Earnings Labs

Vuzix Corporation (VUZI)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Fri, May 13, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the Vuzix First Quarter 2016 Financial Results 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 call is being recorded. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Andrew Haag, Managing Partner at IRTH Communications. Mr. Haag, you may begin.

Andrew Haag

Analyst

Thank you very much. I would like to welcome all of you to Vuzix’s first quarter 2016 financial results conference call. With us today Vuzix’s CEO, Paul Travers; and the company’s CFO, Grant Russell. Before I turn the call over to Paul, I would like to remind you that on this call that management’s prepared remarks contain forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties, and management may make additional forward-looking statements during the question-and-answer session. Therefore, the company claims the protection of the Safe Harbor for forward-looking statements that is contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by any forward-looking statements, as a result of certain factors not limited to, general economic and business conditions, competitive factors, changes in business strategy or development plans, the ability to attract and retain qualified personnel, and changes in the legal and regulatory requirements. In addition, any projections as to the company’s future performance represent management’s estimates as of today, May 13, 2016. Vuzix assumes no obligation to update these projections in the future as market conditions change. Last evening, the company filed its 10-Q with the SEC and issued a press release announcing its financial results. So, participants in this call who may not have already done so, may wish to look at those documents as we provide a summary of the results we discuss on today’s call. Today’s call may have included non-GAAP financial measures. When required a reconciliation to the most directly comparable financial measure calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP can be found on sec.gov or at the company's website vuzix.com. I would like to now turn the call over to Paul Travers, who will give a brief overview of the company’s business activities and developments during the first quarter of 2016. Paul will then turn the call over to Grant Russell, Vuzix's CFO who will provide an overview of the company’s first quarter results, Paul will then talk about the company's outlook and programs as we move through 2016. We will then open up the call for Q&A after management's update. Paul?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Thank you, Andrew. Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining our call today to discuss the company’s first quarter 2016 financial results and outlook for the remainder of 2016. And thanks to everyone else for joining the call. As everyone knows, the Intel investment of last year, Vuzix has been working hard to bring to market a series of next generation VIRTTU products and starting in this current quarter, the results of those efforts will concretely start to show. In the quarter we are currently in, revenues for our video headphones will start to accelerate as we have resolved the production issues and are beginning again to build and ship high order customers. Even more exciting in Q2, Vuzix will launch its highly anticipated M300 smart glasses. This is the first major upgrade to our smart glasses on the first major product developed since we received the investment from Intel and began that relationship. We are happy to report that the M300 smart glasses has tool parts already completed with production of the electronics due in next week. As many of you know, the M100 smart glasses is one of the top selling enterprise smart glasses in the world. We have developed the M100 at a time when Vuzix was not as well capitalized and still have sold thousands of M100s. We feel this has helped to create a high level of pent-up demand for a new solution that would solve the many problems current smart glasses have and we are confident the M300 does just that. As a result, we expect the M300 will far outpace the M100 sales, both in units and speed of sales ramp. Over the coming months, the initial demand should be robust. I’ll share more on this later in the call, but first I’d like to turn the call over to Grant to review the financial results for the first quarter. Grant?

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Thanks, Paul. Good morning, everybody. Before jumping in, I would like to point out that I’ll be rounding many of the discussed numbers to thousands even though we currently in dollars. Further, I encourage interested listeners to review our 10-Q for a more detailed explanation of some of the quarter’s year-over-year differences since I’ll be highlighting just the major items. For the three months ending March 31, 2016, Vuzix reported $364,000 in revenues as compared to $809,000 for the same period in 2015. Binocular smart glass product sales or M100s were 86% of revenues for the three months ended March 31, 2016 versus 72% in the prior 2015 period. And total consumer focused video iWear product sales were 12% of revenues for Q1 2016 versus 13% of prior year’s quarter. The decrease in sales was primarily the result of lower M100 smart glass revenues caused primarily by existing and new customers choosing to defer purchases and so, the new M300 smart glasses began shipping in the second half of 2016. Sales of our M100 to M300 migration packages and M300 preorder deposits are continuing to accelerate, but of course, most of these customer preorders and deposits for the M300 smart glasses are not recognized as revenue in the last quarter and won’t be until these units ship to customers. The revenues from our video iWear product line categories were less than due to the impact of our ongoing production difficulties with our iWear video headphones. This limited available shipments despite demand. Contributing to the comparable revenue reduction in this category is the fact that during the quarter 2015, we were still selling our prior luxury products which we will discontinue to invest early spring of 2015. Sales from our – the company’s engineering programs for the three months ended March…

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Thank you, Grant. I would like to begin my update and outlook by first talking about our iWear. During our year-end conference call, we reported on the production quality issues we are having with the iWear and that we finally have them in hand. The last 30 days we have rolled these fixes into the production line and are now producing one of the best HMVs Vuzix has ever brought to market. The quality improvements not only have improved yields, but we are seeing significant improvements in color and contrast and other optical futures. With this effectively brand-new version of the iWear, Vuzix is starting a proactive marketing campaign to share them with the world. For example, and this is just one example, as most of you know, the home industry is growing like wildfire and as it happens, our iWear is perfectly positioned to be the hands-on choice for FPV growing use, that’s first person view, find a remote controlled drone through a twisted race cars at speeds in excess of 80 miles an hour is all done with a video feed coming off the drone that allows the racers to see as if he was sitting in the drone. To this V, the racers use head-mounted displays, much like our iWear. You could imagine that if there was delay in the video link, you would end up hitting the tree before you saw it, this is where the iWear shines. The iWear was designed to be a low latency device for VR gaming and with less than one millisecond video delay, it is 30 times faster than any other HMV out there. Again, this is a big deal. When you are flying that fast at 30X increase in what you see versus where you really are is important.…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Jim McIlree of Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Jim McIlree

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Thank you and good morning, Paul and Grant. Paul you talked about production issues with the iWear being resolved. And I just want to make sure I understand that statement versus your follow-on statement, that you are not going to really be producing in fall until the end of this month. What’s taking place over the next couple of weeks that, I guess why don’t you start doing it today if all the production issues have been solved?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Yes, we aren’t doing it today actually, Jim. What’s happening is this – the parts and everything are starting to ramp on to the plant floor so it’s just like everything is hard to just instantly turn the pump on as it works. We are also coming up to speed on the plant floor with a team and the process on how the assemblies go by it’s just going to continue to grow and get faster and faster from here on out.

Jim McIlree

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Good, so the issue right now isn’t more of parts or how to put it together it is not just more of the pre-production staging everything. Getting everything is set and the processes correctly staged.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

So we have processes in place and they are actually functional, we are improving them so that we can do things faster. We have a certain number of people available to run the lines and as we are expanding we need a few more of those to go faster and so yes, that is correct. It’s not…

Jim McIlree

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Okay.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

There is no issues with parts availability and those kinds of things it’s just kind of turning the engine on as it were.

Jim McIlree

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Got it, got it, great. And the confidence you are expressing in the M300 production issues. I know it’s a different product, we have different components and all that. But can you just talk a little bit about why you are so confident that you are not going to have production issues with the 300?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

So this is not just fair thing, current partners and all. The folks that we’re working with our – they are really very good one. The product it’s complex with the M300, don’t get me wrong, but the products that we’re having a hard time with today, it’s much, much simpler for the M300. We’re seeing the stuff being done. It’s much easier to build the M300 than it is iWear just all of those things add up, so we’re right on track with the product and we’re not seeing the kinds of issues frankly that we saw with the iWear.

Jim McIlree

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

You are talking about different…

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

I’m sorry. I was just going to say we’re ahead of schedule on things like tuning in the lights…

Jim McIlree

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Yes.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

It’s great. And it hasn’t been the case for the iWear.

Jim McIlree

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Right. I got that. Thank you. You talked about different stages of the rollout for the 300. I’m wondering if there is also different pricing associated with those rollout stages. Are you giving introductory pricing to the customers who are getting the initial engineering units and then pricing similar more or less for that next stage? And then when you go to full scale production again what happens to the pricing on those units similar just more or less though that’s been earlier than first two stages.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

So these first units that come off the line and the partners that we’re working with some of them are getting different levels of support. And so the prices range from $4,500 to $10,000 a piece for the unit. So but it also comes with a little bit of support on the – and at the same time. So yes, these first units are much more expensive, but we’re getting the advantage of being able to be an upfront and for some of these companies, they’ve invested an awful a lot over the years and that’s a very small price to pay to get your hands on these first units. The second round, the DVT will be less expensive than the production units are what they are.

Jim McIlree

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Okay.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Hi, how are you guys doing?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Good, Matt.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

So you guys are reiterating that the cash balance on hand is sufficient to get through the next 12 months. Can you kind of I mean you are not going to exactly share your plan, but there is a lot of this is going to be conversion of existing iWear inventory and the M100 inventory into cash and then growing the rest of the base of product revenue. And can you just kind of walk through why you are confident in that projection.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Matt, that’s an important part of the assumptions in our plan. I mean it falls, stage of the iWear production issues are behind us. I’ve told you we have two-thirds of our $3.3 million mostly we want inventory balance is iWear products. So effectively any sales with that are almost pure cash, I mean yes, there is the container – our current batch filled out so be a little more investment, but those generate a lot more cash and normally they’ve read because we have all these to start, similarly with the M100, we have those an inventory and stock and converting and selling that through its cash. Of course Paul alluded there could be some optimal price, good carrying adjustments, but we’re still very confident that, the next average selling prices will be – all be profitable in that basis. Clearly the rest of the plan requires us to achieve our product milestones and introduction. And to see some reasonable level of customer take up based on the forecasts, sales pipeline that we’ve been provided by our sales team. And that’s effectively that the plan got going – we don’t have any large capital expenditures plan, as I mentioned. I mean we have the, one the 300, the 3000 products. We know what we’re going to doing for the next three years. From that standpoint but I mean these, the 300 and the 3000 of these should be the only two new products we see from Vuzix this year. And we feel that working with them, those assumptions, we had to continue following. Ultimately if the business exploded because its finally running up the hockey stick that we’re all hoping for. There may be a need for some additional working capital. But when you have a pipeline that’s backed by purchase orders and financing that is much easier and there are sources to do types the dumbness require further dilution to our existing shareholders.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay. So the racing here you mentioned for drone’s form this seems like a kind of a new area. I know there’s some excitement that I’ve seen on this in our ESPN they signed a deal with them to kind of get this, bring this product to light. Can you kind of extrapolate how big this opportunity is potentially for the iWear like how many racers are – how far this industry expands kind of into the market as potential opportunity to – for your sell through initiative of the iWear?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

I don’t have all of the statistics on the size of the market broken down by high-end versus low-end, versus lasers, versus the enterprise market, because there’s opportunity in all of that, it’s not just about drone racing. The cool thing about drone racing bit though is you are right, it’s ESPN sponsor is trying to stop, it gets the iWear a lot of attention in the world. And as I said we’ll be hearing – you guys will be hearing more about those kinds of things here shortly. But just in the enterprise space even they use drones for inspection purposes significantly. And having this low latency links important there’s some partners that Vuzix is working with that are all about low licensee HDMI video transmission. Most of the systems that are out there today are these old style analog radios 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz that are noisy they don’t have good range. And our digital system that’s really fast as it’s really the next step in the marketplace. If you have followed the marketplace of ours it’s really exploding, it’s being – drones are being used all over the place. I don’t have a direct correlation of how much marketplace that represents for Vuzix yet. I can tell you it’s just one of many new markets that iWear will started to be introduced into. Sorry, I can’t get more granular than that just yet, Matt but we’ll learn more here over the next couple of months to gain on some share where we can.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay. So just getting a little bit more into the iWear, so you guys originally were thinking you can sell 10,000 units which is roughly a pace of 200 units a week. With production ramping up, when would we expect kind of a more mature sell through for the iWear? Is this going to be the end of Q2, or are we thinking more of a Q3 event, just from a timing and looking at the cash and when we are anticipating some more receipts?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

So without doubt iWear in Q2 is going to be significantly bigger than it is in Q1. But Q3 and Q4 I’m confident that all of them will be sold.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

I mean we believe we’re taking you through the consumer side that products like the iWear tend to have a fall seasonal push, when we get into the gift buying season for both. So we expect Q4 to like Q3 to be the strongest sales period. As far as the 10,000 units go, yes that’s our first batch we haven’t – the company is not committed to a second batch at this stage. And we haven’t made decisions on what future generations would be iWear might look like. If and not they go ahead at this, because they have other products in the pipeline that potentially could be a replacement to the iWear, that we feel might be more compelling to competitors.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay. So just moving on to the M300 you mentioned a 194 known opportunities in the pipeline, and as far as, I think, you did mention this purchase orders that you’ve already received. I mean how far – if you think of a big company you’ve mentioned the DHL, like how far order are they looking at this opportunity? Is this something they are staging for the next year, next two years, like how far is the visibility to a customer like the DHL or anybody else, how far is the visibility towards deployment and putting these products into use?

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

194 mentioned accounts are accounts we expect to start doing stuff in 2016. So those are not – there’s may more accounts that we sell thousands of these things and you can go down the list and I’ll reach to the bunch of them and you never know where we’re going to be or when, but those 194 are accounts that we talk with frequently that are planning for them between now and at the end of the year.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

But not in a company like DHL would be thinking about a little over 200,000 employees I mean they said they can see ultimately down the road may be half their employees using products like wearables, wear glasses. Clearly there’s how much Vuzix might ultimately get about and the timing and deployment to do that, I mean, training and deploying all this equipment on that scale requires a lot of resources. And we can take these large enterprises one to two years to deploy in a costly network which consist of distribution hubs all around the world where a smaller places they can go quicker. So I mean Energia Logistics [ph] the customer and their buyers, integrator, consultants, they deal with and that’s not something that Vuzix does. We provide the tools and the products. Like I said it can take at least two years to deploy [indiscernible].

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay. And just to reiterate so you don’t the proof-of-concept so the M300 has gone through that process with these folks so it’s really not – they don’t have to sell some new device, and integrate it, and test it, and kind of trying to make sure it meets the specifications for their network and security at this point. It looks like this is really just going to be the next generation so there won’t be a delay from that standpoint, is that a good way to look at it?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

, : Some of them are smaller companies and their life is depending on the fact that it’s ready to go because they need the revenues to be in business even. So its a lot of motivated people, folks out that have invested a lot that are just waiting to get the product to roll.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay. I still have a few more follow-ups and I’ll let some others to join in here. So looking at your M100s in the field are those units approaching replacement timeframe now that they’ve been in the – some of them been in the field for a couple of years?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

I think the way to look at replacement there is those folks are looking at the same, I need to get the next one because it will help me with what didn’t work well on the M100. So yes, and then they all want the newest version of the OS, et cetera. So, we have a pilot guides that we look at that are more than 1D, 2D et cetera that are M100 sort of upgrade folks.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay. And then looking at your – I’m sorry.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

We don’t – in the pipeline that we build here, we don’t have a large number of units that haven’t might fit into that bucket, what we try to do here was go with our known accounts that we believe for sure are rolling. As opposed to maybe if we do a lot of marketing, we could get some of these upgrades kind of a thing.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay. And then on the waveguide side, you’re talking some multiple partners, you think are going to be ramping up some volume in July, I mean is this looking at your mix for Q4 between the three products potentially four if you include waveguide between the M300, the M3000 the iWear and waveguide. What type of long-term mix do you guys anticipate for revenue? I mean, do we look at the Waveguide as a significant opportunity long-term or kind of how does hold that kind of looked and come together?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

One of the talks, we didn’t talk about from a revenue perspective is the potential OEM, NRE generation with some partners that Vuzix is working with that. And that will also add to the revenue stream from that until the end of the year. The Waveguide themselves though a standalone OEM is going to be – would be something that you see earlier in 2017. The fall will be roughly representative of M300’s iWear and the start of the M3000 Vuzix as waveguide those products.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay, so just to reiterate on that the NRE for the Waveguides, do you expect that before Q4 some sort of contribution of cash through those relationships?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Yes.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay. Are you able to share any sort of – significant or we’re looking at a minor contribution or is there any color you can add there?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Not really at this juncture, sorry.

Matt Margolis

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Okay, all right thanks again for your time and I look forward to seeing these products start to ship in earnest here.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Thank you, Matt.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question.

Amit Dayal

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

Thank you, good morning, Paul and Grant. Just I’ll be quick. So the second quarter revenues, should we expect these to come in sort of in line with what we saw in the first quarter given that the two key products as to being ramped up?

Grant Russell

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

Sorry, Amit, did you say similar to the Q1 revenues or…

Amit Dayal

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

Yes, Q1 2016 revenues. Just want to set some of the realistic expectations for investors in terms of how Q2 might play out given that you are in the process of ramping everything up still?

Grant Russell

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

We expect Q2 will be better than Q1, but we won’t – the M300 is might going to be a real contributor to that and it’s going to be M100 sales and iWear sales. And that’s the main revenue source of Q2 2016.

Amit Dayal

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

And in terms of getting sort of revenues for the remainder of the year just to kind of summarize your comments. So it looks like Q3 you could see more iWear coming through and then Q4 the M300 and the iWear. Is that the way to look at it?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

Yes, I mean, we will have M300 revenues in Q3, they will come as the M300 entered production in August, September, but clearly in Q4 we’ll have the M300, the iWear assuming with [indiscernible] then the M3000 coming on.

Amit Dayal

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

So there was a press release out a few weeks ago in a nation through the iWear production solution et cetera. It looks like there are some new features and improvements. Are you changing pricing on the iWear? Is it the same pricing? And could you remind us what this is going to be sold for?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

Currently, we’re not changing the price of the iWear itself. However, when you – for instance, if you entertain going into a market like the drone space there is some accessories that makes sense to bundle with the iWear that are relatively inexpensive that would allow Vuzix to yes improve – increase the price of the iWear. And we’ve had an opportunity to explore in that space now. We’ve gone to see some of the top racing guys and some of the drone lead folks. And their opinion is our lower priced product is significantly better than competing high – much higher priced products. So, you will see that – I believe in the drone space, you will see at least drone offerings that are priced a bit higher.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

And also, I think, we’re not necessarily going to rule it out longer-term, but right now we want to bring up some of our task that’s tied up in the iWear inventory. And I would like to point out that we aren’t priced less than a lot of less than 80C other competitors, the only products. I mean we’re not a high-end VR system, but you have a hard time telling those people, but actually price limits them we didn’t represent a lot better value for the similar pricing.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

We’re going to see. Well, we certainly discuss it, okay. The things starts to look pretty darn good, but let’s prove [indiscernible] get $1 million or $2 million back out of inventory then we can look at longer-term more mature pricing.

Amit Dayal

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

Understood. And just last question, so what happens to the M100 once the M300 is fully launched and you guys are marketing that aggressively. Is there an application for the M100 once the M300 is in the market or is this going to be phased out?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

We expect that the M100 will be phased out.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

I mean we could build more, but we don’t currently intend to do that. We do have product plans on the drawing board for a lower priced consumer – lower more price sensitive that I can just mark last product in the future. So that’s probably what will we do whereas respectively replace the M100 with a model, but that’s 2017 timeframe.

Amit Dayal

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

Got it. Thank you. That’s all I have.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Amit Dayal of Rodman & Renshaw. Please proceed with your question

Thanks, Amit.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Ross Silver of Vista Partners. Please proceed with your question.

Ross Silver

Analyst · Ross Silver of Vista Partners. Please proceed with your question

Hi, Paul and Grant. And this has been the best Vuzix conference call, I think that’s even been on and I mean my head is spinning from the excitement just because of all that’s been put out there. So my question is around the M300 and how to talk about 194 potential customers are really going to shipped especially I mean how you – sort of my head falling off with excitement here I mean how do I think about the pull out of the M300 and kind of put expectation or sort of expectations you can going to put out there with the launch given there seems to be so much demand for this product. How should we on the Street thinking this?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Ross Silver of Vista Partners. Please proceed with your question

Yes, you can ask yourself, why didn’t we make more and give everybody one right. And the issue there is these first units are going to key partners and it comes with a couple of things. I mean they are giving us feedback on the one hand, on the another hand Vuzix is intimately involved with these folks with integration, et cetera, on their side, and there’s a limit to how much current stack and support doing that plus get the products rolling at the same time because the big win comes when we are in full production, right. So we chose to be very selective with the partners that we are picking in. So of those 50 you can rest assure there were folks that represent volume opportunities, the larger and the more short-term opportunities. Those guys that we are working with that – in 2017 it could be massive, but they are not getting units now because it’s a longer-term thing for them. So that’s why we picked that number and you can think of those first 50 as pretty key accounts. An exciting bit about that is in many cases there’s going to be press releases associated with some of the activities that are going on around what they are doing, there’ll be some – I think some pretty exciting news between now and before we’re in production.

Ross Silver

Analyst · Ross Silver of Vista Partners. Please proceed with your question

Okay. Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for taking my question, again a phenomenal call. Thanks guys.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Ross Silver of Vista Partners. Please proceed with your question

Ross, it’d be really phenomenal when Vuzix is actually executing against that. I agree it’s exiting right now, and over the summer I think it’s going to be even more fun.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of [indiscernible]. Please proceed with your question.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Hello, Paul. Hello, Grant. Gladly I’m seeing your progress and I have four questions. One is, you mentioned the Korean – you’re going to Korea the next week to launch 2,000 products. I was wondering if that the waveguide?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

We are working – yes, you can say even like that, sure. It’s also the launch of our – the dealing for our Cobra engine associated with it.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Which is why I don’t related to…

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Correct.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay. So it's actually do you launch the program which is designed in Korea?

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

They are building for our design.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

I see. The second question is about the iWear. And you mentioned about the ESPN marketing. And I was wondering how much you are planning to spend on the marketing?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

So we have already allocated dollars in there – in accounts and kind of prepaid things with some of these marketing efforts that we're talking about that will finally be executed against. As I said before, it's an exciting product and people like it, but these changes, I mean, people in our office that when they put their headset on and they are doing the VR stuff they are ducking even because they’re solely into that. So we haven’t had that until now. And we didn’t want to go out to the press and prematurely when the product wasn’t good enough in our mind. So it starts now and maybe Grant can talk a bit more to the dollars that might be associated with some of those activities.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

I mean it’s not significant from the standpoint of marketing those are around like a large [indiscernible] company like [indiscernible]. I mean its low six figures, it’s targeted social media reviewers. So I mean we are going to insure the product with our PR agency get them to the right hands. So we can hopefully obtain good views and it’s going to be a fairly or upwards network – innovator-driven program around it, it gets [indiscernible] we want to get the product selling and see that we’re not – we don’t believe in selling massive amounts of dollars to it. So we see a lot of the product stands up today.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

But I don’t think we’re going need to because it refers to space right now, that’s hot. Second, it’s an amazing product, it’s going to get great review. Third, with activities like these things that we're doing with drone approaching [indiscernible] point it got great visibility. So there’s a lot of gorilla stuff that we’re doing I guess what they that call the real marketing at the same time. And in fact you see a lot of it related to those kinds of things. You can do a lot with a little money if you’re creative. You guys still there? Hello?

Operator

Operator

It seems our question line disconnected. We will take the next question from Abish Patel, a Private Investor. Please proceed with your question.

Abish Patel

Analyst

Hey, good morning, Paul and Grant. Thank you for taking my call. I just have a quick question regarding the M300s. I know you said the demand is out pacing the supply for the initial rollout for the M300s, how many units are you guys looking to rollout with?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Grant you want to answer that one? How many units are we rolling out with on the M300? The production queue, how many are we building – planning to build?

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

Our first production batch is 10,000.

Abish Patel

Analyst

Okay. And you feel like the demand is quite a bit higher than that?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

The rate at which we’re going to be building those 10,000 pieces versus what we’re getting back from our customer base right now, will be behind.

Abish Patel

Analyst

Okay. And those 10,000 when do you anticipate having those ready to ship out by?

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Well, they start in the August-September timeframe. We have the ability to pull in as demand requires it. So it could all be sold before the end of the year, but I’m not making that level of commitment just yet.

Abish Patel

Analyst

Okay. And finally as far as the revenue guidance did you – how much do you guys expect, or you have not given that guidance for 2016.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

No, we’re not currently issuing the guidance for the balance of the year.

Abish Patel

Analyst

Okay, I understand. Well, that’s all I have for now. Thank you very much and hope you guys – wish you guys all the best.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

Thanks, Abish. I would offer one piece of guidance it should not look like Q1.

Grant Russell

Analyst · Matt Margolis of Wall Street Forensics. Please proceed with your question

That is your part.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time during the Q&A session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to management for closing remarks.

Paul Travers

Analyst · Chardan Capital. Please proceed with your question

So as everybody can see it's exciting right now at Vuzix. We’re right on the cost budgeting starting to really crank up. There’s going to be lots of press announcements coming here shortly as the M300 rolls, our partners get units, I think there’s going to be a lot of exciting catalysts that will get people excited about Vuzix and where we're going. And you should see a continuous flow of that between now and the end of the year. So Q2 is a transition point for the company and we're looking for the forward to the future and we look forward to everybody coming to our open house because as they say seeing is believing, and we've got some really amazing stuff to share with the globe, with the world now. Thank you. Andrew?

Andrew Haag

Analyst

Yes, I'd like to thank all of the Vuzix shareholders for their participation on today's call and their support of the company. This concludes Vuzix’s first quarter 2016 financial call. And as Paul stated, hope to see you all at the shareholder event in Rochester on June 20. Thank you again.