Vislink Technologies Inc (VISL) 2022 Q3 法說會逐字稿

I'd like to remind everyone of the Safe Harbor statement referenced in the SEC filings. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a Safe Harbor for certain forward-looking statements, including statements made during the course of today's call. Statements contained herein that are not based upon current or historical facts are forward-looking in nature and constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. Such forward-looking statements reflect the company's expectations about its future operating results, performance and opportunities that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. When used herein, the words anticipate, believe, estimate, upcoming, plan, target, intend and expect and similar expressions as they relate to Vislink Technologies, its subsidiaries or its management are intended to identify such forward-looking statements.

These forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to the company and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause the company's actual results, performance, prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a more detailed discussion of some of the ongoing risks and some uncertainties of the company's business, please refer to the company's various filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Everyone, and welcome to Vislink's Quarter 4 Earnings Call. My name is Gabrielle, and I'll be your host for today as we navigate the numbers and actually assisting me to navigate today and also presenting. We are joined by Mickey Miller, CEO; and Mike Bond, CFO at Vislink, and they're going to be giving us the much anticipated rundown of quarter 4. So welcome, gentlemen. Thank you.

Thanks, Gabriel. It's a pleasure to be here. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon to our global investor base. Very thrilled to be here. It's been a tough quarter. We'll walk through it about what's happening in the market, but also what we're doing to improve this business and continue to get the results that we all want as investors in the company.

Absolutely. And I'm so excited because we've got Mickey here in studio, but we also actually have Mike dialing in remotely from -- it looks like -- I don't want to guess, maybe it's Hawaii, where are you dialing in from Mike?

He's in San Diego Day.

He's in San Diego, Fantastic. All right. Well, you know what? We've got a lot of audience who want to go ahead and get into the quarter 4 run down. We've got a lot of insights to get into today. So why don't you go ahead and take us off, Mickey?

Great. Well, we'll go right through. You heard the Safe Harbor earlier. Again, for our new investors, our mission, we have the privilege of creating and building technology and solutions for content owners and content creators as well as providing solutions and technologies to those in uniform to protect and serve us. Our solutions allow the content to be more immediate (technical difficulty) take proactive action. So we understand that this is a privilege, and we continue to build this business in support of those, what we believe very noble goals. For our new investors, also, our business is largely between 3 segments: sports, news and entertainment and military government, which our Satcom business is a part of. When you look at this quarter, it's very different than our last Q3 of 2021.

This quarter, almost 60% of our revenue was through our sports news and entertainment channels and customers and 30% was in our military government in Satcom. A year ago, it actually flipped. And we'll go into the details of why that change has happened largely due to a military project that we had for Afghanistan, which has ended since the Afghan exit. So we'll go into that more, but these are the areas that we support, that we bring our technology to help improve, whether it's bringing Tier 1 events like the Super Bowl or F1 or any amazing event, 2 broadcasters and consumers globally or providing technology that allow air-to-ground communications that happen to take proactive action for those in uniform.

Well, before we get into the next slide, I actually do want to remind our audience that as we start to go over this presentation, you are welcome to drop any and all questions into the chat so that way you can get them answered today by Mickey and Mike, you're going to have your experts to be able to answer your questions directly. This chat will be monitored by Vislink. So go ahead and drop your questions in there, and we'll take them into review and just pick the best ones from there. So that is something to keep in mind as we go through this presentation. And Mike, are you available to take us on to the next slide? Looks like he might not be able to hear us. So Mickey, we do have this next slide here. Would you be able to take that over?

Yes. Absolutely. So the revenues for Q3 were $7.1 million compared to $6.8 million in Q2 in the prior quarter. Prior year quarter, we did 11.1. In that 11.1, we had about $4 million as part of that military program in Afghanistan. We saw incredible growth in our sports and entertainment for 2 reasons. One, post-pandemic. We've had a resurgence in live events. And it's not just your traditional live events, but the insatiable demand for all types of content we see in many forms. Secondly, the technology improvements or new products that we added, allowed our customers to upgrade their technology and do a technology refresh. So the combination of that allowed us to grow significantly in the sports and entertainment area. In the first responder market, it was challenged. As you remember, last year in the U.S., the defund the police efforts were very strong. We've seen that pendulum swing the other way now. We saw our order book for government and first responder happened quite extensively in the last couple of weeks. So we expect to see that continue. Everything that we hear from our government and state and local customers is that the budgets are there, and they're looking to deploy this new technology.

And from a new technology perspective, we introduced our AeroLink product, which is our new downlink, both [Coghtom], 5G and mesh product. We introduced that in March, and the amount of interest in that is tremendous. As an example, we have over 7 programs that are in our funnel that are over $500,000 in valuation. To put that in context, between 2016 and 2021, we had a total of 3 programs above $500,000. So right now, we have 7 double what we had over the last 5 years. So we're really excited about what this product brings to us and the opportunities that it brings for our customers to do their jobs more efficiently. Our Q3 net loss attributed to common shareholders of $2.7 million or $0.06 per share, and that was compared to $676,000 or $0.01 per share last year same quarter. Our EBITDA was negative $1.9 million compared to $1 million positive for Q3 2021. And we're not happy with these results. A lot of activity, which you'll find out more to continue to position ourselves for a, growth and for b, profitable growth. Our margins remain strong at 49%, and we ended the quarter with $24 million in cash. Do we have Mike back yet?

Fantastic. All right. Mike, we're going to have you take it away to Slide 3. We are ready for you.

Good morning, everyone.

(technical difficulty) Go-to-market efforts. This has given us an increased ability to address specific verticals and customer markets. We've also integrated Mobile Viewpoint in Vislink product portfolios and engineering teams. We've revamped our service organization and pricing model to improve customer experience and increase revenue. And we've gone about starting some cost reductions to reduce our breakeven even further. Our goal is to reduce our breakeven by another 10% to 15%, and we expect that to yield results into first quarter of next year. Some of the measures we're taking are headcount reduction, footprint consolidation. We're consolidating some of the factories in final test and assembly areas that we have to reduce footprint, reduce real estate costs, and we're streamlining our process and procedures.

We are, though, adding some additional resources in our sales area and our go-to-market model, and we're augmenting and beefing up our engineering teams so we can continue to introduce new products. This year, we'll go on a very ambitious project to convert to a new ERP system. Right now, we have 3 separate systems. We'll convert that to one and that will help us drive efficiencies across the organization. We are successfully completing a pilot run of our new product, AeroLink. This positions us very well to execute on increased opportunity that we'll see that we'll fill our funnel over the next couple of quarters.

Okay. On the new product announcements, we had some incredible products announced this past quarter, our 5G for live event production solution. What that does is bring 5G, the new 5G, private 5G to our solution set. We're the only company in our industry who has boded cellular, 4G, 5G, proprietary caftan solutions and 5G private networks. Now we'll see this fold out in many ways. I think it will be country by country. There are some countries that have spectrum available to use 5G private networks, and we're actively involved in those. We had 2 trials in the past quarter, one with the Commonwealth Games in the U.K. and one with the Premier League Rugby event in the U.K. So we're very confident with our -- again, adding this, this will be a product that evolves over time as private 5G networks become more available. In addition to that, we introduced our Cliq. That's a new OFDM mobile transmitter that is used for many use cases, including drones, body-worn cameras, helmet-worn cameras in some cases, but it gives a lot of flexibility both in MilGov markets as well as in live sports and entertainment to create again those real immersive and clever shots that can bring a whole new perspective to the event or also bring information to make decisions with.

And then lastly, an example of our AI capabilities, we developed our AI clipping tool, which is basically a software tool that allows you to -- the AI will watch a game and then create the highlights from that game and immediately send those out on your favorite social or even mid and NFT.

So it's very exciting what we're doing both from the hardware standpoint, but more importantly, from the software that rides on top of that. So on the live event production side, we saw our revenues grow 42% quarter-on-quarter from prior year. That's because of our new products that we've introduced over the last year as well as live events coming back in a bigger way and new events, new types of sports. As I said earlier, the demand for content is insatiable. And we allow content producers, content owners to do that in a fashion that people love and enjoy and can really experience the event in a much different way. We see new opportunities where Tier 1s are not only ones producing content, but Tier 2 events, Tier 3 events, you see high schools. You see so many different types of content creation that's happening.

As I mentioned, our technology and equipment refreshes. But the other demand that we're seeing that was accelerated through COVID. And to put it in perspective, the broadcast industry has been slow to adopt IP. But COVID accelerate that adoption of IP. And when you have an IP world like the IT departments have had for the last 20 years, when you have an IP world that voice, video and data can just be a bit in the stream, it allows you to do a lot of things like remote production, which we saw take off during COVID, which means you don't have to be here to produce an event like this.

So you can have people announcers in one part of the world. You're going to have camera people in another part of the world, and you're able to produce a live event without having everybody on the event with a truck that's rolled out. So that's where we see a huge opportunity. That's what we're seeing pickup across our entire product line is around what's called REMI, and that stands for remote production. So whether it's AI-powered multicamera systems, 5G streaming or REMI technologies, those are all -- there's a couple of things about live production and live events. They tend to be recession-resistant but also this micro tailwind that we have around REMI, around 5G, and around cloud allows us to continue to grow in whatever markets happen.

One of our new announcements was our Terralink REMI, which is encoded delivers multi-camera remote production capabilities and then the Cliq, which I mentioned earlier. On the MilGov side, our revenues were 50% lower. And as I mentioned, this was primarily due to the military order that we had for Afghanistan in the third quarter of 2021. It was offset a little bit by first responder business, but our first responder business is not back to the levels of pre-pandemic. We are seeing very good signs. The federal state and local agencies are in buying mode. I was just most recently at the Chief of Police Association Conference in Dallas, Texas. And I can tell you that the interest to use technology, again, a market where IP and IT technology still has a huge opportunity to grow. They want to use technology to help them do their jobs more efficiently. There's been pressure on headcount in a lot of the agencies and a lot of the departments.

So the ability to use technology to help them do things more efficiently and certainly in demand. So we deliver tactical insights needed to ensure mission success. So we take air-to-ground videos and are able to get those in the hand of commanders or mayors to make decisions very quickly on the ground. Our Aerolink we introduced in March has been a tremendous success, as I talked about earlier, and we see billing on that because now that we have the infrastructure in place, whether it's downlink transmitters or receive stations and then the software on top of that is where the excitement comes in, that we can provide very unique advantages to our customers.

So we continue to pursue an M&A strategy, a growth strategy, both organically and inorganically. We are exploring opportunities that would be complementary to our business and accretive to our financial model. Some of the sectors that we're looking at are AI-based automated video recognition, airborne video capture and transmission solutions, and C4ISR, which is command, control, communications, computers, intelligence and surveillance as it relates to the communications and communications network of the military. So we're looking at various opportunities in those sectors. We're also looking at sports analytics. And we're seeking market multiples as -- we're seeing market multiples decrease, and that's going to give us additional and ample opportunity to look for inorganic growth opportunities in the future. So we think those opportunities present us with attractive valuations in the future that will help us look for additional opportunities in the M&A space.

I get a lot of investors that ask about what's our strategy? Where are we headed? And we have a technology strategy in addition to the things that we've talked about through our go-to-market and our engineering and our capabilities on the operations side. We have a technology strategy to drive software and services growth. The way we view historically, we've been largely a hardware company, providing hardware to our customers. Now the opportunity is to take that hardware and make it more intelligent. And we're doing that as our operating system, the Link Matrix, which we acquired in the Mobile Viewpoint acquisition, which gives us the ability to remotely manage, control and more importantly, automate a lot of the different workflows for our customers.

And when you look at what our customers do, whether it's military government, the workflows are very similar. You have content capture. So that means 4K cameras, 1080p HDR cameras, 60 frames per second, digital stitching. And then you take that to the contribution. How do you get that to where you need to edit it or way you need to view it? It's either through our COFDM solutions, proprietary or through bonded cellular, which is a public networks or through private 5G, which we just introduced. Those were all compressed at H.265, which is the most recent compression technology that's used throughout the industry.

And then there's applications on top of that, like camera control or intercoms or video return. All those things are part of that. And then specifically for sports, news and entertainment, the ability to produce it in the cloud to do post-production, to add graphics and things like that and then ultimately to play out on whatever type of formats needed. We have the transcoding capability to do that. And then ultimately, how to transport that around their networks, we have gear and ability to do that. But now it is all managed by our LinkMatrix solution, which heretofore we didn't have that capability. So now we have the opportunity to remotely manage and support our customers and also to provide a revenue source there for us and support them in the field in ways that we couldn't before. And then on top of that, bringing our AI capabilities to allow them to make their workflows more efficient, to be able to find the exact content they're looking for based on the need. So there's many ways that we can help our customers become more efficient through using machines to evaluate things as opposed to humans and then giving humans a much better, more concentrated view of what needs to get done and what the opportunities and the content that's available to do that.

We think we're positioning ourselves for profitable growth in the future. Over the last couple of years, we've executed on a turnaround strategy to position the company for consistent earnings growth. We've reduced our breakeven point from over $50 million a couple of years ago, down to around the mid-$30 million mark now, and we're continuing to push that further. We've been reinvigorated our go-to-market capability to support our global blue-chip customer base in sports, news and entertainment. We've also pursued heavily the federal state and local markets for MilGov, and we've invested heavily in R&D. We've launched 5 new products in less than 3 years. Some of those products are the quantum receiver, the IP Link 3.0, the DVE 6100 encoder, the IP Link portable RF transmission system. And lastly and most importantly, we've just introduced the AeroLink. So we've streamlined our headcount and operating footprint and increased productivity over the last couple of years. We've rationalized our product portfolio to focus on higher-margin, higher-revenue products.

Mickey and I, we first came here, we made a decision to exit about 70% of the products that we had at the time, most were redundant, and that was a significant amount of overlap in our product portfolio. We've secured access to necessary capital over the last couple of years. As you know, we did a transaction last October, where we added a significant amount of cash to our balance sheet. We now have approximately $25 million to $30 million on the balance sheet, and we're in very good shape financially. We've closed on the acquisition of Mobile Viewpoint and successfully integrated with Vislink all aspects of the business. We brought the bonded cellular and artificial intelligence technology that they brought to bear, and we put that inside our product portfolio and integrate it into our product sets. We launched several jointly developed Vislink MVT products. We've launched the 5G 4Live, the Vislink Connect, Baselink 5G and the Cliq transmitter. We've also introduced an AI clipping tool. We've established LinkMatrix as the operating system for all our Vislink devices, and that's now the operating system that our customers can use to manage our total solutions. I'll turn it back to Mickey.

Thanks, Mike. You want to walk them through the preferred dividend?

So as everyone knows, effective on November 9, our Board of Directors declared a dividend of 11,000 of a share of preferred stock for each share of the company's common stock. That dividend will be issuable to all shareholders of record on November 21st of this year. That Series A preferred stock will vote together with the outstanding shares of the company's common stock as a single class concerning one issue, and that is the reverse stock split. A special meeting will be called to the shareholders to vote on that reverse split. We expect that meeting to be held on January 11, 2022 -- sorry, January 11, 2023. Each outstanding share of preferred stock will have 1 million votes. Therefore, each common share will receive 1,000 votes. All shares of the preferred Series A stock that are not present in person or by proxy at the opening of the polls of that special meeting will automatically be redeemed by the company.

It looks like we just lost Mike's audio, unfortunately, but we can pick it up in the slide, if you could Mickey.

Sure. All right. So as Mike went through, we have a proxy -- 2 proxies actually coming up. One will be for first the Board and the auditors. That will be the on December 27. And then following that will be...

So as everyone knows, Vislink received notice of a delisting on May 20, 2022 from the NASDAQ. And that notice was due to the fact that we had a share price below $1 for 30 consecutive days. the company was given 180 days to cure that deficiency. We believe the prospects of raising the share price above $1 is very challenging in the near term, and we think the best avenue would be to affect the reverse share split. Delisting normally causes a couple of reasons why we think that a reverse split is appropriate. We think delisting would cause a further decrease in our share price. We think a reverse stock split does not entail dilution to our current shareholders. And clearing the possibility of delisting we think, would reduce some of the downward pressure on our stock price. Many of the institutions that we know would not invest in a company that has a share price below $2. So in retrospect, we think that a reverse stock split is the right -- the appropriate thing to do at this point.

It looks like we did get Mike back. Thank you. You guys are truly the spirit of tag teaming here, finishing each other's sentences.

So why we're optimistic about the future of our business? First, we've got a blue-chip customer base in growing markets. As I said, independent if there's a macroeconomic headwind around a recession, the markets we're in tend to be recession-resistant. But I think what's more important that in these markets, there is a digital transformation happening where they're using technology to help them make their business more efficient. So we think there is a tailwind of digital transformation that allows us to continue to grow independent of what's happening at the macro level. We've optimized our operating platform for profitable growth. As we talked about, we are very focused on profitable growth. We've made a lot of changes in this business over the years to be able to make ourselves more efficient, to reduce our costs, reduce our breakeven, and we continue to do that with our most recent announcement in the third quarter that Mike talked about.

We're introducing new products at a record rate. Mike showed the 5 large products that we introduced. But with those, there's a lot of enhancements that go with those and also other products that we've done and customers love the new products. It's evident by our sales were up 42% on the live production side. And our AVDS sales funnel, that's our aerial video downlink systems for military and government is the highest it's ever been on record. So we're very excited about the work that our teams are doing of bringing new products to market to serve our customers, and our customers are rewarding that.

As I mentioned, digital transformation across both markets that we serve is hot. And our product portfolio leverages all the newest technologies, whether it's artificial intelligence, whether it's 5G, whether it's cloud, we take all those integrated into our solutions to bring that efficiency to our customers. As Mike talked about on the M&A side, we see inorganic growth opportunities at attractive valuations. We're very focused to make sure that if we deploy capital from our cash base, it's very focused on something that's going to be accretive and it's going to be complementary to our customers and serve our customers in a better way. This business has over 50 years of heritage creating deploying complex communication services and solutions. Our customers are here because of our team. The team at Vislink is passionate about what they do. They're passionate about the markets we serve, whether it be live production content or those in uniform. And we are very pleased and very considerate of the fact that we have this very novel mission.

And we believe in our team, the team has done a phenomenal job through very difficult situations, whether it was during the pandemic in 2020, coming out of the pandemic where everything needed to be delivered at once through the challenges that we've had in the supply chain and continue to work through every day and focus on meeting the needs of our customers and helping them do their jobs more efficiently. So as I said, we're optimistic on our future. We believe in this business. We believe in our people and the team we have in place. I talk to customers on a regular basis, and our customers want us to continue to succeed. They see a huge opportunity for the services that we're offering. They're giving us feedback to that and we want the opportunity to continue to do that.

So I'll just close it at that, and then Gabrielle will open up to questions.

Fantastic. Well, thank you, Mickey, and Mike. That brings us, as Mickey said, to our live Q&A portion of this broadcast. (Operator Instructions). And we've already got a few questions here ready to go. So we've got one here from [Marion Komon]. What are your plans for regaining compliance with marketplace requirements? Can you take us through that?

Yes. So ideally, we have until this extension and then potentially another extension. But we want -- we believe that a reverse split is the best approach now. There's over -- I'm told, over 400 companies, micro-cap companies that are under $1. A lot of companies are in our position. As you saw in Mike's slide, we have over -- we're trading well under our cash level. We think we're undervalued, but every CEO thinks they're undervalued. So that's not investment advice. But certainly being under $1 is a challenge for us to get above $1 to be NASDAQ compliant. We think -- the best thing at this point, at this juncture, what we see is a reverse split. Now I know at our last reverse split, I said this is the last reverse split that I wanted to do. And believe me, we didn't think we'd be in this position when we did that. But this is an impact that's happening across the market with microcaps. And then for us, as a company, we have to view what is the best situation for us because many of these companies will be delisted.

And I know there's a lot of frustrated investors on this call right now that heard us say we're hopeful that was our last reverse split. But I think things are different in the sense that the market is well down in the previous reverse splits before the one that we did, markets weren't necessarily down. And we've been investing prudently. We've been cost-cutting where possible. As you can see from our breakeven that we brought the company through, and we've been doing things from introducing new products, increasing our ability to extend our reach to customers. So we'd like to continue with this mission as a public company because a public company gives us access, we think there's upside there. And we ask our investor base to consider this. We can't give you an opinion on which way to go. But certainly, we will go in the direction of our shareholders. This is your company. We're here at the pleasure of the Board, which is here at the pleasure of our shareholders, so we will execute as deemed appropriate by our shareholders.

Well, Mickey or Mike, I'll like you take either or of these. But so from Byron Weaver, how do government orders look? Mike or Mickey.

I can answer that. We're seeing a very robust sales funnel for government orders at this point. And we typically term that as mill government, military government, we're seeing a great uptick in business, potential business with government first responders, particularly because we've just introduced our new AeroLink product. So that AeroLink product is being embraced very well by the customer base, and we expect a very strong sales fund with that and our other products in 2023.

Yes, I might add to that. We've -- it's not -- this is not just a U.S. solution. It's a global solution. military of defenses throughout the world are interested. We've had several coming to our offices to do evaluations of the product with our engineering teams as well as many have been looking at it independently. As I said, our funnel is the highest it's ever been. -- in the last 6, 7 years. We're very excited about that. Obviously, as challenges, social injustice happens throughout the world, the need to have technology and systems in place to proactively deal with that. We see that happening throughout the world. So we think this solution is coming at the right time in the market and our customers based on the interest that they have and are supporting that.

We know we've got another question in the chat from Susan, and she wants to know who are the decision-makers in the buying process, ultimately, your product offer is compelling, but I can imagine that some in the industry may be hesitant to change.

Yes. So we focus on the aviation departments within these organizations because our bulk product is about air-to-ground communications and then taking that information and doing things proactively. And that can range from large groups at the agencies that are making decisions across the entire agency, all the way down to a sheriff’s department where the sheriff will award the business. So it's a wide variety, and we do it through both our partners and our direct channels that we have in the market.

This next question is from Nelson Morgan, and he wants to know what will you do to increase transparency with the shareholders, especially in terms of contract announcements. While we see the post and releases about use at sporting events and conference displays, he says it's really hard to quantify how these are reflected on the balance sheet until these earnings reports and calls. How would you respond to that?

That's a great question. We get asked that question a lot. We'd like to share as much -- we'd like to share everything. Unfortunately, there's a big event that's happening in the world right now, which we're participating in, but we can't say anything about. As you can imagine, many people in the live Tier 1 events want to be able to sell their branding rights, sell their content rights. So they don't like people writing on the tails of that. So we're limited in what we can say there. Secondly, for a lot of militaries, a lot of governments, particularly governments, they don't like to make large announcements. If there are announcements around where there's been a vote among the city councils, for example, Miami-Dade, we received a $1 million order from Miami-Dade for upgrade of all their aircraft as a part of their large program that they announced at the end of last quarter. That's a great example. But many times, it's limited on what the customer is willing to announce and what they'll allow us to announce. And at the same time, we push our sales teams to get that information. But at the same time, we want our sales teams going out to find new orders, not necessarily badgering our existing customers to have them to allow us to do a press release. So it's a balance, and we're trying to work that. But obviously, in a lot of cases, it's not to the level that a lot of – some of our investors would like.

Well, I know in the -- earlier in the presentation, you mentioned the Afghanistan. So I just want to ask to further elaborate what was your involvement there.

Yes. Mike, maybe is Mike still on?

Yes. Mike, do you want to take this one?

Yes. So... We had a very good contract with the Army -- an area, the army called USSOCOM, which typically buys equipment for special forces. We had a contract where they were feeding in a particular type of receiver into special forces in Afghanistan. With the fall of Afghanistan, we concluded that contract with the army and with USSOCOM. And so we stand ready to do more of that type of business. But at this point, absent that type of theater of war, we're not going to see a lot of orders with that particular product at the moment. But again, we still try to find other ways to work with our military partners and customers to continue to increase sales. But with the end of hostilities in Afghanistan, that ended a very big piece of business that we did last year.

Well, Mike, as a follow-up to this, maybe you could answer this question we just got about how are you planning to make up for the military business shortfall that caused the quarter's decline.

Yes. As Mickey had mentioned, we've just introduced the AeroLink, and we've fashioned a new go-to-market team in that sector. And so we're seeing -- it was a lag, there was a defund of police effort last year, and that caused a lag to a certain extent in the orders that we were experiencing in the government first responder side. And so now we're seeing that lag diminish, and we're seeing some real robust interest in our new products and our offerings. So we think we're watching the sales funnel fill up. We think that we'll see a real uptick in that government military business, mostly government in the next year.

Well, we have the next question here. Maybe, Mike, you can take this one. It seems like we've been hearing about the benefits of 5G for consumers just forever. So when will it start impacting the back-end production side of business? And where do your 5G products fit in this?

Yes. So I think it's going to be country-dependent. In the U.K., for instance, they've allocated 400 megahertz of 5G private 5G spectrum. And what that allows is for a broadcaster to set up a private 5G network, which they can uplink the videos and then bring those to the cloud or distribute them any way they want. In other parts of the world, particularly here in the U.S., private 5G is largely around what's called CBRS, which is only 150 megahertz, which isn't public. It's privately owned. There are some unlicensed bands, but anybody can propagate on those bands and such that there's a potential for interference. So in that case, broadcasters are very concerned about using private 5G. What we do see happening for Tier 2 events is the public networks being used. If you can imagine, if you're a Verizon or an AT&T, you're focused on the downlink. What you care about the downlink is as consumers, we want to get a feed right down. We don't have a lot going up. In our use case, it's more about the uplink because we're taking video, compressing it and sending it up.

So you need bandwidth going up. What we do for that in the public networks is our bonded 4G, 5G cellular capability, which allows you to bond 2 to 3 to 4 to 7 different bands together to be able to get that uplink. So we see that as an opportunity for growth and then combined with our REMI products for a lot of people to produce events and completely have maybe one person at the event [filming] it or that could be handled by an AI as well.

We got a question here about the new small click transmitter you just launched. So Mike and Mickey, you're free to respond. But just what are the use cases for it and the sales that we're seeing?

Yes. So we are in the process. We haven't -- we've announced that. We're working with customers on final definition and final prototypes. That will be introduced in volume at the end of first quarter, in the second quarter next year. The use cases are vast. Everything from drones gives us a very small compact to shoulder cameras, the stability that's happening with POV cameras, that's point-of-view cameras. If you can imagine in the past, POV cameras were very shaky. It was very pleasant to watch it. That's stabilization through the development of a lot of the sensors has improved dramatically. So with that and our transmission capabilities, it's allowing both body-worn cameras as well -- and again, these aren't yet to where our goal is to get them in a helmet, but it allows them to have multiple feeds, whether it's from a helmet, say, a motorcycle helmet and a shoulder camera as well as small applications where they want to get a camera, very conceivable camera for surveillance that allows them to do that. So with that size and format and power, it allows them to have a low-power unit in a small package that use in whatever variety they want. Today, we have solutions that are used in basis, on a Major League Baseball game, and this continues to evolve that capability.

Well, you've mentioned that you're actively looking at M&A opportunities on the last few calls. So when do you think you'll be able to announce one?

No. We're not going to make an acquisition just for acquisition stake. We've had -- we're very active. We're in a lot of discussions. We see multiples coming down. That's the price-to-earnings multiple whereas before, they are well in the teens. We're seeing that come down a bit given the recession concerns. And so we're being prudent on how we want to allocate our capital, and we're seeing how things evolve. So I don't want to put a timeline. Our goal was to be able to announce them before the end of the year, but we're not going to sign up to terms and conditions or a price that we don't think is in the best interest of our shareholders. So we're patient, but we're also very active.

Got you. Well, are there any recent customer wins that you can publicly announce?

Well, Miami-Dade was big, certainly. We shipped that in the third quarter. We have -- and again, that was a $1 million plus order and included some of the services things that we talked about today. We have -- it's funny. The ones I'd love to talk about were under NDA with and they're not – I know it's... to announce them. There's one that's going on right now, which we have deployed a tremendous amount of gear that's going to do amazing things for the content that we're not able to share.

Okay. So not publicly announced, but there are some amazing things in the works. Okay. Well, we have one last question here. Maybe Mike can take this one. Where do you expect to finish up in sales by year's end compared to last year?

So we don't give guidance ordinarily, but we do see a pickup in sales. Again, we're seeing a robust sales funnel filling and most of that is for 2023, but we do think that we're going to continue to increase in sales over the next quarter or so. And we have very, very strong folks for the coming year, for the first quarter, second quarter. And again, we are seeing very robust customer activity. But we do think we'll stay on the same path that we've been on through the remainder of this year, and then we'll see an uptick in sales and increase in customer activity entering into 2023 and beyond.

Fantastic. All right. Well, we do have another question that just popped in the chat. And it's just about where are we with cameras with NFL helmets.

We still have an iteration or 2 to get there. That's our goal to ultimately get there. The challenges are these. You have to have an encoder and a modem that's low enough power, low enough in size and density to be able to provide at least the 1080p HDR signal. And so that's -- this click that we've introduced is closer to that type of product, but we need probably 1 to 2 more iterations to our ultimate goal. I said a while ago, our goal is to do that before Tom Brady retires. We'll have to see if that happens, the pain upon this year. But we still have some work to do, and that's working with our semiconductor partners to be able to get the products that allow us to have a lower power, very dense type of product that provides the solutions that our customers are driving for. But that's our goal. And with everything that's happening around the software on top of it as well as having bonded 4G, 5G, having private 5G and COFDM. We'll have many different ways that, that can be pushed to the cloud and content created.

Well, fantastic. That concludes our Q&A. So thank you to everyone who submitted questions so far. And just as we conclude this call, I want to ask Mickey and Mike, any last thoughts you want to leave with our audience who's watching right now?

Yes. I'd like to say, look, we're as unhappy as anyone about where our stock price is today. We've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, but it hasn't translated into results for you and us as shareholders. We're very focused on that. We're here to build a big business that makes a difference. As we've said when we started. We're still very focused, very committed to make that happen. The reverse stock split request, we understand it's not something we wanted to do. But at this point in time, we think it's the best thing for the company given where the market is and where that timing on the market coming around may be. So I know a lot of people are not happy with it. I'm not happy with it. Mike's not happy with it. And we're going to continue to work with our team who are working hard every day to support our customers and deliver them solutions that allows them to grow and generate new revenues and new content. So we get it. We're continuing to work hard to make it happen for you, our investors. This is your company. We want to make you proud of your company and what you're doing, and we'll continue in earnest to work hard at that, and we appreciate your support.

Well, thank you, Mickey. And Mike, any last thoughts?

No, thanks. I do want to echo Mickey's thoughts though we are not satisfied or content with where we are today. Our mission when we came to the business a couple of years ago was to change it fundamentally to create a better value proposition for you, the shareholder, such that we could all benefit from that. Our mission is not done. Mick and I will not stop. We won't rest until we've created a business model that works that increases the value of the company and hopefully increases the value of the shares. As Mickey said, at this point, we're not happy coming back to the shareholders and asking for another reverse split. But at this point, we don't see a better alternative, and we do want to keep public shares in the hands of our shareholders, and we think that's the best way to do that at this point. So we're -- obviously, we're not happy, but we're going to continue to work very, very hard for you, the shareholder.

Thank you, Mike. Well, believe it or not, that wraps up today's conversation. So a big thank you to Mickey and Mike for joining us today to talk about the quarter's updates and answer all of your Vislink questions. Hopefully, you got some of your questions answered. We learned a lot. We appreciate your time.

Thanks, Gabrielle. Thank you.

Of course. And as always, if you want to learn more, check up on current updates, events, please visit www.vislink.com. I've been your host, Gabrielle. Thanks for tuning in.

And we'll have a new website coming up in the next 2 weeks.

Fantastic and a website updates to boot. Thanks.