01 Quantum Inc. (DFK0.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Let's get started. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2025 Fourth Quarter Conference Call. I'm Brian Stringer. I'm the Chief Financial Officer for 01 Quantum. And with me today is Andrew Cheung, our President and CEO. Now the format today will be, Andrew will give us a rundown on an overview of our business, the results and business developments going forward. Now before we get started, there is a disclaimer, which forms a portion of this presentation, so just take a look briefly at it. Now following Andrew's presentation, there'll be a chance for Q&A. So please, everybody, I think, understands now with Zoom, how to how to answer. Just at the bottom, there's a Q&A, click it, type your answer. I'll moderate questions at the end and Andrew or I will answer them. So now, Andrew, it's over to you.

Thank you, Brian. Again, my name is Andrew. I am the CEO and President of 01 Quantum. So welcome to our fourth quarter result webinar. And I would not go too deep into about what quantum computers are because it's like, everyone knows about it already. So I will be focusing on just saying that, the excessive computing power of quantum computer has indeed created an unprecedented cybersecurity threat for the world or AKA Q-Day, which is the day when the bad guys are using quantum computers to do the dirty works. So on and after Q-Day, everything under the sun will be vulnerable. That's why it matters. So whether you are e-mail, AI, cryptocurrencies or remote access, everything will be vulnerable or totally naked in front of a quantum computers. So a lot of large companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft has already started their quantum migration journey. So I think -- I keep saying that, don't listen to this company, just listen to what the government says. So first of all, 2 years ago, the President's office in the U.S. has already issued an official NSM-10 letter, reminding the agencies to be very mindful about a famous attack called HNDL, harvest now, decrypt later, whereby the hackers are obtaining your data publicly, but they are encrypted. They cannot do anything, but they simply hold on to it until they got hold of a quantum computer, then they decrypt, right? So with this, the problem is not a tomorrow problem, whatever you believe whether it's this next year, 3 years later or whatever, it's not a tomorrow problem, not even the today problem, but a yesterday problem for you. And so no wonder why the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, about 6 months ago on the CNBC interview, he already opened said that the worldwide cybersecurity threat will be totally broken if we don't act immediately. And in addition to that, the founder of NVIDIA also said that we are now in the inflection point. And founder of the Ethereum also said there's a 20% chance that the Q-Day would actually hit the crypto market by 2029, right. So what we have done is that we have invested in this since 8 years ago already. So with multimillions of dollars spending on creating our engine, we -- our plan is not to license the engine to others doing the job. Our plan is to give it out for free while we are helping our customer or partners achieving the quantum migration journey with a fee, right? So far, it seems like our strategy is successful because we are probably the only one in the post-quantum PQC industry exited the pre-money stage and into revenue generation, right? So what we have done, the more notable one are that we have helped our customers created a quantum-safe remote access product, quantum-safe digital asset, and we also have created quantum-safe e-mail security, which I'm going to get into more details one by one. So first of all, the [indiscernible] from the press was only a week ago, we have announced the completion of this project with Hitachi in Japan. We signed the agreement in June last year, and the product is completed at the end of December and they have commercially launched the product just about a week ago on the 15th of January this month. And the press release by Hitachi has been made in Japan, and we have also released our joint version in the U.S. and Canada, right? So what we have created for them is a quantum state version of Remote Access. Now this is exactly like how I described. We don't want to license this technology for our customers to do the work. So basically, they talk to us, they say, "Hey, you know what, you guys are a quantum expert, and we don't want to do the technical work. We give you the -- very simple, we give you the quantum vulnerable version. And at the end of the day, you gave us back". On the other side, you spin-out a quantum-safe version, and that's it, so simple. We'd rather pay you guys a onetime fee plus royalty moving forward this doing this. And this is perfectly fine for us and for them. And this also gives Hitachi a quantum-safe version of remote access to market in Japan. Now this is very important because HNDL attack is like a perfect storm for the remote access. You can imagine that people are working a lot remotely these days. So the remote access channel or the session fundamentally represents also a history book of the company. So if the hackers are recording the history book and then hold on until they got hold of a quantum computer, then decrypt, the whole company secret will be naked. So basically, this -- I we don't want that to happen to us or to our customers. So we wanted to be quantum-safe, and we did it. So the market is potential is huge. In Japan alone, it is growing from $45 million last year to $72 million in the -- by 2030. So 01 typically receive a onetime fee, as I said, plus royalty moving forward. So that's Hitachi, number one. So number two, is even bigger. This is actually something that we have announced in July of last year. We signed up with a crypto foundation called qLABS. So qLABS basically asked us to create the world's first fully true quantum-safe token for them, right? So this token is going to be used as something they call PQC like quantum gas fee token, right? So that it is designed to be used to protect other assets like Ethereum, any kind of smart contra-based asset like Ethereum, Hyperliquid or whatsoever, so that these holder of the digital asset will simply go to their site and click a button to do what they call quantum lock and quantum unlock, right? So after locking, you will be safe against quantum computer attack. And then when they want to sell, they want to trade, they do unlock first. And then after that, they lock again, right? So the only thing is that we are asking them to pay, a very small fee when they do the lock and unlock process in the currency that we are creating at the very end stage of QA, quality assurance right now. The quantum -- we call it the qONE token. So this process is at the very last stage of QA process and is slated to be -- go to go public probably the last day of January this month or the first week of February. So we're talking about just weeks away. And the market is huge, simply because the whole $4 trillion digital asset must be quantum-safe before Q-Day. Now this doesn't -- it's not only applicable to token, but it's also applicable to stable coin, which is huge in the world right now. So typically, 01 is also receiving similar to Hitachi receiving a onetime engineering fee plus the royalty sharing of asset, token sale and money raise and things like that. So it's moving forward with a very big opportunity for us. From a technical point of view, this also -- this whole process also causing us to have filed 3 U.S. patent. One has been granted and 2 more in the pending stage. So it gives us a lot of things from the IP to monetary reward. So that's the digital asset. So the third leg of this stool is the e-mail security, probably I don't need to say that e-mail is probably the largest business tool in the world, but yet they are 100% quantum vulnerable, and they are also 91% of the source of ransomware attack through fishing. So what we have done was created the world-first e-mail security product that is complied with the NIST standard. And it's also giving the end-to-end quantum-safe digital signature. Now with quantum-safe digital signature, it means guaranteeing the authenticity of the sender. So given the authenticity of the sender, meaning that you know, it is real, and it is plucking the hole of fishing e-mail which in turn, plucked 91% source of ransomware attack. Now this is unplanned. Originally, we were slated to just creating a quantum-safe e-mail security, but the quantum-safe signature has a side effect of also plucking the 91% source of ransomware. And then on top of that, it also has end-to-end encryption, which guarantee privacy that when the -- a, like when the Peter is sending a message to Mary, the message is totally encrypted end-to-end, so that even the authority in the middle get hold of or intercepted the e-mail, there's no chance that the CIA or NSA or whatever can read the message because the message is encrypted that only Mary as the recipient having the private key can decrypt the message. So this is slated to be a SaaS product for just typical $10 a month and the channel -- after the channel discount of $7, we are receiving $3 per month from the channel. And the market is huge because very simply that there are [ 730 ] business e-mail addresses in the world, if only 10% are serious and wanting quantum protection and paying $3 a month, that is already equated to $2.6 billion per year of recurring revenue of a grab, right? So what I have described are the 3 legs of the revenue generatio stool that we have. And number one, remote access by Hitachi; number two, the quantum-safe digital asset by qLABS; and number 3 is the e-mail security product by ourselves. So on top of these 3 current revenue-generating machine, we are also creating for the immediate future, that is a platform related to AI security, which is really a cross over between AI and quantum safety. Now everyone knows about AI, but the general AI market today is just basically LLM, large language model. What most people don't know is about the SLM, which is a larger market, a small language model or some people calling it a special purpose, the AI, for example, credit card fraud detection, anomaly detection, facial recognition, medical [indiscernible], those are all SLM market. But the SLM market has been lastly, paralyzed by one thing, which is privacy. A lot of the organization doesn't even allow the people like the bank or the national security or something. They just don't even allow the people to go into AI for a privacy issue, right? So after identifying this pain point about 2 years ago, we spent most of 2024 and 2025, invented a technology whereby we are calling it in the QAW Quantum AI Wrapper technology, we have filed patent application about 6 months ago, and we are fundamentally using full homomorphic encryption to encrypt both the user data and the AI model before doing the AI inference, right? So this allows us to be open to the source support market, professional service market and the managed service market. And the initial addressable market is already very huge, number one, because they are 3x more likely for people to use SLM, if it is secure. So the total addressable market is expected to be huge because, as I mentioned, we have essentially lifted on major obstacle for the SLM privacy, right? So the market is expecting to grow from $0.9 billion now to about $5.4 billion by 2030, which is a 600% increase. The market is already there. It's just been paralyzed by privacy. And FHE is just a subset of it. It's already $880 million in size. And then the target segment that we're initially targeting like finance, government and health already also represents $650 million in size. So it's a huge market we are tapping into, right? So value proposition we build for this is very simple, because we make SLM secure, not only secure in terms of privacy, but also secure in the post-quantum fashion. So what we will be building is not just the service business, professional service or managed business, but also we're going to build what we call an AI marketplace, which is kind of like an -- you can imagine, it's kind of like an AI-oriented Amazon or eBay, whereby we allow the AI model vendors to list the model on our platform, and we bridge them with the user, and we are encrypting both sides, right, before doing the AI inference so that they are not exposed to each other. So the privacy issue, remember, is not only applying to the user data, but also apply to the AI model because the AI model, if it is performing in an encrypted fashion, it is up for anyone to copy, right, just like simply the DeepSeek copying ChatGPT and build on top of it, nothing wrong, but it is -- if it is unencrypted, it can be copied and the SLMs or special purpose AI model doesn't like that to happen, right? So we are opening up to, as I said, community open source, professional and managed service enterprise support. And for the AI marketplace, we're typically charging 15% or 20% commission similar to Amazon or eBay. And this is also opening up to the government funding such as provincial and federal innovation fund from the government and procurement of the business. So we will be using 2026 and 2027 as our go-to-market time with stage approach where we will be having the -- like the stage 1 to be later in the Q1 this year to have an optimized FHE offering and followed by the Q2 of the private AI and then Q1 of next year to have a hybrid efficacy model, then it would be the AI marketplace for the managed and hosted the private AI by Q2 2027, followed by AI marketplace for the optimized model Q3 2027, and then finally culminated with the full hybrid model. So that's kind of like a 6 stages of road map that we have identified for the QAW market for the next 2 years. So I guess, as a conclusion, this is very obvious why we are -- we have exited from the pre-money stage compared to our competitors. So it is also fully reflected in our quarterly results. So maybe I will turn over to Brian, our CFO, to explain a little bit about our financial picture and where we stand today. So Brian, back to you.

Okay. Thank you, Andrew. Well, let's take a look at our Q4 results. Our adjusted P&L, which is essentially our cash burn. If you take a look at revenues of $434,000, our cash burn of $130,000, which is down significantly from Q3. And our revenue specifically is up, the revenue is derived from development fees that we received, as Andrew has talked about, for the qLABS project and the Hitachi project. There's still more to come for Q1 and a bit into Q2 as well. So when you take a look out at that adjusted burn, we can foresee knowing the revenue that we have and the expenses we're committed to of a similar type of adjusted P&L for the next 2 quarters. We essentially look at it as it's plus or minus a bit $200,000 a quarter. Compare that to our cash of $3.1 million. We've done a financing in Q4 in October with Hampton Securities for net proceeds, $2.1 million. You can see we've got a reasonable runway. Okay. Andrew, if you could move to the next slide. Our market cap today, about $76 million. Cash, the reason it's $3.5 million is subsequent to the year-end, we had some warrants exercised. So we've now got about $3.5 million cash, which extends the runway before we turn profitable. Basic shares, $108 million, options outstanding today, $8.2 million and warrants, $6.5 million. As I say, our cash burn quarterly average, approximately $200,000 per quarter. With respect to our market cap, you can see $76 million, others in our space, good technology, Quantum eMotion QNC, $960 million, BTQ, $1 billion. So they're about $1 billion market cap. Throughout 2024, we are nose to the grindstone developing. They were better known. We're now with a full marketing program, a full public awareness program. And I think last year, it was for us, proof of performance because we were playing catch-up, so to speak. I think we're performing now, so we hope to catch up. And with that, Andrew, I'll turn it back to you.

Thank you, Brian. So before I take a break, a pause for question and answer, I just want to do a closing. Basically, timing is everything. The Quantum market is coined by a lot of independent analysts to be at the inflection point where it is kind of like the AI market 3 years ago. So the total addressable market is extremely huge. And as Brian mentioned, we are also undervalued compared to our peers. And most importantly, we have already leveraged a multi-segment product offering moving into the future. And I guess, it is all being backed by our global partnership network. We signed up many partners working together and more notable, like I mentioned earlier is Hitachi in Japan, and also PwC in Asia, Thales in France and CGI in our backyard, qLABS in Europe and Ternium in Australia. So with these partnership network, it is dovetailing into our expansion plan. So at the end, we also backed by strong IP portfolio, whereby we have patent-protected technology and patent pending technologies, which is all adhering to our products. So I'm going to take a quick pause here to allow some time for question and answer as mentioned by Brian earlier, I'm sure everyone is already familiar with how the Q&A feature works at Zoom. So please feel free to type in your questions, and Brian will, as usual, act as the moderator to list your question, and I would do my best to answer everyone one by one. Brian, over to you.

Okay. Thank you, Andrew. The first question has to do with our qLABS relationship. And I've got several questions here, so I'll try to group them together. So -- and they're all commercialized related. And can you elaborate on the marketing rollout for the qONE token? When do you think it will start? That's the marking part? How much do you think the qONE token will be worth? And how do you get paid for the gas utility? And then he said, he just wasn't clear on that.

Yes. Thank you, Brian. I think this is a very loaded question from this investor, which -- but they are good questions. First of all, let me try to answer in a short way, right? The -- and a short answer is that they are slated to release the qONE token by the end of this month or the first week of February. So we're talking about just weeks away from that. And then the second thing is I have to always stress the point that we are the cybersecurity and blockchain expert. We are not the digital asset or crypto marketing expert. The best analogy that I always use is that, we know how to build the best plane in the world, but we are not the top guy. We don't -- we are not even a pilot, right? But we know how to build the plane, and they are the pilots. So they are doing the job. They're doing the marketing. In fact, they are doing a lot of marketing, I mean, pre-marketing before the launching, right? So from the compensation point of view, as I mentioned earlier, 01 received onetime development fee in cash and also sharing of the proceeds moving forward. The proceed moving forward is composed of cash raise that they do and also a percentage of the fund token which is the qONE, Q-o-n-e token, they are releasing, we'll get a percentage of that. So the upside to us is definitely in these 2 things. In a nutshell that every dollar value of the token they've successfully promoted, we will receive equivalent of a lot of U.S. dollar revenue for us to go into our team. So I guess that's a long-winded answer to your questions. Yes.

Okay. The next one has to do on the financials. It's a good job on the financials, thank you, with a cash burn of $130,000. How do you see this year turning out? Any insight on potential revenue and level of expenses?

Yes. I would say that we expect -- I think Brian has kind of alluded a little bit when talking about the financial picture, we expect the revenue still happening more or less the same way in the Q1 and Q2. And then because the partners has already completed the quantum-safe product. For example, Hitachi has released the product last week and starting to market this week. So we would expect them to January revenue. And how much? Obviously, we don't know because, again, the good thing is they are the marketing arm. They are spending sales and marketing dollar. We don't need to spend a dime, we just sit back to collect the royalty percentage, right? And the bad thing is that we don't -- it's their job, but they are a huge Fortune 500 company, they know what they're doing. So we expect them to generate revenue for us to share. And then number two, the token, as I just briefly mentioned, is also slated to complete in a few weeks from today. So it will be contributing to the Q2 or Q4 on ongoing revenue, counting for us. So these things are completed or completing as we speak today, and is going out to the market. So while I don't have a crystal ball, I am very confident in the generation process. Plus, as I mentioned, on top of all these current revenue generators, we are also creating the immediate future AI crossover between and the -- and quantum safety. So yes, we got -- we believe we got all the base covered.

Okay. And you just came in if you were talking on Hitachi, as you were given that answer. And the question is, do you have any information you can share on both Hitachi's marketing plans?

In fact, I think it's part of my answer too, it is their marketing. So we don't have any say on how they're going to market, but I believe they are going to market to their existing customers and new customers in Japan, which in general, they are -- their customers are no lack of the large company, the government, university basically larger organizations in Japan.

Okay. and cognizant of time, this is the last question. And here in Canada, there appears to be a Buy Canadian mentality, it's especially in governments. There seems to be a good business case for security surrounding your technology. Are you? And if so, how are you going after government business because it seems like a good proposition?

Yes. This last question is also a good one. Yes, the Buy Canadian mentality is very good for us. And indeed, we have started since a few months ago, heading by our new COO, Tyson, who is also a Board member of us. He has already started a whole campaign with staff focusing on marketing to the government in terms of 2 things, not only just the government funding, federal funding but also the government procurement, specifically in the area of secure AI because this is a very important sector that, for example, the national security or the military, they need AI technology, but they cannot use it because of privacy issues. So with the lifting of the price problem of SLM, we have opened the market, and we believe is a very important footstep into the into the government market, not only just for Buy Canada, even without Buy Canada, it's already there. But the Buy Canadian is just a catalyst making it happen even better.

Okay. Thank you, Andrew. And as I said, I'm cognizant of time. If anybody has any questions that weren't answered, there's a couple, feel free to contact myself or Andrew. And with that, thank you very much for joining us. I'll turn it back to Andrew for any closing comments.

Thank you, Brian. So in closing, as I said, timing is everything. We have crossed the bridge, and I'm very happy to announce this very encouraging quarter. And I'm looking forward for a lot more good things to happen. So please stay tuned, and I'll see you in our next meeting. Thank you very much for joining.