Nano Dimension - Q4 2022
March 30, 2023
Transcript
Operator (participant)
Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's conference to discuss Nano Dimension's Q4 and Full Year 2020 Conference Call. My name is Nick, and I'm your operator for today's event. On the call with us today are Yoav Stern, Chairman and CEO, Yael Sandler, CFO, and Julien Lederman, Head of Corporate Development. Before we begin, a reminder to listeners that certain information provided on this call may contain forward-looking statements, and the safe harbor statement outlined in today's earnings press release also pertains to this call. If you've not received a copy of the press release, please view it on the investor relations section of the company's website. Yoav will begin the call with a business update, followed by a Q&A session, at which time Yael will answer questions.
I would now like to turn the call over to Nano Dimension's CEO and Chairman, Yoav Stern. Yoav, please go ahead.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Thank you very much, Nick. Hi, everybody. Hopefully, some of you have seen me lately. Wish I could see you today, but I'm trying to visualize you. I will go to the business description. You have presentation in front of you. I will try not to read the presentation, just to scan through it. If you have questions regarding the business, please write them down, and I'll be happy to answer them later. We had an excellent year, excellent Q4. The best Q4. Actually, it's the best quarter we ever had, $12.1 million. The best year. It's not so great. It's not so difficult to have the best year at $44 million, give or take, $44 million, because the years before were hundreds of percentage less.
It's really the challenge going forward and continuing to grow at very high rates, which we intend to. Still, it's good to tell and to let the employees and shareholders know that it was a good year. We had notable advancements with customers and relationships. We sold to very serious players, all our products, including additive manufacturing electronics, additive electronics, people in organizations like NASA, Western Defense Forces, all kinds of institutions, research institutions, et cetera. We have a partnership with Hensoldt, which is a German-owned or German partly-owned public defense company. Personal relationship between the CEOs and their management team and partnership teams is growing and doing very well, a 50/50 partnership.
We got into engagement with the government of Bavaria, which is considering putting a grant in our operation in Germany. It's very exciting. On the technology and the business side, we did the acquisition of two acquisitions this year, one in the beginning, one in midyear. We launched product in ceramics and metal printers, which are manufactured in Europe, in Netherlands. We are now in the process of merging, actually, those technologies. Very, very exciting. We're merging the technologies that we acquired with the technologies of Fabrica, which we have, and we're going to have new products and technologies that are merged. Not so simple, not so obvious, but justifies the acquisitions because it creates growth engines. We have patents in the AI and the cloud manufacturing, et cetera. Everything else is on the list.
Actually, one of the most important that people may overlook is the last point. Progress in standardization of protocols with IPC. IPC is the organization that does protocols for electronic engineering. We work with them. It's kind of, together with other companies, but we are leading. The fact that they will set special criteria for additive manufacturing electronics means that our materials and our products will fit the IPC criteria because it's not going to be the same criteria as for the regular electronics, because it's very, very new technologies. That by itself will enable companies to buy and integrate the product that our machines are making into their own products because they're going to be IPC approved. Extremely, extremely important. People understand what it means.
You know, if you compare it to the medical business, it's like FDA approval. A little bit of the numbers. You now have the numbers highlighted in front of you. Let me focus on the year, yearly numbers, 'cause again, Q4 was very, very good. Let's look at the full year. Focus on the fact that we, this shows the quarter. We have improvements of gross margins, and we have the negative EBITDA, which is mostly affected by the R&D expenses. If you move to the next one, which shows... Actually, where is the full year? Full year on the right side.
Sorry, in the bottom part of the slide, you will see that the gross margin are up from last year, which is a manifestation of the fact that mostly our products that are higher margin are being sold more. It's product mix. We didn't even start improving the gross margins of the product by reducing the cost of manufacturing. That's going to be the next step, because we're still in the stage of product penetrating into the market. Most important for us is to put products in customers' hands, even if we reduce the price a little bit or even if we didn't finish maximizing the value engineering at the cost of goods sold. That's the next step.
I expect in the longer term, gross margins to grow because new product with our advanced technology, when it goes out to the market, has to have 65% gross margin. The 46 you see here is a combination of we have 65, we'll have more, and we have products that are more mature and are lower than 65, and the average ends up being 46. Another thing to pay attention again on the full year on the bottom, is the fact that the negative EBITDA of $88 million, out of that $55 million is an investment in R&D.
As I said to people who were listening to me two years ago, a year and a half ago, a year ago, half a year ago, and now, the investment in R&D is, of course, recorded as expenses because we don't capitalize those. This is the value we built other than through acquisition. Most of the investment in R&D is, I should say all of the investment is in between the additive manufacturing and advanced manufacturing electronics. We are actually seeing the investments starting to slow down because we are getting closer to the performance we need. I expect the investment in R&D to slow down in the next year or two, unrelated to acquisitions. Once we do an acquisition, then of course, investing in R&D there is already into the acquisition specifically.
The next slide, again, shows you what I just described in graphic form, so I don't wanna get into details, but you see between the year 21 and 22, the very large growth. You see it in a very nice way. Thank you, Yael and Julien. The difference between the IFRS and the adjusted non-IFRS, like the similar to GAAP, non-GAAP. In a way, I'm always thinking, why should we show the non-GAAP? There are certain funny things with the IFRS, including non-cash expenses that we need to take out in order to show the real operation of the business.
The next slide is interesting slide that I've been asked a lot about people, including, people who I wouldn't mention their names, but they're not, call it shareholders that have real interest in the company growth, that wrote lies and false information all over the place, that claimed that we don't have organic growth. We decided to show you the organic growth, which is combined 24% from the acquisitions, that I mentioned here, and it's broken down here between three acquisitions. You see, each acquisition has a different growth rate. After we acquire them, comparing to the year before, which means this is called organic growth. Not to speak about the organic growth of our own products before the acquisitions, which is also substantial.
By the way, we are now close to Q1 of 2023, and I can tell you that in Q1, this organic growth is continuing strongly. Next slide speaks about improving operational efficiencies. Not good enough to my taste. Yael is sitting here, I'm looking at her eyes, I want. You know, when the operational expenses are high, it's easy to reduce high percentages, but the next stage will be to reducing those percentages even more toward profitability, and that comes in two ways. One, increasing revenue without increasing operational expenses, because we build an infrastructure, guys. We have a run rate of 50, last year, $44 million, this year projected to grow dramatically. In a run rate of above $50 million company with an operating expenses that I believe will fit the next acquisition.
We'll have a huge saving in OpEx once we do the next acquisition. Next slide relates to a subject that, again, some of the small shareholders that eyeing the cash and don't care about all you shareholders that are looking for an upside, take it as a negative, we see it as a positive. The positive things is, here, the positive item here is that we have theoretically, of course, 12.5 years on the run rate, cash run rate we have today. Of course, we're not going to continue the cash run rate negative and for the next 12.5 years. We have to be profitable very soon, at least, by cash flow. I can tell you that our cash flow improvement from 2022 to 2023 is going to be huge.
We're going to be much less in cash burnout. Again, the profitability will follow. It depends on the acquisitions as well. If you compare yourself to three other companies, it was based on their last year results. I know Markforged, Desktop Metal, and Velo very, very well. They don't have 2.3 years. Markforged and Desktop Metal don't have one year, and Velo maybe have half a year. Those guys have less than one year to survive unless they go raise money. Their share price is lower than us, both in numbers, and is also lower than us in so much as losing value over the last year and a half. The strength of our business is we don't need to raise money.
They, I don't know what they'll do, but you obviously can guess behind the scene, if I tell you I know them, what is happening. Next slide will speak about our intention to become a market leader. We are the best-positioned company to become the market leader. This market is $16 billion growing, according to industry reports, to $105 billion in 5, 6 years. So forget five, six, years. Let's say $16 billion today, let's say it's going to $20 billion in a year or two. There's no 800-pound gorilla. There's no large company. The largest companies are two, which is Stratasys and 3D. They are not too large for a market at $16 billion. They're only half a million, $600 million each, give or take.
They're not doing the right things in order to consolidate the market. Plus, they're not capitalized properly. We do, and we are. We intend to do it based on synergies and based on technologies and based on running a business that is focused on the bottom line, not on the top line. We're not looking to be a $1.5 billion business that's losing $200 million a year. We prefer to be half a billion dollars business that's making $100 million a year, and that's our aim. Our aim is EBITDA or eventually profit per share. We're going to do it both by growing organically, as you saw, and by acquisition.
Stratasys, in so much as saying no to the first proposal, and now the second proposal since yesterday or so is out, they better hurry because we have three others that we're looking at and talking at different stages, and we are not permitted to buy Stratasys at any price. At the price we're offering, we're going to go all the way to get them. If eventually the shareholders will say, no, of course, shareholders are shareholders. We'll probably, in parallel, you will hear other news about acquisitions. That was my presentation or kind of points I want to speak about. I took my 10, 15 minutes of your time, and I'll be happy to answer your questions. Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. We'll now begin the Q&A session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble the roster. Thank you. First question comes from Anne Margaret Crow, Edison Group. Please go ahead.
Anne Margaret Crow (Senior Technology, Media and Telecommunications Analyst)
Hello. Thank you for taking my questions. I've got three. The first is, could you please restate your target gross margin? Thank you. The second one is, can you provide a little bit more detail on what you're doing with respect to merging the technologies you acquire? You mentioned Fabrica in that context, so it would be really helpful to hear a bit more about that. The third question was about the impairment. My question is this purely to bring down the value of the balance sheet, so it's closer to the market cap? Have you looked at the underlying cash generative nature of the businesses that you've acquired to get to that reduction? Or is it simply to get the balance sheet in the right-
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Okay.
Anne Margaret Crow (Senior Technology, Media and Telecommunications Analyst)
kind of framework?
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
That's great.
Anne Margaret Crow (Senior Technology, Media and Telecommunications Analyst)
Thank you.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
three excellent three questions. Thank you very much. I'll start with the first two, and, if I'll be able to hold myself, I'll let Yael answer the third one.
Anne Margaret Crow (Senior Technology, Media and Telecommunications Analyst)
Thank you.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Target gross margin. Our target gross margin for new machines in additive manufacturing and in additive manufacturing electronics is above 60%. When it's totally new, it should be 65%, 68%. When it's a little bit older, it'll tend to slide down to 60%. Our target for systems and electronics that go into the machine and we sell them as subsystems is about 55%-60%. Our target gross margin for additive electronics is 40%, give or take, because this is a more mature market. While we're using a lot of artificial intelligence there and robotics, the competition is a bit stronger in that area, and therefore it's 40%.
The combination, as we expect the AM, AMA to grow faster and to take more portion of our revenue, the combined gross margin will tilt above the 40% into the 60%, depends on the combination of the product sales, product line sales and revenue. Second question, emerging technologies. That's a very, very interesting question. Let me start. You said the technologies we acquired. We acquired a company called Global Inkjet Systems, for instance, which has the software and hardware. They're managing the injections and Sorry, the ink injection heads. Extremely important technology. We started by already using those technology because they were suppliers to our machines. Now we're integrating their technologies into our other machines that were acquired, for instance, in Netherlands, the additive manufacture machines. We're integrating those technologies and the software.
Secondly, we're integrating our software and artificial intelligence, the deep learning, with the Atlas software package that is made and developed by GIS to make it a combined software, both for user experience and designers, and software that operates the printing heads together, and there's a connection between the two. We're combining it across the board from, in all the company departments. Another example, we have a company called used to call Fabrica, now it's a name of a product line. It's using DLP technology, direct light processing or direct light projections. Better. We acquired another company in Netherlands called Admatec, which is also have a DLP technology. The Fabrica machines are using DLP technologies for very high accuracy polymer, specialty polymer products.
The Fabrica machines in Netherlands are using DLP similar technology for very high precision, ceramic and metal products. Now we're combining the two technologies, which are using different factors and different form factors and different sub-technologies, and we are applying certain technologies from Fabrica in the ceramic machines and the metal machines coming out of our Netherlands facilities and vice versa. Well, we are actually almost merging the two R&D teams because the technologies are very similar and complementing each other. Another example, of course, is the technology we purchased two and a half years ago, in DeepCube. DeepCube is going into almost all our machines in order to improve the performance of the machine in as much as throughput and yield. Now we are speaking about even using it for predictive maintenance, the artificial intelligence.
You can take it across the board in both Additive Manufacturing, additive electronics and additive manufacturing electronics. The deep learning, DeepCube technology is now going into each one of the product lines. Last but not least, the impairment.
Yael Sandler (CFO)
Ye-yes.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Yael.
Yael Sandler (CFO)
Thank you. Regarding the impairment, because as of the end of the year, our market cap compares to our book value of the assets less liabilities, there was a difference there, obviously, because our market cap was lower and because we have intangibles on our book, we needed to check for impairment for the intangibles. We did it. The impairment test is not based on a specific value of any acquisition that we did. It is based, you know, on the total company as a combined. Because of this difference, basically we had no choice but to do the impairment. We wrote down approximately $40 million, some intangibles and also some fixed assets.
It's important to know that it's not related to any specific acquisitions or it's not any indication that the goodwill or technology from any specific acquisition is not good. Quite the opposite. It's a very technically accounting issue. I hope it answers your question.
Anne Margaret Crow (Senior Technology, Media and Telecommunications Analyst)
Yes, it does. Thank you very much.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Okay, next question, please.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Next question will be from Ram Reddy, Private Investor. Go ahead, Mr. Reddy. All right. He's no longer on the line with us. Next question will be from Eric Marcus. Private Investor. Please go ahead, sir.
Speaker 4
Thank you very much. Can you hear me?
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Yes, please.
Speaker 4
Okay. First, Mr. Stern, thank you very much for taking our questions, and thank you for your presentation. In your recent videos and communications, you have said that you believe that the direction that you're taking the company represents the majority of shareholders. As a shareholder who respectfully disagrees with that assessment, I'm asking why will you not call a shareholders meeting and put your chairmanship to a vote of confidence, letting those of us who own the company weigh in? Thank you.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
First of all, I didn't say that I believe I represent the majority of the shareholders. I only said that I propose to the shareholders what I think is the right direction. Secondly, in the next shareholders meeting, the shareholders can make a decision and vote me down, and I will leave the board or leave the company or whatever the shareholders... I work for the shareholders, so no problems. I agree with you.
Speaker 4
When will that shareholders meeting be held to have that vote?
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
As we usually have the shareholders meeting after we publish the Form 20-F, we have annual shareholders a couple of months later, once we finish preparing all the paperwork. I don't expect more than a couple of months from now. Look at the time we did it last year, we'll do it this year again, and you'll be more than welcome to vote me out. If most of you will, then I'll step down. There's not a problem at all.
Speaker 4
Thank you.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Our next question will be from Ram Reddy, Private Investor. Please go ahead.
Speaker 4
Hello.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Yes, please, Ram.
Speaker 4
Yeah. I have a couple of questions. The first one is, last year, you said you are going to get analyst coverage within next couple of quarters. It's more than a year. I don't see any analyst coverage. Second one is, what was the interest you earned in the last quarter, Q4 of 2022? How much interest you are expecting for this 2023?
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Sorry. The second question again.
Speaker 4
What is the interest you got for the quarter 2022 last quarter? I mean, you have more than $1 billion sitting in your bank account.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Okay. Okay. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand.
Speaker 4
Yeah. Yeah, please.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
First question, I'll answer. The second question, I'll let Yael answer.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
you're right. I was speaking to, at least one analyst-
Speaker 4
Mm-hmm.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
-from a small outfit in Midwest that is following other companies in this industry. He promised and said that he's very interested to write a research report about us, which I spoke about. It was exactly, I think it was Q3 of 2022. The guy didn't do it, and I don't understand why. You're right. It's my failure. I'm still of course, doing the same thing. As much as I'm looking at myself, the fact that we don't have analysts writing about us is disappointing to me, and I am disappointed in myself. I can tell you one thing, that the two, three acquisitions we are looking at will cause the analysts to start to write reports about us. That's for sure. I already spoke with them.
The fact that we are employing two banks now, both, Greenhill and Lazard, is in a roundabout way, and people who work in Wall Street know it, because they are going to become, part of the upside of closing a deal, is going to cause analysts, I hope, and that's the way it works, to write reports.
Yael Sandler (CFO)
In terms of the interest revenue, so in 2022, we had interest revenues of around eighteen and a half million dollars. Obviously, most of it is towards the second half and very heavily even in Q4 because of the rising interest rates. In this quarter, Q1 of 2023, we are at a run rate of more than $11 million a quarter from interest revenue. Assuming the interest will continue to be as much as they are today, you can multiply it by four and see where we project our interest revenues will be. As you have mentioned earlier in the call, it is expected to influence our total cash burn significantly this year.
Speaker 4
Thank you very much.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Thank you, Rammy.
Speaker 4
Yes, sir.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. This concludes our Q&A session. I'd like to turn the call back over to management for any closing remarks.
Yoav Stern (CEO and Chairman)
Okay. I'll say a few more words in case other people want to ask. I wanna relate back to the question that the person before the last person asked, and he said. I wanna re-emphasize my answer to him. He said, "Mr. Stern, you claim in your videos that most of the shareholders support your business plan for the company." I never claimed it in the videos. I don't know if most of the shareholders support what I propose to lead the company toward. The only thing I know that 90% of the shareholders, that don't include these two entities on the lake of on the shore of Lake Ontario. Don't remember exactly the names. Other than those two, 90% of the shareholders don't support their way of wanting to dismantle the company and pay $4 a share.
That's the only thing I said. The other side of it is I'm trying to convince shareholders in the sense of moving along the businesses we are proceeding with, and I'm totally at the mercy of shareholders. This is a business democracy. I'm voting down. If they vote me out, I have many, many things to do with my life, other than working 18 hours a day. The only thing I won't be happy if I will step down is to be able to help you make money, but I'll definitely respect any directive that I will get from shareholders. That was just to reemphasize this point and to gain some time to let you guys maybe have more questions, but I see that you don't. As we always do, by now, I'm much more involved with the shareholders.
They're writing me, and I'm writing back, and it's actually a pleasure. It's a pleasure to speak with you today, and I thank you very much for the opportunity.
Operator (participant)
Thank you. Conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
Yael Sandler (CFO)
Thank you.