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

Good morning or good afternoon, everybody. There's a few more people logging in. My name is Matthew Selinger. I handle the Investor Relations here at Nanalysis. As a background, we always offer this call to try to give access to management to both Sean and Randall. I'm going to request that everybody -- I'm going to mute everybody at first besides Sean and Randall, if that's all right. And maybe we'll give a brief overview. I'm going to wait a couple of minutes here and see if we get some more people signing in. But again, the premise of this call is always to give access to management because we do host the call at 5:00 Eastern. So it doesn't work out for all time zones. And there's a few more people -- couple of people in. Great. And we're just waiting, I think, for Randall as well. The press release went out yesterday at approximately 4:05 p.m., highlighting the fourth quarter and full year results. And then again, we hosted a call at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time. So with that, I'm not -- there's Randall. I do see you're on.

Yes. Good morning, everyone. Afternoon for those in Europe.

Fantastic. Sean, did you want to start off the call with any kind of opening comments?

Absolutely. So thanks for joining. I see Walter there and others. So thanks very much. So I think what we press released yesterday is the fruit of all the hard work we've been putting in basically since we signed the CATSA contract. And we started investing a lot of money in that contract, and it took some time to get to positive gross margins. And you just -- and while we've been doing that, we've been making our company more efficient. We've also launched new products and increased our revenue on the product side. But all that kind of got masked when we were burning so much cash associated with that large contract. So from my perspective, this last quarter that we just announced is the first time we've been able to show sort of all of our cylinders starting to fire simultaneously. And that's not to imply that we're done. No, we're just getting started. I think a lot of you have known me for about 5 years. I remember one of the first meetings we had in May 2019 and in Belgium and Netherlands, and people would ask me what's your -- where are you going to be in 5 years? And I said, well, we're going to grow revenue by a lot, and then we're going to position ourselves for profitability. So my answer is to that type of a question, looking towards the next 5 years is essentially the same. We're going to experience some significant growth, and we're going to expand profit margins. So those are my opening remarks. I know from Walter that he commented on our press release and wanted some comments to clarify some of the noncash charges that we conveyed. And I just want to convey to -- and I'll let Randall talk about the details of that as our CFO. But I just wanted to convey that from my perspective as CEO and with my engineering background and my problem-solving background, those noncash charges reflect accounting treatments. And I still have a very positive outlook on most of those assets. Some of the things like customer lists associated with the K'Prime acquisition, well, that's more indicative of we're evolving as a company and some business that was important to us 3 years ago isn't that important to us anymore because it's selling other people's products, which we wanted to do for a while, but isn't our go-forward strategy, right? But in terms of the main assets like Quad, I still am very optimistic about that. So I'll let Randall emphasize that the noncash charges aren't really indicative of where our business is going, but rather in treatments.

Yes.

And just if anybody wants to ask a question, again, it's -- there's no limitations here. [Operator Instructions]. I know Walter did send in a question, and I'm happy to read that if that makes sense for you, Walter.

Yes, okay. Yes, of course.

Okay. Again, I definitely don't want to speak for you. But one question you said, and this is most likely for you, Randall, why didn't we amortize the $7 million impairment in the third quarter, which we end up impairing it here in the fourth quarter? It would have shown a much different improvement. What was the decision? Why we waited the last quarter?

Yes. It's -- so Walter, that's a really good question. So I'll point out to 2 things. So the first is we took -- as you may recall, in several quarters this year, we took smaller impairment charges against certain receivables related to Quad. And when we got into the second quarter, we did a very fulsome analysis on this as to whether that would present a broader indication of impairment on the Quad asset, and we made the decision at the time that we're still close enough to the revaluation from the loss and loss of -- from when we lost control of Quad in July of last year that the indicators hadn't themselves fully yet. But we were watching it closely through the third and into the fourth quarter, given the lack of progress to their plan, like they have certainly progressed but much slower than we anticipated when we invested in Quad back in 2022. And given that we were sort of at the end of the effectively third year of having invested in them and still not seeing the progress to the level that we had anticipated, we remodeled -- we decided at that point that, okay, it's time for a full remodeling and a full revaluation as opposed to the indicators test, which is what's required under IFRS. And so once we did that and ran through it, it became clear that there were a range and there were a range of values associated with that. None of this is precise because, of course, it's valuations work, but we took the conservative approach here in Q4 and said, okay, we're going to write this down. The other thing I'll note is if you look the way the accounting works on Quad, as they lose money every -- as they post a loss every quarter, we pick up our 43% share of that loss. And we're writing it down by about $1 million a year through that process as well. So we took the step to say, okay, we're going to put this all down now because we're moving on with our core business quickly and in the right direction as we showed, if you look at the normalized net loss where I take impairment out on the press release, we were at only negative $400,000 of loss -- accounting loss on the quarter, positive operating cash flow, positive EBITDA. And we want -- and that's including the Quad portion. So we want to get for Q4, not including the impairment, but including their loss pickup. So we were like, okay, it's time to move on with the business from that perspective. But operationally, Quad is still there. What I expect to happen in the future is if Quad does succeed as we expect them to, we'll actually write that back up because it is a reversible impairment. So that's -- and the same thing there with the loan to Quad. If it's repaid in the future, which I'm still hopeful it will be. And if Quad hits their business plan, it will be repaid, then again we write that back up. With regards to the K'Prime one, that was part of our annual impairment testing. So when we looked at that, the K'Prime customer list intangible, we actually still -- we still service that customer. There's a bit of an accounting anomaly there where we have to allocate a portion of the corporate overhead to that, but we can only test it against a very small amount of revenue. So the way the test worked, it forced an impairment on that list as well. But we still, in fact, generate 4 figures of revenue a year from that customer list. Does that answer your question? It's pretty complex IFRS stuff, but...

I understand. I understand.

Okay. Great.

And by the way, Randall, Walter is a chartered accountant and practiced for a long time. So he's very sophisticated on these matters.

I didn't realize that, Walter. So if I -- apologies if I was speaking down, not my intention at all.

No, no, no. It's a good explanation because I think most other people will probably not understand and it's better that you explain than I do.

Fair enough.

And just for clarity, too, one of the pieces that Randall referred to in the press release further down, I think it's -- depending on how you're looking at it, I think it's on Page 2. There is -- we did -- Randall did add a table showing normalized net loss. So we did want to put a table there to kind of explaining what things would look at on a normalized basis.

What I'm worried was that inexperienced people look at the financial statements and say, "Oh, my God, there's a loss of $7 million in the fourth quarter. This is ridiculous. But it's only a loss of $400,000. So I just want to emphasize that.

Yes, I appreciate that, Walter. And I think for everybody on the call, too, I would encourage you to read that press release if you haven't look at those normalized numbers because I do normalize them back for a full year. And then I'll emphasize here today as well that we generated on the full year $3.3 million of operating cash flow and about $3 million of adjusted EBITDA, which is a pretty good indication. The adjusted EBITDA is intended to be an indicator of our cash flow generated from the operations of the business, the way we're calculating it. And our investments were into research and development and capital assets were about $1.7 million. So we're generating much more cash from our operations than required for our own internal investments, and the remainder is going to servicing debt and things like that.

And again, with regards to Quad Systems as a company, it's important for everybody to know that it's a tech start-up, a tech start-up that is -- when we invested was pre-revenue with no product, and they were developing world-class technology. Today, they have a working product. They've made great progress on their tech platform and the founder is a world-renowned expert that spent over 20 years at Bruker Corporation, which is the maker of the very large NMR systems, the #1 in the world. So it's a tech start-up. It wasn't an investment in an operating company.

I had one other question. One of the -- my followers pegs at me that you would have an issue with 2 bank covenants. Is that a matter of concern? He read that somewhere. I didn't read it, yes.

Yes. No, I do think we'll have a bit of an issue with the 2 new covenants coming on that relate to EBITDA, primarily because it's a trailing 12-month calculation. And I'm not -- we don't quite have enough EBITDA to get there most likely. Now we're still closing the first quarter. So that's not a certainty, but it's a likelihood. I've spoken with our bank. They're very much willing to work with us, and I expect that to be resolved likely by the Q1 filing.

That's what I expect, too.

Yes. I'm not -- at this stage, it's an issue to deal with, but our bank is happy. They've told me our bank is happy with the progress -- or they have told me -- our bank has told me that they're happy with the progress we've made. And so I'm quite optimistic that that will get addressed.

We have a great relationship with our bank. We pay them a lot of interest each month, and they're very happy with us.

Do we have other questions? Walter, anyone else? you can -- [Operator Instructions]. Feel free anyone to bring forward a question. I have also -- I will get a transcript of the call if you have not listened to it, I'm happy to send you a transcript. The replay is available on our website.

Please do with that, yes.

Okay.

Yes. I listened to the call this morning. So I heard most of it. But I would like to see the transcript because I send it to maybe 800 people afterwards and that -- they're interested.

Happily get that. I get it. I don't have the official yet, but as soon as I get it, Walter, I'll send it your way. And then again, as Randall mentioned, too, we do strive to put a lot of detail in the press release, right, including additional tables. I know Randall works very hard at kind of giving full kind of clarity. So if you haven't seen that as well, happy to send out and that is on our website as well as it fully disseminated.

Yes. So I'll just maybe make some closing remarks and then -- I mean -- but if people still have questions, that's okay. So we continue to keep downward pressure on costs, but we're doing it in a way that doesn't negatively affect our important assets, especially on the technology side. One of the misconceptions, I think, that people have had is that, maybe the company is not spending money on R&D anymore. Maybe they're not innovating. And I want to be clear, that's not true. That is absolutely not true. We've continued to spend significant amounts of money on R&D, on product development. We'll always be an innovation company. So we've achieved these strong financial results without in any way neglecting our technology and our product innovation. So I just wanted to assure people of that. But we still have a lot of inefficiencies that we can remove from our cost that will make EBITDA and eventually our net income stronger. And we can do that without affecting -- negatively affecting revenue growth. So I just wanted to assure everybody of that. I'll be in Ghent and Antwerp in roughly a month to meet with everybody that wants to meet with us. I always enjoy those visits every year, and I'm going to be excited to talk about our new products and about our growth trajectory. And I'll do what I always do, which is give everybody insight into what our business plan is for the next 5 years. So really excited about that, and I hope you join me in Antwerp and Ghent, I believe, on May 16 and 17.

Well, if I'm not seeing any more questions, we always appreciate everybody joining us and appreciate everybody's support. And again, Walter, I'll send you that transcript. And keep in mind, we will have -- this is the -- we've gotten the longest time between calls, right? From the Q3 to this end of the year. Now we're going to go to the shortest. We have -- we just had a call. We'll have one in approximately another month for Q1. I'm not giving the exact date yet. But -- so we do look forward to giving more results here in the relatively near term.

Okay. Looking forward to see you in Antwerp, Sean.

Likewise. Thanks, Walter. You look like you're on a golf course, are you?

No, no, no, no. I'm with my wife is somewhere 50 meters behind me. We were on the bike trip so, I was just in time, was just in time.

Enjoy your bike trip.

Good to see everybody. Thank you.