WISeKey International Holding AG (WIHN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. During this call, WISeKey management will discuss the selected items of the agenda of the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders, which is scheduled for May 25, recent business development and operational and financial highlights for the first quarter of the year. Before the start of the call, I'd like to direct your attention to the forward-looking statement in this presentation. Today on the floor we have Carlos Moreira, Chief Executive Officer; Peter Ward, Chief Financial Officer; Ben Stump, Chief Revenue Officer; Chris Boos, Chief Technology Officer; and Alexander Zinser, Chief Legal Officer. After the prepared remarks, management will answer investor questions received through the chat option in the order of questions are received. I'll now turn the line over to Alexander Zinser, Chief Legal Officer, who will start this call for a discussion of selected items of the agenda of the AGM. Alexander, please go ahead.

Thank you, Lena, for the introduction. My name is Alexander Zinser. I'm the Chief Legal Officer of WISeKey. And I'm happy to go through some selected agenda items which will come up for the annual general assembly for all shareholders of WISeKey, which will be held on the 25th of May. Due to the COVID situation, it will be not held in person. Now the purpose of this call today is also to highlight some of the agenda items. As you may have seen into the invitation, the AGM entails 12 agenda items, we will highlight 3 agenda items. On the agenda, there are other items, like the appropriation of accumulated loss for the first fiscal year 2020, discharge of the members of the Board of Directors and the executive management, reelection of the Chairman of the Board of Directors, reelection of the Nomination and Compensation Committee, reelection of BDO as the company's auditors, reelection of the independent proxy, then also agenda items advisory vote on the company's compensation and then the vote on the compensation for the Board of Directors and the executive management. Now as I said, we will highlight 3 agenda items, which will require further explanation from the management. And that's the purpose also of this call of today. Agenda item #1 would be approval of the annual report 2020 of WISeKey International Holding, including the audited consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2020 and the audited statutory financial statements for fiscal year 2020. And here, the proposal for the Annual General Meeting is the Board of Directors proposes that the 2020 annual report, including the audited consolidated financial statement for the calendar year ending December 31, the fiscal year 2020 and the audited statutory financial statement for fiscal year 2020 be approved. So basically, this agenda item entails the approval of the annual report 2020, which has been published on the 13th of April, so more or less 1.5 weeks ago, and made published to everyone. So that's agenda item #1. The second agenda item, which we are selected, which might raise further management explanation is agenda item #4, and that's the renewal and increase of the authorized share capital. And here, the proposal is the Board of Director proposes that this general authority to issue registered shares with a nominal value of CHF 0.05 each, a Class B shares, out of the company's authorized share capital pursuant to Article 4a and paragraph 1B and a, increase to up to 21,541,721 Class B shares; and b, renewed for a further 2-year period expiring on May 25, 2023. And why we are doing that? I hand it over to Carlos, who will explain the rationale behind that agenda item. So Carlos?

Yes. Thank you, Alexander, and it is a pleasure for me to join you on the explanation on the agenda item 4. As Alexander mentioned, due to the fact that we cannot meet this year, we just selected this format, which is a format that at least will allow you to understand what is the company's proposing, so you can take your voting decisions and the agenda items, and they are more relevant to those decisions are going to be displayed and explained here by management together, at the same time, we will be providing a detailed explanation of our strategy during last year, but also mainly during this year, which is a very important year for the company. So the renewal and increase of authorized capital will allow us basically to support the investment and the development of the WISeKey platform. As you know, WISeKey has been, in the last year, consolidating different assets. We acquired several companies like when we acquired VaultIC from INSIDE Secure semiconductor. We then acquire 51% of arago. And we also, as you know, maintained some of the residual assets we got during the QuoVadis acquisition, which is mainly on the connected car, ISTANA platform. So we need to integrate all those assets into an end-to-end platform. That's the positioning that WISeKey is moving out. And for that, that includes, obviously, development of new products, IP and fast-growing IT cyber security positioning in markets where we believe there's going to be a potential M&A acquisitions as a target. So obviously, we are not going to necessarily use all those shares, but those -- this capital is reserved, means that if the company sees an opportunity to acquire or to enter into a market like the United States, those shares will be made available and will be used by the company as we have done in the past. Obviously, in a wise way. The objective is not to delude the shareholders, but basically to increase the value of the company by entering into this consolidation platform model. It is important to note that due to the COVID, this is a good opportunity this year to look into M&A possibilities. There's good companies with good revenues and they are available at a reasonable price, and that will allow us to have a currency on which we can act at any time. I'll give back the floor to you on the next agenda item, Alexander.

Yes. Thank you, Carlos. That brings me to the share agenda item, which we would -- which we have selected and where Carlos would be happy to give more background about that. And that's agenda item #5, the increase of the conditional share capital. And here, the proposal is the Board of Directors proposes that its authority to issue Class B shares out of the company's conditional share capital be increased by a maximum of 31,469,207 Class B shares, of which 125,169,207 Class B shares may be issued to third parties or shareholders in connection with bonds, options, warrants, notes, other securities or contractor obligations; and second, 6,300,000 B shares may be issued to employees, members of the Board of Directors, consultants and other persons. So that's agenda item #5, which Carlos will give you more information on the rationale and more background information.

Thank you, Alexander. So this agenda item 5, it refers to conditional share capital. As all company in growth stage, conditional share capital is always used to support the expansion and growth of the company, mainly in our case in the United States as WISeKey is making an important inroads into the U.S. Now we have a very important revenue generating in the United States, which is great news for the company because the IoT and AI segment is actually expanding in priority in the United States. While at the same time, we also invest in other geographies like joint ventures, like the one we did in Saudi Arabia and in India, and also to increase in operations in terms of generating new type of revenue and attract and maintain talent for WISeKey. As you know, WISeKey has increased substantially the number of employees since the acquisition of arago. We have now staff in 4 main locations: United States, France, Germany and Switzerland. And also operations in different or other countries. So obviously, option plans are required for the extended number of staff and also to attract new talent. We are in an ultra-high competitive industry. If we want to recruit top talent, we are in competition with the Googles of the world, and we need to be attractive in terms of being able to provide the right packages. Otherwise, we will never be able to get the right executives. So this is the rationale for agenda item #5. So with that, I think we went through the 2 main agenda items that require clarification. The rest has been provided to you by Alexander, and everything obviously is available to you in the documentation that you received that will allow you to vote on the general assembly. Just maybe to give you an introduction now with the key team, so we're going to be, myself, Chris Boos, and Ben, giving you -- Ben Stump, giving you further clarification and color on the current progress of the company. So WISeKey is, as you all know, is a trust technology company, leader in cybersecurity, with core technology and patents that they are strategic now for the deployment of IoT. We have been successful, although we are still small, but we are in a very niche market, where everybody is small, by the way. And in that niche market, we have done very concrete steps towards position WISeKey in areas such as IoT, such as semiconductor design, such as cybersecurity, identity management, even later this year on COVID-related project, COVID certification and protection of data. As we are entering to a complex world where everything is going to be digital, protection of data is becoming ever more important now than it was before. So the company now has reinforced with another major asset, which is arago. Arago is a German company founded by Chris Boos, which is now the Chief Technology Officer of WISeKey. And arago has -- is a pioneer on artificial intelligence, one of the leaders in the business process automation, with a very powerful knowledge and software related to knowledge automation, which is an industry that is expanding. Automation is required everywhere, more autonomous deployments, you do more automation you need. And automation now has reinforced highly the position of what we call the new WISeKey or the WISeKey third generation. The first generation was the start-up. The second generation was the M&A activity. And the third generation of WISeKey is actually the platform that we are able to integrate now and coming to the market with adding trust to knowledge automation process, delivering the next-generation business processes; cloud-based SaaS offering, which is quite unique also in the market and will allow us to create another type of revenue that we didn't have before; and being able also to maximize on the current deployment on what we call the trusted NFT, the non-fungible token, which is an interesting positioning that WISeKey is making, which has been reflected on the fact that during the first quarter of this year, we were actually the best stock traded in the Swiss Stock market, has been a huge increase in February and March, which then basically went back to lower levels due to the fact that this is a very speculative market and it has a cyclical process, which I'm sure I will give you more details later on how we can remedy that. So the platform effect, what we call the digital transformation asset, is a cybersecurity asset, which is the DNA of the company mixed now with digital identities, IT, objects and sensor, all that creating a huge amount of customer system integration and data. Data is the oil of the digital economy. And HIRO is able now to analyze that data. And without data, which comes from authenticated sources, they require less data to take better diagnostic and assessment. Chris will give you a more detailed information about that. Another new area, which is a new vertical now WISeKey has added during the first quarter of this year is the TrustedNFT.IO. It is important to mention that WISeKey is financing the integration of WISeKey. Part of the money that we needed actually was to acquire 51% of the arago capital and funded the company as the company needed funding in order to further deploy their technology and case. AI companies have, all of them, unpredictable revenue. It is a revenue that it is hard at the beginning to be made. But once enters into a speed process, it is actually an amazing revenue to have. That obviously values the entire valuation of WISeKey, although this is not yet reflected into the value of the company. The acquisition of arago has not been yet factored into the valuation of WISeKey. So it's a good opportunity for investors, because as we move forward in the integration and we can start to see the synergies, that value will be soon be reflected. So I give the floor now to give you more color on arago and the knowledge automation to Chris Boos, Chief Technology Officer of WISeKey and the founder of arago. Chris, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Carlos. And it's my absolute pleasure to, for the first time, speak to you as the CTO of WISeKey, and I'm very excited to how we're integrating these technologies. But let me give you a little introduction on what we're doing in terms of automation, how we're using artificial intelligence and then how this works together with the fantastic security platform that WISeKey has always been and where it is going to take us. So the first thing is when we're talking about automation, the things that we can achieve is triple of what other automation companies achieve. You might have heard of the robotic process automation, or RPA, that has gone to the market. They fizzle out at about 30% automation. We can achieve 90% automation, and we have done so in customers. The second part of that, and the second step of that, while the AI is automating inside a company, it also collects data for our company to make that company machine readable. And that means that for a future digital transformation, just by raking in the fruits of automation and saving money and having better quality, the company is also building up a data pool for digital transformation, which I think is really important. And the last part is that we're automating on top of knowledge, right? It's not a single path that gets automated like a factory in an assembly line. What we're actually doing is we automate, we take the knowledge of the company into the artificial intelligence and then enable the AI to perform all types of tasks with it. And we have turnkey solutions that can be deployed. And you see here on the right side, as for example, there is IT service management, all types of things in security, application management, SAP and so on and so forth. Meaning that we manage, we automate 90% of all of this automation. Then there's also supply chain, right, especially in days like COVID, there is a lot of nonstandard supply chain efforts that you simply can't do with scripted or bot-based automation. And this is where artificial intelligence jumps in and goes there. And then, of course, with Carlos already mentioning, the COVID activities, with the type of data platform that we're running, we're able to calculate risk for an individual person rather than just giving a prediction on what the incidence level of the disease is. This is a nice application as well. If we go to the next slide. If we look at automation and the history, and I'm going to go through this very quickly, then we have had multiple generations, right? And so far, we're on the third-generation of automation, which has been taking the old style scripts to robotic process automation. But still, all of this means that everything is predetermined. And when the world around the automation changes, the automation needs to be maintained. The step that we have taken with knowledge automation means that the machine will write the automation itself. Instead of giving the machine the goal, instead of giving the machine all the steps that it has to do, all you tell to the machine is, this is the goal that you achieve and the machine will go and do it by itself. And we'll see that on the next chart, how this actually materializes into knowledge. So what happens? We put knowledge into the machine. It's like having an experienced pool. When you give the machine a specific task, it will execute it automatically. And if it doesn't know, it can go to a person, ask for a specific piece of knowledge and then reuse that all over again. Why is this a great combination on the security platform? Because most companies out there simply don't have enough data. I'm sure all of you have followed the AI hype and how AI has not really been adopted by a lot of companies. Unfortunately, they are all in the pilot phase. Why is that? It's because they don't have enough data. And the problem here is that they can't collect more data. The only way to get the AI into a state where it can take good decisions is to make sure that the data that you have is trusted. And this is exactly how WISeKey technology is integrated into AI, how arago's technology is building on top of WISeKey, because that way, this automation technology becomes available to everybody. And the strategic step is, as I've already said, to have the AI data warehouse with all the data collected while the AI is operating businesses and running business processes in order to do digital transformation. Next slide, please. So here, you see the real difference, the real difference in effort of maintaining an automation. You see the automation that is achieved on the x-axis of the charts. So up to almost 100% automation can be achieved, meaning that we simply take the people out of the game of operating business processes and that has lots of good effects. And this is compared to the effort yellow line that traditional automation methods have achieved. And you see, with traditional automation methods, it's literally impossible to achieve 100%, which you can achieve with artificial intelligence. You normally have a good business case up to 30%. And then because of the exponential effort you have to put in, it won't work. If you look at the pink line in the chart, that is the effort that was needed to put in overtime in order to achieve up to 100% automation. Depending on the use case, our average automation across all the domains that you just saw, IT automation, marketing, supply chain and so on, is 87% at the moment. We go to the next slide. And here is just an example from running a data center, meaning that all the physical aspects of a data center get controlled, all the service of the data center get managed, all the operating systems, the databases, the standard software like SAP gets managed here. And you see that from a client perspective, this is a provider deploying it to his clients, we actually achieved an automation because this is low in the stack of 98%. And the interesting thing is that instead of having 3 days average on problem resolution, we took it down to 3 minutes. And just doing that in terms of quality increase is huge, right? At the same, we achieved the automation level of 98%. We were able to take 65% of the workforce out and we had 0% human error in the system. I mean these are numbers that are amazing. And if we go to the next slide, we see that the analysts look at this as well. The arago technology is right where it should be in the innovation square. And I think that if we look at that, we are very unique in terms of this is a platform that is not just in development, but that has been running at scale and solving millions of problems over time and still being at that innovation level. If you go to the next slide. Here, you see the actual scaling. On the left side, you see how the amount of data has scaled over time. So those are all million data points. Takes you up to be by far the largest data pool in Europe at the moment. You see how tasks have been automated and how this is massively increasing since arago and WISeKey are working together. There we see, this is the actual work the machine does. This is what the clients in their projects are paying for. Then you have the automation rate, which is constant over a long time, and I'm telling you that the average is 87 right now. Meaning that we can actually see that over time, the automation rate stays the same. And when you look at that middle dip, that was in the automation rate, then you see that was a major change in the SAP system. But it didn't go down to 0, like you'd expect with RPA. It went down by not even 10% and recovered really quickly. And you see that there is an exponential growth in automation, while there is a linear growth in knowledge that is put into the machine. So the effort of maintaining the automation is totally linear, while the benefit that customers get from that is totally exponential. And this is what we're building on with the security tech now integrated, this becomes available to every company in the world. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Chris. So as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, arago brings 20 years of experience on processing data through AI capabilities, automation, which, as I mentioned before, is going to be one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, especially after the digital transformation the COVID is accelerating worldwide. We can immediately see how countries and enterprises are all moving into the fourth industrial revolution, where the critical assets of WISeKey are going to be essential. Assets like data, data is the oil of the digital economy. More data you are able to collect from authenticated sources, more predictability you can provide and sharper analysis and more educated risk assessment for decision-makers. So all that obviously reinforced by trust. AI can be biased. There has been a lot of debate about whether AI can be trusted or not. Obviously, the cybersecurity aspect of WISeKey adds this layer of trust, which is unique in the market, and that is reinforced by the fact that we are Swiss. The jurisdiction we have, this has been expanded, and will be actually even further expanded the Swissness of the WISeKey model. Just one example, as you read in the press, WISeKey recruited as one of the C-suite staff for digital transformation, Pierre Maudet. Pierre Maudet was the mayor of economy of Geneva, one of the engineers of the digital transformation of the Canton of Geneva, and he's now working for WISeKey and for WISeKey clients to bring them into this journey of digital transformation, which is going to be essential, as Chris just mentioned, to end up with knowledge automation and improved processes. It's also an interesting way to sell this because, in some cases, company see cybersecurity as a kind of burden. They say, "I have to invest in cybersecurity. It's expensive." Now automation reduces cost, so it means the company has become more lean, become less populated in terms of the requirement of people that they need to have in order to run processes like administration, like financial, like IT, all that can be automated. And as a consequence, this is an investment versus being just a cost item. So I just -- as I say back again, the combined technology, is where we are now. WISeKey, it's really positioned in the market now as a trusted platform. Platforms, there are not many in the world. You have technology companies that develop products and then you have platforms that integrate products into an end-to-end solution. And this is the new position in WISeKey. Although we are small, but we are there. I mean -- and being a platform on the Internet is like a real estate location. I mean it takes a long time and a lot of credibility before the market sees that company as a platform. So the immediate benefit of that is that we can react very fast to the new trends in the market. NFT has been there for a few years, but it was only at the beginning of this year that companies like Christie's and Sotheby's starting to auction NFT, non-fungible tokens, which are equivalent what we call a digital twin, and can be either only digital or can be physical and digital. And as you know, WISeKey has been doing the physical certification of objects for many years. We have done something like 2.5 million watches in Switzerland. They have already some sort of authentication and certification from WISeKey, whether it's inside a watch or in a smart car or a QR code, this industry or the certification of watches was used as a brand protection at the beginning just to ensure that objects are protected. Obviously, when we acquired VaultIC from INSIDE Secure, the possibility of adding the certificate into microchips accelerated the deployment of IoT, because we have something like 1.6 billion microchips being sold already in the market historically by the VaultIC ecosystem. And now bottom line, and basically any of those objects that they are authenticated by WISeKey can be converted into NFTs. So NFT is going to be, for the moment, it's only very selected objects. But in the future, everything is going to be an NFT. Everything will need to live both in the real world and in the metaverse. The metaverse is the digital version of a world that is starting to gain a lot of value because crypto currencies are accelerating the deployment of the metaverse. So WISeKey did roll first with Hublot on a very prestigious watch. That was the first watch ever being designed by Hublot. We had a coverage in the New York Times. We then did an NFT watch with Jacob's, which was a $1 million watch. And now we are expanding this offering to everything: paintings, architectural design, intellectual property, patents, all that are becoming NFTs. And those NFTs are being now authenticated by WISeKey. So WISeKey does all the what we call the provenance certification. We check the origin. We go through the brand protection process to ensure that this is a unique object. And once all that is done, we show a digital certificate for every digital provenance. And that certificate, together with the pedigree and recommendation of the object, becomes embedded into the non-fungible token. So we are, I will say, one of the only companies in the world that have the capability to provide NFT directly for an object within seconds now. And this is activating a huge demand for WISeKey, which is also being reflected in the valuation of the company in the last months. So we also have a back-end and tracks all this information. So this back-end is -- allow us to help, for instant, concrete object -- projects that has been released, like in Jacob's. Jacob is a very prestigious manufacturer of very high-end watches. They are between $1 million and $10 million per watch. And for them, the possibility of providing an NFT to the clients every time they buy such an expensive watch is essential. And it's also a way for them to protect investment. If you buy a $1 million watch, you don't want somebody else to do the NFT for you, you want to own that property. So basically, the company now has launched the NFT Trusted, which is -- it is an application platform that runs an NFTs. So now anyone that wants to do an NFT, maybe by the end of this month, we are finalizing this application, we'll be able to do it directly into a platform. Because like the Amazon of NFTs. And with that platform, WISeKey makes money as it takes a commission of every NFT being sold into the platform. It also provides the work required to create the digital identification of the provenance, that might be a very expensive and profound work if the piece is very unique. Imagine a Picasso or a Da Vinci statue. Now all that will require a very profound evaluation of the provenance. When the provenance is being established, this is being created. And WISeKey has developed with 2 very strategic leader. One is Casper, Casper Network. And another one is open -- Ocean Protocol relations that allows the company to be even further integrated into this blockchain ecosystem, right? Casper, for instance, token last -- today just went up by 3,000% after the announced integration on their blockchain platform, which has been used now by WISeKey for the deployment of the NFT platform. So this integration of WISeKey now with a major cryptocurrencies company is a new positioning that the company has and is new this year. And it's only possible because, as I said before, we have strategic IP patents like the one we signed in 2015, which is a patent for a method and apparatus for digital authentication of valuable goods. So look at that patent, I mean, this is kind of visionary patent where already in 2015, we were predicting that one day a digital object will need a digital certification in order to connect to other physical objects and to connect to the cloud. And that is part of the WISeKey cybersecurity back then. So with that, I would like, before I give the floor to Ben, just to mention that WISeKey organized a few weeks ago an earnings call. We had a very large number of shareholders and also analysts. The consequence of that earnings call was coverage by HCW, which is available on our website, covering the stock. And they summarized what I think pretty well the new positioning of WISeKey on both AI, automation and NFTs. The company has, as I mentioned last year, the company was having a COVID effect. Some of the revenue losses we had last year were mainly due to the fact that some clients were paralyzed due to the COVID. We also had supply chain process difficulties on obtaining microchips. This applies to everybody with any microchip company has suffered that because some countries that they are manufacturers of the chip, they just shut down. There was no possibility to export anything. And that obviously reduced substantially our revenue. But the good news is that this is not lost revenue, this is revenue that we are regaining back in 2021 onward. So we'll give now the floor to Ben Stump. Ben is our Chief Revenue Officer. He oversees the entire sales organization in WISeKey. So he has his network of salespeople in Japan, in the United States, in Saudi Arabia, in Europe, in Germany, in France and many other locations where we are incrementing our revenue and positioning. So I give the floor to give you a Q1 2021 visibility. This was announced just 2 days ago, together with the announcement we made yesterday, which I would like just to highlight, which is the announcement of the creation of a crypto token with the name TrustECoin. So this is a crypto coin. It's like a bitcoin. Initial steps, baby step towards what could become a very powerful crypto coin. Because the crypto coin will be required to do NFTs in our trading platform with name WISe.ART. So the volume of that coin will increment as we increment the numbers of NFTs. And the value would also increment as they are based on the same economic principles and not any other cryptocurrencies. Higher is the volume, higher becomes the price and bigger is the valuation of that specific asset of the company. So with that, I would like to give the floor to Ben to walk you through Q1 2021. Ben, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Carlos. And as has been said by others, it's a pleasure to speak with you all this morning, this afternoon or this evening, depending on where you're joining from. So as Carlos mentioned, 2020 was a difficult year for everybody, but we've positioned ourselves extremely well, and we're very, very excited to have reported 2 days ago, as Carlos said, a very successful Q1, showing growth from the same time last year in 2020. What's really exciting for me about that is Q1 2020 was still pre-COVID. So being able to show growth year-on-year is actually a very positive outcome for us. And not only that, but it tracked ahead of what our internal budget was for the quarter as well. The other exciting things about the revenue coming in from Q1 is that it was also showing an opening of some additional market verticals for us and showing success in some of the new customers and verticals that we closed towards the end of 2020, now translating into revenues, which will increase our go-forward position. So it was a very positive Q1. I think the traction that we have put ourselves under is going to continue to go into Q2, where we are showing very positive outlook from our perspective. I think when we look at the financial health and the revenue health of the business, one of the most exciting opportunities for me is to be able to say, our current backlog, and backlog would be orders for products and solutions that are already booked and on our -- on our financials and are still either have been delivered and billed as in Q1 revenues or are to be delivered and build in the year. And our current backlog as compared to the same time last year is about 155% of where it was. And again, when comparing year-on-year, that's a comparison to pre-COVID impacted numbers from 2020. So I think that this, again, is showing the strong traction that we've positioned. It's showing the fact that we finished 2020 in a position where we were very, very strong in our points and market verticals and approach to 2021, and we're now delivering quite well in 2021. And by the way, that 155% of backlog is apples-to-apples comparison with WISeKey, excluding the arago component. As you know, and as Carlos has mentioned, and we've announced the arago acquisition only occurred at 51% on the 1st of February this year. So when you look at adding arago in, arago is continuing to perform as we expected and as we planned, it will be a positive position for us. This is the year of integration. As Carlos and Chris have discussed already on this call, this is the year for the 2 platforms and companies to come together. And that will position us even better as we go forward for cumulative growth, cross-selling opportunities and integrated opportunities. In addition, some of the things that we haven't even contemplated because they're so new are all of the NFT-related opportunities that Carlos discussed over the past 10 or 15 minutes, and that being the platform of the future and really showing one of the first fully integrated components between the arago platform and the traditional WISeKey platforms. So bringing those together and delivering that in the very near future, as it will come out shortly, and will be an additional source of revenue and opportunity that was not part of our initial 2021 planning, because that's a new position and a new opportunity for us since we started the year. So very exciting start to 2021, even more exciting position for the rest of 2021, and very, very pleased with where we are from a revenue and, in particular, backlog position for the year.

Thank you very much, Ben.

I'll hand the call back to you.

Thank you very much, Ben. So just to reinforce the point that WISeKey is also recruiting new executives. They're going to be -- the announcement already made of Mr. Maudet in Switzerland, but also a very high-profile announcement to be made in the future about further recruitment in the United States, which are all designed to growth and reposition WISeKey into high-growth areas, so we can increase our revenue. We have very strong conscious that revenue is important, and we need to accelerate our revenue in order to become what we believe we should be, a major player in this field. It is important to understand that for the moment, our revenue is mainly European revenue. As we grow into the United States, that is going to be accelerated as the revenue in the United States is more mature and has a tendency to grow exponentially, which is not necessarily the case of Europe. So that will be -- that was already our plan in 2020. We postponed that due to the fact that we are not able to travel. We have been operating the company from our houses for nearly now 18 months. And that has obviously created disruptions in running non-deal roadshows and preparation for the company for the next stage. The -- I get some shareholders than the content holders about clarifications on the share price. As I say, WISeKey was the best-performing stock in Switzerland in the Swiss Stock Exchange in Q1, actually, during the month of February and March. That went all the way 180% up to the point of CHF 3.2 a share. That was an amazing ride, and it was truly justified by the fact that we were one of the first in announcing NFT technology. Obviously, we have been -- now the share price is about 20% higher than where it was in January at the beginning of the year. So we are still fluctuating. It has been a major sell-out. And the reason -- main reason is that, as you all know, WISeKey has been using some facilities in order to finance the growth of the company. And those facilities, when they see the price of the share going to where we were, obviously, they sell. And that has created the fluctuation, together accelerated by the fact that many of those buyers are daily traders, that they buy 1 day and they sell 2 days later, right? So the combination of daily traders with some of the facility has depressed the stock again. But it's very -- I mean, it's fluctuating. It goes up 10%, down 5%, and it's keeping growing. And I think as soon as we are able to deploy our integration with arago and with the new NFT platform, you will see this start performing much better. Also important to note that WISeKey has recruited several investment banks to establish what we call non-deal roadshows in the United States. We are doing those already. We are having calls with institutional investors. Then they stayed longer on the stock on a daily basis. Peter, myself, Ben and Chris and the WISeKey team are very much involved into that activity. Basically, we are there to reassure the market that this is a very serious business, that we are creating a very powerful platform. But we are competing against Google, Facebook, Amazon companies with trillions of dollars of mark cap and billions of dollars of cash in their banks. So obviously, it is a difficult fight. We believe that -- and this is our objective during 2021 is that the company has now what we think is an amazing volume. WISeKey is trading 1 million shares per day in the Swiss Stock Exchange on a daily basis. Now if you compare that to our competitors, then they are trading very big company in Switzerland like Kudelski and others, and they are trading 20,000, 30,000 shares per day, and we are trading 1 million shares per day. So there, you see that there is actually a huge amount of investors that are following WISeKey. And actually, on the NASDAQ, which we only listed the company in 2019, December 2019, with a full COVID year in the middle, we are managing to trade 5 million ADRs per day. So 5 million ADRs per day at 5 shares per ADR is actually the equivalent of 25 million shares. So 25 million shares at 1.5 is nearly $30 million per day that the company is trading in the NASDAQ. So this is obviously being viewed by a lot of people with a lot of interest because higher is the volume of trading, more reassurance investor gets because they know that there's going to be enough demand, if whatever they need to invest and then they need to sell. So the volume of WISeKey is a major, major, major milestone of the company in the last 18 months. I just give you an idea that 18 months ago, we were trading 20,000 shares in Switzerland and 0 on the NASDAQ, right? So moving from that situation to where we are now is a major result. Obviously, the share price has been depressed. I get many calls, people saying, "Hey, you were at 7 when you did the Swiss listing. Now you are at 1.5. Why? The company is much bigger now. Why you are getting this kind of position? And it has a reason. I mean the reason is that for whatever reason, Switzerland is not the best country in the world to do a listing of a company because you don't have late-stage institutional investors that follow the sector. Therefore, when you do acquisitions like we did, we acquired 2 or 3 companies actually, many of that acquisitions needs to be done with shares. So we have a part which is done on cash, but there's a part done in shares. And normally, you can lock an investor if you buy a company from somebody and you buy its shares, you can lock that person maybe 1 year as a maximum. More than that, it doesn't make any sense. And obviously, when they do that, they sell the shares. And when they sell the share, that create an overhang because you don't have a financial institution working with you in organizing a block trade or the ways to disposal of those shares. So that has created pressure on the share historically which is reflected on the fact that we went down. But again, as everybody knows, the market, our base market is so crazy that things can be -- can go anytime back to where we were, a much bigger as the company is continuing making process. In terms of the losses, I got a lot of calls of people saying, "Oh, but you lost 28 million last year. And what is it? Actually, if you break down those losses, you will see that one of that part was 7 million on Tarmin. Tarmin is an investment that WISeKey did on a Boston data company. We own 22% of that company. For reasons that, to be honest, even myself, I have a difficulty to grasp, the auditors decided that because this company was not sold yet and it's a start-up, we shall be putting those 7 million as losses. So there, you have 7 million, 128 million, which is not really losses because the day we will sell this company, we will get paid 22% of whatever sales. So that's one part. The other part, we inject a substantial amount of money into R&D. I mean this platform that we just demonstrated to you require heavy investment. This is high prices for experts, consultants, engineers, computer, data centers, all that needs to be reinforced. I mean we are cybersecurity company, we're never to be hacked. But it's not because we don't have people trying to hack us, right? So we need to maintain or resilience, and that costs money. So we have invested $7 million into research and development. And we also invested about the same amount in promoting the company in the United States, all the work of creating the brand recognition, the promotion and the marketing, with the recruitment of marketing expert has also been there. So if you really look at the non-GAAP results are much better, and they are not as alarming as the U.S. GAAP, then brings everything. I mean just to give you an example, companies like Palantir, Q1, they lost $900 million, and a lot of that was for the same reasons. Because in U.S. GAAP, you treat everything as a loss. And that includes option plans and bonuses and all that is being added as a loss. So I will say that from the assessment, the company is in a very strong situation. We have $23 million cash plus $10 million available that we just signed a few days ago to finance the operations of the NFT platform. So we have -- we have something like $33 million on the bank that we can use to expanding the growth of the company. And we believe that the revenue will be substantially improved as we move forward. We get some outlook for 2021 around the $23 million, which is a substantial improvement. Obviously, part of that comes from the arago revenue. Arago is being an AI system, generates revenue in a gradual way. So that means that the clients that arago has are increasingly paying arago for increasingly getting automation capabilities in their own companies. So this is a process. But the good news, that this process brings high margins, and it's a very good -- it's a low-hanging fruit for us because we have many clients in the cybersecurity and will now become client on the arago AI. So my assessment and my recommendation, as always, is to -- for you to vote for the resolutions the company has presented and will be voted on the general assembly on the 21st. And I would like just to thank you for your continued support to the company and your commitment to make WISeKey a major player. We are fully aligned to that principle. We work very hard to make that happen. And I would like to use the opportunity as well to thank my team. We have an amazing team in WISeKey, very now in arago, a very committed 190, nearly 240 people if we add the lab in Vietnam. And they work day and night to make the success of this company. So my strong appreciation for their commitment. And also for our shareholders, I know some of you, as a shareholder, has been following the company for many years. And obviously, you like soon to get rewarded for that. We are -- just want to assure you that we are doing everything possible to make that to happen. So with that, I would like to close this explanatory meeting that was only designed to give you a color before you vote. Obviously, the official agenda will be the 21st, and you will do it accordingly, the documentation that you have received from Computershare. And if you have any questions to the company or any clarification that you need, you will be most welcome to send those to WISeKey shareholders' e-mail, and we will answer those questions directly. So without more, I would like to close, not to keep people too long on the Zoom. It's a Zoom fatigue for everybody. So I would like to thank you for your attention. Thank you, the team, for their excellent presentation. Thank you to Lena, our Investor Relations to organize this informative Zoom. And we look forward to see you very soon. And hopefully, next year, once the COVID situation will be controlled, we can see each other face to face and continue exchanging. Thank you very much, everybody.