relevant to many markets using one platform, one AI platform that we spend a lot of time in designing, and we have a nine patents on, et cetera. And that made us relevant to different markets. We already created the penetration. One of them is what you mentioned, the retail based with automotive.

But when you look at the different retailers that we are now exposed to is all the car dealerships. All the drive throughs that go into car washing, different additional airports in different -- additional ones, not only major ones that we're exposed to today. We have got more than 50. It makes everything more anything that has today, the low hanging fruit, anything they have drive through either in retail or in restaurant.

We have the in a box solution that is becoming a plug and play one, that we are relevant to. And that's what makes it so unique, that's what makes us so exciting. Because now we were relevant in it's crossing or eliminating all the borders between markets. It's eliminating our limitations. We're not looking just some markets. We're looking now on the platform that is relevant to many markets.

So, as we train the engine, the algorithms to identify any type of vehicle that opens it up with additional components that we design, but open it up for a drive through, for example, a product in a box product that we're providing to this retailer and the restaurant fast food restaurant, but now taking it to the other ones in different markets. Like I mentioned, give you some examples, that's the scalability that we're talking about. And that's what really makes us excited.

Okay. Well, again, thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you again in three or four months.

Thank you, sir. Appreciate your support.

Thank you. There appear to be no further questions in queue. So I'll hand it back to Mr. Lustgarten for any closing comments he would like to make.

Thank you, operator. And I'd like to conclude. First of all, I really would like to extend my sincere thanks to our loyal customers and suppliers, our professional team, and other strong supporters.

Last but not least, we would like to thank our shareholders, for sharing the success with us as well as wish you all continued success. I'm really looking forward to talking to you next quarter. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's call. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day. And we thank you for your participation.