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spk03: Good day and welcome to Biotricity's fiscal fourth quarter 2022 financial results conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Walter Pinto, Managing Director at KCSA Strategic Communications. Please go ahead, sir.
spk08: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Biotricity fiscal 2022 fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. As a reminder, Biotricity's fiscal fourth quarter ended on March 31st, 2022. All figures presented for this period will reflect that end date. This morning, we issued our fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results press release and filed our form 10-K with the SEC and posted on Edgar. A copy of this press release and access to the 10-K is available in the investor relations section of our website. Before we begin our formal remarks, I'd like to remind listeners that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements that reflect management's current views with respect to future events. As such, statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Biotricity does not undertake any update to update any forward-looking statements except as required. I'd now like to turn the call over to Biotricity's founder and CEO, Dr. Waqas Al-Sadiq. Please go ahead.
spk01: Thank you, Walter, and thank you, everyone, for joining today. Welcome to our fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. Fiscal 2022 was a pivotal year for our company as we made significant strides in our product development and commercialization strategy, positioning our company well on its way to becoming the all-in-one go-to solution for cardiac diagnostics and disease management. In fiscal 2022, the majority of our revenue was derived from BioFlux, our high-precision, single-unit mobile cardiac telemetry device that provides real-time monitoring and transmission of the patient's ambulatory ECG diagnostics. We are pleased not only with our revenue growth year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, but the margin expansion we are seeing due to our model and economies of scale. Revenue year-over-year grew 126% from 3.4 million in fiscal year 2021 to 7.7 million in fiscal year 2022. Revenue for the fiscal 2022 fourth quarter grew 81% from $1.19 million for the 2021 fiscal fourth quarter to $2.15 million for the 2022 fiscal fourth quarter. Furthermore, gross profit margins increased to 60% for the full year and 67% for the fourth quarter. Our recurring revenue model provides technology to doctors and providers who can prescribe and hook up patients with our device. This creates a more streamlined process for the patient and doctor while also creating an additional revenue stream for the doctor. Despite COVID restrictions and more recently macroeconomic challenges, as of today, we have over 300 centers across 27 states with over 1,500 cardiologists using our BioFlux product, which is a significant amount of growth in a short period of time. For moderate to severe cases, remote real-time monitoring is a life-saving tool. However, it is critical we capture the life cycle of the patient and follow them through their cardiac care journey, Through our internal innovation capabilities, we set out to build a complete ecosystem that fills the current gaps in cardiac care. We have recently launched two new products as a part of this comprehensive ecosystem, BioTray and BioHeart. First, after receiving FDA 510 clearance in January 2022, in April, we commercially launched BioTray, our FDA approved wireless wearable cardiac monitoring device. BioTray is a revolutionary holter technology that represents the future of remote patient monitoring and the delivery of real-time diagnostic data. It serves as a three-lead device designed to continuously record ECG data. This provides a significant advantage over a conventional one-lead patch holter monitor, which requires longer analysis and diagnosis time. We began taking pre-orders for BioTray in February and are currently experiencing strong demand from new and existing customers. As important, we also launched BioHeart, a cardiac monitor now directly available to consumers. This device offers the same continuous heart monitoring technology used by physicians, allowing patients to manage heart conditions with retrospective snapshots and long-term data collection in a true state-of-the-art manner. BioHeart is currently available for purchase by consumers at www.bioheart.com for $199. We are excited to roll out our ecosystem. For the first time, cardiologists will have a suite of products available for their patients, all within one portal. We have purposefully designed our ecosystem in a way that when we bring on new customers, they have full access to the portal, allowing seamless data collection as they adopt new devices during their cardiac care journey. With three products in the market today, we have successfully increased our total addressable market from $1 billion to approximately $25 billion. More importantly, we have designed scalability with minimal cost to our business model as we can now offer additional products and services to current clients for little to no increase in marketing spend. During the second half of 2022, we look forward to introducing BioCare, our virtual clinic and disease management platform, enabling clinicians to provide outstanding patient care remotely, ensuring at-risk patients and those needing remote cardiac monitoring do not have to leave the safety of their home. This user-friendly platform ensures seamless integration to the clinic's current workflow, saving time and reducing costs. Monthly care is a large market opportunity, roughly $35 billion. We have seen other industries, such as diabetes, be very successful with this model, but no one has attempted to execute this model in the cardiac space. We are the first. We are at the beginning of this journey. Our newly expanded product portfolio, combined with the upcoming BioCare clinic platform, will enable us to enter this market in the near future. Integrating our BioKit with BioCare will provide us with the opportunity to capture this market. BioKit and BioCare capitalize on BioTricity's focus on a technology-as-a-service business model, creating a profitable revenue stream for cardiac care providers and ultimately driving revenue for the company. Cardiac disease often afflicts patients for the rest of their lives and is the leading cause of mortality across the globe. The current approach to care is often disjointed and unintegrated. Biatricity's technology assists the patient throughout their cardiac care journey, beginning with diagnostics, monitoring, and lifestyle management. This comprehensive and integrated approach could help solve some of the major issues in cardiac care today, in an efficient and cost-effective manner. The significant progress we have made in the last year is a testament to our technological innovation. By combining AI with data and predictive capabilities, we are creating better and faster analytics for preventative patient monitoring and lifestyle management, driving the company towards its goal of becoming the largest and most comprehensive cardiac cloud platform in the world. I would now like to turn the call over to our CFO, John Ayanoglu.
spk10: John? Thank you, Akash.
spk04: During the year ended March 31, 2022, the company revenues totaled $7.7 million, a 126% increase compared to the $3.4 million of the preceding fiscal year. During this period, biotricity incurred a net loss of $30.2 million, a loss per share of 66.5 cents. We devoted and expect to continue to devote significant resources in the areas of sales and marketing and research and development as we build the infrastructure required to support higher sales volumes. The fiscal year ended March 31, 2022, marked the trailing 24-month period of full market release of the BioFlex NCT device, that's mobile cardiac telemetry device, for commercialization. originally launched in limited market release in April 2018 after receiving its second and final required FDA clearance. To commence commercialization, we executed a manufacturing program and ordered device inventory from our FDA-regulated manufacturer. We hired a small and captive sales force with deep experience in cardiac technology sales. Then, at the right time, we expanded our limited market release after identifying potential anchor clients or KOLs, key opinion leaders in the space, who could be early adopters of our technology. By increasing our sales force and geographic footprint, we have since launched sales in 27 U.S. states by March 31, 2022. Gross profit for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022, totaled $4.6 million, yielding a gross profit margin of 60%. That compares to 1.3 million for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021, the preceding year, which had a gross profit margin of 38%. Total operating expenses for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022 were 22.6 million compared to 14.6 million for the previous fiscal year. Our general and administrative expenses for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022 increased to $19.9 million compared to $12.6 million during the prior fiscal year. The increase of $7.3 million was primarily due to the cost of expanding our sales force, product marketing and promotion incurred for our go-to-market efforts, as well as industrial relations spending. This year was marked by the milestone of our NASDAQ listing last August. During the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022, We recorded research and development expenses of $2.7 million compared to $2.1 million for the prior fiscal year. The R&D activity related to existing and new products. In addition, the activity related to engineering the future product enhancement with a pipeline that continually increased during the year that just ended March 31, 2022. Biotricity ended its fiscal year with $12 million in cash. We remain focused and confident in our fundamental business strategy to innovate, commercialize, capture share of a fast-expanding marketplace, and grow revenues. We are building to achieve strong revenue growth. We believe that business has greater potential for that growth. We expect to continue disrupting the cardiac marketplace with our devices and Biosphere cloud-based subscription services. I would now like to turn the call back over to Lacoste for his closing comments. Thank you, Lacoste.
spk01: Thanks, Sean, and thank you again for everyone who has joined our call today. We're more confident than ever that our technology pipeline will produce continued growth over the next few years as we build our cardiac ecosystem to further penetrate and monetize the patient population that we have already touched with our cardiac technologies. For our most advanced remote cardiac monitoring solutions, we expect our services will follow those customers throughout their lifetime to monitor and protect them and ensure they are provided with technologically sophisticated chronic care. Doing so within a recurring revenue business model is a powerful means to scale the business, increasing both revenues and gross margin. We are very pleased with the meaningful progress we made in fiscal 2022. Through innovation, we are now in a position to build a comprehensive cardiac cloud with new and upcoming products that complement BioFlux, providing patients and cardiologists more and better choices based on their individual needs. We are excited for what fiscal years 2023 and 2024 have in store for our company and shareholders. I would now like to open up the call for questions.
spk03: Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Once again, that is star 1 if you would like to ask a question. We'll pause for just one moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal. And we'll take our first question from Frank Takanan of Lake Street Capital Markets.
spk09: Hey, Bacoste. Hey, John. Congrats on the results. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start on the new product initiative. Exciting to hear those are on the market and starting to sell. So maybe just talk a little bit about the complementary nature of BioTray as well as BioHeart2. bioflux and how those three products can work together to be the one-stop shop cardiac care clinic and how the selling has been going into some of your established accounts.
spk01: I have a question, Frank. So, you know, one of the things that we've talked about previously and we really talked about the complementary nature. So, you know, if you talk about the cardiac journey, everything begins in diagnostics, right? So the bioflux product is our flagship. You diagnose the patient. Once we've diagnosed the patient, And real-time monitoring is really a once-in-a-year usage. What ends up happening is that that patient goes off and they either get care delivery, they get a medication, they get some interventional procedure, and then three or six months later, they're back into the office for a follow-up. So, at that point, they're not going to be running diagnostics again unless there is some sort of symptom. They go into disease management or long-term care. We know from the bioflux that these patients have been diagnosed with, you know, one of maybe, you know, 15 to 20 different ailments. And so this is where the biotrain comes in so that if they're coming back and they're feeling something, you can run a simpler diagnostic, which is a Holter solution, which is a passive recorder. And if they are stable and it's really about disease management and managing their medication and making sure that they are stable, the BioHeart product comes in. So really the funnel begins with the BioFlux and then the idea is, okay, let's touch these patients in between because without those complementary products, we're really not going to see that patient for maybe six to nine months. In between, they'll be in and out of the office for sure for follow-up visits, but we didn't have a technological solution to service them. You know, even today, if you talk about, you know, what do we lead with, we still lead with diagnostics, we still lead with bioflux, but now we have these subsequent products that will support the clinic and the patient, you know, once we deploy that.
spk09: Great. Very helpful. Maybe just shifting over to gross margin, nice snapback and margin in the fourth quarter. Could you speak to just some of the moving pieces around input prices, how you were able to snap the margin back the way it did, and how you're kind of thinking about gross margin ranges as you look into the future with some of the inflation uncertainties and other supply chain impacts that we've had?
spk01: Oh, great question. So, you know, one of the things that we're constantly looking at, so I'll kind of layer and break that question up because there's a few moving parts, as you noted in the way you asked the question. So, you know, from a margin perspective, we see long term our steady state margin to be around, you know, the high 60s. That's where we expect things to land. And that's, you know, independent of supply chain issues, inflation issues, and things like that. Now, of course, we're managing those, and I'll speak to that in just a minute. Now, where we see the margins recovering and where we see margins being a little bit moving around, at least at this stage, is we're in the early stages. We have new products coming out. And so what ends up happening is that there are certain economies of scale that kick in after a period of time. And I don't know if you heard me talking about this previously, but when we talk about the bioflux, It's got cellular connectivity. My cost of putting one device and making it available versus 1,000 devices is not marginally more different because there's just a fundamental cost of having that infrastructure there for 24-7 cellular connectivity and all of that. And then there's, of course, the individual device pieces. So as we get more and more devices out, we start getting economies of scale and we can say, hey, it's this much per device. And so that's what's really, you know, moving our margins. But as we commercialize, as we get further down and the products mature, the bulk of our revenue becomes service revenue, right? And technology as a service or software as a service revenue. And that's where you see the high margin. So anytime we have new product launches, anytime we have, you know, hardware expenses, you'll see this margin impact. But long-term steady state, it's going to be a high 60%. Now to the second part of your question about, you know, inflationary pressures and supply chain pressures. So we have a very tight understanding of end of life. And again, hardware cost is a very small component. So the inflation is less impactful to us just simply because if we're further down in the stream of, you know, commercialization, you know, 80-90% of the revenue is all service revenue, so the inflationary cost is not really impacting us from a device level. The supply chain side can impact us if we end up having end-of-life products and those chips or products become unavailable and then the price gets hiked. So we triage that and we look at that with a very tight control on ERPs and bond management. So we understand which parts are end of life, and then we are already working on new designs well in advance. So if we know a product is in a critical path and its end of life is a year from now, we're already working on a replacement part to ensure that that price hike doesn't occur.
spk09: Perfect. Okay, maybe just one last one. You state in the press release, continuing to recruit top talent for continued expansion of the commercial team. Maybe just talk a little bit how the hiring environment's been out there and how you are thinking about pursuing growth. Obviously, there's a fantastic growth opportunity in front of you, but increased focus on profitability is also important. So maybe how you're weighing growth aspirations with profitability aspirations over the medium term.
spk01: Yeah, great question. And so, you know, we, and as you know, I'm a big proponent of growth, but controlled growth, right? So, you know, one way of growing is, you know, how some of the other people in the space have grown where you go and you hire 200 sales reps, you grab market share, and then you fire or, you know, lay off, you know, the ones that are not performing or the ones that are standard and come up with some, you know, package to exit them. you know, that's not really our approach. So what we really do is control growth. And what I mean by that is we are managing and looking at our cash flows. We're looking at our growth plans. We're looking at, you know, when and how to bring on reps in terms of, and, and who, what else we can do to enable. So sales enablement is a big component efficiency of our, of our sales channel and our sales reps is, is another area. So these are all levers that we're, we optimize or work on optimizing and, when it comes to trying to grow, but in a controlled manner where we can see forward and we're making calculated risks while still managing cash, while still looking at profitability. And so our path is we want to, at least right now, we have a growth strategy and a plan to execute over the next 18 months and get to a path to breakeven and profitability. And then at that point, depending on how the markets and what the opportunities are and what the situation is from an economic perspective, you know, we can make a judgment call and say, you know, we want to continue this growth. And then, yeah, you get to profitability, but then you go back into the red. But you're doing it because the opportunity is compelling and the growth is there. So, you know, you guys have heard me before and I'm still, you know, stick to that, you know, our goal and management's goal is, At BioNTech, you need to build a billion-dollar company, right? And so for that, you need to grow, but we're not going to do it in a way that's going to sacrifice short-term optimization in pursuit of long-term growth. So it's really a controlled approach and a managed approach.
spk10: Perfect. I'll stop there. Congrats again on all the progress, and thanks for taking my questions. Thank you.
spk02: Thank you, sir. Next, we'll hear from Alan with the Maxim Group.
spk05: Yes, hi. When you were doing your sales, hi, for sales this quarter,
spk06: To any extent, did you see a negative impact of COVID in the sense of being able to get into doctors' offices, hospitals, to be able to talk with a potential buyer? Or do you feel that that's not an issue at this point?
spk01: So it's an interesting question you bring up. So there's different dynamics that we've seen. So in the beginning of the year, we saw there's like, I don't think it was COVID, but there was some sort of flu or something going around. And so there was like this apprehension in cases where, you know, people were like, oh, is this COVID? Is this not COVID? Is this going to spread? But in general, it was okay. But there was a, you know, automatically there's a, if someone is gets sick or something like that, the clinic or the hospital, they want to limit the number and the traffic of individuals coming in. So that was still there. And I really view that as a delay, not as something that was impacting. And then what we're seeing is as things became normalized, and I think things are a lot more normal today, and we see that right at the airports, we see the visas requirements, sorry, not visa requirements, COVID testing requirements dropped in all of Europe and the U.S., people are moving more freely, masks are removed in the airport. So what we've seen is there's a lot more people moving around, a lot more holidays being taken and those kinds of things. So again, these are, you know, really shifted revenue for us where someone, if a clinic has gone for holiday for two weeks, you know, they're still our customer, that revenue will pop back up, but it's a seasonality issue. So I haven't really seen anything that was like in the middle of the pandemic. What I see is a return to normal, maybe an increase in holiday usage. That's more really right now, you know, in the June and the summer months. And then what I noticed in the beginning, and that has now gone away, was this, anybody gets sick, there's like this immediate apprehension, oh, is this COVID, is this what have you. Once the mask mandates and all those kind of went away, that became less of an issue as well.
spk06: Okay. In your 10K, you break out your revenue in three buckets, and I'm looking at it. Definitely, you're growing at least year over year. I don't have the quarters to buy sales, technology, fees. You have this service-related and other revenue, which I think maybe that's consulting, which was $750,000 this year. Could Could you talk about what you're doing there and what's the potential from that?
spk01: Yeah, so one of the things I talked about before was really about us focusing on, you know, as a part of 2022 is building more strategic relationships and partnerships, looking at other – of course, we're very U.S.-focused, but, you know, can we find partners to work with internationally and is there an opportunity there? And now, of course – part of that is really knowledge transfer because, you know, we don't have and, you know, we got to stay focused, our company has to stay focused, our team has to stay focused. And so really, it's about knowledge transfer to help somebody set up a similar type of, you know, distribution channel, where they are providing, you know, cardiac monitoring and solutions within those regions. So, you know, that's where that revenue has come in. And we will continue to look at you know, international expansion. We will continue to look at, you know, consulting, working with, you know, complementary technology that could potentially come into our ecosystem that complement the bioflux in our cardiac. So, you know, as you know, cardiac patients have multiple disease conditions and modalities. You know, is there somebody that we can work with and, you know, develop complementary technology that can be built, you know, added into our ecosystem? So that's where that part of our business has started. And it's just natural as we grow, as we look at other markets, there's going to be revenue that flows in that piece. And, of course, we want to make sure that whoever we work with are financially sound and have the ability to commercialize and actually implement what we are trying to do with them. So that's kind of a new thing for us and, again, a natural course of the business.
spk06: Thank you. My next question is forward looking, so you may not answer it, but I'm trying to get a grasp of the ability to grow like the number of doctors that Or is that somewhat stabilized sequentially? And is the growth really coming from more utilization with who you have? But then in addition to that, as BioFlux launches in April and then chronic care comes out this year, is it reasonable to think that the revenue potential for them in the first year may be to look at, like, your first year of BioFlux and kind of how that ramped up and, um, is that a good proxy or is there a reason maybe that that's not because you didn't have the, the already installed base or, and maybe it could be better or maybe if you could just give us any, uh, color. Thank you.
spk01: Yeah. So, um, it is very forward looking. Um, So what I would say is it's the right way of thinking about it if you think about what BioFlux did. Of course, it will be a little bit different here because, you know, each product is different, and this is like lower revenue per usage but higher volume. But, you know, even though we have a big ecosystem, yes, the marketing sale or the marketing costs and that cost is already sunken, so there's not much little to no cost in really deploying that. but what ends up happening is that there is this adoption piece, right? So, you know, you can go in and provide it to every doctor, but then you got to work with them and follow up with them to get them trained, engaged on this new solution, get the nurses trained, maybe some nurse changes a job, then the new nurse comes in, then you have to teach that nurse, and he is having trouble getting a hang of it, so you have to spend a bit more time. So there is this general time that naturally, you know, shows up every time you look at a new product, which is related to training and permeating the ecosystem. Once it permeates the ecosystem, then you say, okay, great, now it's on the shelf, now you're using it, you know, and you want to get 100% utilization, that takes time as well, right? Because, you know, identifying the right patients, which is the right patient to use, and then you basically get to study. So, we notice in the BioFlux that we take Once we launch, it takes four or five months for them to essentially have it like a well-oiled machine where like the nurse here, she knows exactly which patient profile fits the bioflux, needs to be hooked up. So it took time to right-size that. And I think that a lot of that is going to repeat itself with each of these products. So you will still see that. know time from this that we have the ecosystem i think it'll be a little bit faster simply because you know the network's already there there we already have the sales force the sales force is already of a certain size what's also going to happen is that as we open up new accounts yes we're still leading with the bioflux but we're no longer selling one product we're going into the accounts and now um showing them the entire product portfolio so there will be Whereas existing customers, we have to introduce the new products and drive adoption. With new customers, we're selling an entire portfolio. So they're already aware of it at the outset.
spk06: On the chronic care, what feedback have you gotten from doctors and how are they thinking about choosing you competitively?
spk01: So one of the big differences that nobody's really talked nobody's looked at chronic care in the context of cardiac, and this is very forward-looking, right? So we're still probably, we've been getting very good feedback, but, you know, it is something that is early days. And in terms of looking at us versus, you know, other chronic care solutions, because we marry it to diagnostics, because it's cardiac-focused, because we're talking to cardiologists, you know, our solution stands as a differentiated solution. And everybody else really isn't It's generic chronic care. You have 16 different conditions that you can apply to. It's mostly medication adherence and lifestyle-based. It's not tied to a specific diagnosis. And that's what we did that's different and unique. And nobody's doing that.
spk06: Great. My last question, in April you had announced, or was it March? I'm sorry, March, a $50 million ATM at the money potential issuance thing. Are you able to comment if you guys have used any of that?
spk01: We have not used any of it. I mean, that was more of a, uh opportunity to put something in place and and make sure that you know if you know bombs are being dropped the world is going into you know a mess we were well capitalized but we put that in place just as a as a as a backup but we have not touched any of that it would have shown up in a year-end report so um but yeah we have not we've not moved on uh on any of that
spk10: Okay, great. Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you.
spk03: And next we'll hear from Kevin Deedy of HC Wingright.
spk07: Hi, Wilcox. Thanks so much for taking my questions. I thought I'd first piggyback off of where Alan was going in your response and sort of a competitive light, would you mind giving us a few examples of where you see your competitors falling short, specifically in the technology that they're bringing to market? Understand you're not alone on the Holter side either. So maybe you could explain how the combination of your products differs from what you're seeing your competitors offer.
spk01: Yeah, for sure. So we talk about Well, let's talk about the Holter product because that's a new one, right? So, you know, you have Bardi, which was bought by Hillrom. And Bardi is a one-channel Holter product. And they don't have any real-time monitor. They don't have real-time diagnostics. So if you're a hospital or you're a cardiologist and you do Holter and you do real-time monitoring, which most do because you have, you know, different kinds of patients with different risk levels, then automatically you have to be used two different vendors, which means your nurses have to be trained on two different platforms and that whole thing. So that all goes away with us, right? Because you have one company. Now, they also don't have chronic care or disease management. So again, that's a third vendor now that you have to use. So with us, we collapse all of that in our one vendor and one ecosystem. So that simplifies the workflow, simplifies training, simplifies a lot of things. From a technological perspective, You know, Bardi's model is they operate as an IDTS. So they are an outsourced provider. So if you're a doctor, you're going to put a patient onto a Bardi monitor, send them home. Bardi will bill, and you get $25 to read the report. Same kind of stuff that we were doing with the BioFlux, and we saw how effective that was. iRhythm does the same thing, right? They bill. So there's a couple problems there. So the... iRhythm doesn't have connectivity. So you have to mail the device back, get it to iRhythm's headquarters, you have to download the data, then you get a report. So it takes two weeks. So if the patient was on a seven-day study, you're talking about three weeks before you know what's going on. Because the BioTrace is a connected device, we go from a three-week turnaround to three days, right? Or if you're on a one-week study, let's say it's 10 days, right? So still, it's three days versus two weeks. Bardi cut it down because Bardi allows you to download the data and pull a chip out. But again, you're talking about one week. So you went from two weeks to one week, but you're still waiting for data. And from a patient safety perspective, three days is much better. Not only that, we enabled the provider to bill directly. So that creates a profit center. The third area, and this is all in my press release as well, like where we win, right? And then the third component is Well, Bardi and iRhythm are duking it out and fighting about which channel is better because Bardi is saying we have a P-Wave. P-Wave is better. Of course, their study was conducted against a three-channel Holter for noise floors. So, you know, they were comparing it to archaic technology. So I don't even know how much better they are against iRhythm because I don't know if they actually did a head-to-head. But anyways, their whole argument is P-Wave is better. I-rhythm says, well, our position is better because we catch more arrhythmias. Then Barty comes back and says, well, P-wave is for more risky arrhythmias. This argument all takes place because you're a one-channel product. When you put in the biotrade, we're a three-channel product. So we have the P-wave and everything. So both of those arguments fall short because we have both the I-rhythm arrhythmia detection capabilities and the Barty detection capabilities in one device. So that makes us clinically superior. So we're clinically superior. We're technologically superior. We're from a patient safety and a response and a diagnostic time, we're superior. And then we are, you know, iRhythm is not profitable right now. You know, Bardi was struggling with profitability. That's why Hillrond tried to back out of the acquisition. And then you take us. And the reason is because most of these devices are designed to be They're trying to become profitable on one use, right? And that's why they're so sensitive to reimbursement, right? So they're trying to be profitable on $200 because they're not reusable devices. Now, our product is a reusable device, and it's got a lifetime of two years. So if the doctor uses it once a month, which actually most doctors will use it twice a month at least, but let's just say once a month, I look at profitability across 24 uses. So how do you compete with that? At the very least, I'll be 10 times cheaper. So that's where, you know, that's our advantage, right? And then, of course, we have our whole ecosystem and portfolio.
spk07: Okay. Thanks. Good detail there. On technology development and the supply chain, Wakaz, can you talk a little bit about – I mean, you mentioned – end-of-life products. You've mentioned two-year lifespan. Can you talk about how BioFlux has morphed over the past two years and how you've been able to secure product, where it's made, and just ensuring that you're going to have components delivered to your manufacturer and your manufacturer delivered to you?
spk01: Right. So, So, end of life is an ongoing thing that we're always looking at. So, we're constantly upgrading chips. And so, where BioFlux has changed, certain components we replaced over the couple years, you know, resistors, chips, there's just that where there are newer versions or smaller packages and we go through some additional safety testing. Every time you make a chip that it could affect safety and it's a letter to file and we make sure the specs are there, we get it tested independently and then we swap out the chip. And I think the, which I think you're getting at, and I'm gonna, so I'm gonna ask you a question differently than how you asked it, is really what I think you're trying to get at is like, okay, there's a shortage going on. And I have said in my past calls that we have managed to navigate the supply chain issues by keeping six months of inventory on hand by being proactive and whatnot. But if we grow and we just announced triple-digit growth and we do that again, how are we going to have inventory, right? And so the answer to that is we build our inventory and our inventory procurement and plan based on our projections plus a buffer, right? So today, If all inventory dried up and we could not get a single component, which is not the case, single more component, I already have the inventory on hand to execute my entire fiscal 2023 year growth plan. I already have all that inventory secured. So for me, it's not impacting my growth plan. until march 31st of 2023 now what about after that so that's what we're working on now right so we're saying okay we've got this in the bag what when when do these components free up we're in very deep and detailed conversations with our suppliers with the chip manufacturers to understand what when does their inventory open up so when we're down to the level where we're like okay Where's your shortage at? So we know, for example, that Texas Instruments, which is a supplier of ours, has the silicone chips, but they have a shortage on the plastic. And that plastic will open up in November. So it's the packaging, the casing, not the actual silicone that is a problem. So those are the level of details. We're going down to their assembly and their manufacturing capabilities and understanding that. I'm looking at that for 2024. So from my perspective, if I don't get a single component or a single additional device that I can produce, I already have all of the inventory that I need for all of our product portfolios that is required to execute for our triple digit growth, internal growth plan, plus a 20% buffer, probably even more than that, for March 31st, 2023. So that's where
spk10: you know, I'm confident in our ability to execute on our growth.
spk03: Thank you, Mr. Al-Sadiq. It appears there will be no further questions at this time. We'll turn the conference back over to you for any additional or closing remarks.
spk01: Thank you, everyone, for joining the call. Please call and email us anytime if you have any further questions. I hope you were able to listen in and get the answers to any questions that you may have. If there was anything that was left unanswered, please reach out to us. We're always available. Thank you and have a great day.
spk03: And that does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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