This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
spk04: Good afternoon, and welcome to BioElectricity's first quarter fiscal 2024 financial results and business update conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Deborah Chen, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.
spk03: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to BioElectricity's first quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. As a reminder, Biotricity's first quarter fiscal 2024 ended on June 30, 2023, so all figures presented for this period will reflect that end date. Earlier, the company issued its earnings press release, which highlighted financial and operational results. A copy of the press release is available on the Investor Relations section of Biotricity's website, and the full financials have been filed with the SEC on Form 10-Q, and posted on EGGR at www.sec.gov. Before beginning the company's 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. Any such statements are subject to risk and uncertainty that can cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Biotricity does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements except as required. At this point, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Biotricity's founder and CEO, Dr. Waqas Al-Siddiq. Please go ahead.
spk05: Thank you, Deborah, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today. I welcome you to our first quarter fiscal 2024 teleconference. As reported in our earnings press release, we experienced a very solid quarter with a year-over-year revenue growth and improvements in key operating metrics. Specifically, our recurring technology fees, device sales, and gross margins all demonstrated positive growth while maintaining a firm grasp on cost reduction and expense management. I can confidently assert that we are making strides towards positive cash flow given the consistent results we observe from quarter to quarter. From a market perspective, The increasing interest and demand continue to drive the adoption of our suite of products focused on chronic cardiac disease prevention and management. Our efforts in commercialization and development have yielded tremendous progress in remote monitoring solutions for diagnostic and post-diagnostic products. The expansion of our sales force has expanded our geographic reach, and I'm pleased to announce that as of June 30, 2023, our sales have launched in over 35 states in the U.S., contributing to a remarkable 46.9% year-over-year revenue growth. Notably, our gross margins have also seen significant improvement, rising from 59.6% during the same period last year to an impressive 63.5%. We accomplished all of this while also announcing that we reduced our SG&A by 22% to 3.5 million. Through diligent cost structure management, automation, and utilization of our proprietary AI technology, and strong growth across the board, we achieved a reduction of our net loss by 33% year over year to 3.6 million or 6.9 cents per share from a net loss of 5 million or 9.8 cents per share. At BioTricity, our responsibility as a management team and my role as CEO is to innovate and create transformative healthcare products while ensuring financial discipline, driving margin and revenue growth to deliver value creation for our investors. This approach has been consistently demonstrated on a quarter-by-quarter basis. The results we've achieved this quarter serve as a testament to the successful execution, hard work, and dedication of our exceptional team. Turning to our BioSphere platform model and complementary products, we're thrilled to observe continued growth. Our BioCare app has garnered thousands of downloads, and BioTrade continues to attract industry-wide interest among both new and existing customers. Earlier in the quarter, we announced a significant milestone between Bioflux and Biotrade products. Biotricity has monitored over 2 billion heartbeats for atrial fibrillation, a leading cause of stroke. Over the past two years, our efforts have benefited over 14,000 patients diagnosed with AFib, providing early intervention and resulting in cost savings exceeding $330 million. By preventing late diagnosis and subsequent strokes, Biotricity has also facilitated savings exceeding $1.3 billion. Our commitment to innovation remains unwavering as we harness data intelligently to explore novel avenues for enhancing healthcare outcomes. Through cutting-edge research and development, we're not only redefining medical diagnostics in patient care, but also pushing the boundaries of what AI-driven solutions can achieve. Just last month, we announced that we are expanding our AI technology development in remote cardiac care. We are leveraging our proprietary AI technology to provide a suite of predictive monitoring tools to enhance new disease profiling improve patient management, and revolutionize the healthcare industry for disease prevention. This comes at the heels of us also announcing that we've strengthened relationships with both Amazon and Google. The healthcare AI market opportunity is projected to grow to $208.2 billion by 2030, according to Grandview Research. Our company has already established a strong foothold, having already built a powerful proprietary cardiac AI model that combines Google's TensorFlow, AWS infrastructure, big data, and a continuous learning engine. This combination allows us to rapidly improve our cardiac technology. In the near future, we believe the capabilities of our cardiac AI model will allow us to support healthcare professionals in handling exponentially more patients while identifying the most critical data. This will enable healthcare workers to elevate the quality of care while serving a larger number of patients. As growing patient numbers further stress the shortage of healthcare professionals, our technology could help alleviate this pressing issue. We have engineered our technology to not only improve patient care and outcomes, but to do so in a manner that supports more patients. This has led to increasing sales of our remote cardiac monitoring devices and the ramp-up of our subscription-based service, increasing our recurring revenue over the past few quarters, and charting a clear path to profitability. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, John Iannoglou.
spk01: Thank you, Akash. Given the insight that you provided, In your discussion of key operational matters, I am going to review the first quarter fiscal 2024 highlights, which are unaudited. Our technology-as-a-service subscription-based recurring revenue from our BioTray and BioFlux devices continue to grow at a healthy pace. Revenue for the first quarter ended June 30, 2023 increased 46.9% year-over-year to $3 million. Our gross profit percentage was 63.5% for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, as compared to 59.6% in the corresponding prior year quarter. This increase in gross margin was largely attributed to an increase in margin related to our technology fees and reductions we were able to achieve in processing costs from providing these services, some of which relate to efficiencies gained through the use of AI. Given consistent gross margin on technology fees of approximately 70% or better, and an evolving revenue mix where technology fees are expected to comprise an increasing proportion of revenue, we anticipate continued improvement in overall blended gross margin over time. Technology fees comprise 92% of the quarter's total revenue. Gross profit totaled $1.9 million, up 56% from $1.2 million a year ago. Net loss attributed to common stockholders for the three months ended June 30, 2023 was $3.6 million compared to a net loss of $5 million during the comparable quarter in the prior year. As we've mentioned in our call in June, our revenues come from two sources or segments. First, our technology fees, which are recurring subscription service fees generated by our monitoring, diagnostics, and biosphere services. For the first quarter fiscal 2024, our technology fees rose 47% to 2.77 million. In part, it's strong growth reflects our extraordinary customer retention rate of approximately 98%, which And one simple single number speaks volumes about our excellent customer and cardiologist friendly support services, superior device hardware and tech services, ease of use and superior diagnostics. Our second revenue segment is device sales, which are the sales of our proprietary hardware, which like our software is all designed in-house. In first quarter fiscal 2024, device sales comprised 8.3% of our total revenue and were reported at $252,000. We are continuing to work hard towards achieving positive cash flow. And just like we discussed in our fourth quarter year on call, are starting to notice things taking a turn for the better in our financial growth. Indeed, all of our fundamentals are pointing upwards. I will now turn the call back to Akash for his closing comments.
spk05: Thank you, John, for that report. In summary, there's a lot to be excited for as we look into the future of bioelectricity and the addressable markets that we are involved in. Our AI segment has begun to accelerate. We've strengthened relationships with Amazon and Google, validating our position, leadership, and commitment to AI development into remote cardiac care. In the future, we envision our cardiac AI models capacities will empower us to assist healthcare experts in efficiently managing a significantly higher patient load while discerning the most vital data points so that we can enhance disease profiling, improve patient management, and revolutionize the healthcare industry by centralizing these data points for disease prevention. Looking towards the rest of calendar year 2023, our focus remains threefold, to increase sales of our remote cardiac monitoring devices and suite of products, ramp up our subscription-based service, and accelerate our recurring revenue, and as such, draw a clear path to profitability. That concludes our opening remarks. I will now turn the call over to the operator for questions. Thank you.
spk04: Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from Kevin Seedy with HC Wainwright. Please proceed with your question.
spk02: Hi, LaCoste. Thanks for taking my question. Appreciate it. Nice to see the sales ramp up. I was wondering if we could dig into the top line a little bit. Commentary that you and John offered and some digging suggests that device sales and fee revenue pretty consistent measure the mix. But what isn't clear are the types of devices that are dominating the device sale mix and the relative service fees that you're seeing on those specific devices.
spk05: Yeah, great question, Kevin. I mean, we aren't really breaking that down yet. We will, you know, I think in future quarters. What I can tell you is that, you know, the bulk of the revenue is still BioFlux. We have BioTray coming up, and I will refer you back to, I think, a press release that we did back a couple months ago where we broke out how much of that revenue in terms of fast revenue was. related to BioFlux and BioTrade, but that mix is still about the same. And, of course, BioTrade is a new product. It's only been around for a year. BioFlux has been around for four years, so it's still going to make up the bulk of that revenue. But it is going to, as the other products pick up rates and they become more available in the market, and as time goes on, they'll become a better mix, and that's when we will start breaking that information out and making it clear because, you know, it's still early days for some of these products, and we want to make sure that we have a handle on it internally before we start talking about exactly which one relates to what.
spk02: Okay. Fair enough. Appreciate that. The past couple of calls, well, Klaus, you've really sort of centered in on the ability to deliver AI-enhanced solutions. And I'm wondering – You know, in this era of cost containment, how you're emphasizing your R&D expenditures vis-a-vis what had been a strategic imperative of expanding your product portfolio to address ancillary cardiac issues, such as nephrotology. So I was just wondering if you could just sort of help us think about where you're putting your development emphasis?
spk05: Yeah, absolutely. So what we've done is, you know, as you know, we've launched a bunch of products in the last six to nine months, right, growing our TAM, and we've been really focusing. That development effort has already been sunk in, and we've already invested those dollars. So now we want to see the fruits of that, right? As those products become commercialized for a longer period of time, we're going to see more of that revenue coming in, right? In In the meantime, we are focusing on two things in terms of our R&D dollars, right? One is in the automation perspective and in terms of cost management, like you identified, we're focusing on stuff that is enhancing ultimately the product, right? So we can expand the product and go faster. So it's still product related, right? So when we took a look at what can we automate from workflow perspective, where can we apply AI? you know, some of the improvements that we're seeing on the margin side, some of the stuff that we're seeing on the expense reduction side is directly related to efficiency that we are applying within the existing product portfolio, right? And so, you know, taking AI, taking automation, applying it to enhance the workflows and provide better support and better data into our existing products so that they are effectively operating at a more efficient level, right? one area that we're investing R&D dollars into. And why we do that is because it's direct drive, right? We know if we spend X number of dollars, there's a measurable result that we will get, meaning our cost reduction will go down, right? So when we're thinking about an initiative that we have, we're saying, hey, if we do X, right, if we implement this automation, and this is a practical example, we know that our COGS will come down by 3%. So that's something that is a direct drive when we know what that 3% means and we know what that cost means. Then the other area that we're looking at for R&D is we are continuing to invest in areas. And of course, we're looking for, last call I talked about our NIH grant. So when we talk about nephrology and some of these other areas, we're looking at areas that again, how can we collect low hanging fruit revenue and where we can take our technology, enhance it, and then apply it in another market, right? And where we can, we will go in and try to find grants or R&D projects or work with universities and see where we can, of course, further reduce that cost. But the investment on the R&D is very much driven directly by, okay, how can we commercialize or how can we increase or how can we apply the product in a market where we know that we can get direct drive revenue from. So it's a very focused approach in our R&D because now that we've built the platform, before we had, and that division was building the platform, we invested dollars for two years to build that platform. That platform is now built. Now it's about enhancing and applying it in areas where we know we can get revenue back from.
spk02: Okay, thanks. I appreciate the color on that. A little on the business development, you know, I always go back to this topic. You mentioned coverage of 35 states. I'm wondering if you're comfortable sharing what your targets are for the balance of the fiscal year, just so we can sort of keep an eye on that. Or If you're more comfortable maybe offering the number of physicians you hope to address or the number of clinics, some sort of quantifiable measure that we can monitor.
spk05: We're not usually providing the guidance on that stuff. What I can say is what we are saying is we're announcing as we grow that network and as we optimize that network. I mean, obviously our goal is to have 50 states exposure. And I would say in, in some parts, because we've added distribution relationships, we do have that presence, but what we've been really focusing now on is of course, building out our Salesforce, making sure that the key markets, uh, we've addressed the key markets. And I think what's going to happen, and we will, we'll certainly announce this, uh, when we, when we have a better. Which is to say, okay, um, as we build out these distribution relationships, we will put a concerted effort in trying to march towards 50 states. So distribution partners have people in, they essentially have 50 state coverage. But when you do a distribution partner of size, you have to work with different groups within that division and different reps. And for us, we focus on areas where we're not covered. So I think what we can say and how I can answer it is that you know, look for us over the next couple quarters that as we work with some of the relationships that we've made, how we're going to expand that state coverage, and we will announce that and notify everybody. And our goal, of course, is to get to 50 states as quickly as possible and focusing our primary, like our direct sales efforts, in the areas that we have the most opportunities.
spk02: Okay, a couple of financial questions. Maybe John will chime in, too. The gross margin, absolutely great sequential progress on that. I'm wondering how you think we should see it from a sustainable perspective. I know John mentioned approaching, I think, the like a 70% margin. I think I understood that. I'm just wondering, you know, what sort of timeframe we might expect that to happen.
spk05: So, you know, I think the piece that is happening is that, you know, before we weren't even identifying this stuff. So as you see that we get a handle on these things, we're going to provide more and more color. The thing is, as we've announced in the last few press releases, our revenue mix of sas versus device sales device sales um have a you know a different margin and sas has had consistent margin right of between you know 70-ish percent so we will start announcing that and in terms of how long will it be you know i would say that eventually You know, I think once you are 99% of your revenue being SAS related and 1% being device, essentially you're at steady, your, your, your margin steady state rate is going to be your SAS rate. We still have, you know, about 9% or something around that revenue that we have to build up towards on the, on the SAS side to get to that steady state. And, you know, can we predict and tell you when we expect to do that? I would say no, but I think that going from now forward, every quarter we will announce that mix and you will see that margin creep closer to that as a steady state margin.
spk02: Okay. Just on the OPEC side, cost controls and you eliminated almost a million dollars of OPEX from the March quarter. I'm wondering if you think this reduced expense level is sustainable.
spk05: So what we've done, and I think that this is a fantastic quarter, and I think it's going to be indicative of what we are doing going forward. So, you know, cost cutting, I wouldn't call it about cost cutting. What we have done is we have optimized our operations to focus on a commercial team, which is focusing purely on sales, and a corporate team, which is focusing on account management and operations and delivering services at a certain efficiency level. We grew to a size, and everybody, there's always these milestones for companies, and there are, I think, milestones for reasons. And we achieved a milestone, which we were at a $10 million revenue run rate, and it allowed us to basically look at the organization and apply more processes and procedures. So, you know, moving forward, the ratios that we are seeing that are, you know, in this past quarter, we expect to be able to continue those. But if we're growing, our costs and our expenses are going to grow. But the ratios we expect to be maintained.
spk04: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. Gentlemen, we'll turn the conference back over to you for any additional or closing remarks.
spk05: Thank you, everybody, for joining our conference call. If there are any other questions that pop up or if you guys have any other information that you are looking for, please feel free to reach out to us. We are always available. You can reach us via our website or through email or through LinkedIn or any of our social channels. Thank you again, and we're very excited about the rest of the year. Thank you so much.
spk04: Thank you. That does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer