Clear Blue Technologies International Inc.

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We've got Clear Blue reporting their Q1 fiscal 2023 results shortly. Miriam Turk, CEO and co-founder, will walk you through the earnings. At the end of the call, we'll take some questions. There's two ways you can submit your questions. Please feel free to use the Q&A tab at the bottom, at which point one of us will read the questions out. Alternatively, please feel free to email the questions to us at investors at clearbluetechnologies.com or allall at sofficcapital.com. With that, over to yourself, Mary.

Thanks, Nikhil. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone in Europe. going to go over a bit of an overview of Clear Blue. There's been a lot of changes around the new products that we have. I'm very pleased that Farouk Anwar, our CFO, is with us here today, and he is going to lead the discussion on the Q1 2023 results. And at the end of the presentation, I'll give us a bit of an update on what our outlook looks like, and then we'll take it open to questions. So, you know, the world has really changed for Clear Blue. We did a lot of heavy lifting in 2022 to position ourselves for strong growth and really to get lift off and strong leverage from the significant R&D investments that we've made and the significant market leadership that we have with our products, intelligence, data, analytics team. and operational performance. So we raised more than $10 million in non-dilutive capital last year. $6 million of that comes in in pure grants over the next three years. So that helps our balance sheet. It helps our cash. It helps our EBITDA and net zero cash burn objectives. We acquired a pretty critical company that is got one half of the two part story required to take advantage of the huge movement investments now happening related to solar. Clear Blue's products were good for new installations and new deployments, but when it came to the world of the existing telco tower with existing diesel generator and larger grid connection, we didn't have the best fit. We could do it, but it wasn't the best fit. With the acquisition of eSight Power Systems, which we concluded in January of this year in Q1, We now have a fantastic product offering when put together with Clearbus Illumium Services to go after that market. And that market is now moving significantly with many, if not all, of the larger telco and towercos moving towards solar, not just because of the focus on climate change, but mostly because of the cost of diesel and servicing those sites. So if you look at it, you know, January 1, 2022, we had two products out in the marketplace, Illumiant and NanoGrid. As of July 1 of this year, we will have five products in the marketplace. Illumiant, the core traditional product that we have. Senti, our new Illumiant all-in-one streetlight product. NanoGrid, our telecom product that is great for satellite sites and satellite cell phone sites. eSight Power Systems, which is good for the larger retrofit hybrid diesel grid and solar systems. And lastly, our PicoGrid smart off-grid power system, which is perfectly aligned with the IoT marketplace. With the addition of eSight Power Systems, which is a Swedish company, it's been in the market since 2008. It's got more than 1,000 sites up and running on its patented eSight power technology. We added a number of strategic and large customers, and we increased our country coverage significantly. We've now got a nice active customer, for example, in Vietnam that we've gotten, I think, three orders from since the beginning of the year. So we're really moving into the core network of telecom and into core infrastructure with IoT. We're doing retrofit large-scale hybrid power up to 30 kilowatts now with our Eastside power systems. And in our Illumiant and infrastructure, you're starting to see mission-critical infrastructure projects, runway extension project at O'Hare Airport. Interstate Highway Exchange. And so, you know, the 2023 is certainly very different from 2022. And the trajectory for both bookings and everything going forward is looking quite positive. We are cautiously optimistic. So just to go over our product line. You know, if you remember your decimal world, you had the micro, the nano, and the pico. So eSight Micro is the previous eSight product with the addition of Clearblue's Illumiance Management Service and Technology, cloud-based analytics, our service team, as well as we now offer a full solution, not just the eSight system itself. And we're addressing a market that's anywhere from three to 30 kilowatts. Our nanogrid product continues to be a really great asset. We're moving forward with a lot of satellite projects in that marketplace and satellite cell phone systems. It is servicing 20 watt up to three kilowatt systems. And our PicoGrid product, which begins shipping commercially in early Q3, so July, is a multi-device. So it can support up to four different devices, a lot of different IoT applications. Certainly, Wi-Fi Hotspot is a great application. We have some applications. agriculture applications coming in, security camera monitoring, and a myriad of other opportunities, smart city projects that we're talking to a couple of customers about for our PicoGrid product. Just to summarize on our Illumiant product, over the last eight to 10 years, we had the Strata series, which was really a lead acid, very large, significant infrastructure, big, heavy pole that was really good for the part of the world where you're better off going lead acid than anything else. Highways and roadway series type projects, good for all weather and for really high powered lights. The beginning of last year, we launched our CAMI product, which is really the movement towards lithium technology, good for warmer weathers and also higher-powered lights. And one of our biggest orders this year has come out of that CAMI product launch. And then the new Senti product, which we will begin shipping commercially in Q3, as I mentioned, is our all-in-one solar streetlight. When you talk about PicoGrid and Senti, one of the things that's very different about these two products is these are mass market products. These are products that are in a box. They're sitting on a shelf. There isn't a custom engineering project, a custom design project required for each of these projects to ship like you would have with an eSight project or a NanoGrid project or even a large Illumiant product. This is something where we'll have volume sitting on the shelf and at distributors and customers can buy it. It's in a box. It weighs something I can lift up and walk out the door with. And it's ready to go. You just open it up and anyone can install it. So on the PicoGrid side, it will power IoT devices around the globe, whether it's water pumps for agriculture, Wi-Fi access points for the large satellite global rollouts that are now happening outside as a result of billions of dollars of investment by large satellite companies. We all know the Elon Musk Starlink story, but you may have noticed that there was a major successful launch of the Viasat-3 first rocket. That is a very high speed, one terabyte per second, large capacity satellite that's coming online now. And more will be coming online. We have a strategic partnership with them. And on the ground, those satellite systems are going to be talking to Wi-Fi routers and access points and satellite modems. And those devices require power on the ground. In many cases, solar off grid is the better solution. One, potentially because there's no power in the area, very applicable in the emerging markets. But two, even when you're talking about large urban areas in downtown cores, it's not easy oftentimes getting power to a little device that you want to mount on a pole, whether it's a security camera or some sort of a sensor. So PicoGrid is perfect for that. Senti is an all-in-one solar streetlight. We have a bunch of patents filed for this, but we had not launched with our own all-in-one solar streetlight because the product didn't really work to the standards that are required by engineering lighting standards in North America up until now. The performance was too small. You were really talking about like a little flashlight, you know, coming out of a device and not enough energy and power to really give reliable power all night long. With the advancements that we have, we now have our own lighting engineer on on the LED side, as well as the high performance of PicoGrid. It's MPPT. It's lithium cells inside. It's not a separate battery. All of PicoGrid goes inside of Senti with a high performance, larger solar panel. And all of a sudden, you have an all-in-one solar light that meets engineering standards and city, you know, national, provincial, state standards for lighting in many, many applications. It ships in a box, you put it on a pole, and away you go. At the other end of the spectrum, we have eSight. And eSight Power Systems is the company that we acquired. eSight Micro is the new product that occurs when you take eSight Power products and you merge them together with Clear Blue's Illumion's Management platform, our management operating service, our big cloud analytics, our predictive analytics, weather forecasting and energy forecasting, troubleshooting remediation, and when you turn it into an entire system. I've started talking with customers about the road to zero diesel, and it's not an easy road. Customers demand higher availability of their cell phone telecommunications connectivity than they do of any other power device. The power can go out, but that internet router better stay up. And so high availability in telecom is a really key requirement. And so the rule has always been just put a diesel generator, turn it on all the time. And I know I've got power all the time. The problem is it's become prohibitively expensive. And we all know the impact to climate change as a result of all of these diesel generators running everywhere. So investing solar kind of gets you one step there, but it's a very limited small site. And so if you look at an old fashioned site, you have a cabinet, you've got air conditioners in it with lots of cooling and fans. And if you want to get to a solar only site, the first thing you got to do is you got to become energy efficient. You have to get rid of air conditioning. And a lot of people don't understand that heat and thermal issues kill outdoor systems. And so moving out of that nice air conditioned environment to a non air conditioned environment is the first step to going zero diesel. And rather than just trying to make it work with existing technology that works great when you put it in the fridge, but does not work great when it's not air conditioned. eSight took the visionary step of designing a passively cooled system that does not require active air cooling. It took the second step of pulling it outside of the battery cabinet. So inside that cabinet is a bunch of batteries and a bunch of telecommunications equipment. And all that power generation switching equipment was really, really hot and adding to the heat in the cabinet, not only affecting the electronics, but the batteries and the things. So on the hardware side, eSight Micro and the converter technology that they've built and that we are honored and pleased to have as an asset within the merged companies now is the first step on the road to zero-hits diesel. The second step comes from data analytics. So you know that our core technology, and I've got to update this picture and show all the different power devices. There are now five or six of them instead of just one. But every power device we have, Pico, Senti, Illumiant, Nano, eSight, communicates wirelessly to our Illumiant's cloud platform. And in our Illumiant's cloud platform, we have... to our knowledge, the largest data set of 12 million operating days of historical data around the world of telecommunications and lighting systems and solar and solar hybrid operational systems. And using our energy forecasting and management and our troubleshooting and remediation, we deliver maximum uptime, longest life, and easy to install and maintain. And on the maintain side, it's all about how to get to zero diesel. So our customers benefit from this intelligent management capability in many ways. Everybody in the marketplace is talking about AI and I'm very cautious as to how we talk about it. And I want to make sure our investors and our customers and our stakeholders are all aware of where we're going. The first thing that's important to understand is that it doesn't happen overnight. And, you know, you start at the ground level and you build over time. And it's kind of a continuous line. So I find this capability, this analysis from Gartner, a very good analysis. And understand that we've been talking about big data, data analytics and predictive analytics since almost the first day that the company has been established. We started off by getting all the data all the time. As that data has grown, figuring out how to manage very, very large repositories of data is a huge endeavor, and we've got an infrastructure that allows us to do that. We have a lot of sophisticated analytics and tools that allow us to leverage information from that data, and we've now moved into predictive analytics. What is going to happen in the future? As part of our government grant program, we have a $14 million three-year plan to invest, to take that last step and to begin adding a check mark under AI. And the kind of AI we believe we're going to be using is machine learning. There is no checkmark there, but we've got the first four checkmarks. And it's important to understand that the competitors in the marketplace can't just start with machine learning AI. They need the data. They need big data. They need domain knowledge about the operation of the sites from analytics, predictive analytics, and that capability to move forward before they can add the layer of machine learning. And that's where Clearblue is going. What's our target objective? Well, first of all, we want to lower the upfront cost. The upfront capex of tower infrastructure is the number one limiting factor that limits the ability for people to roll out additional infrastructure in telecommunications. And we've been able to demonstrate independently validated that you need 40% lower upfront cost versus the competition of in the configuration of those systems using Clear Blue. That's just not lower cost of our stuff. It's less solar panels and less batteries for a Clear Blue smart off-grid system versus a traditional power grid or solar grid system. The next step is how do we reduce customer diesel consumption? Well, adding solar will help, but these are very difficult sites, shaded, legacy. They're not out in the middle of a farm, you know, and they're a small footprint. So using data analytics and performance objectives and energy management is really what's needed. And our target objective is to reduce diesel consumption by 20 to 50 percent. As I said to one CEO of a very large tower company, we're never going to get to zero diesel on all of your sites. But right now you have 100% of your sites on diesel. You're going to reduce the diesel on all those sites by adding solar. If our predictive analytics can take 20% to 50% of those sites where you could actually shut down diesel down to zero, that's going to have a huge impact. So it's going to improve maintenance. It's going to increase uptime. And then most importantly, from his perspective, maybe it adds 5% to 10% profit margin to his bottom line. So now we're going to turn it over to the discussion of the Q1 results. And I'm going to hand it over to Farouk, who is going to walk you through our financial results. Farouk, are you there? Yep.

Thank you so much. Hello, everyone.