Socket Mobile Inc (SCKT) 2016 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Greetings and welcome to the Socket Mobile first-quarter 2016 management conference call.

(Operator Instructions)

As a reminder, this call is being recorded this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host Mr. Jim Byers of MKR Group. Thank you, you may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome to Socket's conference call today to review financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2016. On the call today from Socket are Kevin Mills, President and CEO; Dave Dunlap, Chief Financial Officer; and also joining us today from Socket Mobile is James Lopez, Socket's Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, to answer your questions on recently announced Socket products and the market for these products.

Socket Mobile distributed its earnings release over the wire service earlier today. The release has also been posted to Socket's website at www.socketmobile.com. In addition, a replay of today's call will be available at Vcall.com shortly after the call completion and a transcript of this call will be posted on the Socket website within a few days.

We have also posted replay numbers in today's press release for those wishing to replay this call by phone. The phone replays will be available for one week.

Before we begin I would like to remind everyone that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. Such forward-looking statements include but are not limited to statements regarding mobile computer data collection and handheld computer products including details on timing, distribution and market acceptance of products and statements predicting trends of sales and market conditions and opportunities in the market in which Socket sells its products.

Such statements involve risks and uncertainties and actual results could differ materially from the results anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors including but not limited to the risks that manufacture of Socket's products may be delayed or not ruled out as predicted due to technological market or financial factors including the availability of product components and necessary working capital, the risks that market acceptance and sales opportunities may not happen as anticipated, the risks that Socket's application partners and current distribution channels may choose not to distribute the product or may not be successful in doing so, the risks that acceptance of Socket's products in vertical application markets may not happen as anticipated as well as other risks described in Socket's most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Socket does not undertake any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements.

Now with that said I'd like to turn the call over to Socket's President and CEO Kevin Mills.

Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today.

We are pleased to report first-quarter results that include solid revenue growth year over year and continued profitability. The quarter was very much in line with the expectations we outlined in our previous earnings call and is a solid start to 2016.

Our revenue for the first quarter was $5 million, an increase of 26% over Q1 last year. This increase was primarily driven by our cordless barcode scanning business which grew approximately 16% year over year and represented 80% of our total Q1 revenue.

Our legacy SoMo-related business contributed 17% of our total revenue in Q1, reflecting some last time buy orders we deliver during the quarter. And the remaining 3% of total revenue came from service-related products.

Our higher revenue coupled with our improved gross margins and modest expense growth in Q1 resulted in a bottom-line profit for the quarter of $548,000, or $0.10 per share. This is a substantial improvement over the loss of $77,000 or a loss of $0.01 per share we reported in Q1 of last year. This also represents our fourth consecutive profitable quarter.

Our Q1 results reflect the continued success of our strong application-driven business model, which has been our focus over the past few years. As we have discussed before, under this model our scanners are a secondary purchase to an application sale. The mobile point-of-sale market is a good example of how this model works and has continued to be the primary driver of our business with over 70% of our scanner sales being mobile point-of-sale-related.

Once the customer has selected and purchased their mobile point-of-sale application, they then must choose from a limited number of hardware peripherals supported by that application provider. Socket Mobile remains the scanner of choice for most mobile point-of-sale applications, a distinction we have earned over the past few years with our excellent SDK, our application-centric focus and our Apple certified scanners. As a result, the customer's decision to purchase a Socket Mobile scanner is primarily determined by their scanning needs which varies based on the items being sold.

As I mentioned, the first quarter follows the expectations we outlined on last quarter's call. The year began slowly as January and February are generally slow months for technology deployments in retail with retailers focused on closing out the prior year and evaluating their requirements for the new year. We saw the market for mobile point-of-sale systems begin to improve in late February, early March as decisions were made and deployments began.

We began to see our scanner sales build, resulting in a strong finish to Q1. We expect this pattern of increasing deployment to continue during Q2 and Q3 and then slow as we head into Q4, the same pattern we have seen for the past two years.

While our near-term revenue continues to be driven by applications that were developed in 2013 and 2014 and are now in deployment phase we continue to work with providers of new applications that we expect to reach the market over the coming quarters. We are continuing to see a large number of asset tracking, inventory and other non-mobile point-of-sale applications being developed. Once these applications gain some market traction we expect to see the mobile point-of-sale portion of our overall sales adjust accordingly.

Our first-quarter revenue also benefited from a temporary increase in our SoMo-related revenue which reflects delivery of SOMA products in Q1 related to last time purchase orders we received in 2015. The final portion of these orders will be delivered in Q2 and once these deliveries have been completed, our SoMo revenue will end as we phase out this product family.

Looking ahead to Q2, we plan to begin deliveries of our new DuraScan durable barcode scanner product line in May. We are very excited to get this product into the market and in the hands of the many developers who have expressed interest in us.

Based on the feedback we have received to date we expect this product to expand our market reach and introduce Socket to many new customers. DuraScan has been designed for harsh environments and serves the requirements we are seeing from developers who want to use Apple and Android tablets in more traditional AIDC applications like logistics. While we don't expect an immediate impact to our revenue as applications need to be written and deployed we believe the introduction of the DuraScan should result in additional revenue for Socket in the quarters ahead.

The same is true of our new DuraCase solution. We expect to begin deliveries of this product to developers starting in Q2. And as with the DuraScan, the level of interest has been high and we are confident it will both expand our market reach and add to our revenue in the coming quarters.

So in summary, with our Q1 results we are off to a solid start for the year. And we expect to see a continuation of this positive trend in Q2 and Q3.

During the first quarter we grew our revenue and profitability and significantly improved our balance sheet. We also made solid progress on the goals we outlined at the beginning of the year.

To recap these goals and our progress we are growing our revenue with our many existing customers. We are delivering new products in Q2 which we expect will expand our business into new markets.

We improved our balance sheet in Q1 which enables us to apply for a listing on NASDAQ this quarter, a goal we had originally believed would not be achieved until midyear. And we continue to make progress with our RFID plans, though we are not ready to provide an update just yet.

That said, I will now turn the call over to Dave for a review of the financials. Dave?

Thank you, Kevin. The first quarter of 2016 was Socket's fourth consecutive profitable quarter. First-quarter revenue in 2016 was $5 million compared to revenue of $4 million in the first quarter a year ago, a quarter-over-quarter growth rate of 26%.

Cordless barcode scanning revenue in the first quarter grew 16% over the first quarter of 2015 which maintained the 16% growth pace that we experienced in all of 2015 compared to 2014. Cordless barcode scanning revenue in the first quarter was nearly 60% -- I'm sorry, 80% of quarterly revenue and we expect these percentages to grow.

Our handheld computer sales in the quarter were $868,000 or 17% of total quarterly revenue. Service comprised the remaining 3%.

Our handheld computer sales included 40% of a one-time $1.6 million order we received last year. We expect to ship the last 40% of that order in the second quarter.

Our quarter-over-quarter growth in barcode scanning units shipped during the first quarter was nearly 27%, up from 13,892 units in the first quarter a year ago to 17,624 units in the first quarter this year. Our fastest-growing product continues to be our entry level 7C linear imager which is also our most attractively priced entry-level product. Our growth continues to be driven by mobile point-of-sale applications into the underserved Tier 3 retail sector from registered developers who have incorporated our barcode scanners into their applications.

Our first-quarter margin on sales was 49.7%, up from 45.1% in the first quarter a year ago, reflecting our success in reducing product cost while holding our overhead cost level despite increased shipment volumes. The increase in our margins has been a significant contributor to our bottom-line growth.

Our operating expenses in the first quarter increased 6% or up $105,000 over the same quarter a year ago, well below the rate of growth of our revenue and revenue contribution. We reduced first-quarter interest expense by paying off a subordinated line of credit in the amount of $500,000 during the quarter. Our net income from the quarter was $548,000 or $0.10 per share, up from a loss of $72,000 or a loss of $0.01 per share in the fourth quarter a year ago.

Socket's employee salaries and benefits represent more than half of Socket's operating expenses. The ability of our employees to facilitate growth in the manufacture and delivery of quality products while holding our overall headcount level at about 50 employees has been a key to our improved operating results.

Turning to our balance sheet, our stockholders' equity at March 31, 2016 increased to $4.1 million, up from $3.3 million at December 31, 2015 and up from stockholders equity of $1.2 million at March 31, 2015. Equity growth reflected the combination of profits which were $548,000 for the first quarter of 2016 and $2.4 million for the four quarters ended March 31, 2016 plus stock option compensation expense of $66,000 for the quarter and $229,000 for the four quarters ended March 31, 2016 and stock option and warrant exercises of $216,000 for the quarter and $343,000 for the four quarters ended March 31, 2016. All remaining warrants were exercised during the first quarter.

Our cash balances at March 31, 2016 were just over $1 million with more than an additional $1 million of draw capacity available on our revolving bank line of credit. Our bank line of credit was extended during the quarter to February 2018. We generated total positive cash flow and positive cash flow from operations for the quarter as we have for the past four quarters.

We expect to remain profitable and to further increase our net capital balances during 2016. Socket Mobile today trades on the over-the-counter QB market level as a full reporting Company.

Our plans are to apply for a return to a NASDAQ capital markets listing once we've filed our first-quarter Form 10-Q in May. Assuming a mid-May filing, we should have a confirmation from NASDAQ around the end of June.

For the many investors who are looking to become more familiar with the Company I recommend you visit our website at socketmobile.com. I also recommend a review of the business section of our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2015, a copy of which may be viewed or downloaded from the virtual IR kit in the about us portion of our website.

We actively support software application developers to integrate our products into their applications through our registered developer program. We provide an easy-to-use software developer kit and training and technical support to our registered developers. We support the marketing activities of our registered developers in promoting the applications that include our products.

Once our barcode scanning products are integrated into a developer's application our products become part of the application solution and are part of the developer's marketing program for that application. We stay current on operating system updates provided by Apple, Google and Microsoft to support new products running the latest versions of their operating system on smartphones, tablets and mobile computers while providing backward compatibility.

We spend extensive engineering time and resources to ensure that our cordless barcode scanning products are compatible with a wide variety of the most popular smartphones, tablets and mobile computers running a variety of operating systems. We adhere to standards of a number of standard-setting bodies whose technologies are used in our products including Bluetooth and barcode decoding symbologies.

Our growth is driven by sales of barcode scanners integrated into retail mobile point-of-sale and other mobile applications for use with Apple, Google and Microsoft tablets and smartphones. Many developers of mobile point-of-sale applications have been funded by venture capital organizations enabling their rapid development and growth. Other mobile markets being addressed by registered developers include hospitality, asset management, commercial services and healthcare.

We expect all of these markets to increase the availability and use of mobile applications and demand for mobile barcode scanners. We offer a wide range of products that enable application developers and their customers to design their mobile systems to meet their specific requirements and we encourage our distributors to support the full range of our products. The goal is for customers to view Socket as a primary source for their mobile barcode scanning and data capture needs.

Within our family of barcode scanning products, we offer durable and standard cases, the latter in multiple colors; linear imaging and laser barcode scanning; 2D barcode scanning and two form factors, an ergonomically designed handheld cordless barcode scanner which is our model 7 series and a smartphone attachable barcode scanner, our model 8 series, to enable one-handed barcode scanning. Both Series 7 and 8, Series 8 products connect cordlessly over Bluetooth and may be used as handheld barcode scanners.

We design our products to comply with the regulations of the many worldwide agencies that regulate the safety, performance and use of electronic products. We upgrade our products from time to time including our soon to be released DuraCase and durable DuraScan products and are working on future technology opportunities such as the application of Near Field Communications as a data transfer technology.

We have designed our products to be priced competitively, although we are subject to changes in component pricing by our suppliers. We update our products from time to time and work with our vendors to achieve reductions in component pricing.

We distribute our products through a worldwide distribution network that places products into geographic regions to shorten purchasing time and provides a credit shield to us. Our largest distributors are Ingram Micro, ScanSource and BlueStar and they support a worldwide network of online resellers including Amazon.com, CDW and Barcodes, Inc.

We believe that our products make a difference in the daily work life of mobile workers and the people they serve. We are building a brand image focused on business mobility. This image closely associates us with business mobility solutions and to reflect this image we began doing business as Socket Mobile, Inc. in January 2007 and changed our legal name to Socket Mobile, Inc. in April, 2008.

We stress with customers the design of our products for the markets they address, emphasizing quality and standard space connectivity. Mobility requires products that are compact and designed to be handled while mobile with low power consumption to extend time between charges and easy to use. We strive to offer high performance products in a wide range of competitive prices.

Through our developer support program we work closely with application developers who are developing productivity enhancing applications for the mobile workforce. Our overall Company brand identity and positioning goal is to be a leading provider of easy-to-deploy business mobility data capture systems to the business mobility market.

Looking ahead, our annual meeting of stockholders will be held on Tuesday, May 10, 2016 at the Company in Newark, California. Stockholders of record on March 14, 2016 are able to vote. Matters to be voted on consist of the annual election of directors, approval of executive compensation policies and practices known as say-on-pay and ratification of our external auditors for the 2016 fiscal year.

Proxy ballots were mailed at the end of March. Our proxy materials consisting of our annual report on Form 10-K and our proxy are accessible for viewing or downloading on Socket Mobile's website at www.socketmobile.com about us investor relations stockholder meeting information. I'd like to thank our stakeholders for their continued support including our investors, our registered developers, our suppliers, our distributors and resellers and our employees.

Now with that let me turn the call back to our operator for your questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions) James Yannello, Skyden Capital Management.

Good afternoon. Kevin or James, the DuraScan product that's coming out, is there any clear industry where you think that would have the biggest demand for can you give us a little more kind of flavor on where you think that would be very popular?

So it's designed -- this is James by the way -- thanks, James. DuraScan is designed primarily for non-point-of-sale markets but we still see a strong demand in mobile point-of-sale as well. In our non-mobile point-of-sale markets about 40% of scanners purchased are our more durable scanners so this is certainly going to meet that need.

But it also is a limiting factor in those markets where they are looking for something that's even tougher and IP rated as an example. So we definitely see it hitting that market.

In the mobile point-of-sale space, 20% of our scanners sold there are our durable flavor of scanners. So this is going to even be a better version of that product for those customers.

Okay, thank you. And a question for Dave. Dave, I may be getting ahead of myself, but is there -- the outlook looks really good, there's a lot going on, is there any way to consider buying back stock, borrowing some more money, doing anything to buy back stock?

Well, you know --

I said we're getting a little ahead of myself. But I mean realistically I think it's a fair question.

Sure, sure, I agree it's a fair question. I have to laugh because Kevin once in a while will mention that Socket Mobile is probably one of the longest startups in the Valley. We go back to 1992 and obviously we're still growing, we're developing products, we have no shortage of ways to apply our cash.

That will change over time. We will start to, assuming we maintain our profitable growth, we will start to generate positive cash in the future. But I think in the near term as I look out a year the needs for us to maintain the cash available for our operating use is probably the biggest priority.

That's fair. I just see so many absurd valuations out there in the market that you hear about all day long and obviously you're such a small relative Company.

But the growth outlook and what you guys are doing of late is just pretty compelling. That's why I brought it up. Thank you very much.

Well and the other factor is availability of stock. We have a lot of long-term holders who have recognized the direction we're going and are believing that as we do that we're going to see continued growth in the customers we are serving and the markets we are serving. And so stock is, in order to get stock from people who have that belief you almost have to bid the stock up.

So even if we were to go out and try to buy stock back I'm not sure we'd get a lot of people who wanted to sell it to us at these prices. But anyway, certainly that is always an option down the road but certainly we don't want to do that yet.

I would say we've been part of the stock going up buying it. But okay, thank you very much.

Peter Mintz, Fleetwood Research.

Thank you. First of all, I've got a congratulate you guys. As you know I've been following this for quite some time and it's great to see steady growing revenue and profit that's fantastic.

I guess on the financial side I want to find out, in particular like in the operating budget going forward, do you see that being relatively stable over the next year? I guess R&D in particular it seems that you've been able to hold that pretty stable. Is that going to be the case going forward at least for the next 12-plus months?

Well I think our general parameters, Peter, are that we are looking to fund our growth from operating results. That's why we've maintained positive cash flow and why our profitability has been there.

But our research and development as you know is driven by the opportunities that we see in the market. And we continue to evaluate that, we are working on products now that will come out end of the year into next year. So I don't want to predict that we're always going to hold things steady as we've done over the past two years.

I do expect growth this year in operating expenses. But I expect growth to be in line with revenue growth. And we'll apply and we'll only add expenses where we believe it's in the best interest of the Company in growing toward the future.

I think our biggest expense, obviously, is our personnel expenses, that's more than 50% of our operating expenses. And we've done a good job of holding our headcount at around 50 employees over the past two years. And I'm anticipating that we'll moderate growth, not add a lot of employees during this current year that we're in.

But as we look to the future we also want to be sure we're being responsive to our customers and the opportunities we see. So we'll manage it as we go.

Fair enough. A quick question regarding the revenue distribution of where it's coming from, international versus US. Can you tell us a little bit about that and then are there any specific areas internationally where you see some dynamic or potential growth coming over the next year or so?

Well, let's take that in two pieces. Historically our European revenues have run between 15% and 20% and our international revenues out of the Asia-Pacific region have run between 5% and maybe 8%.

So we're seeing that continue. But I think the other factor is how quickly the international locations are catching up with the focus by developers on mobile markets. And maybe I can turn that part of the question over to Kevin for his comments.

So, Peter, what we're seeing is that I think the two things that affect the sales is the availability of applications and the level of comfort people have in buying online. Certainly in the USA I think people are much more comfortable buying online than they are other parts of the world. So today we probably have 75% of our business in the US, 25% in Europe and 5% in Asia-Pac if you will.

But we are seeing the trend whereby as the level of comfort with online shopping increases outside the US, people are buying more of our products and there's more applications coming to the market. So I will actually say the trends outside the US are probably 12 months behind what we're seeing in the US but we're seeing them starting to mirror or copy what we're seeing.

So there's nothing dramatic. It's just an evolution here and I would say longer term we would expect to do probably get back to a 60/40 split over time.

Okay, thank you. And by the way I agree with the person who made the previous question. I mean the valuation of it is ludicrous and someday it will catch up to where it should be, so keep going. Thanks.

[Al Troy], private investor.

Congratulations Kevin and Dave. It's really nice to see the Company going in the right direction. As far as NASDAQ goes, does Socket meet all the qualifications to get on NASDAQ so there should be no problem with a listing?

Well, I'll answer the first part of that. We believe we meet the qualifications. And the process is we've got to file the Q because NASDAQ will rely on our net equity balances as we report them on the Q which now are above the $4 million minimum listing for the net income standard for the capital markets.

From there it's a very detailed application. NASDAQ indicates four to six weeks. They will be interacting with the Company and they will obviously make the determination if we're qualified but we will move that process along as quickly as we can once we file the Q.

Right. And Socket has a tax loss carryforward I believe of about $28 million, so you won't have to pay taxes for quite some time, is that correct?

Well, that's our expectation yes. We still will be fine-tuning the numbers relative to what they call section 382 which limits your ability for any particular years' NOL to be applied. But we had lots of years of NOL, unfortunately, and that's now fortunately and we'll apply those -- we don't expect to pay taxes for a long time.

Okay, that's good. Now if you go on to NASDAQ I think that Socket should somehow do something to increase their exposure as far as being known.

This Company is doing so great and growing so fast and making money in all the right things and yet there's really very little exposure with the volume on the stock. So is there any plans to somehow get more PR work?

We do expect to improve our outreach. Getting on NASDAQ is actually a major step forward.

It provides us -- the system provides a lot more information about the Company to people on whatever systems they are using to track companies. But we do expect to increase our outreach activities, particularly on the other side of getting on NASDAQ.

Okay, that's great. Thank you very much and it's great to see the Company going in the right direction. And I'm really happy about things.

(Operator Instructions) [David Savory], private investor.

Hi, congratulations on another solid quarter. I've got a question just for clarification, so in the second quarter, the balance of the 640,000 OEM orders should ship plus then the remaining amount of SoMos. And about how much revenue do you have left in just individual unit SoMo?

We're talking a couple hundred thousand dollars, David.

Okay. And now do you expect that to be done in second quarter or just kind of will --

The bulk of it will be done in the second quarter. We have customers who will continue to buy product in small quantities as we support them but there will be no significant revenue going forward based on SoMo.

Okay, okay. On that topic you did about $150,000 in service warranty revenue this quarter. Usually you do about $100,000, $125,000.

How do you see that playing out going forward as the SoMo fades away? Are you getting more interest in scanner warranties?

Yes, we can do a better job on the scanner warrantee. The bulk of the revenue has come from SoMo. The programs we have for scanner revenue really need to be revamped.

We're in the process of doing that and we will expect some revenue to come from scanners going forward. Plus we do have let's say 100,000 SoMos out there that people want to continue to use. And we're happy to service them.

So you know the SoMo does work well in a number of very important applications and people seem to be dependent on it. As long as they are we'll support them. So it doesn't just evaporate overnight.

Okay, well, that's good. On your margins I was glad to see they were at 49.7%. As you start to sell more scanners do you see them going up above 50% or will you do the opposite and then potentially like drop the price of the scanner but hold margins about the same level?

Well first of all, I think there's many things that go into the margin calculation and there's many moving parts. We're very happy with a business model that surround 50 points of gross margin. Yes, we will have a combination of price reduction, cost reduction.

But I think that from a model point of view we'd like to be close to around 50 points of gross margin. But it's not just -- it's not something we fully control because we're dealing in a live market where there are moving parts.

Okay. Just kind of a follow-up question on the operating expenses, do you expect second quarter to come in lower than first quarter because the audit isn't there?

Well, again, I'd characterize our plans for this year as being a moderate growth plan. So we will add some engineering people to help pick up the pace on future products.

But in general we're going to keep costs down to those we feel are absolutely needed to support growth. But I would expect operating expenses will grow more than they did last year, but certainly less than what we will see in terms of growth at the top line.

Okay. And speaking of top-line numbers, you grew scanner 16% year over year in 2015 versus 2014.

You matched that again in the first quarter. Is that the type of growth rate we should be looking at going forward? Or do you think it can ramp up as more software applications come online, other markets open up?

Well, in the short term we don't know. Officially longer term we believe it can ramp up. But we're selling I'd say 13%, 14% of our scanners via Amazon, probably 50% via Amazon, CDW and a few others.

It's very hard to predict the growth that's going to happen today. When the customer gets up today they don't know they're going to buy the scanner. So it's hard to predict it.

So we're comfortable we'll be in the high teens. We're hoping it will go faster. But we don't have the controls to know that for sure in the short term.

But a lot of the revenue growth we've seen to date, David, is we just characterize that as small quantity purchases. We refer to it as run rate because we just don't know. It's a whole lot of small quantity purchases.

The new products will help in non-mobile point-of-sale areas. And we would expect that because it takes longer for large organizations to begin to move in the direction that we've been able to see mobile point-of-sale moving of adopting smart phones and tablets and using them for business applications.

But we do expect that there will be some larger organizations over the next year or two that will start moving in this direction as well. And we would like to think we'll benefit from that.

Okay, wonderful. And just as a last comment I had to smile about the idea of buying stock back.

I actually kind of found as you guys become a cash cow maybe you could give a dividend. But that's a conversation a year or two from now. All right, thank you very much.

Mike Schellinger, MicroCapClub.

Yes, so in the NASDAQ up-listing process in the past you've talked about needing to do a midyear audit. It sounds like from what you said that that's no longer required.

Correct. That is not required. We weren't 100% sure of the process.

As we got closer we checked all the rules. And the rules are that we can use the Q1 results based on the filing of the 10-Q.

Excellent. And then just one other question, operating expenses have been slightly higher in like Q1 in the last couple of years. Is there something seasonal about operating expenses like just the audit that is kind of leading to that?

That's the biggest item. Our audit is expenses are pretty much all captured in Q1. And our audit expenses which we disclosed in our proxy are in the $80,000 range, plus we have quarterly reviews, so most of that falls in the first quarter.

Okay. All right, thank you very much. Great quarter.

[Bernard Fidel], private investor.

Hi, fellas. It's nice to see that we're being profitable every quarter but I do believe I noticed that most of the scanners are related to point-of-sale. Could you comment a little bit on the enterprise possibilities now and in the future?

Yes, I can comment on that. So we kind of view that as our non-mobile point-of-sale space but it's actually what was a traditional space for Socket in the SoMo days. As that space starts adopting to mobile devices, we definitely see more opportunity.

That space is typically characterized by deployments that are three- to five-year-long deployments of equipment. So as we start seeing those kind of cycle into the new mobile equipment we see opportunities there.

And that's reflected in the developer sign-ups that we have where we have developers coming from those spaces developing new applications for those of spaces and hopefully carrying us and our products into those spaces with them. And that's one of the reasons why our next couple of products are focusing more on the needs and demands of those spaces with a more durable solution for harsher environments and our new DuraCase which is a more captive solution for mobile fieldworkers that operate in those environments.

Right. Okay, I notice the American dollar has been quite weak. And is that benefiting us for particularly in Japan and overseas increasing our revenue?

Obviously it's marginally improved our profits when we bring those results back to the US because you get more dollars but that's really not driving the business. We're not in a competitive, if I lower the scanner by $0.02 people will buy it or not by it. As we pointed out, people buy it because their application dictates that we are the scanner that works with the application.

I think that overseas we don't have as many applications because those markets are not as far along in moving to an application-driven business model. So in the short term, we derive a little benefit in our gross margin because of the dollar but it doesn't really change the demand profile. Because the demand profile is determined by applications.

And so I don't know if that answered your question. I think the short answer is the dollar price doesn't make a big difference to us at this stage of the game. Longer term obviously it will but today it doesn't.

And the only area of the world that we're selling in foreign currency is in the European area where we sell in euros. And we're not in the business of speculating on foreign currency, so we do hedge our receivables which would be exposed to currency fluctuations. So doing that minimizes I think our exposure.

The other impact just becomes where we're doing dollars in the rest of the world if the local currencies then our products either become more expensive or less expensive to the people who are buying. But as Kevin said that's not a highly elastic decision process.

At the moment.

Okay. Is it a fair assumption that the second quarter as you would expect it to be surpassed the first quarter?

Yes, certainly in terms of scanner sales that's a fair assumption.

Okay. Most of my questions were already answered.

But this is the last one, I'm very, very pleased that we are now eligible for the NASDAQ because two things that I thought of is that once we're on NASDAQ it makes the stock marginable which gives us greater demand. And number two, if I'm correct, there are many institutions that will not buy an over-the-counter stock and when we get on NASDAQ they will take another look at us.

I think that those are two valid points. I think that what's actually also important is that many people today look at their stock portfolio and make their decisions within programs like E*TRADE or other online programs. And the level of connectivity to NASDAQ-based companies is much greater with these programs than to over-the-counter programs.

So I think getting back on NASDAQ which is something we said we would work hard to do and we're pleased to be in a position to apply for that now will be of benefit to everyone in that it will allow more people to see our story and to see the progress we're making, etc. So I think there's nothing but goodness about getting back on NASDAQ.

Okay, well I'm finished. Keep up the good work.

Thank you. I show no further questions at the moment. Management, would you like to make any closing remarks?

Yes, we would just like to thank everyone for participating in today's call and to wish everyone a good afternoon. Thank you.