Modulight Oyj

OMXH:MODU

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q1

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Modulight first quarter webinar. My name is Seppo Orsila, Founder and CEO And I have here with me, our CFO, Mrs. Anca Guina.We're going to first talk about the company. Just as a short recap, we do lasers and optics for better life. There is ample material about our products and our solution in our investor site, and I encourage everyone to get acquainted with our recently released annual report, which has a lot more detail about the [Technical Difficulty] of products and the company overall.But now let's go to today's agenda. We're going to recap the first quarter, talk little bit about the FDA approval. Anca is going to talk about the highlights from the finance point of view, then I'm going to discuss the R&D pipeline, its implications [Technical Difficulty] and then we are going to recap very shortly the revenue model. And then we have the summary at the end.As I said earlier, the company is not issuing an outlook, but we hope that providing you events in sequence in a well-organized manner will help you to understand better what the company is doing and what you can expect from the company.So first quarter in brief. The R&D pipeline remained strong at 27 projects, and we are particularly happy about the progress within the pipeline for multiple projects. First and foremost, we received a PMA approval from United States Food and Drug Administration in January. And now our laser system is certified for wet age-related macular degeneration. And as many of you may know, there are also other off-label indications which are being generally treated with that. We announced with our collaboration partner that we expect that the device will be in the hands of the healthcare professionals during the first half of 2023.Our revenue growth, 18% sequentially but was still down 7% versus year-on-year. What was very important for us was the fact that customer meetings have returned to the pre-corona level. And during the first months of this year, we can pretty much say that every single month, we had more people visiting our head office here in Tampere than we had the whole of last year. And this has traditionally been a very good indication to us about the progress with the portfolio.And in connection with our equipment investments, we completed the investment program last year and have now been ramping up the activities and accelerating activities that benefit from the new equipments. And we'll discuss those more later on in this presentation.But about the PMA approval, I said, we're extremely happy about this for 2 reasons. One is that it gives us a clear milestone in our R&D pipeline. And thus, one project is moving forward towards commercialization. And secondly, it validates our cloud strategy. It validates the business model we are trying to push. And thirdly, it's a very big customer reference. I have had multiple senior customer executives and CEOs tell to me that how impressed they are about our cloud technology and our kind of advances in digitalization. And I guess there's not a single customer who has not been feeling that we are at the forefront of digitalization in the domain. So not only is the validation in a formal way from the regulator, but also overall that we've been able to take this up to the state of the approval, it's a significant step forward according to the customers.And I said, we have again announced, together with our partner Bausch, that we expect to put the first devices in the hands of healthcare professionals during the first half of '23. And this is something that we expect to do.Anca, will you talk about the numbers?

[Ancuta Guina, executive]

Yes. Thank you. So we closed our first quarter with revenue of EUR 1.49 million. This is 7% below what was in the same period for last year, but 18% higher than the fourth quarter of last year. We'll continue to see delays with the customer projects, and we can't say we are happy with the level of revenues that we have right now. Nevertheless, we have to [ now accept ] the fact that it is a sequential growth of 3 quarters. The profitability was lower, and that was mainly driven by the increase of the operational cost associated with the acceleration of our growth strategy implementation to emphasize every single quarter, especially this investment program completion last year, basically accelerated related activities and this made an increasing of our cost temporary.Our balance sheet remains really strong with over EUR 75 million. As we announced in our previous webcast for Q4 financial result release, we had in the last quarter of the year, the core number of equipment investments. Part of those investments are obviously translated to cash transactions also in this quarter and also in the next coming quarters, as milestone payments related to installations of equipment or final testing. The setting up of the new process equipment will continue also in the coming quarters.We have already mentioned this before, and we keep seeing the benefits of our investment programs in the form of increased differentiation compared to our competitors, expanded offering, increased productivity, increased capacity as well.Our investment -- investments done in the past basically increased our opportunities to be more competitive in the market. The acceleration of these investments increased temporarily the costs, and that is expected to reduce basically this year. It will not continue for a very long time.Cash at the end of the quarter was EUR 37.6 million and headcount as full-time equivalent was 63 persons. And balance sheet, as mentioned earlier, very strong at the level of EUR 75 million -- over EUR 75 million. Thank you.

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

Thanks, Anca. So as announced in 29th of November, we defined 5 strategic programs to help us steer the company forward and particularly help with the transition in the go-to-market process, but also to build on the long-time strategy related to the products and the technology. We also introduced a separate package for development of ESG governance and reporting.About the first one, operations development. The most important topic which we said that we want to work on and invest more is U.S. local operations. Now during the first quarter of the year, we have had constantly more activity in the U.S. than ever before. We have a U.S. service center to support our clinical customers as well as regulatory work and providing demos to the customers and most importantly, providing the security and feeling to the customers that Modulight is present there no matter what the restrictions, et cetera. We continue to invest into building the local operations to be on perceived level closer to the customer. I will now emphasize that we have been able to provide excellent customer service also remotely from Finland according to customer feedback, but this is now taking into the second level.Secondly, we have had more exhibitions, more conference participation and more activity with the customers and the market and the doctors than ever before. During some of the weekends this spring, we have had 3 different consecutive conferences running in parallel and thus 3 or 4 teams -- separate teams in the United States simultaneously. So we are really investing now to the go-to-market, which was obviously a big identified gap in our execution last year.Secondly, the cloud technology and the cloud-based service development, we have made progress with our SaaS/pay per treatment business model. And as reported already for the Q4, we have seen a pickup in the activity since last summer. And there has been particularly good development after the FDA PMA approval, which, of course, was an achievement itself for the cloud technology, but has also enabled us to accelerate those things, and we expect to tell more later this year. But this is something where we feel particularly happy about the progress and ability to accelerate the implementation of the strategy versus what we felt 2 years ago.Productizing platforms, devices for various indications and applications, we obviously have now reached an approval stage for AMD, but there is also significant application progress in bladder cancer, glioblastoma and uveal melanoma to name some.Firstly, technology development based on the complete investment program, Anca elaborated a little bit of the benefits that we're seeing here. But we can, for example, say that for some of the laser devices, we have doubled performance for certain critical parameters versus the best in the market and so forth. So we really believe that technology development is accelerating and helping us going forward. This is very much thanks to the completed investment program. Yes, it has increased our cost levels temporarily, but this is mostly due to the fact that accelerating, driving of the equipment into the process and applying them for a wider range of applications and offering takes more money on a short-term basis. But this is not to be expected as a kind of a long-term impact on the operating expenses.And the development of the ESG, governance and reporting, last but not least, we have made our first ESG report as part of the annual report, and this is not so much a kind of actual progress but rather a progress on the visibility and reporting. As some of you probably remember, the company has been acting in a very responsible way since its birth in year 2000, but now we are being able to make it more visible and more transparent, and we continue to work with efforts, making it more transparent as we go forward. We have also launched certain programs that we expect to contribute to reduce carbon footprint, reduce social responsibility and other activities and announce the results of those later this year. But I think the core point here is that we are now making it more visible and more transparent. And also, we expect that the company's governance will develop in a favorable manner, but this is maybe something that is better addressed after next Tuesday's AGM, depending on what are the decisions proposed and approved by the shareholders.About the R&D pipeline, the most important thing is obviously the progress within the portfolio. No new project introduced and no new projects -- and have no projects killed. I discussed a little bit about the progress in the cloud technology, translates obviously into the portfolio through many ways, whether we are talking about ophthalmic diseases or cancer. But the -- in nutshell, we see that some of the projects are progressing in a manner that they propose a significant revenue potential still this year. And here, the cloud technology, new business models and their applications both have kind of so-called production and clinical activity as well as clinical trials are seen as important significant opportunities. Almost all of this progress is with existing long-term customers.And some studies which also suffered during COVID about patient recruitment and things like glioblastoma have now started to progress better. And this is, of course, something that takes the activity forward as well even if they're not the kind of concrete step in a clinical result point of view.Here we're summarizing some of the benefits or the progress in the portfolio. From a more technical point of view, we are kind of making progress in the glioblastoma, i.e., the brain cancer in several technical terms as well as patient recruitment. Then I talked about the cloud progress. And I think the pinnacle of that is the FDA approval, but more so the validation and signal it sends to the market. One customer said that this is kind of helping the industry to renew and shows the way for the cloud technology in our industry. This is, of course, not kind of a study result, but feedback from the customers, which we find very important. And then thirdly, the fact that we are able to accelerate and deploy the cloud wider, obviously, furthermore validates our cloud technology. And most importantly, not just the technical services but primarily where the focus has recently been with several customers ranging from different indications to different applications, meaning preclinical as well as clinical trial activities and applying the pay per treatment or other SaaS-based business models across different applications. And we are extremely pleased about the reception it has been recently taking on the market.I just want to remind you about our revenue model. The company is still getting a fair share of its revenue from early-stage clinical trials. But as the maturity of the projects increases, the predictability and steadiness of the revenue is expected to improve. This is, of course, to be validated through practice, but this is how we see and expect things to develop.We have discussed the revenue model in more detail in earlier presentation, so I encourage to refer back to those if you are more interested or come back to us with a separate discussion.The customer base remains steady, and we have now, as promised, a year ago, focused on this one single view, which was anyway only view that was discussed with the investors. Earlier, we had 3 other views, but -- after the same data, but those were a little bit, to some degree should be active. And as this is a fully objective view regarding the definitions and classifications of the companies, we have now this year, as said a year ago, more fully to implement only this view. No changes in the customer base that are relevant, i.e., no change in customer base for the most important projects. Bulk of the companies remain to be public companies, and there are several with over EUR 1 billion revenue.Just a reminder, company has not issued a guidance for revenue or profit. And as the company's projects are still distributed across [ prime ] early-stage development, and predicting development in the market remains challenging. It is difficult to forecast the performance in 2023. And as the company expects changes in operating environment and so forth, we will eventually to be able to introduce outlook maybe in the future.But in summary, we had the FDA PMA approval in January. There is significant increase in the customer activity. And as I said, it has been traditionally very important to us when the senior executives of the customers visit our HQ in Tampere. Product development pipelines stayed on the year -- level of the end of last year, but most importantly, there is progress, and we see significant revenue potential in this year.We believe that our actions are in line with our strategy, and we made progress in all strategic programs during the first quarter. And we reiterate what we announced as strategy that the company intends to grow revenue every single year during the strategy period and come back to the strong profitability during the strategy period of 2023 to 2025.Thank you very much. We're happy to take questions.

[Ancuta Guina, executive]

All right. So we have our analysts online, Lars Hevreng, Antti Siltanen and Joona Tersa. And I'd like to first give you a chance to ask questions. Lars, please go ahead.

[Lars Hevreng, analyst]

Can you say anything about the -- your comment that you see a significant revenue for -- revenue potential already this year for a project. Would that be -- these revenues, would they refer to milestone payments or what do you refer to really?

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

Thanks, Lars. So there are some projects, not one project, but some projects where we see that there is progress, which takes us forward in the business case. I'm not necessarily meaning only milestone payments. But as you know, a few project -- progress in a project at some point you will start to have -- and more kind of, let's say, little bit of volume type of business. So these are all options. We didn't reiterate specifically what those would be. But I mean, as the projects mature, there are also things other than milestone payments that we see coming. And if you think about what we said, for example, about cloud products, we are putting it into the hands of the healthcare professionals. So that should start generate things other than milestone payments. But this is maybe something that is appropriate to say at this time, and I hope it answers the question.

[Lars Hevreng, analyst]

And also, so with Bausch + Lomb, what can you say about -- you said the first installation is going to take place in the first half?

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

We have announced, together with Bausch, you can see the exact wording from the Bausch website, but it's roughly so that we expect to have the first units of the product at the hands of the healthcare professionals during the first half of 2023. And we will announce more as we have more updates to give on to the markets later on this year.

[Lars Hevreng, analyst]

And your revenue recognition in this collaboration, is that that you paid for deliveries to Bausch + Lomb and how will it work really?

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

Our revenue recognition remains the same as it has been for a very long time. So we only recognize revenue on -- of the delivery product or service. Going forward, there may be slightly delayed revenue recognition, meaning that, for example, assuming that there would be a payment based on each patient treated, we may extend certain clinics or hospitals additional payment time and then recognize the revenue only when, let's say, certain criteria are met and may not recognize the revenue on the spot when the therapy occurs. But this is yet to be defined, but there are several options, including something that is quite typical in the pharmaceutical industry. And we are considering to be relatively, let's say, conservative with this given our history and everything.

[Lars Hevreng, analyst]

And can you say -- I'm not sure if I saw the -- any balance sheet details from the Q1. Have I missed that?

[Ancuta Guina, executive]

We have the key figures in the usual figures we publish in every quarter bulletin. So basically, the cash equivalent is there and the acquisition of the fixed assets.

[Lars Hevreng, analyst]

And can you say anything about the status of the accounts receivable items?

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

Yes, there is actually just a question on the bulletin about the chat about that. So we have not had kind of any serious or major issues certainly in -- for quite some time with the customers regarding the payments.And there is a question that whether we will be able to recover the loss from last year. We will obviously update the market if there are significant recoveries, but we are expecting to make progress. But we'll announce, of course, if there are significant steps forward.And then there is another question on the chart asking about significant revenue potential. How large that is in euros? This is something that, I guess, is still a little bit indetermined factor. Obviously, all of us would convert significant revenue for a company that for Modulight, a certain number is significant. This is probably talking about millions of euros. But for others, it maybe more, or some it's less. But we want to just say that it would be significant from our point of view and not to give it any definitive number at this time. But we believe that the -- making progress and the progress we see with the portfolio gives us opportunity to have potentially significant revenues from the progress even this year. But I emphasize that is by no means certain and we are seeing significant potential due to the progress.

[Ancuta Guina, executive]

Thank you, Lars. How about you, Joona Tersa, Antti Siltanen, any of you have questions you would like to ask?

[Antti Siltanen, analyst]

I'm trying to understand your revenues in Q1 a little bit better. Last year, you mentioned about USD 3.9 million deal that will be realized over several quarters. So can you advise on how much of that deal was realized during Q1, and what is the outlook on Q2?

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

Yes. I know maybe Anca would answer better but, I mean, the -- as we are not giving revenues, please, so it's a little bit difficult to answer the first part. And as we're not giving an outlook, it's slightly difficult to answer the second part. But we have had significant revenues related to projects, which we have discussed in the past, and we have no updates to those. Yes, there are also delays with some customers not necessarily [ pioneered ] specifically to the one that you referred to. But I would say that we have been happy with the portfolio overall in a way that portfolio of the stream of revenues has been distributing and thus, this has given us, let's say, certain operational benefits. But overall, we're not satisfied obviously with the revenue level. And this is obviously something that the company needs to focus a lot going forward. But I'm sorry, I'm unable to give you any outlook.

[Antti Siltanen, analyst]

And another question on your development in Europe and the recent news on your distribution deal with Laser 2000. So checking their website, they seem to currently have 1 Modulight laser platform on their offering. So how will that develop? How many products do you see kind of being distributed via Laser 2000? And kind of how long do you expect to kind of reach the potential of that distribution deal?

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

Yes. That's an excellent question. So Laser 2000, you can obviously look at the website how they are. They are definitely not a life science-focused company. But they are, to our understanding, very well penetrated with the majority of the large OEM laser users in Germany, in particular, but as well in France, Switzerland and other DACH countries. And the main product that we are pushing with them is our configurable cloud-connected subsystem. So it's -- you can consider it as an intelligent component, and that would be integrated by kind of device manufacturers who use lasers as substantial portions of their product namely life science products, but maybe also some other high value-add products. And the whole rationale strategy for the collaboration was that since Modulight is more or less solely focused in the United States and any businesses that branch out of United States, then Laser 2000 can address particular in the Central European markets and offer the same products to system integrators there.We do have our own limited collaborations with pharmaceutical companies also in Europe, but those are out of scope of this relationship and we continue to serve those independently of them. But we believe that as years go by, the integration of the same subsystems that we have been selling elsewhere to products made in Europe is an interesting opportunity. But here, you are looking for a time frame of easily 1, 2, 3 years to make a significant business potential. And this is why we are not highlighting that so much also in the summary of the highlights because while this provides an interesting long-term opportunity to leverage the same technology in Europe, it is still not expected to have a huge short-term benefits, but more like long-term synergies with products we are anyway developing for the U.S. market.

[Ancuta Guina, executive]

Thank you. And Joona, do you have any questions?

[Joona Tersa, analyst]

Yes. You mentioned that the costs are significantly higher than a year before. Can you specify what type of costs have increased? Are those wages, raw material costs or some other?

[Ancuta Guina, executive]

Well, we -- I was mentioning about the operating costs related to this investment program. So basically, yes, activities related to development of technologies and so on and so forth. We also, yes, announced that last year that we would increase the headcount to basically support the growth strategy. So yes.

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

May be from the technical point of view, one thing that is a fairly big cost driver is that, once you take into use, for example, a molecular reactor, there is a fair amount of materials that you are consuming in running up the reactor and taking the process into use. And especially if you are leveraging across a wider range of processes, which we have been doing, developing more technology. So there is a fair amount of consumed materials, but those are not kind of representative of -- and we have done this before, so we know that it's not going to be a permanent level increase in the operating expenses, but they are more like temporary.Do you have any additional questions on the line?

[Ancuta Guina, executive]

No. No. I think we tackled every question so far.

[Seppo Orsila, executive]

So if no further questions, we thank everyone and wish a great weekend and great Vappu to those who are celebrating that and hope to see many of you in the Annual General Meeting and in the, let's say, related events during the spring and the autumn. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

[Ancuta Guina, executive]

Thank you. Bye.