Precipio Inc (PRPO) 2023 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to the Precipio Shareholder fourth quarter and year-end 2024 shareholder update conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please note that the conference is being recorded.

Statements made during this call contain forward-looking statements about our business. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements as these statements are based upon our current expectations, forecasts and assumptions and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. These statements may be identified by words such as may, will, should, could, expect, intend, plan, anticipate, believe, estimate, predict, potential, forecast, continue, or the negative of these terms or other words or terms of similar meaning. Risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those set forth in any forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the matters listed under Risk Factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as other risks detailed in our subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These reports are available at www.sec.gov. Statements and information, including forward-looking statements, speak only to the date they are provided, unless an earlier date is indicated. And we do not undertake any obligation to publicly update any statements or information, including forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.

Now, let me hand the call over to Ilan Danieli, Precipio's CEO.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our 2023 year-end shareholder update call.

As you know, we've always run our shareholder calls a little bit differently than other companies. Instead of reviewing the numbers filed in our 10-K report, which you've had a chance to read, I wanted to provide you with a bit more color into some of the things that took place in our company during the year. So today, I'd like to share with you the success that we had during the year and also share the challenges we face and how we overcame them and provide you with a picture of where we see ourselves in 2024.

So I started by looking back at my notes from last year's shareholder call, where we set out a few goals for the company. The first was for the pathology business to reach breakeven at $14 million annualized run rate. The second was for the products division to reach $8 million annualized run rate or $2 million per quarter. And the third was an outcome of combination of those two for the company itself to reach breakeven.

As I reviewed these goals, here is our scorecard. For the first goal, in Q3, we were able to reach $3.7 million in pathology revenues, which equates to almost $15 million, exceeding the breakeven mark, with a slight increase to $3.8 million in Q4.

For our second goal of $2 million per quarter for product division, we fell short at about $750,000 per quarter. In a few moments, I'll discuss some of the elements that caused that shortfall and what we've done to rectify that going forward.

Our third goal was to reach breakeven. As you saw in our press release in January, in Q4, we came within less than $100,000 from breakeven, which is a huge reduction in our cash burn.

If I were to give our company and myself a scorecard based on these three goals, I would say we achieved goal number one, fell short on goal number two and came very close to creating goal number three.

I'd like to expand on a couple of the points here and provide some more color as to how and why things panned out the way they did. Let's begin with goal number two of the product division revenue.

As you know, in early 2023, we launched collaborations with some of the major distributors in the US, Thermo Fisher and McKesson. We've also since joined the premier network and recently launched another distribution partnership with Cardinal Health. All those were intended to supplement the direct sales force effort that our team has been leading.

So why didn't the numbers show the growth that we expected? Unfortunately, as we've learned, distribution is a complex business that involves getting several factors right. I'd like to take a moment to highlight a few of those factors that we face.

First, we need to make sure that we're working with the right team within the distributor. Most distributors have several sales teams that may be assigned different responsibilities based on skill sets, expertise, tenure, product line, customer segment and geography, to name a few. Therefore, making sure that there is a correct match between our company and the right sales team can be complicated and is critical to the success.

The second challenge is training the sales team. How much do we want them to know? Is more better? As we learned, not always. Some distributor sales reps can carry a complex conversation and get into technical details around the product, while others will shy away and prefer to avoid getting into a complicated product discussion. What we found is that in some situations, the best approach is for sales reps to leverage their relationship and just say to the customers something along the lines of, Hey, we're working with a new partner called Precipio. I'd like to bring them in and for them to share with you what they have to offer.

Yet another challenge is incentives paid by the distributor to the sales rep. One of the right tools to create the proper incentives that align the distributor's sales rep's goals with the company's goals. Should there be compensation for closing the sale, for ongoing purchases? Or both?

And lastly, how do we ensure that distributor's leadership enables our product so that we receive proper mind share of their reps who have another 400 products in their bag? How do we communicate with the rep and get them comfortable that this is not only going to make them money, but also going to make them look good in front of their customers?

These are just some of the challenges we faced as we launched the partnership with these large distributors. Unfortunately, we learned these challenges through trial and error. And so at the end of the year, we paused, spent time with the leadership of the distributors we work with and took some time to debrief and review our collaboration to identify what worked well and equally important, what didn't. As a result, we've restructured our launch for those distributors and devised a new plan that takes all the feedback we learned from and implement it into a new structure that will go live starting Q2 of this year. The idea is to work with a subset of the reps in each distributor, we launch our products, get in front of the customers quickly and get some wins. Once we figured out the recipe, then we'll roll it out to the entire team.

A few key learnings I'd like to share with you that will drive the new launch plan. Sales reps. Working with distributors, we've identified the reps that have the highest likelihood of success based on experience, aptitude, geography, and their customer base.

Customer segmentation. We've clearly defined the target customers and have worked with the reps to scrub their customer list and identify the top, potential and also high-likelihood customers.

Messaging. We decided to minimize the presentation efforts burdened on the rep and instead, have a distributor reps sell the meeting and get us in front of the customer. Our data shows that we have a very high success rate when we give the first pitch to the customer, even more so when it's in person until the marching orders are to get us in front of the customer for an in-person presentation.

We spent Q1 of this year working with the distributors' leadership teams to put this together as we launch together and that will be going live in Q2. I think we've learned a lot from our experience working with the distributors, and we put together a plan that has taken those lessons and implement them into a revised program designed to generate results rapidly. Once we can demonstrate both to ourselves, but also to the distributor that these launch plan works, we can then expand to the entire team and scale up the effort.

I am cautiously optimistic that these relaunch plans will yield better results than last year and that we can see an acceleration in the revenues generated by our distribution channels. We will be monitoring those effects closely to ensure that all feedback, good and bad, is relayed back to the leadership on both sides to ensure our mutual success.

The other element I wanted to address is our road to breakeven. One of the things I've seen management teams, including ours, struggle with is the doubt as to whether the numbers on the spreadsheet translate into reality. We've spent a lot of time building complex Excel models and have dozens of assumptions and hundreds of line items and paint a picture of what the future will look like. The question is not -- is always not if, but rather how far off were our assumptions and our models from reality. Quite frankly, unless you're running a pizza parlor, most businesses are far too complex to be able to build a perfect forecast model.

Over the past couple of years, we have been eyeing the prize of breaching breakeven, and we've spent countless hours modeling different scenarios to see which triggers and levers pulled will generate different results and get us to that promised land. The challenges of those labors and goalposts are constantly moving. Even in 2023, as we implemented some of the operational changes that we discussed in the past, we saw our breakeven point reduced quite dramatically.

Then Q3 happened, we had a really good quarter. And because of the lag of revenue translating into cash, as well as seeing the full impact of some of the operational changes also take place in Q4, we were able to achieve a cash burn of less than $100,000 for the quarter in Q4, which was 10% of the cash burn just a year before.

As you all know, businesses [felt that] linear, [they go] up and down, but what this showed us was that for the most part, our models were correct. In fact, our models were a bit more conservative, and reality turned out to be better, which is exactly how you want your finance team to operate. And for that, they deserve a big kudos.

So now we know that we can indeed achieve profitability because we came quite close to it. The future will still its have ups and downs, but to my team and I, Q4 was a validation of our business model and the economics to drive our cash situation. We have converted the uncertainty of an Excel model into the certainty of cash in the bank. And that was a very, very important step for our company.

There's a few other points I'd like to address that were questions or concern that were raised to us. Number one, changes to laboratory testing guidelines from the FDA. As we've been following closely, Congress is expected to rule this year on legislation that will bring all laboratory testing under the FDA. We have plans and are ready for the application of the ruling on both sides of our business. I'll explain.

For the diagnostic services division, this will mean a gradual conversion of our testing to be run as FDA-approved assays in our clinical laboratory. This involves conducting studies to demonstrate accuracy, reliability and reducibility of these tests. The good news is that because we are operating a clinical lab, we are running these tests daily as part of our normal course of business and collecting the samples and the data that will ultimately be required for the submission. Because we have our own samples and subsequent data, which are the most costly elements for an application to the FDA. We don't anticipate that the submission will be too much of a heavy lift nor do we expect to incur any substantial costs as part of this conversion. Furthermore, the FDA has stated they will allow between three to five years for companies to complete this process, and it's expected that due to the sheer vast number of labs and tests that this timeline will be extended. So we are fine on that aspect.

On the product side, we will need to submit our assays for FDA approval. Contrary to other product manufacturers, we use our own products [exclusively] on a daily basis. And we've been accumulating samples and data that will be required to submit the products for FDA approval. Therefore, much like on the diagnostic service side, this will require little effort or cost because we already have the mechanism to collect the necessary data. Bottom line, we have plan in place so that if and when these regulations are passed, we are in an excellent position to remain compliant with neither business interruption nor substantial cost.

The second topic I want to bring up is the issue of Change Healthcare, one of the largest billing exchange companies in the US through which we submit our billing claims and which recently got hacked. While we are part of that billing system, the hack experienced by Change Healthcare did not have a material impact on our systems. We did experience minor and temporary delays in our cash collections, but nothing substantial, and our own systems were not hacked.

A few things to mention. First, this situation relates only to our diagnostic services and does not impact our product division. Second, as soon as this hits, our billing team readily switched to an alternative process where we could easily bypass Change Healthcare and bill insurance companies directly, and we've already started to see cash coming in. And lastly, because our cash burn has dropped, and thanks to our available cash reserves, we see this as a short-term issue. Recently, Change Healthcare has announced that they've overcome the hack and are able to restore service. And so while we see a temporary cash drop, this will pick up back up as we close the billing backlog.

The third topic I'd like to mention is line items some of you may have noticed in our income statement recently filed in our 10-K from last week. Since the merger with Transgenomic, we have been carrying approximately $1.7 million in aged liabilities that predated the merger. At this point, due mostly to the expiration of the statute of limitations, we were able to write off these liabilities and clean up our balance sheet. This is yet another step in the continuous improvement of the company's financial health.

In summary, while we certainly have challenges we face and will continue to face, I think we are keen to overcome these challenges and a strong tailwind for the company. Our diagnostic services division has demonstrated the ability to reach breakeven. We've done a lot of work to revamp our distribution partnerships for our products where we can relaunch an effective campaign to grow that business beyond our internal sales force, creating a real opportunity to scale up this business. And lastly, our business has validated our models and our ability to reach profitability.

With that, I want to thank you all for your ongoing support, and I look forward to connecting with you later in the year. Thank you, and have a nice week.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.