Remark - Q2 2024

Executive Summary

• Q2 2024 revenue was $3.70M, up 16.8% year over year and up $3.31M sequentially (an 856% improvement) as North America scaled rapidly; operating loss improved to $(3.21)M, net loss was $(5.26)M, and EPS was $(0.12).
• Clark County School District (fifth largest U.S. school district) drove $3.7M of recognized revenue; management views this as a reference customer to catalyze further U.S. wins.
• Remark completed migration to Microsoft Azure, preparing its Smart Safety Platform for marketplace distribution, and highlighted Oracle/NVIDIA collaborations; the company also resolved debt defaults via a Mudrick note exchange into convertible debentures in August 2024, improving balance sheet trajectory.
• Near-term stock reaction catalysts: visible U.S. contract revenue ramp (CCSD and ongoing POCs), Azure Marketplace go-to-market, and potential H2’24 contract closings in European rail and U.S. municipal agencies as described on the call.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• CCSD contract execution led to $3.7M revenue recognition in Q2; CEO: “opened the door to additional opportunities… throughout the U.S.”.
• Sequential revenue inflection (+$3.31M; +856% vs Q1) and year-over-year growth (+16.8%) while operating loss narrowed to $(3.21)M; CFO noted lower payroll-related expenses and absence of prior-year impairments supporting improved operating loss.
• Platform distribution readiness: completed Azure migration for SSP, enabling Microsoft’s global salesforce to sell across verticals; continued Oracle/NVIDIA collaboration, positioning for marketplace-led scale.

What Went Wrong

• Liquidity remains constrained: cash was $0.44M at 6/30/24 and operating cash usage was $6.1M in H1; finance costs tied to obligations to issue common stock remain material.
• Net loss stays elevated: $(5.26)M in Q2 with net income margin deeply negative; interest expense and finance costs continued to weigh on results.
• Balance sheet pressure: notes payable remained past due as of period-end; although defaults were later resolved via Mudrick exchange to convertibles in August, leverage and stockholders’ deficit remain significant.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Faye Tian. Please go ahead.

Fay Tian (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Nick. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Remark Holdings' second quarter twenty twenty-four financial results conference call. I am Fay Tian, Vice President of Investor Relations for Remark. On the call with me this afternoon is Shing Tao, Remark's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Todd Brown, Vice President of Finance. In just a moment, Mr. Tao will provide an update on our businesses, and Mr. Brown will recap our second quarter twenty twenty-four financial results. Following these remarks, we'll open the call to questions. But before I turn the call over to Mr. Tao, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that some of the statements made today may be forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements.

Any forward-looking statements reflect Remark Holdings' current views, and Remark Holdings expressly disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements after the date hereof. This disclaimer is only a summary of Remark Holdings' statutory forward-looking statements disclaimer, which is included in full in its filings with the SEC. I'll now turn the call over to Remark's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Tao, so he can provide additional information to Remark's businesses and recent developments. Please go ahead, Shing.

Kai-Shing Tao (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you. It's been no secret about our intention to transition our revenue base from Asia to the U.S., especially due to the political conflicts between the U.S. and China. While it's taken us some time to do so, as most government contracts do, we are proud to see the successful fruits of our labor begin to show with our recent contract win with the Clark County School District, which is the fifth-largest school district in the United States. Our recent contract win for implementing weapon detection technology in the Clark County School District is a significant milestone that will likely lead to a multitude of future opportunities, both within Clark County and other school districts of similar size.

Fay Tian (VP of Investor Relations)

We are optimistic that the contract value will meet or exceed its proposed $45 million value over nine years as we expand and introduce the value-added functionality of our Smart Safety Platform. By successfully deploying weapon detection technology in a large school district, Remark AI demonstrates its capabilities, building trust with potential clients. The Clark County School District serves as a high-profile reference, enabling Remark AI to showcase its expertise and technology in a large, real-world setting. This contract win attracts attention from other educational institutions, law enforcement agencies, and government organizations, potentially leading to new partnerships. Remark AI can leverage this success to enter adjacent markets such as other school districts and educational institutions, public venues, government facilities and buildings, and private enterprises. Remark AI can offer complementary solutions like facial recognition, fight detection, unattended object detection, and advanced analytics to existing and new clients.

We have already started our POC with one of the largest subway systems in the U.S., and we look forward to updating you on our progress. Other highlights for Remark AI this past quarter: We showcased our AI fire and smoke, smart city, and smart agent solutions at the New York City Smart City Expo in conjunction with Oracle and NVIDIA. The success and uniqueness of our AI products has led to additional POCs to help the top 100 U.S. cities turn into modern twenty-first century smart city. We completed the POC at the headquarters train station for one of the largest European railway systems with over 600 stations, deploying our AI-powered passenger counting, fare evasion, fire and smoke detection, and unattended baggage detection.

The success of this POC has led to current contract negotiations to close the deal in the second half of 2024. Another highlight is that we have completed a successful POC for the migrant centers in one of the largest sanctuary cities in the U.S., where we deployed our AI-powered facial recognition, fight warnings, fire and smoke detection, as well as weapons detection modules. The success of this POC has led to preparations to deploy our technology across multiple city agencies as we negotiate to close a contract also for the second half of 2024. As far as the new platform and product introductions, going into the second half of 2024, we are introducing our Remark FastAI training platform. FastAI is a SaaS product that can train and tune up general and specific computer vision models.

For example, fire and smoke detection, unattended bags, unauthorized personnel, and vehicles. As a SaaS platform, it provides AI training infrastructures, i.e., GPU optimization, GPU resource management, TensorFlow framework, CLIP framework, and SAM framework to ease the training and testing of computer vision and multimodal models. It also offers the zero-shot sample annotation, which can annotate training samples by AI itself without a large amount of human labeling. FastAI license is a permanent license and a fixed cost for individual AI models, with training, testing, hardware provided in the cloud. There is no extra cost for AI model retraining, upgrades, or tune-ups for customization. The IP of the training data and the trained tune models belongs to our customers. Why do we think this is a winning proposition in the U.S.?

I'm sure you have read about how our businesses are looking for smaller models, ones that solve real business problems with precision, while those large language models solve creativity problems with bearable errors. Bearable errors for them, but unbearable for business solutions. Let alone the cost, data privacy, and IP problems that are unsolvable, yet with large language models like ChatGPT. During the second quarter, we've continued our alignment with both the Microsoft and Oracle sales team. Remark AI completed its migration to the Microsoft Azure platform, preparing Remark's Smart Safety Platform, otherwise known as the SSP, to be marketplace-ready, allowing Microsoft's global sales force to begin selling Remark's SSP across multiple industry verticals and through established systems integrators.

Integrating with leading cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud is crucial for success, especially as we are now able to tap into their vast customer base and expand our market presence. Our focus with Microsoft Azure marketplace is simple and straightforward. Based upon our mutual analysis of the potential for Microsoft and Remark to jointly capture $400 million of business together in the next five years, we've committed to consume $80 million of services on the Azure platform, which incentivizes Microsoft's sales force to evangelize and widely deploy our AI products. We are conducting regular teach-in sessions to their sales force by specific industry expertise. Microsoft's sales force is tracked and paid commission based upon how much Remark software is consumed and priced by the annual recurring revenue SaaS model.

With Oracle, we'll be one of the companies featured in the Oracle AI Pavilion, along in partnership with NVIDIA, at the upcoming Oracle CloudWorld, taking place in our town of Las Vegas in early September, as one of Oracle's key innovation partners. This will be the second event we'll be presenting together. The first happened this past May at the New York City Smart City Expo, in conjunction with Oracle and NVIDIA, highlighting the broad capabilities of our AI Smart City platform. As we go into the last couple quarters of the year, we're excited to bring Remark AI into the hotel hospitality industry. In the near future, we'll announce our partnership with a global hotel hospitality brand that combines music, art, and culture as its preferred vendor on all AI-related initiatives. This strategic partnership aims to revolutionize the guest experience and operational efficiency across its properties worldwide.

Remark AI will provide its innovative AI-powered solutions to enhance various aspects of the hotel operations, including, one, personalized guest services, experiences through AI-driven recommendations and tailored services. Two, intelligent chatbots for seamless guest interactions and support. Three, predictive analytics for optimized room allocation, pricing, and revenue management. And four, automated workflows and process optimization for improved operational efficiency. Remark AI's proprietary AI platform will be integrated with its existing systems to provide a unified and intuitive interface for staff and guests alike. The partnership will also facilitate the development of new AI-powered application and services, further solidifying our position as a pioneer in the hospitality sector. Todd?

Todd Brown (VP of Finance)

Thank you, Shing, and thank you to everybody for joining us on today's call. As we have previously noted, we have been working to expand our business in the U.S., and during the second quarter of 2024, we were able to complete the first Clark County School District project, which resulted in $3.7 million of revenue for the second quarter of 2024. As Shing noted earlier, this has already led to an additional order and other opportunities for us in the U.S. Our operating loss of $3.2 million during the second quarter of 2024 reflected a decrease of about $0.8 million from an operating loss of $4 million during the second quarter of 2023.

Fay Tian (VP of Investor Relations)

During that second quarter of 2023, we had recorded an impairment of approximately $0.4 million, related to certain prepaid expense amounts that were deemed unrecoverable. The absence of any impairments during the second quarter of 2024 contributed to the decrease in operating loss, as did the $0.2 million decrease in payroll-related expenses reported as part of tech. For the second quarter of 2024, we are reporting a net loss of $5.3 million or 12 cents per diluted share, compared to a net loss of $5.9 million, or 42 cents per diluted share during the same quarter of 2023. Interest expense during the second quarter of 2024 did not significantly change from the amount that we reported during the same period of 2023, while finance costs also remained relatively flat.

Finance cost is related to the establishment of and remeasurement of our obligations to issue common stock, which arise as a result of our transactions with Ionic Ventures LLC, which consists of draws on an equity line of credit. At June thirtieth, 2024, our cash balance totaled $0.4 million, which compares to a cash balance of $0.1 million on December thirty-first, 2023. We used $6.1 million of cash in operating activities during this second quarter of 2024. Lastly, in August of 2024, we were able to resolve all outstanding events of default regarding our debt agreement with Mudrick Capital Management by entering into an agreement with Mudrick to exchange the existing non-convertible notes we had issued to them for convertible debentures.

With that, I will turn the call over to the moderator to begin the question and answer portion of this call.

Operator (participant)

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. Seeing no questions at this time, this will conclude our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Faye Tian for any closing remarks.

Fay Tian (VP of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Nick. Thank you everyone for participating in Remark Holdings' second quarter twenty twenty-four fiscal financial results conference call. A replay will be available in approximately four hours through the same link issued in our August nineteenth press release. Have a good afternoon. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.