Venus Concept Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the second quarter 2021 earnings conference call for Venus Concept. At this time, all participants have been placed in listen-only mode. Please note this conference call is being recorded and that the recording will be available on the company's website for replay. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that our remarks and responses to your questions today may contain forward-looking statements that are based on the current expectations of management and involve inherent risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated, including those identified in the Risk Factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and 10-Q, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Such factors may be updated from time to time in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our website. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise our forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. This call will also include references to certain financial measures that are not calculated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. We generally refer to these as non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of those non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP are available in our earnings press release issued today on the investor relations portion of our website. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Tom Serafino, Chief Executive Officer of Venus Concept. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome everyone to Venus Concept's second quarter of 2021 Earnings Conference Call. I'm pleased to be joined today on the call with our Chief Financial Officer, Dominic Della Penna, and Chad Ziering, our Chief Commercial Officer. Let me start with a brief agenda of what we will be covering during our prepared remarks. I will start with an overview of our better-than-expected revenue results in the second quarter, including an update on how our business trends continued to improve during the period, which gives us further confidence in our 2021 revenue guidance, which we increased in our press release this morning. Chad will then discuss our strong system shipment results in the second quarter and how we believe it was a direct result of both improving overall system adoption trends, particularly in North America, and strong execution of our targeted commercial strategy. I will then provide a brief update of our continued progress in the area of new product development, and then Dominic Della Pena will provide you with a more in-depth review of our quarterly financial results, our balance sheet, and financial condition, and our updated guidance for the full year of 2021. Then we will open up the call for your questions. With that in mind, let's get started with a review of our second quarter revenue performance and overall business trends. We reported gap revenue of $25.8 million, up 52% year-over-year, exceeding the expectations we provided in our Q1 call, which assumed a growth of 40% to 45% year-over-year. We are very encouraged by our second quarter revenue performance and believe it reflects the improving system adoption and procedural trends we experienced during the quarter. Importantly, our second quarter growth reflects both the continued improvement in our aesthetic and hair restoration procedure trends and the pace of system adoption. We are very encouraged by the strong execution of our global sales team in the quarter. The team was also able to substantially increase the qualified pipeline of new prospects across the full product portfolio, which gives us confidence in our increased revenue growth expectations for the balance of 2021. Diving deeper into our growth performance and improving trends we experienced in the second quarter. Q2 sales increased 14% on a quarter-over-quarter basis driven by 50% growth in revenue from sales of our subscription systems and 17% sequential increase in total leases and systems revenue. Our systems shipped increased 8% sequentially in Q2, reflecting continued improvement in the capital equipment environment. System shipments under the subscription model increased 32% on a quarter-over-quarter basis in Q2, and represent more than 52% of our total global shipments in the period. As discussed on prior calls, the flexibility we have in our commercial model with unique pricing and payment options via our industry-first subscription model is an incredible lever that we have which differentiates us from our competitors. Importantly, this lever really empowers our commercial team to work with customers to identify not only the right technologies for their practices, but also the right business model for each clinic depending on their needs. With respect to the improving procedure trends we experienced in the second quarter, our real-time IoT data on our devices gives us strong visibility into the active device trends for a large portion of our medical aesthetics install base. This average usage per system data reflects improving consumer activity demand for our product procedures during the second quarter. In terms of the procedure trends for our hair restoration customers in the second quarter, we are very encouraged by the continued improvements in utilization trends among our hair restoration customers as global procedures on our artist systems increased 37% year over year in the second quarter. Importantly, this global procedure growth was fueled by an impressive growth in North America where procedures increased 67% year over year in Q2. Artist customers in North America performed the largest number of procedures in the second quarter in the last four years. We believe the strong procedure growth in our U.S. hair restoration business in Q2 was driven by a combination of an improving procedure environment during the quarter and strong execution by our commercial team towards our key strategy to reengage with U.S. customers who have artist systems that we believe have been underutilized. We have made a concerted effort to engage with artist customers throughout North America over the last 18 months, and we could not be happier with the results. We look forward to continued strong utilization in the hair restoration systems part of our business going forward. I'm going to ask Chad to provide an update to our second quarter performance on the system side of the business. Chad?

Thanks, Tom. Our second system sales results reflect improving system adoption trends in certain key markets around the world and strong execution of our commercial strategy. As you recall from earlier discussions, we've spent the past 12 months restructuring our global commercial strategy to divest our interests in smaller and less profitable markets and reinvesting those resources in higher opportunity markets like North America and key direct countries in EMEA. Those efforts reflect in positive Q2 system revenue trends. Stripping out the effects of COVID, and comparing Q2 2021 system revenue to pre-COVID levels in Q2 2019, we're up 10% and 25% in North America and EMEA respectively. Turning to a brief update on our Venus Bliss. We are happy with the continued strong market response to our differentiated non-invasive fat and body contouring platform. Global sales of Bliss increased 85% year over year in the quarter. Venus Bliss offers a significant clinical and financial opportunity to the customers and patients that we serve, and the feedback we are receiving from the field continues to support these key points of differentiation. As expected, the investments in both our commercial team and in our marketing strategy continue to drive strong adoption of Bliss. We continued our Bliss Roadshow in Q2, a multi-city tour aimed at increasing the pipeline for Bliss and driving market development and consumer awareness. We also launched our Bliss University Master Class and focused the attention of our practice enhancement team to helping customers develop successful programs with the technology. We are also quite thrilled with the positive response from our customers, prospects, and patients on our collaboration with Venus Williams for the Venus Bliss. We expected that adding Venus Williams as a global brand ambassador for the Venus Bliss would create significant brand awareness with consumers and provide significant patient lead generation given her global recognition and appeal. The initial response from the market following the announcement has exceeded all of our expectations. We have experienced a significant increase in visits to both our B2B and B2C websites. This initiative has also engaged our prospects and accelerated the sales process. Since the announcement, Bliss sales in North America have increased 64% year-over-year And we have been especially pleased with the adoption trends we've seen from existing Venus customers as a result of this collaboration. Our customers are excited to capitalize on this partnership with our branded assets, growing their Venus Bliss utilization and overall patient base. Notably, these key investments in our Bliss marketing strategy combined with strong execution of our sales team resulted in global sales of Bliss increasing more than 122% quarter over quarter in Q2. We remain very confident that we have a product that customers want and the right strategy to drive continued adoption and utilization and expect strong revenue contributions from this product throughout 2021. With respect to our second strategic product line hair restoration, sales of artists and NeoGraph are up 90% year over year during the first half of 2021. And the qualified pipeline is up over 100% year over year. Our new commercial strategy is maximizing the opportunity of having the most comprehensive hair restoration solutions offering available today. With Artis and Neograph, we have an end-to-end portfolio of minimally invasive solutions unique from any competitor in the $4.1 billion hair restoration market. We are seeing notable success with our customer targeting strategy as well and are driving strong new customer adoption among dermatologists and plastic surgeons. We expect to see accelerating growth trends in our hair restoration business as we move through 2021 as we leverage our improved targeting strategy of these core doctors, as well as large national accounts. We're also exploring key partnerships with nationally recognized brands to drive procedure adoption. With that, let me turn the call back to Dom.

Thanks, Chad. To summarize our second quarter results, we delivered better than expected growth fueled by improving utilization trends and strong system adoption, particularly in North America. Our second quarter leases and systems revenue resulted The results, combined with the strong qualified pipeline we are actively managing today, were the primary drivers of the increase in our full 2021 guidance, which now calls for total revenue in the range of 102 to 107 million, representing an increase of approximately 31 to 37% year over year. We are very confident in our outlook for 2021 based on our belief that we have the right product portfolio and the right commercial strategy, which has us extremely well positioned for future success over the near to intermediate term. Most importantly, the longer-term outlook for the company is equally compelling as we continue to make progress in our new product development. We are pleased to announce AIME, or A-I-ME, the new commercial brand name for Robocor, the development project for our next-generation robotic technology for medical aesthetics applications. We wanted a name that embodies the innovation and science of artificial intelligence, A-I, with the personalization of an aesthetic procedure. We feel Amy will resonate well with consumers on the AI-driven robotic treatment that is personalized for me. We are very excited about prospects of the Amy device, a robotic non-surgical procedure that will potentially disrupt the skin tightening and directional lifting market. We completed our feasibility and safety studies on our handheld device, which included 50 patients and 90 treatment zones across six different body sites. In early June, the first patient was treated robotically with Amy. And to date, seven patients have been treated on multi-parts of the body, including the arms, behind the ear, and most recently, the face. We are finalizing commercial design and are prototyping the look and feel design options. We also continue to make progress in preparation for our full human clinical trial. We have identified three clinical investigator sites and expect to enroll up to 60 patients with enrollment currently expected to begin early in the fourth quarter. We intend to submit to the FDA as soon as possible upon completion of the study, which, depending on the pace of enrollment, is expected to be done by the end of Q1 2022. We are also excited by the prospects of our new product introductions, including the Venus Fiore, which recently received regulatory clearance from Health Canada in Q2. We have also submitted for 510 clearance for the Venus Freedom, the trade name of this technology in the US market, and we expect potential regulatory clearance in Q4 of this year. Lastly, we are also making excellent progress in our efforts to expand the Venus Bliss portfolio of systems and products. Specifically, the Venus Blix Max, a new device that not only includes fat reduction and skin tightening capabilities, but also muscle stimulation technology for body contouring and toning. This device addresses the three most in-demand body contouring procedures requested today all in one workstation. We expect this new device to have a list price of approximately $250,000 and contributing gross margins above current company averages. We intend on adding a modest but important utilization fee of approximately $100 per treatment. Importantly, we estimate that the ROI of just 33 weeks, which we expect will be extremely compelling to our clinician customers, and compares nicely to the current 28-week ROI that Venus lists customers experience today, based on the visibility we have of our IoT data platform. We are still targeting FDA submission in late Q3, which keeps us on track for potential clearances by the end of 2021 and a commercial launch, full commercial launch in early 2022. With that, let me turn the call over to Dominic Della Pena, who will provide a detailed review of our second quarter financial results and discuss our balance sheet and financial condition.

Dominic? Thanks, Don. Given Dom and Chad's detailed review of our revenue results, I will begin with the review of our financial performance across the rest of the P&L. For the avoidance of doubt, unless otherwise noted, my prepared remarks this morning will focus on the company's reported results for the second quarter of 2021 on a GAAP basis, and all growth-related items are on a year-over-year basis. Growth profit increased $6.8 million, or 57% to $18.7 million. Gross margin was 72.5% compared to 70% of revenue for the second quarter of 2020. The increase in gross margin is primarily driven by higher sales of Venus consumables and improved revenue mix of system sales sold under our subscription program primarily tracing to Venus Bliss. Total operating expense decreased 3.5 million or 17% to 17.2 million The decrease in total operating expenses was driven by a decrease of $6.8 million or 46% in general and administrative expenses which reflects a positive $3.2 million bad debt recovery and a $2.8 million gain on forgiveness of government assistance loans partially offset by an increase of $5.6 million or 123% in sales and marketing expenses and an increase of $0.5 million or 29% in R&D expenses compared to the second quarter of 2020. Excluding the gain on forgiveness of government assistance loans and bad debt expense recoveries in Q2, our normalized total operating expenses were $23.2 million, up $1.1 million or 5% quarter over quarter. This sequential increase reflects targeted commercial investments and inflationary pressures both of which we expect will continue in the second half of 2021. Total operating income increased 10.3 million or 117% to 1.5 million. Net income attributable to stockholders increased 13.5 million or 103% to 0.4 million. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA increased 3.2 million or 117% to 0.5 million. We have provided a full reconciliation of our GAAP net income to adjusted EBITDA in our press release this afternoon. Turning to the balance sheet, as of June 30th, 2021, the company had $23.1 million of cash and cash equivalents and total debt obligations of approximately $77.7 million compared to $34.3 million and $79.6 million respectively as of December 31st, 2020. The change in cash for the three months ended June 30th, 2021 was driven primarily by 4 million of cash used in operating and investing activities offset partially by 0.1 million of cash provided from financing activities. We are pleased with our improving cash performance during the first half of 2021. Our cash used in operations in the first six months of 2021 declined 51% year over year driven primarily by a reduction in our net loss and a 47% decline in cash used in working capital compared to the prior year period. Turning to a review of our guidance, as detailed in our press release this afternoon, we updated our revenue guidance for the full year 2021 period. The company now expects total revenue for the 12 months ending December 31st, 2021 in the range of $102 million to $107 million representing an increase of approximately 31 to 37% year over year. While we are not providing formal profitability guidance for full year 2021, we would like to offer the following considerations for modeling purposes. First, we continue to expect our gross margins to be in the range of 68 to 70% in 2021. This represents an increase of approximately 200 basis points versus the prior guidance range, driven by the strong gross margin performance in the first half of 2021. Second, we continue to expect gap operating expenses of approximately $88 million, representing a 26% decrease year-over-year. Importantly, this represents approximately $92 to $94 million of normalized operating expenses in 2021, which excludes certain items that impacted our gap operating expenses in 2020 and 2021, including non-cash goodwill impairment, incremental bad debt expense and recoveries, the forgiveness of government assistance loans, and the non-operating, non-recurring items related to retention, severance, and other legal expenses, which together represented approximately $2.3 million of costs and expenses last year. All of these items were detailed in our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA reconciliation tables in 2020. Third, We expect our interest expense to be approximately $4.5 million, given the lower borrowing costs and debt obligations compared to the prior year. Fourth, we expect a non-cash G&A of $5 million and non-cash stock compensation of approximately $2.5 million. Fifth, we continue to expect our weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately $55 million. With that, operator, we will now open the call to your questions. Operator?

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you'd like to ask additional questions, we invite you to add yourself to the queue again by pressing star 1. And our first question will come from Marie Thibault with BTIG.

Great. Good morning. Thank you for taking the questions and congrats on a nice result here. I guess I'd like to start with, you know, the impact of COVID. It's nice to not hear too much discussion of it on the prepared comments, but I would like to hear a little bit about, you know, the impact you saw on your various geographies and where you feel that your customers are in terms of the recovery trajectory.

Yes. Good morning, Marie, and thanks for the question. You know, look, we watch the news like everybody else. Ironically enough, I think that for the most part, our customers have learned to live in this COVID environment. The reason we are not overly concerned about it at this particular point in time is there are two data points that are providing a very high level of confidence for us. First of all, the continued growth in our qualified pipeline, and qualified pipeline is defined as a 50% or greater likelihood of closure in a given quarter that pipeline continues to grow very nicely. And secondly, as we look globally to our system utilization through our Internet of Things activation on our devices, we continue to see trends where customers are still treating patients above and beyond what they were doing pre-COVID. So these two data points have given us a fairly strong sense of confidence to the back half of 2021.

Okay, that's helpful and encouraging. Maybe a question, I guess, for Chad. I wanted to get an update on the U.S. sales force. If I recall correctly, you were undertaking some hiring efforts, so I'd love to hear where headcount stands. And then on the Bliss news and the boost from Venus Williams, curious how long you think that boost or interest might last, maybe some details on how long your partnership with her lasts. continues and any more details on kind of the outlook with that marketing initiative. Thank you.

Sure. Yeah. Hey, good morning, Murray. Thank you for the questions. First off, the Salesforce expansion in the U.S. is actually going very well. We've communicated in North America we'd be at 70 salespeople by the end of Q3, and we're ahead of schedule. We have done some dramatic overturns and changes and now increases to the U.S. sales force. And I'm very pleased with the level of onboarding and training and impact that our new reps are having. So we're ahead of pace on that, and we're optimistic that we'll be able to fill out the team. Regarding Venus Williams, we actually believe, given that we're in this rapid install base expansion of Venus Bliss, You know, we think the impact can persist for some time. You know, we're in a multi-year agreement. But as we bring new clinics on and open up, we're still in a position of opening up new markets. And so those clinics are very interested in how they can utilize the impact of Venus Williams as a brand investor to grow their own volume from a B2C level. And we have a fair number of activities planned for next year and into next year. So we think that impact is going to persist for some time.

Marie, just to add one, sorry to jump in, but just to add one more thing around the Venus Williams that we should consider. The numbers and the increase in sales activity and so on since we announced, we announced Venus Williams' relationship in March, but it was just recently, late in Q2, that the actual collateral materials to support the clinic's use of the images, brand, etc., really only started late in the quarter. So to your question about how long we can sustain this, we believe that we have at least another 12 to 16 months of runway with her in terms of helping us promote and grow the Venus Bliss business. And by the way, it will also extend to Venus Bliss Max as well.

Oh, okay. Very helpful. All right, I'll jump back in queue. Thanks for taking the questions.

Thank you.

The next question is from the line of Jeffrey Cohen with Lidenberg Salmon. Please proceed with your question.

Oh, hi, Dom, Chad, and Dominic. How are you? Good morning. How are you doing, Jeff? Good morning. Good morning. Just fine. I'll stick to two. So can you talk a little bit about the margins? It looks like you had a very strong quarter on the margin side, and I'm just curious about the pull through as it relates to us previous thinking in the high 60s, and now it looks like perhaps low 70s.

Okay, so I'll let Dominic Della Pena address that initially.

Sure. Thanks for the question, Jeff. So we had a good result on margins in Q2. Certainly we had good mix on the system side with Bliss having a good contribution. In addition, we're seeing very decent results on our consumables business, which also has a margin that is in the sort of the higher end of that range. So to the extent that we're continuing to fuel that growth, that certainly helped us. Our view is that we've been a bit conservative in terms of the outlook in Q3 and Q4 on the gross margin side, but there's also regional considerations to consider. APAC, for example, does not have margins quite as high as North America. So it really depends on how the mix evolves over the next few months. But there's a bit of a hedge in that, given the regional component as well. But again, the system side was quite strong due to Bliss, and consumables are performing very well.

Just to add to that a little bit, Jeff, that given the very rapid ROI on the current Venus Bliss platform, as you'll recall, I mentioned 28 weeks on average for the customers who are buying our devices. We felt it was appropriate to take a price increase on the bliss on an ASP basis. And we feel that that did resonate nicely without any pushback really from the customers in Q2. And we expect that'll continue in Q3 and Q4, which ultimately given the, you know, the mix, the product mix, ultimately that'll help us maintain our, you know, improving margins.

Okay. Got it. And then secondly, for me, I guess for Dom or Chad, Could you walk us through and give us an update kind of on your international footprint and any commentary there from the quarter and back half the year? Thank you.

Yeah, I'll let Chad touch on, well, I'll answer part of it. First of all, one of the areas that we do still see some significant challenges is in Latin America. Obviously, COVID is still an issue in markets like Brazil and The good news is that Mexico has been pulling out of it very nicely, and that happens to be our biggest market in our definition of Latin America. Chad, perhaps you can talk about the strategic decisions we made in EMEA, which we think will bode well as we go forward and continue that disproportionate growth there as well.

Yeah, sure, Dom. As I mentioned, the last 12 months, we divested our interest in less profitable or less revenue opportunity markets. We reinvested in North American EMEA, that's going quite well with the 10 and 25% Q2 21 versus Q2 19 system sales growth in North American EMEA. Outside the US, we're actually encouraged by the markets we are focused on. The key direct markets, Australia, Mexico, Germany, the UK, Spain, France. We recently brought in a new sales executive in Q2 with significant industry experience in EMEA. He's already made some significant changes to the sales team and is expanding the sales team in key direct markets so that we can garner more market share in our key countries we are focused on. So, again, we consolidated, reinvested in North America and EMEA, and then in the markets OUS where we are focused, we're focused on the same kind of strategy of expanding the sales force and driving the adoption of our strategic products.

Got it. Thanks for taking the questions.

Thanks, Jeff.

Next question is from the line of John Block with CIFL. Nice to see you with your questions.

Perfect. Good morning, guys. Nice quarter. I've got a small handful. And, DDP, maybe I'll start with you just on maybe some clarifications. I just want to make sure. The government assistance was back out of the EBITDA calc, I believe, but the bad debt recovery was not. I just want to see if that's correct. And then maybe the tack-on would just be for artists, Is that still expected to be roughly 25% of company revenues for this year?

Yeah, so on your first question, you're correct. The government assistance loan, we consider a complete one-time item. In the area of bad debt recovery, we believe there's a possibility of more of that recovery happening and the balance of the year, we can't bank on that. But we feel that there is that possibility because we've provided for a bunch of accounts in 2020 that we identified as risky given that the accounts were shut down and so on. But with the reopening, we had some positivity. So there could be some positive results that happen in the future. We don't know for sure. And that's why we wanted to continue to show it as part of operating expense and not backing it out. And for artists? And for artists, 25% is approximately in the range. You know, it could vary by quarter, but overall on an annualized basis, that's still a number that we think is fair and representative.

Okay. Perfect. Thanks for that. And then Dom, you know, Mac certainly seems exciting. Just curious what the approach is going to be with the existing bus accounts from a trading perspective. And would you do that out of the gate or would you wait a little while and try to service, you know, brand new accounts first? Maybe I'll stop there and then I'll ask my final one after that.

Sure. No, I think that the strategy is twofold. Number one, obviously we think that having a three-in-one solution will be very appealing to new customers. And we think that the price range, given the competitive pricing of standalone systems, is really fair and achievable, given the history we have with the Bliss on its own. So the approach would be really twofold. Number one, for customers that are in the top 10, 20% performance, again, remember, we can target these customers directly because of our real-time data gathering as to how well they're doing. It may not be a trade-in program. It'll be an add-on. simply because they can have two treatment rooms going instead of just one, because remember, you can only use the device on one patient at a time. So this would give them flexibility to toggle back and forth between rooms by adding muscle stimulation and so on. We do intend to have a fairly aggressive trade-in program, but given where we believe our cogs will land on this product, the better-than-average margins that we'll experience on the typical sale of a Bliss Maxx, It does give us room to do some pretty aggressive trade-ins for those who are very successful with the blitz, but it may not necessarily go to a second room option.

Got it. That's great. And last one, maybe a little bit long and two-part, but first, you've got great visibility from your IoT data. We've heard from other companies and aesthetics, you know, some doctors are taking well-deserved vacations after a very difficult 18 months. I'm just curious, as we get into the middle of August, what are you seeing here in the third quarter? Do you expect maybe pronounced seasonality? Hey, the market's okay. You're just seeing some guys go on vacations, unlike last year. And then, Chad, maybe for you, the last one, Bliss, was that moved to or now sold under the subscription program? I just want to clarify that. And if so, What led to the change? Thanks, guys.

Yeah, so I'll answer the first one, and, Chad, you can answer the second one. You know, unlike our competitors, our information is definitive. It's not anecdotal. So the truth of the matter is we can see what's going on globally, whether well-deserved or not. We're just not seeing any trend that doctors are taking time off. In fact, I think that they're relishing the increased traffic at the clinic level and taking full advantage of it. The second reason I can say that with a high degree of confidence is that we look at our performance so far in Q3, we're well ahead in terms of our tracking at this stage compared to last year. So we feel pretty confident in the fact that clinics aren't going to shut down for a couple of weeks in August or whenever, simply because I believe that based on our data points that we have, we're able to see very clearly what's going on in real time on any given day, any given week. Chad, perhaps you can touch on the Bliss question.

Could you repeat slightly when you asked the second part? Could you repeat that, please?

Sure. I'm sorry. Yeah, I just thought, you know, artists and Bliss were not sold under a subscription, but I thought, you know, it seemed like Bliss is now being sold under a subscription model, so I'm just curious if that's the case or not.

We reserve it for special occasions where we do a modified subscription for Bliss if necessary, if that's what the client needs, but with a higher upfront license fee. So we try to use it in specific situations. But artists, we continue to take on a cash-only basis.

Okay. I can follow up with you guys.

Thanks. Great. Thanks, John.

The next question comes from the line of Siraj Kalia with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your questions.

Good morning, Dom, Dominic, Chad. Can you hear me all right? We can, Siraj. Good morning.

Good morning, Siraj.

I hope everyone is safe and healthy. Hey, so, Dom, let me start out with a micro-level question. May I ask you to quantify the bliss performance in the quarter? And more specifically, what kind of collateral material are you talking about that would yield a net positive impact on this Venus Williams collaboration?

Well, first of all, Suraj, thanks for the question. We're not going to get specific into products. We've been pretty consistent in our approach. Excuse me. We do know that, as we reported, our global sales are up 85% year over year. We continue to see very strong market response Collectively, we think that the Blitz and the artist system will represent consistently, you know, around 50% of our total business that we do. The investment strategies that we've made as it relates to Venus Williams and so on, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we signed and prepared or recorded, I guess, if you will, all of the digital media assets, et cetera, et cetera, with Venus in late Q1. Basically, throughout Q2, we continue to perfect them and make these assets available to our customers. Specifically, things like in-clinic marketing materials, in-clinic videos, social media influencers, et cetera, using the Venus brand with Venus Williams. We have just initiated a global contest. with Venus Williams sort of leading the charge in that, asking people to share their best Venus stories for a competition, if you will, in terms of clinical results and so on that we continue to experience very nicely with the Venus Bliss. So it's a plethora of different materials that our customers can use, not only for us in the B2B area for our sales organization, but also for B2C, given her global appeal, quite frankly. Last but not least, one of the things that we're really excited about is that there is a new movie that is coming out called King Richard that comes out early November, I believe, that is Will Smith acting as Venus and Serena Williams' dad and the evolution of these two sisters coming from Compton to the world stage. So we think all of this stuff combined will continue to create a very compelling reason for the choice that we made with Venus Williams. And so far from our customer population, she's been extremely well received.

Got it. Dom, one high-level question, and Chad, I'll throw one your way. So, Dom, you know, as we come out of COVID, how would you characterize the competitive landscape, U.S. versus O.U.S.? What is driving shifts, if any? And also, what procedure category are you seeing the most competitive activity, U.S. versus OUS? And Chad, if I could quickly throw it in there, and thanks for taking my questions, guys. Chad, you guys have been working on Robocor, or now Amy, if I pronounced that correctly, for some time now. How would you characterize, based on your field information currently, how would you characterize the low-hanging fruit for Robocor. Gentlemen, thank you.

Yeah, Chad, I'd like to address both those questions, and then you can add, certainly. Sure. The first part, when it comes to competitive landscape, we've all been around this industry a long time. That is not softening. I mean, there's always going to be a lot of competition in this industry, which is one of the reasons why we made the decision to acquire a robotic company to create a whole new category, which we believe we're accelerating beyond what our expectations were. Specifically, as we look at the global footprint, there's no question that outside of North America, there's a tremendous amount of competition simply because there's lower barriers to entry. In other words, not an FDA process and so on. The categories that we see a lot of competition in obviously vary by region. For example, in EMEA, the category of fat reduction is extremely competitive because there's multiple players compared to North America where really there's a handful of serious players. That's one of the reasons why we also redirected our energies to North America because we believe that we have a very compelling argument to make when it comes to our competitors and how we compete against them. To your second question, I will respectfully say we haven't been working on Robocor a long time, Amy. In fact, it's basically just over a year. And if you look at any evolution of a product, even forget robots for a second, the typical product takes two to two and a half years from idea to commercialization to come to market. We feel that we're ahead of schedule given the fact that we've been able to already treat humans in feasibility trials, animal trials, and have actually got the robot now treating people out of the gate. So I think that we're quite pleased with where we are. We've accelerated this project. We've put some real effort into it. The fact that we already had the baseline robot that's used in hair restoration, we felt that that gave us a very significant head start, if you will, to the next generation. And we don't see any reason why that will slow down in any shape or form down the road.

Yeah, Suraj, the only thing I'd add to your question is that As in prior discussions, we've talked about expanding the artist-installed base rapidly to the core market of derms and plastics. So we see, Amy, as an evolution of that, of a total robotic strategy for the office to create further distance between the core market and the differentiation from the med spa that they're trying to offer a higher level of clinical service and outcome to the patients. So we see it as a great entree to go back to the installed base and talk to them about the next robot.

Thank you.

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. The next question is from the line of Anthony Vendetti with Maxim Group. Pleased to see you with your questions.

Thanks. So I'll focus on the two products that account for about 50% of your business, Bliss and Artist. First on Bliss, if you can correct me if I'm wrong, Dom or Chad, the Bliss product, the standalone Venus Bliss product, does not have a consumable, correct?

That's correct.

And the Venus Bliss Max, you mentioned, approximately 250K, and we'll have a consumable of $100 a treatment. Is that going to be $100 a treatment for any one of the treatments that it'll offer? Because it'll be a three-in-one, right? It'll be fat reduction, body tightening, and muscle stims. Is that correct?

That's correct, Anthony. So I'll share with you how we're looking at this. As we look at the Venus Versa, we introduced a treatment called TriBella a few years ago, which was basically a one-hour treatment that included basically IPL, radio frequency, and fractional resurfacing. This TriBella procedure was extremely well received and really drove a lot of the business that we did for the Versa. We feel we're going to do the exact same thing for the body So the Versa was for the face, the Venus Bliss Max will be for the body. And it'll be the same type of scenario where we'll have a one-hour treatment protocol, approximately 25 minutes of fat, 20 minutes of muscle stem to 25, and 10 minutes of contouring. Our initial calculations are that, on average, based on our current IoT data on the Venus Bliss, we should be able to achieve an average of about six treatments a week per clinic. in combination therapies. And that would translate, we're only going to have the $100 charge on the muscle stimulation portion of the technology. Now, this will not be a throwaway disposal. This will be a utilization activation code, for lack of a better word, on that particular element of the device. So it's a very high margin opportunity for us, which we think will be quite compelling in future years with the sale of the Venus Bliss Maxx.

Okay, yeah, that's helpful. So the $100 treatment is only on the muscle stem component. Correct, correct. Okay, and when you were talking about the trade-in, you can't just add, I just want to make sure I'm correcting this, you can't just add the muscle stem component to a current list. It would require a trade-in, is that correct?

Well, we haven't finalized that yet, Anthony. For sure, we will not be able to do the upgrade in the field, but that doesn't preclude us from saying that, hey, we'll take the Bliss back, do it in-house, and send it back. Right now, the plan is not to do that because we don't think that we need to do it, simply because, as I said earlier, the average return on investment is 28 weeks on our Bliss user base. So most customers, by the time the Venus Bliss Max will come out, will not only have paid for the device but also covered their cost of operator time and so on. So I think that the financial modeling that we can do and the opportunity we can present to our customers is quite compelling. So I don't think that we're going to get a lot of that. I think that what's really going to happen is more, as I said earlier, we can go to the top 20% of customers who are generating a very significant amount of revenue and simply say, it's time to add a second treatment room because you've got so much business. And by the way, if patient A that was originally treated on the Bliss on its own wants muscle stimulation, you can put them into room number two and do that sort of standalone there. So at this point, we're not upgrading per se the device. It's not off the table, but we just don't feel it's necessary to do so as opposed to just selling them a second device and then taking full advantage of the utilization opportunity on the muscle stem.

Okay, great. That's helpful. And then on artist, I just want to see if I was correct on this. Did you say it was the best utilization quarter ever or in the last 18 months? I just want to clarify. Last four years.

Last four years.

Best utilization quarter in the last four years. Okay. Obviously, you made lots of improvements to that device. You brought down the cost of goods sold. You've completely revamped the protocol. Is there anything else other than getting that message out there? I know there was an effort to bring down the treatment time so that a practitioner could potentially do two of these procedures in a day. Are you at that point yet, or are you still working towards that?

So we spent the last year focusing predominantly on the implantation feature to improve it. And right now we've got it to a place where a doctor can harvest approximately a thousand follicles an hour, and he can implant between three and 400 follicles per hour. Okay. So the total treatment time plus or minus right now is around five hours to do a typical 2000 follicle procedure. What we're working on to help further improve the platform now that we've been able to find our cadence, if you will, in the implantation is to get the implantation feature up to 600 to 700 per hour, which will ultimately dramatically improve the time from start to finish on the procedure. The goal here is to get the procedure down to four hours, again, using the typical 2,000 follicle transplant as the baseline. And we don't think we're that far away from that, but it's still going to take some time to make sure that, you know, everything that we're doing in the algorithms, the software, the cartridges that hold the follicles for the implantation part of it are going to be reproducible at every single clinic that uses the implantation feature in the device.

Okay, great. That's very helpful. Thanks very much. I'll turn it back.

No problem. Thanks, Anthony.

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