Aurora Spine Corporation ($ASG)

Good day, and welcome to the Aurora Spine Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Adam Lowensteiner of Lytham Partners. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Danielle. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to conduct an update with investors and review the financial results for Aurora Spine for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 that ended December 31, 2025. With us on the call representing the company today are Trent Northcutt, President and CEO of Aurora Spine; Matt Goldstone, Chief Commercial Officer; and Chad Clouse, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made during this course of this call may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Act of 1934. These statements reflect current expectations concerning future events and results. Words such as expect, intend, believe, may, will, should, could, anticipate and similar expressions are words that are used to identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean a statement is not forward-looking. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties and other important factors that could cause actual performance or achievements to be materially different from those projected. For a full discussion of these risks, uncertainties and factors, you are encouraged to read Aurora Spine's documents on file with SEDAR, including those set forth in periodic reports filed under the Forward-Looking Statements and Risk Factors section. Aurora Spine does not intend to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. On this call, management may refer to EBITDAC, adjusted EBITDAC, adjusted net income or adjusted EPS, which are not measures of financial performance under generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. Management believes that these non-GAAP figures in addition to other GAAP measures provide meaningful supplemental information regarding the company's operational performance. Investors should recognize that these non-GAAP figures might not be comparable to similarly titled measures of other companies. These measures should not be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or superior to any measure of performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with the SEC Regulation G can be found in the company's earnings release. With that now, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Trent Northcutt, President and CEO of Aurora Spine. Trent, please proceed.

Thank you, Adam. I'd like to welcome everyone to this call to update everyone about Aurora Spine. To lay out the agenda for today's call, I plan on updating everyone on the company's operations and then hand the call over to Matt Goldstone, our Chief Commercialization Officer, to review our sales initiatives. After Matt makes his remarks, I will pass the call to Chad Clouse, our Chief Financial Officer, who will then briefly review the company's financials. Afterwards, I will make some brief concluding remarks and then open the call to answer any questions you may have. Fiscal 2025 was a solid year for Aurora as we achieved record revenues on an annual basis and built momentum into the end of the year, producing the company's first $5 million revenue quarter in the company's history. This is a great accomplishment but -- and puts the company on a good trajectory for 2026 and beyond, and I couldn't -- it could not have been achieved if it weren't for a great team of employees that we have assembled. To our employees, thank you for all your hard work and your efforts in helping build Aurora what it is today. The fourth quarter results were stellar. But not only do we have a record quarter in revenues, but we -- the company also had the best month in revenues on record in the month of October, where we slightly -- were slightly shy of $2 million. These results show that we are executing on our strategy and growing our sales team and getting our line of proprietary products out into the hands of more surgeons. The momentum demonstrates that the fourth quarter was directly due to the efforts that we have made on building our internal sales force, which now has additional products in their bag. Driving this momentum was primarily delivered by our main product platforms, the ZIP and the SiLO, which are approximately 60% of the sales in the quarter. ZIP had a very good quarter with sales increased around 24% due to the strong demand for the product, especially among pain interventionalists that are starting to deploy the product into their practices. The SiLO platform, which is now primarily dominated by the TFX, continues to perform well and was a solid contributor to the company's revenue growth for the fiscal year. Now pivoting to DEXA, we officially launched the DEXA-L, which is a lumbar version during the later part of the third quarter, and we are making strong inroads with the product. DEXA-L is part of Aurora's patented DEXA technology platform, which is a series of products that are the world's first bone density matched implants. We have high hopes for DEXA-L as the sites issues occur more frequently in the lumbar section of the spine due to heavier loads and that are put onto the portion of that spine. In addition, the CDC estimates that most -- almost half of the U.S. population over 50 years of age have low bone mass. This equates to millions of patients that have implants that matches their bone density when having spine surgery. We are extremely excited about the launch and believe that the product will be a key growth catalyst in 2026. Since we've entered the year with our APOLLO plate now in stock, we're able to fulfill orders of our current DEXA products. We have begun to ramp up marketing efforts on the platform and expect to build momentum throughout the year. As this rounds out the discussion of our product portfolio, I'd also like to mention that we are anticipating the addition of 2 new product extensions later this year. Both products will be expanding upon our SiLO family of products. The first product that we are expecting to be ready to go to market over the summer is a product for SI joint pain and will be administrated using a lateral bleak approach, which is a different approach than the TFX. The lateral bleak approach is the #2 type approach currently used in SI joint pain. So lateral bleak and posterior and Aurora addresses 2 of those approaches. We are excited about the release of this product, and we are planning for it to be Aurora's first product in a disposable kit format. We are in the midst of lining up doctors to use this product upon launch and believe it will act as a good catalyst in the back half of 2026. The other product extensions we are currently developing is the DEXA version of our existing products. We have expressed in the past, our goal is to leverage our proprietary DEXA technology platform by offering not only the best devices on the market, but also offering products that are customized for the patient's bone density. If the device, as I can refer as DEXA-fy, DEXA-fy the implants, we have plans on eventually converting such products into DEXA format in the near future. We know from many patients, bone density matters, not all one size fits all. Many times, surgeons don't have an implant that can match patients' bone density and can't perform certain procedures as a result. We're excited about this opportunity and look forward to sharing more about this product later this year. That concludes my formal comments. Now I'll turn the conversation over to Matt Goldstone, Aurora Spine's Chief Commercialization Officer. Matt, please proceed.

Thank you, Trent. The company's sales initiatives in 2025 were considerably active as we worked on growing and building our internal sales team. We added new sales personnel during 2025. It enabled us to build momentum in the fourth quarter, which Trent has identified, producing record revenue levels for both the quarter and for having the highest month in company record in October. So to give an update on where we are, we currently have 17 sales and marketing personnel as today, and we're excited about our recent additions we've made in the past few weeks. We've added 2 new salespeople and have a third that will hopefully be added in the next few weeks as well. Adding these people so early in the fiscal year is a great achievement and puts us well on schedule to meet our goals of increasing sales by -- the sales force by 50% this year. With our recent hires, we have filled 2 territories that were previously uncovered, both the Northwest and the central part of the United States, which will include 12 states and -- both new hires have experience in spine and pain markets, which fits in alignment with Aurora's portfolio. We continue to forge forward with our new products and integrate them into our team. We have a very great opportunity ahead of us this year as many of our product platforms and products are coming to market. As Trent mentioned, the addition of the new products into our portfolio will drive adoption across the United States. While we have more work to do, we are excited about our future and have the right products available to deliver for the best outcomes for patients. That concludes my formal comments. Now I'll turn the conversation to Chad Clouse, Aurora Spine's CFO, for some commentary on our financials. Chad, please proceed.

Thank you, Matt. The company's financial performance in the fourth quarter and fiscal year continued to show excellent progress and reached some new record levels for Aurora. Let's discuss some highlights. Total revenues for the fourth quarter of 2025 were $5.02 million, an increase of 14% when compared to $4.4 million in the third quarter of 2025 and up from $4.7 million in the same quarter 1 year ago. Total revenues for fiscal 2025 were $18.4 million compared to $17.6 million for fiscal 2024. Both Q4 and fiscal year 2025 reported record level -- record revenue levels due to increased sales in ZIP implants and SI fusion devices, along with the release of the ZIP fusion device. The company continues to target the pain market with increased marketing and training and an increase in sales force. Gross profit margin was 62.4% in the fourth quarter, a nice improvement from 57.8% in the fourth quarter of 2024. Gross profit margins on total revenues for fiscal year 2025 was 61% compared to 60.5% for fiscal year 2024. Gross margins were higher in both periods due to increased sales of higher-margin implants, lower distributor commissions and lower royalty expenses offset by shipping costs. Gross margin continue to be at a strong level, and we believe this level is sustainable. Total operating expenses were approximately $3.15 million for the fourth quarter of 2025, which was down when compared to $3.22 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. Total operating expenses for fiscal 2025 were $11.8 million compared to $11.5 million for fiscal 2024. Operating expenses were in line with the year ago and lower on a year-over-year basis during the fourth quarter due to continued tight expense control, specifically in the fourth quarter, where costs were curtailed due to lower R&D expenses as the ZIP study concluded. EBITDAC, a non-GAAP figure was approximately $301,000 for the fourth quarter of 2025 compared to $165,000 in third quarter of 2025 and a negative $320,000 from the same quarter a year ago. EBITDAC was $587,000 for fiscal 2025, higher when compared to $282,000 for fiscal 2024. The improvement in EBITDAC levels for the fourth quarter fiscal year were due to higher sales levels and tight expense controls. Net loss was $41,000 for fourth quarter 2025 compared to a net loss of $653,000 in fourth quarter a year ago. Basic and diluted net income per share was $0 per share in the fourth quarter of 2025 and a negative $1 -- or $0.01 per share in the fourth quarter of 2024. Net loss for fiscal 2025 was $731,000 compared to a net loss of $1 million in fiscal year 2024. Basic and diluted net loss per share for fiscal 2025 was $0.01 per share compared to a net loss per share of $0.01 in fiscal 2024. Moving on to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with -- and year with nearly $900,000 in cash. Accounts receivable are significantly lower relative to prior quarters, but manageable as the activity in the fourth quarter started quickly and included a record level of month in October. During December 2025, we made significant advances in the company's receivables with a total collection of $202 million (sic) [ $202,000 ] in December. This bolstered our cash flow, and we were able to lower our payables in early 2026, putting the company in a strong footing for the year. We believe the capital structure is sufficient to meet our budget needs for the remainder of the year and should continue to improve as we make progress on our collection efforts and experience growth in the business. That concludes my comments and I'll now turn it back to Trent.

Thanks, Chad. To summarize, I'm extremely proud of our team's performance and staying focused on building this company. We are well positioned to take advantage of the emergence of minimally invasive procedures for spine health with many of our new proprietary products. We are very excited about our product offerings and believe they have meaningful years to come. We remain focused on penetrating these markets further this year through continued training courses, industry conferences and sharing and updating clinical data of our products that are currently in use in treating patients. While we are pleased with the record results we have reported, we are working diligently to enhance the company's revenue growth with new products and with offerings, including 2 new product extensions to be launched later this year. We are very excited about the company's future opportunities and product lines we have brought to market. And we continue to build the sales team efforts and educate the marketplace on our products and the value they bring to patients. We're very excited about the future of Aurora Spine for fiscal 2026 and beyond. With that said, operator, we are ready for any questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Tom Fedichin from Microcap Connection.

Congratulations on a solid quarter. I would like to dig into how sales are looking as we move forward into 2026. Of course, you're well into Q1. Are you seeing a continuation as you've seen in Q4 of the increased demand?

Yes. We've seen great adoption across the country as we've hired new people, those people have spent their first so many months gathering up momentum and really getting new facilities onboarded through back processes and engaging new physicians and training. So we have seen great engagement from the market as we've seen for the last 5-plus years, at the beginning of the year kind of starts a little slower and it ramps up through the year. So we do continue to see just the typical ebbs and flows of the annual cycle.

Okay. And do you anticipate seeing full on cash flow positive moving throughout 2026, given you're basically right on the cusp right now. Is that kind of the direction that you see? Or do you see Q1 will be traditionally a little bit slower and then you'll see a ramp-up going forward? What is the baseline that you're looking at on a quarterly basis throughout 2026?

Well, we always have seasonality. We talk about this year-over-year. So seasonality always kicks off for us in the beginning of the year, especially going towards the kickoff of the year, right? So -- but feel like we are landing in the right position to spring forward and continue to off the momentum that we got at the close of the year, second half of the year was very strong for us. So we had a slower start last year at the beginning of the year. So we are ahead of the curve this year than we were previous last year. But obviously, we're always striving for when the line extensions enter and then, of course, adding some new feet on the street, you get that big push towards the end of the year. So we're focused on each month and each quarter, but that's the second part of your question -- to answer your question about the raising cash, we're not talking to anyone about raising cash. We've had some people approach us with it, but we get that on a pretty semi multiple per month questions get asked us, we want to raise money on a regular basis.

Okay. The Facet, you had sales of Facet come through, and it appears that you're going to be doing some optimization of this implant. When do you expect sales to come back online for Facet? And I apologize, I didn't catch it right off the first couple of minutes I missed. So you might have covered this already, but when do you expect sales of Facet to restart?

We don't know now because we have a meeting with the FDA, and we're discussing with them. We have nearly 50 patients that were already performed with the implant and the clinical results were outstanding. We couldn't be more proud of those results and patients are doing terrific. We have some questions and answers that we want to go back and forth with the FDA as we continue to build up the design history of the product, the design profile of the product with the FDA and working closely with them to keep the product going forward. It is still FDA approved. The product is still FDA approved, but we both agreed between ourselves, Aurora and the FDA that we would have this dialogue. So we don't know yet to answer your question. Sometime in the first half is my projection, but I don't have a crystal ball on that with the FDA.

Okay. What are you most excited about as you go into 2026 for sales growth?

Well, I'm excited that we got -- people are coming to us looking to join Aurora Spine. So I'm proud of that, that it's sort of us on the hunt for trying to add people. People are hearing about Aurora, right? I'm excited that last year, I made some promises to The Street that we hit a $5 million quarter and we did. I told The Street last year that we would get a $2 million month, we almost hit that. We were just a hair underneath that. I'm excited about our biologic portfolio that we brought into our company, which is going to -- it's going to give us a -- it gave us in 2025, a 34% increase over 2024. And with more units sold in 2026, which is our goal, that will be added with biologics. So you'll see that increase with it. And I'm really excited about how we have a longer runway this year for the DEXA-L product, which is the lumbar, which is a big, big ticket item. It's got a low COG, very high reimbursement product, and it keeps us relevant with our ortho and neuro spine community. We just did a recent talk at the ISASS conference down in Florida, where we had standing room only hearing about DEXA technology. So I'm still really bullish on the DEXA platform. And if you heard my and read -- heard what I was talking about with DEXA products, I say it all the time, we're going to DEXA-fy everything that we can inside of Aurora and back that up with clinical data and...

Yes, I'm sorry, the phone cut out there. Apologies. Speaking of DEXA, the SiLO TFX, you plan to DEXA-fy that. Is that in the calling card for 2026?

You never know. could be, maybe, we'll see.

Okay. Okay. And I guess one of my last questions is you noted in the MD&A about the TFX and maybe some sort of contractual issue. Is that being sorted out with the vendor?

It is. I think that I can't comment on that because it is in a discussion. But yes, I think we're making progress.

Okay, perfect. Well, again, congratulations on a solid quarter. I'll leave it to the next guys to ask questions.

Thank you, Tom.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Trent Northcutt for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us. We appreciate your time and interest in Aurora Spine. We're very excited about what's ahead. We appreciate your interest and support in Aurora Spine and looking forward to updating everyone in a few weeks on our progress. If you'd like to chat with Matt, Chad or myself, please reach out to Adam Lowensteiner, Lytham Partners. We'd be happy to schedule a meeting. Thanks again, everyone. Have a great rest of your day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.