Earnings Labs

Neonode Inc. (NEON)

Q2 2020 Earnings Call· Fri, Aug 14, 2020

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello, everyone. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Neonode’s Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks there will be a question-and-answer session with the company’s covering analysts. [Operator Instructions]. At this time for opening remarks and introduction, I would like to turn the call over to David Brunton, Neonode’s Head of Corporate Investor Relations. David please go ahead.

David Brunton

Analyst

Welcome and thank you for joining us. On today’s call, we will review our second quarter 2020 financial results and provide a corporate update. Our update will include details of customer activities, technology developments and other items of interest. Before turning the call over to our CEO, Dr. Urban Forssell and CFO, Maria Ek. I would like to make the following remarks concerning forward-looking statements. All statements in this conference call other than historical facts are forward-looking statements the words anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, tend, will, guide, confidence, targets, projects, and other similar expressions typically are used to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements do not guarantee the future performance that may be made involve or be subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that may affect Neonode’s business financial position and other operating results which include but are not limited to the risk factors and other qualifications contained in Neonode’s annual report on 10-K quarterly reports on 10-Q, and other reports filed by Neonode with the SEC to which your attention is directed. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expected or implied by these forward-looking statements. Neonode expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Urban. Urban, please go ahead.

Urban Forssell

Analyst

Thank you, Dave. Hello, this is Urban Forssell, I’m the CEO of Neonode since the beginning of the year. Thank you for joining the call. I will take you through business and strategy update today. And I would like to start with this slide here showing a summary of the Neonode’s legacy. And as many of you know Neonode started as a smartphone company back in 2001. And launched what is the world’s first [indiscernible] based mobile phone in 2004. This phone made the headlines in several newspapers and got a lot of attention and featured Neonode’s IR based touch already back in 2004. So the origins of our touch technology can be traced back to these early smartphone years. Later on Neonode shifted focus on into more business with E-reader manufacturers, printer manufacturers and automotive Tier 1 suppliers and the business model changed from offering business to consumer products to technology licensing mainly. Today in 2020, we are working to establish a new strategy and a new direction for the company. And we are aiming at substantially growing the business and making Neonode a much more profitable company. And we have presented the outline for this strategy in other presentations for instance, with Redeye and April 2, and also with Redeye in June 2, and some information has also been included in our first quarter press release. This is an interesting journey for me being quite new in the company, a little bit more than six months in. And as all of you know, 2020 has not been what we saw or thought it would be in 2019 mainly because of this guy. Some of you have heard of him COVID-19. For us, this has meant both headwinds and tailwind. Headwinds, we will come back to, we can some…

Maria Ek

Analyst

Thanks Urban. You can find our second quarter earnings release and 10-Q available for download from the investors section of our website, at neonod.com. I would like to start out with a summary of the quarter. Revenues are down by $1.0 million compared to the same quarter, 2019, our operating expenses are lower than planned for the quarter $2.4 million compared to 3.0 million the same quarter 2019. Due to the above our operating loss was up by $0.4 million compared to the same quarter 2019. We have net revenues of $0.7 million for the second quarter of 2020, which is decreased by 56% from the comparable quarter last year and a decrease by 41% compared to the first quarter. The main reason of the decrease is that we have no estimation of our license revenues in our business area HMI Solutions due to the COVID-19, but we see indications that automotive will come in a little better than we expected. For the second quarter of 2020, our customers license our technologies shipped 0.7 million devices with an average price being $1. Compared to the second quarter last year where our customer shipped 1.9 million units with an average license fee of $0.17. Total license fees for our automotive business in the second quarter 2020 was 147,000 compared to $440,000 the same period last year. For our consumer business, the license fees were 508,000 compared to previous years $1.0 million. This is mainly an effect of the pandemic, and we expect this to rebound. Within our business are HMI products, we have a low number of shipped products, but we have increased market interest. The sales in the second quarter were slow due to the pandemic related lockdowns. Our gross margin was 84% in the second quarter 2020, compared to 96% in 2019, sorry primarily due to inventory write off in 2020. And for the same reason there is a negative gross margin for business area HMI products. Operating expenses decreased by 19% to $2.4 million in the second quarter 2020 compared to 2019, which is partially due to COVID-19 that we mentioned for factors lower professional fees and less traveling. As a result of this, our operating loss increased by 34% to $1.8 million for the second quarter of 2020, compared to 2019. Our net loss for the second quarter of 2020 was $1.6 million or $0.18 per share, compared to net loss of $1.3 million, or $0.14 per share for the second quarter in 2019. As Urban said the product placement last week January the cash inflow of US$13.1 million, which strengthens our cash position and gives us the possibility to execute our strategy and to accelerate our efforts. Operating activities used $1.0 million in cash during the second quarter of 2020, as well as 2019. With this, I would like to hand over back to Urban for some closing remarks.

Urban Forssell

Analyst

Okay. Thank you Maria. So we are approaching the end of this call and the presentation. Highlights that we want to draw your attention to is the private placements that we closed last week. And through this we have now, what we feel adequate resources to accelerate our growth and to capitalize on the current future opportunities. In practice, what we will do is to continue on the path that we have been operating on, but we have now the means to strengthen for instance our international sales force to go more aggressively with our marketing to reach new customers and to drive sales. We will also use some of the proceeds to strengthen our engineering and our operation. And overall, the proceeds will mainly be used to our payroll. So very little or if anything is going to be used for CapEx investments. So it is mainly human resource related and adding people to our already strong team. We have the technology for contactless touch. As mentioned, this is available robust proven technology, we can offer products, we can offer technology licensing, it is ideally suited. It is very intuitive to create contactless touch interfaces using this technology and the demand for this type of solution and this type of technology is simply exploding, enormous market opportunities to integrate this technology from Neonode into both new and retrofitted equipment. And again, I repeat that two of our main focus areas is interactive kiosks and elevators. And within these, we see huge opportunities. There are also other segments that we could operate in and to some extent our partners are doing this already. And of course we are not stopping them, because we are offering the same products to them. And this only shows the strength and applicability of our technology. We are also happy to note that we are finding new customers for our zForce touch, for instance in the military, avionics and industrial control systems, markets, and that we also have good resonance with several OEMs and Tier 1s regarding our multi sensing, driver monitoring and in-cabin monitoring software solutions. So we are very motivated also to expand our customer portfolio there and the product portfolio in these business areas. And the final comment is that with all these opportunities, and now with financing secured for the next years, the focus obviously the rest of this year and also next year will be on executions. Increasing sales and making Neonode known to all kiosk manufacturers, all elevator companies and third-party companies operating in these markets. So with this, we thank you for your attention and we will open up for some questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you [Operator Instructions] There are no questions at this time. Are there any closing comments?

Urban Forssell

Analyst

Yes. I will take the opportunity here to answer questions forwarded by Viktor Westman analyst from Redeye before the call. And for instance, one question that Viktor asked was how we are dealing with furloughing? And as we have announced in for instance to Q1 release in May, we are working short - have been working shorter hours for four months from mid of April until today actually, and we are now returning to 100% working hours and actually we will increase also our headcount. So what we are doing is everyone is coming back to 100% from today and we will also add further resources. And regarding transportation hubs, there is a question that this is what Viktor sees maybe a smaller market. But as I pointed out, when I was covering the example on the Changi Airport, there are simply more than 10,000 airports actually 17,000 commercial airports in the world. If you add to this other types of transportation hubs, like train stations, subway stations, bus stations, and if you count that there are a number of today self service kiosks, vending machines, elevators and all these types of transportation hubs. If you further add shopping malls, hotel lobbies, and similar. Honestly, I think this is a big market and a huge opportunity for Neonode and our product going forward. And another question from Victor here is about lead times to enter into operations with bigger OEMs, for instance, in the elevator segments. And as we mentioned some minutes ago, what we expect is that the typical sale cycle to come in with a new large OEM customer is three to six months. In some cases we are only already in active dialogue with customers. In some other cases, this is yet to come. So overall we…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That does conclude today’s Neonode second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.