Weebit Nano Limited (WBT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Now let's also check the price of Weebit Nano. It surged yesterday and we see up again substantially today after the semiconductor company announced a commercial agreement with South Korea foundry, DB HiTek. It's licensed Weebit Nano's memory tech. And Juliette Saly spoke with Weebit Nano's Chief Executive, Coby Hanoch, who joined us from Israel.

Yes. This is a very important deal for Weebit. We've been working on it for a long time. DB HiTek is one of the largest foundries in the world. They're actually one of the leaders in the analog and power management domains and sensors. So being able to work with them and having them manufacture our technology means that hundreds of customers that they have, including the biggest that you can think of, Intel, Sony, Qualcomm, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, et cetera, they manufacture at DB HiTek. So with this agreement, we actually have access to all of these customers, and we believe this is a very important step forward for us.

DB HiTek is a global top 10 foundry. It has annual revenue of more than $2 billion. So what kind of meaningful revenue are you hoping for at Weebit Nano following this agreement?

So in this domain, we are actually licensing our technology. So we are now transferring the technology to DB HiTek. Of course, we will be getting payments from them for the license and work that we're doing. And the key element is once we start licensing to their customers. And then we'll be getting license fees. We'll be getting potential engineering work payments and royalties from their sales of their products that have our technology in them. So the potential here is very big. It's tens of millions of dollars from this and potentially even more. So it's a very important deal for us, and we're very excited about it.

Do we expect that it could lead you to sign some further commercial agreements?

Yes, of course. We are now in the process of going out to market. We have -- the first agreement that we signed was SkyWater. This is the second agreement. I think that once the other foundries see that there are already people that have tested us and are working with us, actually have agreements with us, it's going to open more doors. It's going to make it easier to get the additional foundries onboard. And of course, with DB HiTek, we still have to go through transferring the technology and manufacturing prototypes and qualifying. But at the end, we'll have access to all of these hundreds of customers. And we're clearly expecting to sign agreements with their customers.

Can you tell us a little bit more about Weebit Nano's cutting-edge technology and particularly what DB HiTek, excuse me, is hoping to use some of this for?

So if you look today, today's world is so dependent on semiconductors in general. I mean anything you touch, anything you look at has semiconductor in it. The largest segment in semiconductors is memory. This is the most critical area, and Weebit is focused on what's called nonvolatile memory, which is the memory that doesn't lose its content when you unplug it from power. Today, the technology that exists is called flash. It's been around for a long time. It's been hitting a lot of limits. Weebit's technology is 100x faster, 100x lower power, much more advanced on so many parameters. And Weebit is one of the very few companies in the world that actually has such a technology. I would even say, in terms of being an independent provider that can work with anyone, we are practically the only ones. There are some other small activities, but we're really the only ones who can address the full market.

The market certainly appears to like this deal. Thursday saw some very strong buying in your stock, in fact, the top performer on the ASX 200, always something that I'm sure you like to see. Tell us what your sort of future plan's for in terms of expansion and growth.

We're clearly -- well, first of all, we're happy to see the activity on the stock exchange. We were very disappointed that ASX downgraded it to not price sensitive, which I cannot understand. I think this is a very important announcement for us. Moving forward, we plan to sign up more foundries like DB HiTek, foundries being places which manufacture semiconductors. We're planning to sign up customers who will actually incorporate our technology into their semiconductor devices. And even before the end of this year, we are expecting to start seeing some initial revenues. I told the market not to expect huge numbers, but the initial payment, the initial trickle of revenue will start even before the end of this calendar year.