5/8/2023

speaker
Tanya
Conference Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the first quarter 2023 earnings conference call for Conformance Incorporated. My name is Tanya, and I will be your conference operator today. All lines have been placed on listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After management's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I would like to remind you that this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities law, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements made during this call are not statements of historical facts should be considered forward-looking. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated or implied by these forward-looking statements, including those discussed in the risk factors section of conformance public silence with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Conformance disclaims any obligation except as required by law to update or revise any financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call will include time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, May 8th, 2023. I will now turn the call over to Mark Augusti, President and Chief Executive Officer of Conformis.

speaker
Mark Augusti
President & Chief Executive Officer

Thank you and good morning.

speaker
Mark Augusti
President & Chief Executive Officer

With me this morning is our CFO, Bob Howe. We had a mixed quarter of performance with many positive results, offset by lagging revenue growth. From a positive perspective, we saw improving revenue performance within our HIP franchise and international markets, increasing demand from patients for our platinum services offering, and improved gross margin results. And operationally, we reduced OPEX and delivered a higher-than-planned cash balance. However, our USD revenue has not yet returned to growth. The linear effects from our shift to the new business model and our operational challenges have kept pressure on this important part of our business. Nevertheless, we believe we have the right business model and we will endeavor to re-engage surgeons and drive patient awareness of our platinum services program. With our platinum services program, we now have over 225 facilities that have access to our new service. This represents approximately 70% of our U.S. business now being under contract or having access to PSP. Change is hard, and while we are disappointed that not all of our customers have elected to enroll in the Platinum Services program, our Platinum Services orders continue to move in the right direction. In Q1, we had around 500 PSP orders, which is 32% growth from the 380 orders in Q4 and up from the 110 orders in Q3. We like the trend and believe it continues to reflect the strong value proposition of our PSP offerings. Our commercial team continues to seek creative and effective ways to drive interest and engagement to sell our program to ASC and hospital systems in today's challenging economic climate and a competitive environment that is increasingly focused on robotics. One recent action that is showing positive signs is the launch of our TV advertising campaign. We launched this campaign back in February where we targeted surgery-ready patients to explore the benefits of a truly personalized conformance knee. The first two markets yielded 2.2 million households in TV and social media reach and 10.6 million impressions, as most households saw the TV commercial around seven times. This resulted in a lift in patient leads for many surgeons in those markets. The challenge now is converting these patient leads into surgical orders. We will continue to monitor the overall performance of this advertising campaign as we move forward with it. Our hip business had a nice quarter. Although it is still working off a smaller base, we did see growth, which was driven by the recent launch of our newest stem product, Acterra. Surgeon feedback has been favorable and the commercial opportunity is there. We need to address some outstanding supply chain constraints and execute better across our organization to take advantage of the general surgeon interest in this new hip stem. Before I turn the call over to Bob, I would like to briefly cover a few other important updates. We are pleased to announce on April 27th, we received FDA clearance for our new cruciate stabilizing or CS poly insert for our imprint total knee system. Cruciate stabilizing is a growing segment in knee arthroplasty, and we are pleased we will be able to provide this option to our surgeons in the near future. Over the past two quarters, we have implemented many cost reduction measures to improve our cash position and extend our operating runway. We will continue to manage this extremely closely and will further align our cost structure with our current revenue and gross margin performance as needed. We are making strides with our operations. On-time delivery is improving, order lead times are becoming more predictable, and the plant is performing better. However, the transition to the new business model introduced new processes and new workflows which remain inefficient. Although we plan for many of these, the changes and additions from our historical ways of doing things has taken longer than anticipated. We're actively managing these activities and expect to realize improvement in the future. Our company has always been focused on looking at every way possible to deliver a return for our shareholders, and that continues today. As we've done with our past licensing deals, our recent business model change, and the new product introductions, we will explore all options available to us to create incremental value. Finally, I'd like to extend my appreciation to the entire organization. We have been going through a complex transformation over the past 18 months. The energy our team shows on a daily basis is incredible. We feel we have the leading hip and knee solution on the market, and we will keep pushing forward to help patients live better lives through conformance. I will now turn the call over to Bob to provide more details about our financial performance for the quarter, as well as share thoughts on our outlook.

Disclaimer

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