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ClearSign Technologies Corporation (CLIR)

Q2 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 14, 2013

$5.36

+2.49%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to the ClearSign Second Quarter Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. (Operator Instructions) After today’s presentation there will be an opportunity to ask questions. (Operator Instructions) Before we get started, during the course of this conference call the company will be making forward-looking statements. We caution you that any statement that is not a statement of historical fact is a forward-looking statement. This includes projections of earnings, revenues, cash or other financial statements, any statements about plans, strategies or objective of management for future operations. Any statements concerning proposed new products, any statements regarding expectations for the success of our products in the U.S. and international markets; the outcome of product research and development. Any statements regarding future economic conditions or performance, statements or believes and any statements of assumptions, underlying any of the foregoing. These statements are based on expectations and assumptions as of the date of this conference call and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. These were also described in the section of today’s press release titled cautionary note on forward-looking statements and then reports we filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors or potential investor should read these risks ClearSign Combustion Corporation assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or actual outcomes and does not intend to do so. Please note this is event is being recorded. I’d now like to turn the conference over to Rick Rutkowski, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining us. I hope some of you have – all of you had a great summer and been enable to maybe get away a little bit. We had a very busy time here including actually lots of folks visiting in recent weeks and a lot of activity and some of which will be able to give you some color about. Jim Harmon is going to run through the financials very quickly, certainly no surprises here generally on or under budget. As we said, we made some minor reallocations from one area to another notably in the business development domain where we are under running some budgets in technology development and IP. And we have some very promising activities going on as a consequence of that. But, I think other than that there is nothing terribly controversial here or unexpected at all. So, go ahead Jim.

James Harmon

Management

Okay. Thanks Rick. Just to remind everyone, we are development stage company so we have no revenue. And we will – (seems) to be development stage company when we commenced recording revenue. And I will let Rick speak with regard to our efforts to get to that stage. With regard to our expenses for the quarter, our net loss was $1.4 million for the quarter versus last year is a little bit more than $1 million. So our expenses have increased by ($385,000). Now was predominantly R&D increases – increased efforts there. We hired four new FTEs since last quarter – a year ago last quarter. And then consumables increased quite a bit probably about $100,000. On the G&A side, our cost have increased by $137,000, some early marketing and a little bit of extra expenses being a public company since we were – a public company for only a portion of Q2 last year. Probably more important compared to the Q1 of this year, our last Q1 was $1,357,000 versus $1,000,004 this year. So you can see this increased by about 4%. But, the make up of it has changed. Our G&A cost have diminished a little bit by about $30,000 and R&D costs have increased by about 20% from $450,000 to $540,000. Again, that reflects our increased effort quite a bit of use of consumable materials et cetera in our testing efforts. And again, Rick can speak to all of this in the ongoing discussion. With regard to our cash position, we had $6.6 million at the end of Q1, we are at $5.1 million at the end of this quarter. You can see from that our cash burn is roughly equivalent to our expense – our P&L expense. And we continue to be on plan and project that we have enough cash (to last through) April 2014. With that, I will turn it back to you, Rick.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Yes, thanks Jim. So, as Jim mentioned, we have had significant increase in R&D activity and it’s been as we reported here highly productive. And I think just sort of – the story in some ways is getting easier to tell because we are converging on a couple of different approaches mainly the Duplex architecture technology and the ECC technology as it relates not only to the Duplex but to the combustion and solid fuels. Principally in great types soaker systems that’s one where you have a moving grate that moves the fuel through the system. Our combuster here, our furnace here – our test furnace does not have a moving grate, it has a fuel delivery system that allows us to continuously feed fuel into the system. But it’s a good proxy for that type of system and certainly representative. And so – when I mentioned about sort of an intensified focus what’s happening as we engage with the market and deepen our level of understanding with respect to used cases. And correlated with what we are finding and developing and demonstrating in the laboratory. The three segments that are really emerging is very promising in terms of early points of market entry are package boilers which are ubiquitous. Those are found in every line from food processing, through building heat and in between large numbers of those 100s of 1000s units in the U.S. many, many more around the world obviously. And then also, refinery and petrochemical process heaters where NOx is also a primary consideration in plant shape. And then the third area of intensified interest is with respect to the combustion of solid fuels at the industrial scale. And that goes on in a variety of industries we are seeing the forest products industry certainly in…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from Jim Mcllree of Chardan Capital.

Jim Mcllree - Chardan Capital

Analyst

Yes, thanks and good afternoon.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Hi, Jim.

Jim Mcllree - Chardan Capital

Analyst

Hey, Rick on the Duplex burner architecture, I’m a little bit confused as to the interplay between that and the ECC technology, it almost sounds as if its a completely different products for you, is it back or is it that -- it’s most effective with the ECC, however, works with traditional burner technology as well? And then I have another question at the level.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Yes, you should probably think it as a bit of Venn diagram or the heavy overlap on ECC because what happens here is that we anchor the flame on the lower stage, lower floor of the Duplex if you will in a vertical configuration. During start up and then we release it and allow it to move up to the bluff body configuration. So, you’re right in that if I took the ECC out of this, this would still be a proprietary design the very idea of having a proximal on a digital flame holder et cetera, et cetera. I don't want to go into much of the actual claim language and having combustion occur and mixing in the extended what we call the entrainment line, is in itself novel, that’s a determination we’ve made. And there is several aspects of it which are novel. By far, the best implementation of it is to use the ECC technology to anchor the flame. And that’s you know someone asked such as an interesting question is, is there one effect that you really gotten just overwhelming response to. And the answer is, we’ve gotten a very strong response through a variety of different effects. So, we’ve been able to show. But the one that I just really baffle’s people is the idea that we can pull these flames down against this high velocity of flow on current and stabilize these flames. So, I suspected Jim as we scale and the 5 million, you’ll see ECC begin to play a greater role in stabilizing the flame potentially on the upper tier as well but it would be correct to say that you could create an instance on this technology that didn’t’ use the Electrodynamic control on the primary player, it would be mechanically a bit complex and not nearly as, --not have nearly as much utility and we’re on the IP for that as well. So, yes, its bit of an overlap and it does. And I think we’ll see this happen as we progress in the history of the company that the idea of this is very much rooted in the ability to manipulate the flame and change configurations on the ply. And so, I think as I said, you’ll see more ECC player role but I mean you probably characterize it about correctly.

Jim Mcllree - Chardan Capital

Analyst

Great. And secondly, you talked about the space to energy company and I think it where the easiest, but you have aligned with them, can you help me understand what that means that --…

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Yes, that would be more details forthcoming but it’s essentially there is money involved. And it’s the model that we’ve described before the idea here is that the partner’s fund in part or in a whole the development activities from certain point forward and that in consideration of that, we negotiate certain preferential market rights, might be early access to a market, it might be exclusivity within some territory or within some classification. But generally, the model is that they would fund the development efforts and if it would successful at the end, that they would have essentially an option to enter into a licensed agreement. Different folks, the different approaches in terms of when they want to penetrate the back end. Obviously, you don't want to get too far into one of these things without having done that. But, the other thing that’s really typical is that as you would guess with any project of this kind is that you structure a series of faces to redesign to retire risks. So, your strength say what are the highest risk components of this development, let’s make sure we tackle those on the front end of the process and trying to do that in as prescribed fashion as we can. So, that’s a bit of proverbial long poll and the technology risk can, you try and identify what that is and structure a cost effective project to address to that one risk fairly on and then once that’s retired continue the sequence them in the same way. So, that’s not uncommon that you would see the faces become successfully larger in terms of the level of financial commitment as well which of course as someone investing in a project that has risk in it as how you’d like to see that…

Jim Mcllree - Chardan Capital

Analyst

Okay. That’s great. Thanks a lot Rick.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Yes. Thank you, Jim.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Richard Deutsch at Ladenburg Thalmann.

Richard Deutsch - Ladenburg Thalmann

Analyst

Yes, hi, thank you.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

All right.

Richard Deutsch - Ladenburg Thalmann

Analyst

Very interesting story. I think you can make money teaching people how to talk about a technology company, very impressive. The only question I have is, (inaudible) following this, what are your plans for financing, I know you have enough money to not burn out so you get to April of next year, plus have you laid out any other kind of landscape for us to look at in terms of financing?

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Yes, sure. If you are new to the story, you may have missed this but we became eligible for an S3 type filing in late April which was one year from our public offering. And so we took advantage to that eligibility and did put up the self-registration statement so that’s in place. And that’s going to allow us to be agile and opportunistic and I think very quick, we prequalified numerous investors. And so I think we’re feeling confident that at the right moment opportunistically we can access the capital markets. Obviously, a part of our strategy is to minimize dilution or better way to put that maybe to leverage our existing capital through these development contracts and as we look our total operating budget right now Richard is $5 million plus for the current year. It would move up a little bit next year but we expect to fairly substantial offset, I’d say certainly in 2014 from development projects to that. So, I think our capital needs will continue to be modest but we will at some point access the market and obviously we’ll try to be responsive to market conditions as relates to large (shares) particular when the market conditions more broadly. But we got a good following and a good interest in that. So, I think we’re confident that we can access the capital that we need, when the time come. Another element, this is quite interesting, is in the context of this kind of arrangement that I’ve mentioned, in China, there may be a two-prong approach to that where the partner would invest both in joint venture in the host country and possibly in our company. We’ve also had a suggesting from at least a couple of the other partners that we are talking to that there may be some opportunity for strategic investment from them as well. And in some cases, they wouldn’t necessarily be either end users or manufacturers, they are sort of partners which utility for example, gas utility things of that nature. I always take that with a little bit of grimace. So, I never like to hang my hat on that idea was strategic investment. But it certainly the possibility and our capital needs at the moment are small enough that we feel comfortable with the range of options that I have just outlined should be able to take care of those handle it for the foreseeable future in any case.

Richard Deutsch - Ladenburg Thalmann

Analyst

Well, thank you. That answers the question.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Yes. Thank you, Richard. Are you based in New York?

Richard Deutsch - Ladenburg Thalmann

Analyst

No, I’m in the Boca Raton, branch.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Okay. Well, (forget not) way we’ll be sure to stop and see you.

Richard Deutsch - Ladenburg Thalmann

Analyst

Yes.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

(inaudible).

Richard Deutsch - Ladenburg Thalmann

Analyst

Kind of combined to that. So, it’s the kind of stuff we like to work on.

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Sounds great. We have some, we got some great investors down in your neck of the woods and it’s been a while since we’ve been down and seen them. So, we will be, we are going to do that.

Richard Deutsch - Ladenburg Thalmann

Analyst

Okay, great. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions)

Richard Rutkowski

Management

Looks like there are no further questions at the moment. So, again I would -- the things that I want to emphasis are intellectual property, we’re feeling very good and increasingly good, frankly about the scope to the quantity and the quality of the IP that’s being a (inaudible) and the position that’s giving us with respect to our partnering efforts both domestically and overseas. And by the way, I believe we are offending one by not mentioning Europe. There is a lot of activity in Europe as well but Asia is a special interest to us in China because of truly pressing problems and then equally, correspondingly significant market opportunity. So, hence the emphasis on that. So, again, steady as she goes, or putting one point in front of the other deeply engaged in a range of negotiations with the host of different companies and continuing to push activity through the business development funnel. Two things that I mentioned in the press release, I guess that I did not touch on here, one is which is that we’re seeing some interest in gasification as well and I guess the other is, I did mention, the other geographic area that would be new for 2014, would be in Asia. So, in addition to the three market areas that we described the refineries, package boilers and solid fuel combustion at the industrial scale. So, thanks so much for joining us today. We’ll be attending several conferences this fall so stay tuned for those kinds of announcement and as we do those, we’ll be more than happy to schedule one-on-one meetings with the folks who are interested as well. Thanks again and do look forward to catching up on our next call with more news to come.

Operator

Operator

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You many now disconnect.