Earnings Labs

Edap Tms S.a. (EDAP)

Q1 2019 Earnings Call· Thu, May 16, 2019

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the EDAP TMS First Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to your host, Jeremy Feffer. Thank you, you may begin.

Jeremy Feffer

Analyst

Thank you, Matt. Good morning and thank you for joining us for the EDAP TMS First Quarter 2019 Financial and Operating Results Conference Call. On today’s call, we will hear from Philippe Chauveau, Chairman of the Board; Marc Oczachowski, Chief Executive Officer; and François Dietsch, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that management’s remarks today may contain forward-looking statements, which include statements regarding the Company’s growth and expansion plans. Such statements are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in such forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause such a difference include, but are not limited to, those described in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I would now like to turn the call over to EDAP’s Chairman, Philippe Chauveau. Philippe?

Philippe Chauveau

Analyst

Thank you, Jeremy, and thank you everyone for joining us today. It's been less than one year since FDA approval of our Focal One High Intensity Focused Ultrasound device. We remain focused on building upon the strong sales momentum we've established since that time. With four Focal One product sales in the U.S. so far in 2019 and many more at various stages of the sales cycle we anticipate the remainder of 2019 to be a significant growth year in terms of expanding our footprint for our latest industry leading HIFU technology in the U.S. Let me remind you that in Q1 EDAP’s total revenue were an all time high. At the same time we continue to expand our international presence. We remain convinced about the potential of Focal One to disrupt the current prostate cancer treatment paradigm in EDAP’s favor and believe EDAP is well positioned to deliver strong revenues to our shareholders while offering superior outcomes for prostate cancer patients. With that, I would like to turn over the call to EDAP’s Chief Executive Officer, Marc Oczachowski. Marc?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Thank you, Philippe. Good morning and thank you everyone for joining our call. As Philippe highlighted, so far in 2019 we have sold four Focal One devices in the U.S. including three in the first quarter; Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, UCI Health in California and Houston Methodist, all very highly regarded healthcare institutions. We also sold an additional Focal One unit in the second quarter to University of Chicago Medical Center. We are very excited and pleased to report continued high growth in our HIFU revenues during the first quarter of 2019 compared to the same quarter of 2018. We are even more excited to report that this strong growth comes essentially from U.S. HIFU revenues reflecting the continued enthusiasm and momentum that our latest state-of-the-art HIFU technology is receiving in the U.S. since the clearance by FDA in June 2018. Based on this positive feedback, we are optimistic that this could be the beginning of an inflection point in terms of greater Focal One adoption and market penetration. Just a few weeks ago, we attended the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in Chicago and we could really feel the traction, interest and enthusiasm from the U.S. and international urology community. We organized live demonstrations at our booth with Focal One and all of the 30 minutes demonstration slots were fully booked even before the exhibition hall was opened. We indeed did nonstop live demos during the three full days of the conference. Most prospects attending demos were American urologists and many from teaching hospitals and academic centers. We gathered a great number of new leads and interested potential customers for Focal One in the U.S. Adding to our leadership presence at the AUA exhibit hall we had placed in the official scientific programs a novel presentation…

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Thank you, François. In summary, we believe that our continued momentum in early 2019, the high growth of our HIFU revenues in Q1 2019, the second consecutive quarter of profitability that we received for EDAP and our current sales activity create a strong platform for future growth. We are still in the early stages of commercializing Focal One, but the positive feedback we continue to receive from urologists for this novel technology continues to be encouraging as we focus on growing this franchise in the U.S. and key markets around the world. Again, we are very happy about the great performance we achieved in Q1 with over 60% growth in our HIFU revenue and a profitable quarter. I will now turn the call to question-and-answer. Operator?

Operator

Operator

Great, thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question here is from Walter Ramsley from R-Squared. Please go ahead.

Walter Ramsley

Analyst

Good afternoon, thank you for taking my question. Could you break out the revenue for the quarter between U.S. sales and the rest of the world?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Well, we can't, I mean we don’t have here [disclose] [ph] the breakdown of the sales, but we have the overall revenues from the…

Walter Ramsley

Analyst

Well, okay, the revenues, I'm sorry, yes, overall revenues.

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Yes, the overall revenues, I mean I'm not, again we don’t have them separated by geographic area, it's more by division for UDS.

Walter Ramsley

Analyst

Okay, in that case do you have an estimate of how much the currency impacted the results?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

You mean if we had some exchange loss or gain in the quarter? That's your question?

Walter Ramsley

Analyst

Okay, yes. Just, you know, also how it affected the costs and the revenues. If that was, like if [indiscernible] …?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Yes, I don’t think it is very significant and also you have to understand that we also sell in Asia like in Japan, so the number or the figure we might give you on exchange gain or loss will also include the exchange rate fluctuations between euro and Japanese yen as well as in U.S. dollars, so I don’t think it is very relevant. But just, [indiscernible] your question I mean we had a very strong increase in the distribution of our revenue coming from the U.S. again driven by the number of sales we did in Focal One in the U.S. in Q1.

Walter Ramsley

Analyst

Right, the reimbursement in the United States, could you take a minute and describe where that process stands and when you expect to get Medicare reimbursement and private insurance, when that might come to fruition?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Absolutely and that's a key point and I think I spoke about it during the first part of the call today, but just to repeat, and as I said we were invited last week to the AMA CPT panel which is again only twice a year panel, so it's good to be on that one. As I said in the past, we submitted our file to the AMA beginning of this year, so we were very quickly put on the panel without waiting to be on that panel, on the second panel of the year which is usually in October and that panel will decide based on the submission [review] [ph] the code that will be given to our technology. So that panel was held in Chicago last week. The vote is confidential so we don’t know the vote and we will know the vote probably in the next weeks or month once the minutes are released by the AMA. So we will communicate on that. The next step after that will be the establishment of the CPT code probably by the end of this year and then once the CPT code is given by AMA there will be some work on giving a value to the code and usually it takes around a year to do so. So the expectation is that we might be able to have the code by the end of this year and the value of the code by the end of next year to have a full CPT code in place, it could be in the beginning of 2021. And once you have the CPT code you can start negotiating with private payers and so forth.

Walter Ramsley

Analyst

Okay, excuse me, that sounds good. If there are other questions lined up I will get off, if not I have two more. Is there anybody else waiting to ask questions?

Operator

Operator

Yes, I think we have one more questions from Walter.

Walter Ramsley

Analyst

Okay, in that case, the lithotripsy business it was somewhat down in the first quarter but you said that was temporary for the full year, do you see that increasing what 5% to 10%.

Philippe Chauveau

Analyst

Well, we'll see that, that's usually what we've seen in that part of [indiscernible], but it is pretty consistent and as a model growth, so again we're just at the beginning of the year. As I said a quarter does not reflect the entire year and we have a strong pipeline of projects and prospects, so we remain confident.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The next question here is from Brooks O'Neil from Lake Street Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Brooks O'Neil

Analyst

Bonjour Marc, thank you for doing the call in English. I took French in college but that was a long time ago and I didn’t do very well.

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Hi, hey Brooks.

Brooks O'Neil

Analyst

So following up on one of the questions you were just at, obviously there'll be a period of time here before you get CPT code and let's call it official reimbursement here in the U.S., but can you talk about the economics of the system from the perspective of U.S. hospital operators and U.S. doctors as you see it today and why you think there might be fairly rapid adoption of the machines and use of the machines here without formal reimbursement code?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Yes, that's a good question Brooks and indeed I mean as people would probably remember we have today, we've been given my Medicare a temporary code that's called a C-code and we also have private out of the pocket paying patients and the business case is pretty simple as only a few patients a month, from using the C-code and another few from the private basis will make the machine profitable at the hospital level. So basically today, and I think we, today it is very easy to breakeven on the investment and return on investment and actually two years ago of the Houston Methodist Hospital, the administration of hospital did an article explaining on how could you get back on your investment for HIFU device in less than two years. So basically and they were doing around 30 to 35 patients a year, so basically with 30 to 40 patients volume on a machine per year you can get back your cash with less than two years and the operational profitability is reached very quick.

Brooks O'Neil

Analyst

So you are saying a hospital could earn high return or reasonable return on investment if they just see three patients a month?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Yes, on the current structure of reimbursement and payments.

Brooks O'Neil

Analyst

And is it possible for a doctor to be reasonably well reimbursed for his time in using the machine today as well?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Sure, it's a little bit more complicated than doing these kind of claims using a CPT code but they can use an unlisted code and get reimbursement that will be about the same - and get reimbursement that will be about the same level of other treatment or they can also privately deal, with most of them do today.

Brooks O'Neil

Analyst

Just my other question is, is it your plan to target the academic teaching hospitals here in the U.S., the 100 or whatever it is, largest ones, or are you thinking you might be able to find a market also in the, let's call it, the community hospital market here too?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

The goal is really to continue the strategy in targeting teaching hospitals and academic centers for two main reasons, one is that they have the investment capability and most of the time they also want to be first in getting the new technology and offering it to their patients and second it also part of our strategy in terms of quality of treatment potential registration of the database from those centers, so they have to be organized to do so. So for that two reasons our focus and targets remain some teaching institutions.

Brooks O'Neil

Analyst

Perfect, great, congratulations on the progress, keep it up.

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Thank you, Brooks.

Operator

Operator

Our next question here is from Matthew Pilkington from Strategic Credit Concepts. Please go ahead.

Matthew Pilkington

Analyst

Hi Marc.

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Hey Matt.

Matthew Pilkington

Analyst

How are you?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Good.

Matthew Pilkington

Analyst

A couple of questions, first one is could you go over the – other uses, I think you mentioned breast cancer and liver cancer and you were saying Phase 2 trial on the liver cancer? And the second question would be on whether you are going to bring back your mobile unit or whether that's going to be, you are not going to do that anymore?

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

So to the first question, yes indeed I said that the intention from the company this year is to get started on Phase 2 trials for both rectal endometriosis and liver metastasis and then for the mobile we continue to provide mobile services or mobile provider on the other term, the first generation, but for the same reason as I explained to and I answered to Brook's questions Focal One will remain on with a focus on being sold to six institutions and teaching hospitals.

Matthew Pilkington

Analyst

Great, okay that answered my questions, thank you.

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

Thanks Matt.

Operator

Operator

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the call back to management for any closing comments.

Marc Oczachowski

Analyst

All right, thank you everyone for attending our call today and again we're very excited by the strong progress we've made during Q1 with very high grossing or HIFU revenues and profitability for the overall company. Talk to you again soon and looking forward to hosting the next call very soon. Bye-bye.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you again for your participation.