Weebit Nano Limited (WBT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Let's check in now on Weebit Nano shares as the ASX 300 tech company holds its 2024 investor presentation. They are down 2%. Now the semiconductor market is expected to reach $1 trillion in value by 2030, and Weebit Nano says it remains focused on expanding its ReRAM technology and securing new partnerships. Let's get all the details now with CEO, Coby Hanoch, who is in Sydney. Coby, you've got your investor update today. Tell us how you're faring at Weebit Nano as we kickstart full year '25.

Yes, this is really a very exciting time for Weebit. We're working hard on getting another commercial agreement done. We actually have a lot of parallel right now with many key players in the industry, and we're focused on getting that at least one agreement signed before the end of this calendar year. So there's a big focus on that. In general, the market is really realizing that ReRAM is the future nonvolatile memory technology. Weebit is the only independent supplier in this market. So there are only other 2 companies that have it that are keeping their technology for themselves. They're not giving it to anyone else. And so Weebit right now is engaged with, I would say, more than 20 companies, manufacturers and product companies, et cetera, and we're moving forward.

Moving forward. Now we mentioned that the semiconductor industry is expected to be worth $1 trillion by 2030. Tell us how you play into that and how much of that market you're hoping to capture.

So semiconductors are really the biggest and most important and strategic market today in the world; 8 out of the top 10 market cap companies in the world today are semiconductor companies, and anything that you touch today is semiconductors. Now in the semiconductor space, memory is one of the top 2 segments. Basically, if you think about it, any electronic device needs memory to operate, if you want to store the data, you want to store the videos, you want to store security keys, et cetera, et cetera. We are focused on what's called the nonvolatile memory, a memory that doesn't lose the data even when you unplug it from power. And if you think about it, basically any electronic device in the world, when you turn it on the first time, there's that magical moment and you expect to have some software and data there that's going to be running, and that's basically the nonvolatile memory. So this is a big market. The total nonvolatile memory market is expected to reach more than $150 billion to almost $200 billion in the near term. We're focused now on a segment of that that's called embedded. But still, the potential here is very big, and we're very confident about our technology and moving forward.

When we look at where you are now versus this time last year, Coby, more than AUD 1 million in revenue received, You've added Ohana as well, and the 2 new commercial deals. Just talk us through the future expansion, particularly as you're extending it to your China ecosystem, too.

So semiconductors, and I know this is one of the things that's most difficult for Australian investors to understand, this is a very, very difficult market, very complex. Manufacturing semiconductors is something that is really hard to explain just how complex it is. The facilities where you manufacture semiconductors, they're called fabs, and they cost more than $1 billion to set up, even the simple ones. The more advanced ones are tens of billions of dollars to set up. So this is a very difficult market. Now we are working now with these manufacturers. The process of getting them onboard is a very long one. So in this past year, I know there's a certain level of frustration of the shareholders. The last deal that we announced was a year ago, and we haven't announced any new deals since then. We are actually engaged with a lot of companies. We're evaluating, negotiating, et cetera. And as I said, we expect to even get at least one of those. We have several in negotiation right now, and we expect to close one of those even before the end of this calendar year. So that's really the big focus. Regarding China, China is an important semiconductor market. In the past, we had a big focus on China. Because of the geopolitical tensions, we lowered that focus. We're still working there, and we do expect to have customers in China as well. But right now, our big focus is on U.S., European, Korean, et cetera, East Asian companies.

Now you mentioned maybe investors here are not really fully understanding what you're doing. Certainly, when you look at your share price, down 60% so far this year, a 3-year low. Of course, a lot of calls out there whether it's the right time to buy or not. But what do you say when analysts say that they're worried about your cash burn?

Well, first of all, the last report that we issued, we still didn't issue this quarterly report, but the annual report showed that we had, at the time, $63 million in the bank. The burn last year was $25 million. So you do the math quickly, and you can see we have money for more than 2 years. So it's not that Weebit right now is in a cash strain. We will get these deals done. We will be moving forward. And I don't think there's any concern right now on cash for Weebit.