Nano Dimension Ltd. (NNDM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Yoav, thanks for being with us today.

Thank you, Dave. Nice being here as usual.

Well, I want to begin today with your giving us a basic overview of your technology.

Okay. So what we do is we build a machine about the size of 2 home refrigerators. The uniqueness of this machine, and it's a really transformable machine. That is the only machine in the world that's using 3-dimensional technology to print 2 materials at once: one dielectric material and one conductive. And from the other side of the machine comes up an electrical device, highly sophisticated, miniaturized that works. So on one side, you enter a digital file; on the other side, comes out electrical device. Nobody can do it until today. A lot of people are trying.

Give us an example of a couple of applications for, say, the military.

Well, it's true for military. It's true for aerospace. It's also medical. When they need what we call high-performance electronic devices, hybrids, which you can use the different names, say, a very sophisticated printed circuit boards, very high-end. And let's say they need RF antenna connected together with the electrical circuit that operates the antenna and also connected to a battery that make sure that antenna operates right. And you want to do all of it together, 3-dimensional, including printing the antenna, printing the electronic device and printing a base and a little box where that battery can get in, be connected and everything is printed at once. Other than a battery, which is being added afterwards. That's a very good example.

You have nearly $1 billion in cash. You've hired 2 very good investment banks, including Needham. Talk to us about your acquisition strategy.

Okay. Since we -- actually, you're right, having that and we've developed this over the last 4 or 4, 5 months since we started to raise money and since we started to feel that the market and our investors are really believing in the concept and the vision we're having. We hired Needham and another European bank, and we look at 2 types of acquisitions, which, by now, through searching, I think I scanned over 85 companies, which is a huge amount. We have serious candidates. Type A is large companies relatively in the traditional PCB industry, but in a very, very high end of this industry, which was still on the ground in Europe and the United States and are serving the defense community, the medical community, the aviation community, the aerospace community. It's exactly corresponding to our target market. And those companies, there's about, I would say, 15 of them in the United States, 15 in Europe because the rest of all this industry went to China. Those companies are targets for Type A. The reason we want to buy in Europe and United States is we are actually buying an existing relationship with customers' distribution channels. And eventually, we're going to populate all those with our technology. Type B is -- there's many more companies, but they're smaller. And those are companies that have very, very promising technologies. Some of them are aiming at the same thing we are aiming trying to compete but they are coming from different angles. And we see in a vision of 2, 3 years from now, that those technologies will be integrated into our product offering. So we prefer to buy it now rather than to risk in R&D. So we are looking at about, I would say, 3 or 4 companies like this in Israel, 3 or 4 in Europe and 4 or 5 in the United States. That's the Type B.

What does the revenue look like on some of these targets?

The Type A revenue is between $50 million to $200 million per company. The Type B companies is -- are revenue between $2 million to $50 million each company.

Okay. And will you use all cash or you'll put some equity in these deals?

No. I would prefer not to use all cash. The fact that they have cash gets me in the door very fast. These people pay attention immediately. The fact that I don't want to pay cash, in some cases, because I want people, I want the management of the company to stay in. I want the management to be compensated and -- based on the upside. So I want to combine cash and shares and also to get at the right price. I will add one more thing that people should know. I'm sure they know. The SPAC, call it, tsunami, with 200 SPACs running around the market, 95% in the United States, if not 100%, caused the prices in the United States to sore because those SPACs are totally not sophisticated as much as paying the right prices, especially not when they get to the last leg of their career and their career is usually 2 years. That's when they start to raise prices. So I'm very careful not to be pulled into this ridiculous race of retrace of paying too much. It's a retrace. And even if you win, you're still staying -- being the red. So I'm not going to pay and overpay. We are really carefully using the acquisitions. And therefore, looking at Europe, there, it doesn't happen because there's no SPACs campaigns there.

In a recent press release, you provided shareholders a year-end 2020 update. What were some of the most important accomplishments that you're most proud of?

Well, the first and I would say, important accomplishment, which surprised me to be very frank with you is I expect the revenue to be really low because people will not buy machines during the time when corona is there. And corona, by the way, is still there. They can't buy machines and it's understandable. Capital gains are limited, if not zeroed out. So I thought that the revenue will go really, really low. We ended up with revenue of half last year without selling machines almost. We sell machines in the last quarter because things in Pacific Rim started to kind of come up. So without selling machines in a big way, we sold a lot. That actually proves very important concept in our business model. First of all, our customers are buying material, which means they are using their machine. Consumables. [indiscernible] Secondly, by now, 70% of our customers upgraded their old machine into the new machine that came out end of 2019, which means they like their machines. They like the technology. They believe it enough to pay more and to get a machine that's [ 21st for 7 ]. So that, I think, is a very important achievement and proof of concept. It's really proving that we're in the right direction. Secondly, we started Nano services, which means we are now giving services to our customers. Those who don't buy the machines because they need to wait until Mr. CFO will release their budget are saying, okay, guys. So at least you do from us what we would have done with your machines. And we'll pay $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 per round of prototyping. And the inventory -- sorry, the revenue is growing from that services, we call it NaNoS, Nano services. But the revenue is not the point here. The point is that our customers keep in touch with us. We keep in touch with them. And after spending $50,000 or $40,000 next year when the corona will be over, it will be a sling shot effect when they buy the machines because by then, they know the technology. So that's the second achievement. Third achievement is what we described with M&A. We still didn't announce one, but we went far away in scanning the horizon. Understanding who is playing, what are the prices. A lot of work was done and a lot of effort were invested, and I think we reached a very, very important point. There's other achievements that we announced lately for last year, we have developed relationship with customers, the existing customers that end up with a -- new applications being developed and we're really looking forward that as we advanced during this year whether our material back and are getting better, closer to industrial and military is back, we are going to end up with those achievements surfing. And once the corona clears the way, revenue is going to start to rocket up.

And you've talked about some of the milestones you want to achieve in 2021 already. Are there any other milestones you want to talk about today that you hope to achieve?

Well, I spoke about a few of them. We hope to come up -- to finish 2021 -- first of all, in the middle of the year to release the new model of our DragonFly machine. We have the name already. We have the specs. Obviously, it's practically in alpha close to beta sites now in the middle of alpha site, actually. So we will release the information about the new name and when time for release, which will be midyear, I want to release it when there'll be somebody to buy because, again, people have to come back from corona and start to be back in offices. But that's the first goal. Secondly, our achievements on materials are really impressive, and we want to be able to reach a milestone that we can announce towards the end of the year and new materials that we're going to come up with.

What is the major difference between the new system that you're developing now and the current systems?

Okay. The current systems we have now assisted for prototyping and proof of concept. The new system that will come up at the end of -- the beginning of 2022 is going to be still prototyping but getting into early production, first tranche of production. And by the way of manner, I can tell you that even existing machines, some of our customers, specifically in defense are using it for production as well. The reason is certain things in production cannot be done unless it's being done by our machine. So they're using it for production, but it was not built for production. It was built for prototyping. So the new machine will be more for early prototyping and beginning of production.

Are there any new applications or new uses for this technology with the advent of your new systems?

Yes. I'll give you examples. We are starting to climb up to higher altitudes, which means 3 dimensions as pre axises, right, X, Y and Z. So we are climbing up on the Z axis. Climbing up on the Z axis means we are actually starting to build printer circuit boards that look more like printed circuit cubes. Printed circuit cubes, you can actually put inside the cube while you're printing. You can put components and you put components in and then you continue to print above them. And you put components in and you can put -- you end up being instead of taking a very large real estate of printed circuit board, you take a much smaller space of a printed circuit cube. That's a very, very advanced every millimeter, 2 millimeters. We go up an altitude is an achievement, and we expect to show during this year a very serious advancement of that field.

To be clear for our viewers, this is the only technology in the world that can take a digital file and print with 3D, a high-performance electronic parts. And many of these parts are multilayered, 5, 6 layers, correct?

Many of them are 30 -- 20, 30 layers even. The machine -- our machine, the way it prints each layer is a 1.5 micron. So even if the machine ends up printing 3 layers in the PCB, it will print 3 layers by doing 4,000 times going over them until they get them. So for our machine being digital, the machine doesn't know if it's printing 2 layers or 25 layers. It prints the same way. It's just separate layers according to the digital file. So it's a very, very unique technology that way. And it enables us to be very flexible on how many layers we put. It doesn't add money or cost if we print more layers. In a printed circuit board regular one, if you have a 2-layers board, it's very inexpensive. Uncomplicated, if you have 40-layers board, very complicated. For our machine, it doesn't know. It can bring 2 or 20, same price.

Fascinating. I love your business model because you sell the technology itself, the system. You have the inks that you sell, the recurring revenue source and you have the maintenance contracts.

Absolutely. We have 3 -- I'd say, 1, 2, 3, 4 sources of revenue right now. The first one is the machine sale, which, of course, during 2020, was lower. By the way, again, in the last quarter, the Pacific Rim bought the machines. But that's the first layer. Then above that comes the consumables, we sell like HP. We sell the ink for the machines. In our case, only us having the 2 types of inks that work together so it's kind of captive. Above that, we sell the contract -- the maintenance contracts on an annual basis other than the first year, which is a warranty. So that's the third one. And then above that, we have now what NaNoS, which is Nano services, which is we sell services of printing, prototyping to our customers. So it's 4 sources of revenue.

Excellent. In summary, a couple of sentences. What's the essential value proposition for investors today?

Okay. Now you're asking me a serious questions about vision. I'll take you one step further. Our machine will end up being just a node in a network of machines. This is not about a machine that makes PCBs. This is going to be like the PC. The personal computer in the beginning of the ages was the unit on your desk. Then eventually, it was part of a network, which was called local area networks. Remember? Novel networks. And then it became part of a wide area network. And then it became problem the Internet. Today, when you look at your computer, you not even know if it's a computer or not. This is just your gate to speak with the world of the Internet. Our machine is going to be a node in a network of digital fabrication network. It will be a neural network where the inventory will be kept digitally in the brain and will be sent down to the different publication center and will be printed out on the machines. But the machine is going to be a smart node in a network which has a brain. And it's going to be environmental-friendly because our machine, unlike the $65 billion PCB industry, which is full of chemicals and dirt and nonreusable materials. Our machine comes with 2 cartridges. You can have 20 of likes this on the shelf with 1-year life -- shelf life. And you put the cartridge. There's no waste. Once it's finished, you take the cartridge out. And you're in a clean environment. So reshoring this industry from the Far East on to the land of United States and Europe. And therefore, shortening the supply chain is also enabled by the fact that it's becoming a clean industry through using machines like ours.

Excellent. Yoav, thank you so much for being with us today. It's a wonderful story.

Thank you so much. See you next time. Bye-bye.