Scientific Industries Inc

Good day and welcome to the Scientific Industries Report's second quarter year 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joe Durame. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Nick. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today to review Scientific Industries' financial results for the second quarter of 2024, ended June 30, 2024. With us today on the call are Helena Santos, Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Donadik, CEO of Scientific Bioprocessing, and John Moore, Chairman. After the conclusion of today's prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Before we begin with prepared remarks, I would like to remind everyone certain statements made by the management team of scientific industries during this conference call constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Except for the statements of historical fact, this conference call may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, some of which are detailed under risk factors and documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date the statements were made. The company can give no assurance that such forward-looking statements will prove to be correct. Scientific Industries does not undertake and specifically disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Helena Santos, CEO of Scientific Industries. Helena?

Thank you, Joe, and thank you to our loyal shareholders who have given us the capital to transform our company, Scientific Industries, into a modern business platform that will hopefully generate shareholder, and customer value for years to come. The Benchtop Laboratory business has two main product platforms, the Genie Lab products and the Torbao Scales business. The Genie products experienced the collapse of our traditionally strong demand from our Chinese distributors and a continued proliferation of knockoff products that sell for half our price. The resilience of the Genie products revenue is a tribute to our terrific distribution across the world and our brand reputation, as revenues for these products have returned to their pre-COVID levels. Our Torvald pharmacy scale business is being transformed by the success and the marketplace of our growing line of Vivid automated pill counters. However, during the first six months of this year, We did hit a snag because the capital expenditure of our independent pharmacy customers literally stopped due to a change in the billing and reimbursement by the pharmacy management benefit managers. So what does this mean? It meant that starting January 1 in 2024, this year, retail pharmacies had to pay accrued fees to these BPMs from the scripts that they sold in the last half of 2023 plus pay the current fees at the point of sale. The industry called this double whammy six-month period the pharmacy epilepsy, and their cash flow collapsed, and naturally, as a result, so did their investments in capital purchases, including automation equipment like our Vivid Pill Counters. But fortunately, this period is now over. As far as we're concerned, it's in the rearview mirror, and we have seen a huge inflection in sales this month, and we're experiencing rapid growth and market share gains in the beginning of this third quarter. This growth is going to be accelerated even faster in the fourth quarter when we begin shipping our Vivid workstation, our newest product, which completes the hardware portion of our product line as it pertains to Vivid. The workstation has been previewed at the biggest shows of the year, and our distribution partner believes this $13,000 product could match the current unit's volume of our lower-priced Vivid Light S and the Vivid 1. The addition of the workstation solidly cements our position as a technology and market leader in the automated tail counter markets. While our hardware development spend is now ended, or close there to, we will aggressively continue to add software features to extend our competitive advantage with accurate and fast pill counting, providing tons of features and excellent user interface experience, together with a value proposition to grow our subscription revenue. One of our initiatives that I am particularly excited about is a scheduled 2025 launch of an AI replacement of our geometric pill recognition system, which we're currently working on. This feature is a key component of our grand strategy to dominate the retail pharmacy automation markets. While we are focused on growing our revenues, as I've discussed, just as important is controlling our costs and optimizing our cash utilization. And as I mentioned last quarter, we've spent quite a bit of time and effort this year. Actually, we actually started at the end of last year, but on right-sizing our organization and putting in place the operational efficiency measures with the goal of better aligning our expenditures with our people, with the requirements and our vision. It hasn't been easy. But with the cooperation of our entire organization, and this starts with our board of directors all the way to our employees, we've made great progress in slowing our cash burn as evidenced by our first half year results. And we will continue to be disciplined to strengthen our company for success. I'm very excited about the last half of our year and our future. And with that, I turn it over to Mr. Daniel Donadie to talk about the bioprocessing business segment of our company. Daniel?