Nanalysis Scientific Corp. (NSCI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. We're about to get this officially going, and apologies for our tardiness, some technical hiccups here. Sean will be presenting, giving a brief overview of the company. I'll be having a discussion with him talking -- digging into different parts of the business. And then we are opening it up for Q&A from the audience. I think on the bottom of your screen, there's a Q&A button, press that and you can type in your questions. I'll try to filter them and sort of group the similar ones together. Do not use the raise your hand button on it. I ignore that. I'm not too sure how to use that regardless. And yes, we will get this going. And excuse me, I've been saying Sean's last name wrong for a while. So I'm just going to practice it a few times here to make sure we have got it right for the tape. Krakiwsky. Is that -- I got that?

Perfect.

Krakiwsky . All right. And on that, we will sort of get it going here. 3, 2, 1, Nanalysis is a leading provider of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance or NMR technologies with compact NMR spectrometer as well as MRI technologies and services, and a fast-growing equipment services business. The company recently announced its Q4 revenues and an outlook into 2024 and beyond. We're doing a deep dive into the company's business and technologies and its opportunities with Sean Krakiwsky, CEO of Nanalysis. I'm Martin Gagel with Market Radius Research, it's Tuesday, February 13. Please remember this is neither a recommendation or investment advice. We're here to learn about the company. Sean, thanks for joining us. It's been an especially busy couple of years for you and the company. Thanks for joining us, and please let us know what you've all been up to.

It's my pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity to be here, Martin. And yes, we've done a lot of heavy lifting over the last several years. We're still heading towards our grand vision. When I founded the company over a decade ago, we felt that we had an opportunity to disrupt the MRI space and make it work the way it should work. Everybody on this call here has had frustrations and trying to get the doctor to give them an MRI of their knee or their thumb and so on. And we just feel that as part of the next-generation prevention centric health care system that there is a real opportunity. And throughout this presentation, one of the things I'm also going to do is explain what most people don't actually know, and that is that MRI technology isn't just used in hospitals on human beings, but it's also used in big industry like pharmaceutical, food, petrochemical, advanced material to analyze substance of interest in a test tube, and it's the same MRI physics but they want to know exactly what's in there, either for R&D purposes, quality control purposes, manufacturing, and also a lot in academia. So our company is going towards our grand vision and we're building a solid business on what I call the unregulated side of this opportunity, which is industrial analysis. And I'll continue to layer on that. We do seek safe harbor for forward-looking statements. So our mission that we're executing on right now is to just build a fabulous business around the magnetic resonance technology for our industrial customers. And you're right, Martin, recently, we announced that we're essentially at just under a $40 million per year revenue run rate with substantial growth for 2024 and beyond. And what's really exciting, especially in sort of in these markets is that we're coming right to the point of being profitable for our business. And we know that that's what today's investors are interested in. So not just growth but profitability. So -- the scientific instrumentation market, including for imaging in industrial and health care is a massive global market and growing. Everything in the modern world is tested and measured. In terms of the competitive landscape, I've sprinkled some of the names here at the bottom left of this slide, Thermo Fisher Scientific became well-known during COVID because they're the #1 maker of PCR machines, Siemens and GE are the #1 makers of the large MRI machines that you see in hospitals. We have one direct arch competitor that we compete with every day all over the world with our flagship products. It's a company called Magritek, great company, formidable competitor. We have a lot of respect for. They hail out of New Zealand, believe it or not. So that's sort of the space that we're in, in generally. In terms of our sales organization, the United States is our most important market. And along with Canada, we have about 50 people on the ground as part of our sales ecosystem. In international markets like Japan, U.K., Chile, for example, where we sell to mining customers, analyzing lithium brine pools with our products, we sell through a network of local dealers that offer complementary products and services. And then a big growth driver for us in the future will be OEM value-added partnerships where maybe they add a little vertical market specific software or some branding and then they take our products deep in their verticals that they've been in for 100 years like food, for example. In terms of who we sell to, we sell to the biggest companies in the world as well as 2-person little biotech startups, a lot of universities, a lot of government labs as well. Fabulous management team, our CTO, Julien Muller, has a real unique vision for the future of Magnetic Resonance. Our CFO has been with us coming up to about almost 2 years now and has just been doing a great job dealing with some of the complexities associated with the acquisitions that we've done recently. So really doing a great job there. I'm the serial entrepreneur. This is my third tech start-up. By education, I have a master's degree in electrical engineering, but really I'm a tech start-up guy. Just really excited about the trajectory of our business right now. Where we're trading at today, our market cap is a little over $50 million. And then in terms of our 2023 revenue, approximately $30 million is what we did last year. And again, we're poised for some really solid growth going forward. Senior independent Board of Directors. So this slide basically explains what we do from a technology and expertise perspective. And again, part of the story is what people know and feel like they're connected to, like frustrations of getting MRIs from their doctors for something. But then part of the story is sort of new to a lot of people, and that is the fact that these machines configured slightly differently are also used in industrial analysis. And in fact, it's the gold standard of analyzing things in test tubes where you want to know exactly what molecules are in there and the nature of molecules like their chirality and so on, which in terms of a drug used on human being can be the difference between maybe is being born healthy and babies being born without limbs, which is a real historical example, by the way, of when you don't use magnetic resonance technology to characterize the molecules in a new drug. So even though it's a gold standard, these things are very large, expensive, complicated, require liquid helium to keep the supercond magnets cool, and so on and so forth. So there's impediments to adoption. And what our company has done is, specifically for our flagship products, we've miniaturized the magnet systems and the electronics, added our great software. And then more generally, we're democratizing this technology both with regards to where it can be used, so not just specialized rooms with reinforced floors. But on a mining site in a field office where you're analyzing lithium brine tools, a portable labs, where police or analyzing suspicious light powders with our products right now on a couple of exciting projects. So we're making it more widely available, but we're also democratizing it with regards to how the data is interpreted in other words, not just by experts, but by all different kinds of people. So that's what our company does. And again, we've got a full product portfolio that's doing very well in the marketplace today. Here's a look at that full product portfolio. So the products on the top left are our flagship products with the full miniaturized magnet electronics, low-level software that does all the math and then the end user software as well. And these are used by big pharma, food, petrochemicals and so on by putting in a test tube with their new drug, with their cannabis oil or their lithium brine pool to determine exactly what's in them. Just like the gold standard large machines did in the past, our machines are doing today. So the bridge to the medical imaging world is our product on the right, which, as you can tell, doesn't include the magnet system, it's just the electronics and the low-level software and we sell it to pre-clinical like Tier 2 MRI companies like Mediso, where they incorporated in their larger products. We also do custom-made MRI systems for people doing research on how to detect smaller tumors earlier. For example, it's the same electronics and low-level software that's all of our products, but specifically target at the medical imaging side of this opportunity, which represents over $2 million in revenue over the trailing 12 months. So it's not the lion's share of our revenue, but it is a real chunk and the technology and the underlying math and physics is exactly the same. And we have a specific strategy to get to a full FDA-approved product at some point in the future that would be small application specific. In other words, only for your head or only for your torso. So if you get in a catastrophic car accident in the middle of the night, rush to the hospital. You won't go in one of our machines. But if it's part of a prevention going forward, that's where our plan is. It will include acquisitions, but not in the next 18 months at all. So -- but there's 2 more companies -- specific companies that we want to buy going forward that will bridge us into the full FDA MRI world. And then as I mentioned at the outset services are the big parts. So at the bottom of this slide, I'm talking about how we're adding service. So part of our vision is to have not only direct sales in every major market in the world, but also service capability in every major market in the world. And we had a really great opportunity to add a huge contract, which I'll talk about that allows us to build this service organization profitably. So in the future cut, we never get faced with the customer or a government organization that says, "Hey, you've got these great technologies and great products, but how are you going to service these things?" So our plan and my plan and in particular, as a technology entrepreneur that has done this before, is to be able to control our own destiny, and that includes services. All of our technology is proprietary, developed in-house, patent protected, and it includes proprietary manufacturing, by the way. So to protect intellectual property, to protect against reverse engineering, and also to keep costs low and quality high, we have a full-blown manufacturing facility that we build our products in. I refer to this slide as the amplification of magnetic resonance, and I've alluded to it a little bit. Our customers and our partners are telling us that in the future, they want the data from our machines to look like the data on the right of this slide, not the data on the left, which requires an expert to interpret. And happy to talk more about that in the Q&A. We've had a really exciting journey over the last decade or so with our team, the original team is all still with us, by the way, where we've raised a lot of money. We've done some acquisitions. We've launched new products. It's essentially everything we said we were going to do from when we went public in middle of 2019. And we've got a lot of really exciting catalysts coming down the pipe over the next couple of years. So as I mentioned, we're not just about sexy technology and products. I mean, we are that, but it's also about marrying it with services because an industrial tech you want to deploy your equipment and manufacturing facilities around the world. You have to have a credible service capability. And so that's a strategic component of our business. Very happy to announce that purely on the services side, about 1.5 years ago, we won a $160 million contract from the government of Canada. It's actually the Canadian version of the TSA, which in Canada is called CATSA. And the [indiscernible] number is that it's a 5-year $160 million contract with the phase-in period, which we've completed. And by the way, are profitable on that project today. But as CEO, I view it actually as a 15-year $480 million contract because there's two 5-year renewal terms. And this project is so sticky. I mean it's as sticky as you can get. We have 120 fully trained, security-cleared employees deployed in all 89 airports in Canada, 100% responsible for maintaining all the equipment that you walk through or that your baggage goes through and the baggage underground, the imaging and the detection equipment. We're 100% responsible for keeping that all going. It's a lucrative, profitable contract that we've gotten to profitability and our level of profitability is growing each month that goes by. And then we've just promoted a person who is responsible for getting that project going successfully into the President of our Services division, and that person is going to grow that business, not just on that contract, but is already working on other contracts. The customer is very happy. They stated so publicly several times, is paying our performance bonuses, which is the best measure in my world in terms of customer satisfaction and is referring us to other opportunities. And that business will grow into 2024 and beyond just this great one contract. So that's the end of my presentation other than to emphasize all the fabulous people that we have and now ready to turn it back over to Martin and hopefully answer some questions from the great audience.

Sean, thanks. That was a great nice and tight overview of the company. That's great. I guess one of the more provocative show things that the company has done, is this CATSA contract. We're on the face of it, you're servicing security equipment at airports. And I don't -- and it could be maybe hard to see how that's synergistic with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance systems in laboratories and universities. Can you just dig into the rationale a little bit more on that, and why and how that works for an analysis and the shareholders?

Absolutely. So the first thing is, is that it was really a sort of a service business opportunity that we couldn't turn down because of the size and lucrative nature. The second thing I'll point out is that I've got a lot of PhDs working for me that are developing a lot of intellectual property and great products. But fundamentally, we're a market-driven company, not a technology-driven company. And the ability to provide service to -- I mean, you referred to it as security equipment. Yes, that's the vertical, but it's imaging equipment and it's detection equipment. Fundamentally, it's the same thing that our proprietary products do. They image molecules and they detect things either that the customer is worried that might be present or wants to confirm is present. So from a market perspective, market-driven perspective, it's just about building out that services business. And one of the reasons why we won it was because the customer liked the fact that we were a quintessential technology company with manufacturing capability. So we're not just decommissioning these old imaging machines and installing new ones and maintaining them so that they remain under warranty and so on. But we're technology advisers to CATSA. When they have problems with certain modules and they need to be replaced, they come to us for our technical expertise. So going forward, our strategy is that in some market verticals, like pharmaceutical, we're going to lead with our proprietary products. But in other verticals, we may lead with service. And the security vertical is a great example of that, we're leading with the service. But don't be surprised if one day, there isn't our proprietary portable machines that are analyzing suspicious white powders that get compensated in airports, border crossings, embassies, and the like. So it fits perfectly with our strategic objectives. Admittedly, it was something that, because of its sheer size, our services business grew faster than I expected when I first started talking to you, Martin, in 2019, but it's completely consistent with our vision.

All right. So do you see that as -- you said leading with your services organization in some instances. So will that be a -- do you view it as being a competitive advantage against other NMR or other MRI companies where you say, "Hey, we've got this great equipment." As well, we have our own service technicians, you're not using generic [ bob's ] services for that. Can you flesh that out a bit?

That's exactly right. Especially with regards to our arch competitor is we basically just tripled in size relative to them, right? And years ago, I used to say we were approximately the same size. But now we're approximately triple the size and we have the ability to provide service, which is growing, and they do not, right? And so in the industrial tech world, the ability to provide service, whether it's in a hospital, in Menlo Park, California, or a corn processing facility in Rural Iowa, the ability to do that allows you to sell more equipment, and its recurring and sticky revenue.

Can you make any commentary on the margins or the expected margins on the services business?

Yes. So I think we can operate that services business at 30% EBITDA margins. And all the evidence that we see right now with this sort of first major foray into that space, with regards to like utilization rates of our field staff and so on, where we're at right now, now that we've got it rolled out to 100% of the basic service, and are doing the value-added services on top of it. All the data that we have thus far indicates that we will be able to operate this business at 30% EBITDA margins or better.

Do you need to get bigger scale, some additional contracts or more service contracts or just even at the current scale you can get up to that level?

Even at the current scale, we'll be at that level. This contract in itself and the business that we have right now allows us to get there.

All right. You mentioned corn processing in Iowa and Menlo Park. That's obviously not Canada. What is your footprint or your strategy on growing your footprint from very strong in Canada now to a much larger market down south of the border. And then as well, I think you mentioned worldwide in the major markets, which I assume would include Europe and possibly Japan, and now Singapore or something.

Absolutely. So you're right. On the services business, it's currently the majority of it is in Canada. It is expanding into the United States. So we have employees there. We have a facility in Phoenix, and ultimately, in the United States is the best market in the world by far. So all of our inertia is going on leveraging the successful Canadian project to get market share in the United States. But on the proprietary product side, the majority of our presence is in the United States already. And we're having success selling our benchtop machines into the United States with direct sales reps and an ecosystem of partners down there that are actively selling our products. So we've been in the United States a long time, and the services business is going to accelerate on a percentage basis our head count growth into the United States. And then we'll extend that into Europe. And we already have a significant presence with salespeople in the United States. We don't do a lot of services business in the United States, but with some of our higher-end nuclear magnetic resonance, spectrometer products, Europe and services in Europe will grow as well. And then after that, yes, we'll be going more aggressively into Latin America and certain parts of Asia, always keep an eye on sort of geopolitical activity with regards to the China opportunity. But yes, our plan is to make sure we've got the United States nailed, then go to Europe, and then go to some of these other major centers as well. And I want to emphasize, we're already selling products in these other parts of the world. We've sold products in over 150 countries around the world thus far, not in large volumes, but we've done so successfully.

With the services business, would that grow, let's say, through larger contracts driven by the end customer or would it possibly where you, let's say, represent a third-party equipment manufacturer and then maybe take on their servicing contract in a region or certain regions for them where you sort of NMR machines and whatever some other XYZ technology?

Yes. No, it's more of the latter, as you described. And through this project, not only if we really have we really strengthened a great relationship with the customer, but there's also partnerships that we've developed, and I'm not going to mention any names on this call, but I expect some really terrific news about partnerships that we built through this CATSA project, but are applying to the United States and deployment of our services, their equipment. And then with the door open for bringing eventually our proprietary products into those deployments as well. So there will be excellent news with regards to that activity in 2024 for sure.

All right. I always was fascinated and you mentioned the amplification of your NMR machines where it's -- you've got the software, it's designed for one specific application, and corn or food or pharmaceuticals and that. Where are we on that path to having just a green circle or red x on the screen saying, yes, no, as opposed to a bunch of squiggly lines.

So for some applications, we have that right now. So we have customers that, again, just want to see one number from something, right? So it's not the majority of our revenue, and really growth in that area will come through partnerships. But it's also an opportunity for me to talk about why magnetic resonance? Why is magnetic resonance is so important as opposed to other types of techniques like wet chemistry techniques where you did something in and it turns a certain color or you shine a laser through it and so on. And the answer to that is magnetic resonance is an absolute standard that is intrinsically quantitative. And so most of our customers today still buy our products and use them for many different applications. In other words, it's a general purpose analyzer. That's its strength. But the opportunity is to improve the accuracy by turning them into single test machines and go deep into verticals. And so that's really the strength of magnetic resonance relative to other techniques. And I'm going to extend that to MRI imaging, right? The whole reason why MRI machines are so important in health care, it's not because they just create a quality image, right? Ultrasound can create a quality image. X-rays, especially now that doses in X-ray machines have come down within really reasonable safety levels. MRI is important not because it creates an image like an X-ray. MRI is important because the physics of it allows for the analysis of the cells. And that's why so much investment has been made because the promises in the future will be to analyze cells directly with the magnetic resonance phenomena and the output will be independent of an expert. Not in lieu of an expert because there's always room for that, but also provide independent information. So you see the bridge between the sort of industrial analysis world where we're analyzing molecules already and what the future promise is of magnetic resonance for health care industry?

When you mentioned expert, your software can be expert, and I see the imaging there of the brain and the skull. And so healthy brain, no tumor present and so forth. To me, that jumps out artificial intelligence and you need that technology to analyze the data to be consistent to either make a decision or augment an expert's decision on that. Where are you down? Like how -- do you have an AI strategy? How does it fit into what an analysis is doing?

Yes, absolutely. As I sort of implied when I showed the full product portfolio, our revenue in that area is about $2 million trailing 12 months. So a material amount, but it's not where the biggest part of our current revenue is. But going forward, our strategy will include acquisitions. We're working with a couple of companies right now on custom MRI projects. And my plan is to acquire those companies that have experience in the FDA approval process, have great vision for exactly what type of applications, specific -- application-specific, meaning only the brain or only the torso or only the limb. And we're working with them on these projects right now. The only thing that stopped me recently is the state of the equity markets. And so our shareholders are telling me they don't want any more dilutive activity for the foreseeable future, which I and our Board definitely agree with. But that's the essence of our strategy, and it does include machine learning and AI, which we're doing right now on the NMR spectroscopy side of the business and also applying it on the medical imaging side of the business. So for me, I think that is sort of a 2- to 3-year product sort of road map time frame. And in the meantime, you're just going to see absolutely fabulous growth on the industrial analysis part of our business.

All right. Pulling from a question here in the audience, you reported strong Q4 revenues and there was a return strength to the benchtop machines, what led to this? And is this a continuing trend you see there? And I know what caused a bit of the hiccup or a pause in the market. Can you just talk about -- and you mentioned your competitor, can you talk about the benchtop sector you -- because that's really what the company was founded on with a greater vision. Talk about that sector, what's driving it and challenges and opportunities there in.

Yes, absolutely. So we're seeing tremendous growth and steady growth in the benchtop NMR part of our opportunity. We've fixed some of our execution problems. And I've spoken about this publicly many times. And on May 25, 2022, when we signed that large services contract, it did create some turbulence in our company. By the way, that was at the same time when the junior capital market sort of started their downturn as well. So we had to change how we were going to finance that large contract, and it did spill over to other parts of our business. One of our acquisitions also happened right at that same time and brought in a different philosophy to managing our sales organization, which we address successfully, have fixed, and now we've brought growth back to that growth and stability back to that part of our business. So I feel really good about where Q1 is going to be and the rest of 2024. Basically, we're at a point now where we're firing on all cylinders. We've invested a lot of money and a lot of energy trading, this great thing that we've built. And now we're positioned to harvest the benefits from all that money and all that hard work invested.

Can you talk about, because fairly, I can't remember how long it is now and the time flies, the 100 megahertz machine, that's your newest addition to the benchtop line. It's the highest performing system. How that specifically working and as a differentiated from, I believe, it's your 60 megahertz machine. Can you talk about those 2 product lines or those 2 products?

Absolutely. So the 60 megahertz product was our original product that we started selling in around the sort of 2014 time frame approximately, 2013, and it had great traction in the market. But as we were selling it, and we've sold well over 1,000 units of that particular model, by the way. So we got feedback from customers, mostly pharmaceutical companies that said, "We really like your 60 megahertz product. We love the benchtop product because we don't like sending our samples a way to the local university or a different building in their campus that was a big pharma company. We just like having a right here in our lab and our QC facility might be in a fumehood or a glove box. And so we love the product concept, but we need more performance." And so it was with that kind of feedback from pharma companies that we decided to embark on the development of our 100 megahertz product. It was a very challenging initiative. We ran up against some serious for example, material sciences limitations in creating the magnet system, which is a very complicated array of technologies, and we use special alloys, and we have to have some surfaces in that array of technologies have to be accurate to -- within layers of atoms and if you don't get that quite right, the whole thing doesn't work. There's thermal control. So our team led by Neil Gallagher, and our Product Manager, Dr. Susie Riegel, did an incredible job getting that product to market. We did experience delays, but those are all behind us now, and customers are very happy with that. And I really think that that's going to be a juggernaut in the marketplace for customers and for our growth going forward.

All right. Okay. Are there plans or is it even sort of theoretically possible to move it up to, I don't know, 150 megahertz permanent magnet. Can you talk about the road map at all of your of that product segment?

So yes, and maybe that's a good way for me to talk about a major investment we made in a Swiss company called QUAD Systems. And founded by Dr. Klemens Kessler. And we now own 43% of that company, and they've got a product that starts at 300 megahertz. So not quite the number you mentioned, but the point is up market, and we're specifically targeting the analysis of human blood and urine and other biological samples related to virology and proteomics, which is critical in COVID vaccines, for example, and other kinds of vaccines. So that's our immediate plan to go up market with the more expensive product that goes after more complicated molecules themselves, again, a bridge into the eventual world of analyzing cells on the human body. And then just to answer your specific question for the sake of completeness, Dr. Klemens Kessler and I also have some ideas on how we can launch a product that's sort of in between the 100 megahertz and 300 megahertz. That probably will require some exotic combination of permanent magnets and some superconducting wire, but not requiring liquid helium, which is the biggest impediment to where that product might be. But it would fit right in the middle of there, it would be like a $0.25 million product and would really solidify the lead that we've started to expand against our major competitor called Magritek.

All right. A question here from the audience. An analysis has long-term ambitions in the portable MRI health care space. What about the portable brain scan competition?

Yes. No, absolutely. We feel that one of the use cases that I always talk about is in sports. In Canada here, we play a lot of hockey and -- but in other parts of the world, like the United States, they play football, and there's head injuries all the time. And it really shouldn't be the way it is right now. I mean, I guess, at the NFL level, they've got so much resources that they can do different things. But the way the state of the art of the science and technology is today a football player at a poor high school in West Texas, should just be able to go into a sporting facility, have an MRI of his brain and determine conclusively, if he's had a concession or not immediately. And so that's kind of what I talk about when -- that's something -- sort of prevention-centric and application-specific. We've got great partnerships in that area. There's a public European project called GAMMA-MRI that wore one of the key consortium partners on. So a lot of what we're doing on the imaging side, the medical imaging side is in the public domain. And including, if you wanted to look at who's on our Scientific Advisory Board, people like Dr. Matt Rosen of Harvard Medical School. And so we're really excited about that part of our business, and we're very familiar with what's going on in Canada and the United States and other parts of the world. What's different about say, us and like there's a really interesting company on the NASDAQ called Hyperfine, and its next-generation portable MRI machines, specifically for the brain. And they're trying to combine ultra-low field with AI. And they've got a great team and a really interesting thing. We're taking a totally different approach, but it's a really great way to look at to look at a company like that. One of the people on our Scientific Advisory Board was one of the co-founders of Hyperfine. So very familiar with it. There are some aspects of their approach that we agree with and some aspects of their approach, namely the ultra-low field part of it that we don't agree with. But what we do agree with is let's stop people from getting sick rather than having big conglomerates making way too much money from people getting sick.

All right. Is there competition? Or is there any products in the 100 to 300 megahertz range already? Or is that market kind of wide open? Is it sort of in the gap between existing technologies?

There are some academic initiatives that we're familiar with, sort of people that have tried things in the past, associated, for example, with the with a failed product called picoSpin that Thermo bought and eventually discontinued because it didn't work. So there's some academic initiatives that are sort of the usual suspects in terms of blast from the past that are working on things like that, but there's no commercial viable product, and in my opinion, no viable technology to do that other than what we have and possibly what Magritek has, again, our arch competitor and a formidable [indiscernible] of that.

Without getting into the whole physics of it, is essentially the higher the megahertz, just the better the machine, the more accurate. So between -- like a 200 is just sort of halfway an improvement to the 300? Or does the 60 do some things at a higher level -- higher megahertz machine doesn't do? I hope that was clear.

Yes. No, great question. And the simple answer to that is higher is better. And so higher is better. And then what's happening at the same time is with machine learning and AI, you could make 100 megahertz machine, do what a higher-end machine could do, right? And then to extend or extrapolate that idea you can make a 400 megahertz machine, do what an 800 megahertz machine can do, or you can make an 800 megahertz machine do what a 1.2 gigahertz machine can do. And really, the level of what people aspire to you to make inquiries into cellular structures and into atoms, is really impotent in nature, right? I mean nuclear magnetic resonance is associated with quantum computing, people are using high-end nuclear magnetic resonance, spectrometers to try to get insight into how the universe was formed. So really, there will always be a desire for more. And really where it comes to us with is we don't have customers looking into the origins of the universe, but 80% of the applications are like bread and butter kind of industrial or pharmaceutical kind of need. So we're trying to use advanced software and machine learning and AI to get our lower field machines to do what industry wants to do in volumes. And we'll let some of the other people like Bruker work on the sort of exotic esoteric origins of the universe problems?

All right. You talked about that the company has record revenues in the fourth quarter and you're running at $40-ish million run rate at this point, and you've got visibility or you're very close or at sort of EBITDA positive levels here. Can you just run down -- we've got some questions here. is there any need for you to raise some funding in the markets? Just walk through your financial status? And is that anything that investors should be concerned about at this point?

So we're always evaluating growth opportunities, especially now where we've had to turn down a lot of growth opportunities. And in the services business that we just have to say no to customers, and we've had to tell our existing customers, thanks for the reference, but we're not ready to take on that new large contract. So that's something that we've been doing for a while. Our Board of Directors is continuing to evaluate that. We're doing everything possible to get our business to EBITDA positive. We're not quite there yet as an overall company. And so that's all sort of -- that's all I'll say on that matter for now.

All right. Okay. In 2025 or even 2024, what would be expected or do you have an ideal revenue mix between products and services?

Yes. So we're not quite there yet, but where we aspire to be on a steady state basis, it's 50-50. So I think that within the next couple of years, we'll get to that 50-50 point between products and services.

And right now, with the big contract, it's overweighted on the service side. Am I right there?

Today, no, it's the opposite in that because that services contract hasn't fully ramped up. So we would be overweight on the product side.

Okay. So we expect -- the services side should essentially be growing faster than the product side for the next couple of years.

I would say there's going to definitely be sort of a short-term period where there's like we have like 100% visibility on how that service business is going to grow. So I can tell you right now where that ever is going to be every month for 2024. And yes, it's growing fast, and it's going to catch up to -- it's going to get to where there's 50% -- it's 50% of our overall revenue, fairly fast, but it's not now. But our products business is also growing fast, and the services business will catch up and then they'll start accelerating it at about the same rate, and we'll maintain that 50-50 on a steady-state basis.

Right. We have gone through the questions from the audience. You and I have dug down into a lot of deep things here. Are there any parts that we missed that you'd like to sort of emphasize or highlight before we start wrapping things up.

Yes. I mean I'd love the opportunity to emphasize what I think is unique about our story. We're the only company in the world that is leveraging the commonalities between magnetic resonance for medical imaging with our plan to have an FDA product in the future with the magnetic resonance requirements in industrial analysis, which is a huge and growing global market. So rather than ignoring those common ologies, we're leveraging them both in terms of intellectual property, product, technologies, and manufacturing. And then in terms of the capital market side, what I think is unique about us is in the context of, for example, the TSX Venture Exchange, in my opinion, we're the best of both worlds. We have the sexy technology, great products, kind of high multiple part of our business. But we also have a little bit of sort of a less sexier, but very sticky and recurring services part of our business, which is just as important to us. And so I see one as sort of providing a solid floor. We're a real company with real recurring revenue, but we still have that sexy technology side of our business to create excitement with us and provide some blue sky for the future in terms of getting acquired by a company like Siemens or GE and so on. So that's how I view our company. That's how I view our stock right now.

All right. And for the coming year, can you comment on what, beyond your quarterly results, what types of news flow one could expect, maybe some partnerships or big contract wins? Or what sorts of things to generally have on the lookout for on the horizon?

Yes, all of the above really exciting partnerships and growth opportunities on the services side, value-added partnerships and deep vertical penetration opportunities on the product side. You'll continue to see us innovate and make announcements about patents. And also, there'll be some new product offerings on the horizon as well that we're really excited about that are going to provide growth on our benchtop side. So I'm really excited about 2024.

Excellent. Sean, thank you very much for taking the time to giving us an excellent update on the company. I look forward to getting updates as things move forward. Have a great day, and talk to you again soon.

Thanks very much, Martin. Always a pleasure. Looking forward to the next time. Take care.

Cheers.