Acorn Energy, Inc.

As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. Now I'll hand the conference to Tracy Clifford, CFO of Acorn Energy and COO of its Omnimetrics Operating Subsidiary. Ms. Clifford, please begin.

Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Let me first remind you all that the following remarks and answers to questions may be forward-looking. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties. The operating and financial performance of the company in 2024 and future periods is subject to risks associated with potential disruptions to business operations and customer demand, risks related to the company executing its operating plan, maintaining high customer renewal rates, and growing its customer base, as well as from changes in technology, competitive landscape, and in the financial and economic environments. Forward-looking statements are based on management's beliefs and the assumptions using currently available data and information pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. There's no assurances that the company will be able to achieve its goals. The company undertakes no obligation to revise or disclose revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances that occur after today. A full discussion of risks and uncertainties which may affect the company is included under risk factors in our 10-K filed at the SEC and available on our website, acornenergy.com. Now I'll pass the call over to Jan Loeb, CEO of Acorn and Omnimetrics, for further discussion. Jan?

Thank you, Tracy, and thank you all for joining today's call. I'm very proud of the record results Acorn has achieved so far this year, with revenue rising 46.1% to $3. million in Q3 and up 28.4% to 7.46 million for the first nine months of 2024, which approaches our full year 2023 revenue of 8.06 million. Our strong revenue performance drove Q3 24 EPS to 29 cents up from one penny in Q3 2023 and first nine months EPS of 42 cents also up from one cent in the year-ago period. Our performance is a direct result of hard work and discipline of our team, which for the past few years has helped us build an efficient, high-margin business comprised of annual recurring remote monitoring revenue, along with growing revenue from the sales of our proprietary monitoring hardware products. Having achieved profitability in the business last year, we are focused on building on the success of our base business with a model, that can deliver meaningful operating leverage on incremental revenue. We had discussed in our call last quarter that we had executed a material contract that we expected to have a significant impact on our financial results for the second half of the year. Our Q3 2024 revenue benefited in part from the initial shipment of monitoring hardware pursuant to this material contract, which is a two-year, approximate $5 million deal to provide remote monitoring hardware and services for cell tower generators for a leading national wireless telecom provider. We recognized $724,000 in hardware revenue from the contract in Q3. The balance of the contract, which includes hardware bundled with only the first year of monitoring services, is expected to be recognized over the balance of the two-year contract. It's worth noting that even excluding this contract, our Q3 revenue increased double digits over the prior year period. Omnimetrics was awarded the contract in a competitive process, which we believe is the superiority of our solution, our ongoing investments in technology enhancements and cybersecurity, our ability to monitor all the customers' generated brands, and our strong commitment to providing U.S.-based live customer service with key differentiators and are being selected. We are now working very hard to ensure the successful rollout and execution of this program so that it can serve as a powerful case study for other large commercial and industrial opportunities. The $5 million contract covers the purchase of thousands of hardware monitors plus only the first year of monitoring services. Importantly, this contract will materially increase our total number of connections and correspondingly expand our base of annual recurring monitoring revenue. As a reminder, we are fortunate to have a 90 plus percent renewal rate on monitoring, which is partially due to the high cost of switching once equipment is installed. Also, we believe that this customer relationship provides the potential for further expansion or penetration, assuming we execute well on the initial contract for five to 10,000 towers. which is only a portion of the national cell tower footprint. We believe that there continues to be substantial opportunity for growth in our book of business and our number of connected devices, both with this customer and with other large commercial and industrial customers. In a moment, I'll discuss some key factors that are driving demand for our services currently and into the future. In order to be situated in a position of strength, When RFP opportunities arise, we consistently work on objectives to elevate our competitive advantage. In the past year, we have made additional investments and reallocated resources within the company to better support an expanding base of monitoring endpoints. This strategy included expanding our IT department to enable us to timely respond to customer requests for enhanced functionality and customer reporting and to continue to work on technology to be included in the new generation of our monitoring hardware. and developing new tech support tools for our customers to facilitate the ease of installation process for our hardware. As we've discussed in prior calls, we launched our updated user interface we call OmniView 2 or OV2 that provides enhanced navigation as well as useful self-reporting features including air quality index data. Under EPA regulations, business can be fined for operating generators on bad air quality days. The new air quality data available in OV2 can facilitate regulatory reporting and compliance, which is a valuable attribute to offer our customers. It is important to reiterate that our solutions provide environmental benefits as well as compelling return on investment, while ensuring backup power is ready when needed. Remote monitoring eliminates much of the cost and environmental impact of sending technicians out into the field for periodic inspections of backup generators and minor failures of backup generators, often to remote locations. In addition, remote control services such as demand response can provide users and new efficient generators with grid operator incentives by allowing their generators to be turned on automatically and remotely in times of excess electricity demand. We see backup power generation coupled with 24-7 remote monitoring and control solutions as a secular growth trend that is being driven by increasing incidence of widespread power outages caused by extreme weather events, combined with the vulnerability of our stress and aging electric grid. It is supported by the growth of remote work and the importance of having access to reliable power. Tragically, across the U.S., hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires have left millions of people and their businesses without power for weeks. And unfortunately, many experts predict such impacts to grow both in frequency and strength. Adding to these challenges is the substantial growth in electricity demand It is required to support artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the proliferation of electric vehicles. In summary, we believe we have developed industry-leading solutions that help solve growing problems for customers across the U.S. We have advanced our business to profitability, and our disciplined business model enables roughly 50% of each incremental revenue dollar to drop to EBITDA. We expect further significant contribution to our bottom line from our large wireless contract, and we are pursuing a range of growth initiatives across the business that we believe can contribute to our growth and financial performance. It's an exciting time for our team and our company, and we appreciate your interest. To help spread awareness of our story, Acorn will be participating in the Virtual Investor Summit Conference on Thursday, November 21st. So please join that webcast if you can and help spread the word. Let me now turn the call over to Tracy Clifford, our CFO and COO, for her financial review and insights. Tracy?