Lightwave Logic, Inc. (LWLG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Today, we're going to have another conversation with Dr. Michael Lebby, who is the Chairman and CEO of Lightwave Logic. Ticker on the NASDAQ is LWLG. All Access starts right now. Dr. Lebby, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. Great to see you again, Zunaid.

I love the background. You've got something of a different look than usually when we talk about, but where are you at right now?

I am in my home office, I got visitors, international visitor, so I have been pushed out to the kitchen. So that's why you see interesting background here.

No matter how successful you are, they still find a way to kick you out of your workspace. You got to love it. Well, look, you and I have had so many conversations, but for the viewers that are watching you for the first time, give us a quick brief overview of what Lightwave Logic is, but especially in the commercialization process and what next year can kind of look like, I'd love to get insights there as well.

Great. Yes. So this last 3 months has been incredibly busy for us. So earlier this year, we actually went to a major conference and we showed some world-class results. We had a lot of visitors to our demonstrations at the conference and in various other places. But that's been followed up in the last 3 months with visits to our facility in Denver, Colorado. And so we've been seeing Tier 1 companies come visit us, come check us out, go inspect what we really have there. And what we have is a world-class materials facility that can ramp our polymer materials. They're also seeing some of our state-of-the-art testing of super high speed. And so we've been showing them performance metrics performance data. And it's been a really exciting last, say, 3 months since I've last talked to you. So from a commercialization standpoint, this has been, I think, 2024, growing interest in our technology platform.

What makes this company interesting for me is the fact that you're able to have your polymers not just be advanced, but you're able to do it at a faster speed at lower cost. But help me understand how you're able to do that.

Well, we do that because we design our own polymers and we've got really good control both from an IP patent standpoint as well as a performance standpoint. And these polymers perform better than the semiconductors, the semiconductor technologies are already out there. So this is really exciting. And what we've done this year is we've actually showed customers the actual performance. So we're seeing superfast data rates. I'm not going to go into those details. We're showing that these data rates operate at super-low voltage levels. And if you think about these two things, just those for the minute, super high speed is what's been really being driven by things like AI, and low voltage really lowers the power consumption. So you talk to any data center operator, they're looking for creative ways to get that power consumption down. And this is a technology that can do it. So for us, showing these types of performance metrics in our facility in Denver, Colorado has been absolutely exciting.

Yes. Typically, whenever you see faster speeds, you assume higher cost, but that's not the case here. So that's what's most interesting to me. But you mentioned the conference, which is a 2024 European Conference on Optical Communication. How was that? And what is presenting at these sorts of events? And benefit, like how does it benefit the company?

So all the customers will be there. So just similar to the Optical Fiber Conference in March this year, OFC, where we first came out with this level of world-class performance, we're now being invited to talk at the ECOC, that's the European Conference on Optical Communications. And this year, it has being held in Frankfurt in late September. And not only have we been asked to give a talk on the performance of our work, we're actually being selected as one of the finalists for the Hybrid/Optical Integration category, and that's really exciting for us. So I mean this is a conference that has the world's best companies from all over the world. And certainly being asked to give a talk and be in a finalist, too, is actually really exciting for us.

Yes, and just being nominated is such a great accomplishment, good luck on that aspect of it. Let's talk about -- you mentioned finalist, which means there are other folks that are involved in this space as well. What kind of competition do you face? But more importantly, what's your biggest advantage? I understand you've got the polymers at faster speeds at a lower cost. What other advantages do you have?

So one of the big advantages we have is that our technology fits really neatly into the big silicon foundries. And over the last 3 months, we actually did announce that we're in a strategic relationship with a big foundry based in Singapore called [ AMF ]. And these are the folks that are doing our technology on 200-millimeter, huge 8-inch type wafers. And so this is one of the advantages over our competition. Our competition is typically technologies that are difficult to get into a silicon patent, whereas our technology, because it comes in a liquid form, we can spin it onto the wafers, it actually works really great onto silicon wafers. And so that is one of the advantages, in addition to the high performance. Because if you think about what we have is this a disruptive technology compared to the incumbent semiconductors. While you want a disruptive technology, you don't want it to be that disruptive that you have to change all of the infrastructure in order to make it work. And so for us, having a technology that is really good in performance is disruptive enough, yet it doesn't disrupt things like the foundries. It doesn't disrupt their processes. It doesn't disrupt their [ equipment ]. That's already there. And so we are making really good use of the infrastructure with our new technology. And that's why you have to be very careful when you use the word disruptive. Yes, we've disrupted performance, but we don't disrupt the infrastructure. And that's exactly what the industry is looking for.

So many times we've heard the phrase of "they were ahead of their time," right, where a technology or a company just came out a little bit too early to where the retail folks, the audience, the world just wasn't ready for it. And that's what that remind me of what you said, where you don't want to be too disruptive to where you can't utilize it because the infrastructure is not able to handle the advanced technology that you're dealing with. But speaking of technology, how does the AI boom impact your industry? And is there any overlap there?

So the AI boom, I mean, we've heard of companies called NVIDIA that have done really well with their GPU chips. And what those GPU chips are electronic processes. So the processing, the computations are done electronically. What we have here is technology that actually modulates the optical signals that go down the fiber optics. So if you think about what may happen is in the GPU chips, AI is generating a lot more computational processes. Some of those computational process will go to memories on chip. And some of them will go off-chip down the fiber optic network. That means there's more data that has to be sent faster. So we are indirectly benefiting from AI. So when AI is becoming more popular and people want to do more things with it, more computations occurring in GPU chips, that sends more information down the fibers to other, I guess, GPU chips or through the data centers. And we have a technology that really takes advantage of sending that data at higher speed. So we indirectly benefit from GAI, which is really exciting today.

You mentioned chips, and it always reminds me of when I used to have to do with school work, and the chips would be like the -- SanDisk chips would be like, what is it, 256 megabytes will be like this big. Now you can get like 2 terabytes in this smaller one. So it's just amazing to see like my nephew doesn't even know what floppy disks are. So yes, things have come a long, long way. Dr. Lebby, it's always great to talk to you, but I wanted to give you the floor before I say bye. Is there anything else that we missed to talk about? The floor is yours to talk to our viewers.

Oh, no, we've been increasing our position on the patent front. And so I think we had a patent issued in the last quarter. That has been really exciting. And so we're continuing to file patents. And that really helps our part of the business strategy of not only selling modulators, but usually creating the material of electro-optic polymers that we can license. So we have a dual-pronged business model, where we license our material as well as put our material into devices to show people the incredible performance. But yes, this has been a great summer, and I expect it to continue into fall and the end of this year.

Awesome. Appreciate your time. As always, Dr. Lebby. Thank you for coming on.

Appreciate it. Thank you, Zunaid.

Absolutely. And we thank you, chat, for watching as well. That was Dr. Michael Levy, who is the Chairman and CEO of Lightwave Logic. Ticker on the NASDAQ is LWLG. Thank you for watching All Access.