Acorn Energy, Inc.

and only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Tracy Clifford, CFO of Acorn Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome everyone to today's conference call. As a reminder, many of the statements made in today's prepared remarks or in response to your questions may be forward-looking. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties. For example, the operating and financial performance of the company years is subject to factors such as risks associated with disruptions to business operations and customer demand resulting from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Executing the company's operating strategy, maintaining high renewal rates, growing its customer base, changes in technology, changes in the competitive environment, financial and economic risks, as well as having access to sufficient capital for growth. Forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs as well as assumptions made using information currently available to management pursuant to the safe harbor of revisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. There are no assurances that ACORN or Omnimetrics will be able to achieve their growth goals in 2020 nor in future years. The company also undertakes no obligation to disclose any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date made. A full discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect the company is included in risk factors on ACORN's Form 10-K as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. Now with that, I'll hand the call over to Jan Lowe, CEO of ACORN and acting CEO of Omnimetrics. Jan?

Thank you, Tracy, and good morning to those joining our call today. Before I review our operating performance in 2019, I do want to point out that Acorn has built a strong balance sheet, a strong cash position of $1.6 million over the past few years, and we believe we are well positioned to weather the brunt of the business impact over the next several months. I would also like to remind investors of the unique and recurring nature of our monitoring business and its cash flows, with historic renewal rates of 90% plus, gross profit margin in the near term, it is important to note that the value of our remote monitoring and control services business becomes even more evident in an environment where personnel and field activities are being disrupted by travel restrictions, illness, or other factors. For this reason, we continue to believe that the market adoption of IoT technology broadly will return to its long-term growth trend as the pandemic subsides. We are also taking active steps to adjust our cost structure and to spend certain activity to minimize current expenses and to shore up our ability to endure this challenging environment and to leverage any market disruption that may occur. Like all of you, we are working to understand the depth and breadth of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and therefore it's really not possible to comment with any greater specificity at this time. Let us now turn to our review of ACORN and Omnimetrics 2019 performance, following which we'll open the call to your questions. In the fourth quarter and full year of 2019, Omnimetrics extended its record of revenue growth, improved gross margin, and achieved its third consecutive quarter of positive operating profits. Omnimetrics Q4 2019 before 2018. For the full year 2019, revenue grew 8% to $5.5 for the hard work of our team to achieve these gains. As many of you know, we use cash basis sales as a performance tracking measure to supplement revenue and give us another view of our growth in a given period. Pursuant to GAAP, we recognize revenue from our hardware sales over three years and typically over one year for our monitoring contracts, even though the cash is generally received upfront. Cash basis sales therefore provides visibility on the level of business that was completed in a period and therefore a window on relative growth performance. Cash sales for 2019 were $6 million compared to $5.6 million in 2019 and 2018, an increase of 7%. Our pie generation or PG segment sales, which relate to monitoring standby generators, were 13% on cash basis in 2019 versus 2018. In our smaller cathodic protection, Sales on a cash basis declined by 21% due to the impact of turnover on our sales staff and not being fully staffed throughout the year. Sales staff turnover was a combination of staff departures and changes initiated by management to strengthen our team. In Q3, we completed several new sales hires, and earlier this year we hired a new director of sales, Daniel Hess. Dan's extensive and very relevant out-of-sales experience was reviewed in yesterday's press release. Notably, Dan has over 25 years of experience successfully executing growth initiatives within the telecom, wireless, analytics, and IoT spaces, most recently with Sierra Wireless and its NumerNet subsidiary. We believe Dan has the right experience and ability to drive sales of new products and to address new market opportunities for Omnimetrics. We are now fully staffed building a solid pipeline of customer trials that we hope to convert to deployments later in 2020 and thereafter. Reflecting the team's progress, we currently have four times the number of customer trials in progress than we had at this time last year. Moving to power generation, historically our business has been favorably impacted by disasters and emergencies, such as hurricanes and storms, that disrupt power systems and raise awareness of the importance and value of remote generator monitoring. For example, we provide remote general monitoring for thousands of hospitals and other critical health care facilities across North America, and we stand ready to provide support should additional remote monitoring services be required to support the health care response to the current pandemic. Turning back to our improvements in gross margins throughout 2019, I wanted to underscore that this achievement is not only the result of a favorable product mix of higher margin monitoring revenues, but also due to deliberate initiatives that we have pursued in recent years to develop and bring to market innovative new hardware and software offerings that deliver enhanced functionality, as well as more efficient, lower-cost designs that support our margin growth profile. Next-generation products that have supported gross margin improvements include our Hero 2 rectifier monitors and our AirGuard industrial air compressor monitors. We also are about to launch an innovative new enunciated product that provides status updates on critical electrical systems. We have a new software product that we expect to announce in the second half of this year. Now I'll turn the call back to Tracy Clifford, our CFO, to go over the financial highlights. Tracy?