Earnings Labs

NextTrip, Inc. (NTRP)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Mar 31, 2015

$2.54

+0.79%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-2.21%

1 Week

+8.27%

1 Month

+23.40%

vs S&P

+21.32%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the Sigma Labs Fourth Quarter 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]. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chris Witty. Please go ahead.

Chris Witty

Analyst

Good day ladies and gentlemen and welcome to this Sigma Labs fourth quarter conference call. Following management's prepared remarks, we will hold a Q&A session. With me today is Mark Cola, the company's President and CEO; and Vivek Dave, Science Advisor. I would now like to provide a brief Safe Harbor statement. This conference call may include forward-looking statements that represent the company's expectations and beliefs concerning future events that involve risks and uncertainties and may cause the company's actual performance to be materially different from the performance indicated or implied by such statements. All statements other than statements on historical facts included in this conference call are forward-looking statements. Although the company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the company's expectations are disclosed in this conference call and in the company's annual report and Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2014. All subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to the company or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements. Unless otherwise required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise after the date of this conference call. I'd now like to turn it over to Mark Cola. Mark?

Mark Cola

Analyst

Thank you, Chris. And welcome to everyone. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. I’d like to take a few minutes here and walk through a series of slides that we’ve prepared for you and highlight the recent events as well as recap some of the prominent events of 2014 and speak a little bit about our expectations for the oncoming year. And so with that, if you have access to the presentation, which I hope you all do, if you turn to slide number three titled recent highlights I’ll begin there and walk you through some of the more recent events and exciting events that are ongoing here at Sigma Labs right now. And so the first and foremost for us of course is the most recently signed technology cooperation agreement with Additive Industries. Additive Industries is an early stage company in the Netherlands with an exciting new technology for 3D metal printing that help migrate the industry away from the prototype machines that are currently available and allow more serial or mass production activities that take place. And so we’re very excited to be working with them and incorporating our PrintRite technology into their actual machine design such that when their machines are commercially available which they expect to be in about 12 to 18 months, it will complete with our PrintRite 3D technology already integrated into the machine tool. And there is of course more information to be found at Additive Industries’ website. The other interesting point of note was the - finally the contract from General Electric Aviation which was basically proposed and written around the whole premise of our technology of in process quality assurance in its formation of PrintRite 3D, and so that program has large implications for us as we begin…

Vivek Dave

Analyst

Well, thank you, Mark, and greetings and welcome to all call participants. As Sigma Labs has consistently stated in previous presentations we're focused on overcoming the three barriers and obstacles to the widespread acceptance of 3D printing for metal parts. And those obstacles and barriers are quality, geometry and productivity. As Mark had mentioned INSPECT really addresses the quality aspect and that’s something that we've been working with a variety of top line companies to validate and verify and eventually incorporate into their production. The next major problem really is the geometry and although additive manufacturing is a computer driven process, digital design, digital manufacturing what you see in the computer is not necessarily what comes out of the machine. And so verification of geometry is critically important to ensure compliance to a print and to really guarantee that the as built model is what you see in the CAD or the should be model. So DEFORM solves this problem by looking at sensor data so we’re looking at data from the actual build as the part is being made and you can imagine essentially looking at cross-sections of the part as it’s being laid down layer by layer, we’ve verified compliance and then we’re able to take that and compare it to the CAD model and to really answer that critical question, is the as build part within the specification of the should be part, do they match? And so DEFORM involves integration of optics, mechanical systems and of course software to put all this data together and to present it to the user in a useful manner that really immediate flags problems. And so it’s a very valuable tool not just for compliance which is its main function but eventually we feel it will be very valuable as…

Mark Cola

Analyst

Thank you so much Vivek, greatly appreciate that, and hope you all found that quite informative. If you move on the presentation of slide 6 titled Growth Path for 2015 I wanted to review a couple of aspects as we look forward into 2015. Of course we continue to execute on our active engineering consulting programs the likes of which we've announced, the America Makes award with General Electric Aviation which is very key program for us because it demonstrates the complete picture if you will that Vivek just described for multiple OEM end users as I mentioned GE Aviation, Honeywell aerospace and Aerojet Rocketdyne, as well as multiple materials as well as multiple platforms. So it demonstrates the importance and the utility of having a third party platform independent yard stick as you will to use Vivek's analogy and demonstrates the utility of this across multiple platforms albeit all within the same industry Aerospace but nonetheless it's a great opportunity for us demonstrate. So we're quite excited about that. The other of course contract engineering is we were part of the period two team awarded effort with Honeywell Aerospace as the prime contracts a lead on this program. And so here again is another opportunity with again in the aerospace industry to further demonstrate the capability of PrintRite3D and how the different elements that we've began to develop and roll out PrintRite DEFORM and eventually PrintRite analytics which will be the database to house all this big data and how these fit together and basically answer the question how do you know you have the right quality, how do you know you have the right geometry and is your productivity -- are you getting everything out your productivity you can. And of course what are you doing with the…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instruction]. Our first question today comes from Rob Stone with Cowen & Company.

Rob Stone

Analyst

I wanted to touch base first on the OEM and other partnership relationship. I think last year at one point you were entertaining a relationship with Materialise. I wonder if there is any update on that and also other than Additive Industries are you in talks with any other printer OEMs, thanks.

Mark Cola

Analyst

Yes, thanks, Rob, great question and so we continue to work with Materialise to bring our technology to a state where it is compatible with their technology. And so that is still active and current. The Additive Industries opportunity with an OEM like that of course very new and start up and we're excited about that because they've taken a fresh approach to addressing how do you move from prototyping in this single point solution machines that are currently available and how do you address the needs of the larger manufacturing community. And while it is entirely possible to use a single point solutions such as the machine tools that are available today there is great opportunity and lot of efficiencies to be mined when you view it from a systems integration approach. And that’s the approach that Additive Industry has taken and of course it's worked quite well for other industries such as automotive who have mastered the idea of an assembly line quite some time ago now. And so their systems integration approach makes complete sense to us and so it resonated and we found it a good opportunity for us to be part of this as they begin to roll out their prototype later this year and then begin to move towards production of their machines. Regarding other OEMs I'm not at liberty to discuss that right now. But there is plenty of opportunity with the other existing OEMs, machine tool makers.

Rob Stone

Analyst

Okay, my next question is with respect to DEFORM development. You alluded to encountering some unexpected delays and difficulties. But you also said you felt the program was on track. I wonder if you could provide a little more color on what that was and how you overcame it.

Mark Cola

Analyst

So it’s a great question basically it took a little longer than we had expected basically to get our EOS machine up operational. And we overcame those difficulties and so we're back on track. Technically there has been no issues with it; it was more about having the machine available to us to do test and evaluation, final test and evaluation on it. And so it delayed us a little bit, that’s all.

Rob Stone

Analyst

Okay. And that’s actually a perfect segue into my last question which is with respect to thinking about the manufacturing services opportunity alongside your ongoing development work where you have just one machine in house. How do you think about allocating capacity to revenue generating parts and services project versus needing sometime I would imagine to run test parts on that machine for your own development.

Mark Cola

Analyst

Yes, so the wonderful thing about this machine is it can run 24/7, 365 it's not a human, there is little human intervention with this machine other than to load parts and powder into it and extract parts from the machine. And so plenty of opportunity during the evening time to basically run contract manufacturing service work for customers as well as have some time allocated for our internal R&D efforts, so I believe there is plenty of opportunity to strike the right balance there. And of course the best situation to be in is the machine is so busy we need to go get a second and third and so that’s what we’re looking forward to.

Rob Stone

Analyst

What was the total investment? You mentioned it’s in the 10-K but I wonder if you just have the figure handy for what you’ve spent altogether on the machine plus the improvement that we could think in terms of what a second set up would cost?

Mark Cola

Analyst

So we can -- so let me try and address it this way, some of this infrastructure set up of course would benefit a second or third machine install, but I think our overall capital investment in this machine is somewhere north of 900k.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Susan Janssen, a Private Investor.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Could you please tell me if the printer has been paid in full?

Mark Cola

Analyst

Yes, and I believe we addressed that in slide seven where we said we have no debt and so we paid cash for that machine; we did not lease it, we own it out right. And the last payment was made in the first quarter of 2015. And so you will see that reflected in the first quarter financials.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

And does the Weld Pool patent cover IPQA?

Mark Cola

Analyst

I’ll let Vivek address that.

Vivek Dave

Analyst

Yes, so for all of our IP or for the vast majority of our IP it does include welding processes as well as additive manufacturing processes because really we’ve taken the viewpoint that additive manufacturing is a subset or a specialized instance of a welding process. And so, it would be applicable to welding as well as additive manufacturing.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

My third is going to be, are the results going to be audited when they are released today?

Mark Cola

Analyst

Our 10-K, yes, of course was audited and so.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Paul Briard, he is also a Private Investor.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Yes, I understand that your software works with the laser 3D printers. Does it also work with the EBM printers such as what Archem produces?

Mark Cola

Analyst

Yes, that’s a great question, and again I’ll ask Vivek to provide some thoughts on that.

Vivek Dave

Analyst

Yes, so to the extent that laser and electron beam are both welding processes they generate similar data. The key difference between the laser and the electron beam or at least the electron beam as its implemented right now with Archem is that you can’t really see down the same optics column as an electron beam because it’s operating in electrons and the laser is operating in photons. So I mean with the laser we have the advantage that we can actually see right down the same column that the laser is shining we just look at a different wave length of light than what the laser's operating at and we can actually image using the same optics that the laser uses to deliver the laser beam. So with the electron beam you just need to get a little more creative on the sensors but as long as you can get the sensor data the software is capable of dealing with many different welding processes and in fact in previous work for the U.S. Air Force we had demonstrated the ability to use at that point which was the predecessor of PrintRite on an electron beam process. And so we do have experience with electron beam and we have shown it to work.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Excellent. The other question I have is I understand that you have a shelf offering that you can access. Are you issuing any additional shares or basically is the capital and the share count going to remain static for the 12 to 18 months that you indicated?

Mark Cola

Analyst

So the shelf we put in place basically has several criteria associated with it that allow us to either utilize it or not and currently one of those criteria which is a market cap of 75 million is not being met. And so we cannot actively use that shelf.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Kevin [indiscernible] a Private Investor.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Good morning appreciate your information this morning. Could you maybe go into a little more depth and maybe characterize our relationship in terms of our software suite of what we can provide to industry versus industry's readiness to accept our solution. It seems we sort of we have a solution to a problem that industry is not ready to address. Could you maybe characterize that a little bit for us?

Mark Cola

Analyst

Yes so I'll take a stab at it and I'm sure Vivek has some thoughts on as well. Vivek and my background are both from commercial industry prior to the national laboratories work we did. Our experience is quite relevant and so industry right now so where they are today. For the most part the majority of industry is all -- if you think of where they are today and where they want to be I think basically chasm or a gap that may need to get across. And left hand of that gap or chasm basically is prototyping for AEM today. And probably even very small lot size production and so there are all ineffectively the space where they are characterizing the process trying to understand it to the greatest extent possible and they know that they need to get across the chasm and the other side is AEM production or serial production. But they don’t know how to get across the chasm and think of our software modules and INSPECT, DEFORM and eventually analytics has been the element that forms the bridge that expand that gap from where they are today in prototyping space to where they want to be tomorrow in serial production. And we kind of address this as we went to the presentation today and Vivek mentioned design intent I mean even if they figure how they brute force it through and get some left hand side of gap to the right hand side with traditional post processing inspection. There is still going to have to demonstrate that they have objective evidence of compliance to the design intent. In other words did they make what they said they were going to make and can be verify and validate that to the regulator agencies that what…

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

No, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Mark Cola

Analyst

Vivek do you want to add anything to that?

Vivek Dave

Analyst

Yes, so I mean right now to Mark’s point companies could brute inforce INSPECT parts that could do 100% [couple inspection] the problem is it’s going to cost them two to three times more than using an in process approach. So at the end of the day, what’s the [pain] message that’s going to force companies to adopt their technology, it’s inspection cost and the only reason that hasn’t kicked in yet is that companies are not producing millions and millions of parts using additive manufacturing yet. That’s going to change very soon and once that starts changing and those inspection bills come due then you’re going to really see the utility and the advantage of the in process approach. At the end of the day it’s going to be a pain message of cost which gets this technology introduced.

Operator

Operator

There appears to be no further questions, at this time, so this concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mark Cola for any closing remarks.

Mark Cola

Analyst

Thank you very much Chad I greatly appreciate it. And thank you all to those who joined us today our investors we great appreciate your support and we look forward to bringing new news and updates as they occur. And wish you all a very good day. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, Sir. The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.