Asensus Surgical, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Ascensus Surgical second quarter 2022 business and financial update conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mark Klossner, Westwick Partners. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Ascensus Surgical Second Quarter 2022 Business and Financial Update Conference Call. On the call with me today are Anthony Fernando, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Shamiz Rampertab, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to caution listeners that certain information discussed by management during this conference call, including any guidance provided, are forward-looking statements covered under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied by our forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with the company's business, including any impact from the COVID-19 pandemic and other geopolitical factors beyond our control. The company undertakes no obligation to update the information provided on this call or discussion of risks and uncertainties associated with the Ascensus Surgical business. I encourage you to review the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the 2021 Form 10-K filed in February 2022 and the Form 10-Q expected to be filed later today, and any other filings we make with the SEC. During this call, we will also present certain non-GAAP financial information related to adjusted net loss attributable to common stockholders and the adjusted net loss per common share attributable to common stockholders. Management believes that these non-GAAP financial measures taken in conjunction with U.S. GAAP financial measures provide useful information for both management and investors by excluding certain non-cash and other expenses that are not indicative of the company's core operating results. Management uses non-GAAP measures to compare our performance relative to forecast and strategic plans, to benchmark our performance externally against competitors, and for certain compensation decisions. Reconciliations from U.S. GAAP to non-GAAP results are presented in the tables accompanying our earnings release, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Ascensus Surgical's President and Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Fernando.

Thanks, Mark, and thank you all for joining us today. On today's call, I will provide an overview of our recent accomplishments and then ask Shamice to review our financial performance, after which I will discuss our performance during the second quarter, as well as our priorities for the rest of 2022, before turning to Q&A. Before turning the call over to Shamice, I would like to provide an overview of our recent performance. Similar to many companies with surgical procedure businesses, we experienced a number of macro headwinds during the quarter. We have continued to see procedure volumes be negatively impacted by hospital staffing shortages and inflationary pressures. Despite those headwinds, we delivered a strong 34% year-over-year increase in Senhans case volumes, largely a result of significant growth in our European sites. This performance continues to validate the utility of Senhans among surgeons across a variety of geographies, and surgical specialty and continue to feed the augmented intelligence development engine which will help deliver the intelligent capabilities of performance-guided surgery. We also experienced disruptions to our commercial efforts as hospital staffing, capital purchasing trends, supply chain challenges, and the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe impacted our ability to place new systems during the quarter. Even with this, we have installed one system year-to-date and continue to be encouraged by the development of our pipeline with two additional system orders on our books that we expect to be installed within the next few months. During the second quarter, we attended the Society of Robotic Surgery Conference, or SRS, at the end of June, where we had several presentations on the clinical performance of SENHANCE and our vision for performance-guided surgery. Additionally, Dr. Amit Trivedi, the chair of surgery at Hackensack Meridian Health Pasquack Valley Medical Center, led a breakfast symposium in which he described his successful experience with the ISU performing sleeve gastrectomies and his overall experience with performance-guided surgery in bariatrics as he has performed over 300 cases using the Sennheis system. In July, we attended the 30th International Congress of European Association for Endoscopic Surgery, or EAES, in Krakow, Poland. We participated in Meet the Expert sessions throughout the event in which our team shared clinical insights and demonstrated the features of the Sennheis system. These were both great opportunities to show the impressive capabilities that Senhan's system and the ISU have to offer. As it is only one of two approved multiport systems in the U.S., the Senhan system offers truly unique capabilities such as haptic feedback, 3mm instrumentation, and the ISU, the industry's only digital augmented intelligence platform available for use. With that, I will turn the call over to Shamif for a financial update.