Vislink Technologies - Q3 2022
November 15, 2022
Transcript
Operator (participant)
I'd like to remind everyone of the safe harbor statement referenced in the SEC filings. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a safe harbor for certain forward-looking statements, including statements made during the course of today's call. Statements contained herein that are not based upon current or historical facts are forward-looking in nature and constitute forward-looking statements within the meanings of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Such forward-looking statements reflect the company's expectations about its future operating results, performance, and opportunities that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. When used herein, the words anticipate, believe, estimate, upcoming, plan, target, intend, and expect, and similar expressions as they relate to Vislink Technologies, its subsidiaries, or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to the company and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause the company's actual results, performance, prospects, and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these forward-looking statements. For a more detailed discussion of some of the ongoing risks and some uncertainties of the company's business, please refer to the company's various filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Vislink's Quarter Four Earnings Call. My name is Gabrielle, and I'll be your host for today as we navigate the numbers. Actually assisting me to navigate today and also presenting, we are joined by Mickey Miller, CEO, and Mike Bond, CFO at Vislink, and they're gonna be giving us the much-anticipated rundown of quarter four. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Thanks, Gabrielle. It's a pleasure to be here. Good morning, good evening, good afternoon to our global investor base. Very thrilled to be here. It's been a tough quarter. We'll walk through it, about what's happening in the market, but also what we're doing to improve this business and continue to get the results that we all want as investors in the company.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Absolutely. You know, I'm so excited 'cause we've got Mickey here in studio, but we also actually have Mike dialing in remotely from. It looks like, I don't wanna guess, maybe it's Hawaii. Where are you dialing in from, Mike?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
He's in San Diego today.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Oh, he's in San Diego. Fantastic. All right. Well, you know what? We've got a lot of audience who wanna go ahead and get into the quarter four rundown. We've got a lot of insights to get into today, so why don't you go ahead and take us off, Mickey.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Great. Well, we'll go right through. You heard the safe harbor earlier. Again, for our new investors, our mission, we have the privilege of creating and building technology and solutions for content owners and content creators, as well as providing solutions and technologies to those in uniform to protect and serve us. Our solutions allow the content to be more immediate, take proactive action. So we understand that this is a privilege, and we continue to build this business in support of those, what we believe, very noble goals. For our new investors also, you know, our business is largely between three segments: sports, news, and entertainment, and military government, which our SATCOM business is a part of. When you look at this quarter, it's very different than our last Q3 of 2021.
This quarter, almost 60% of our revenue was through our sports, news, and entertainment channels and customers, and 30% was in our military, government, and SATCOM. A year ago, it actually flipped, and we'll go into the details of why that change has happened, largely due to a military project that we had for Afghanistan, which has ended since the Afghan exit. We'll go into that more, but you know, these are the areas that we support, that we bring our technology to help improve, whether it's bringing tier one events like the Super Bowl or F1 or any amazing event to broadcasters and consumers globally, or providing technology that allow air-to-ground communications to happen to take proactive action for those in uniform.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, before we get into the next slide, I actually do wanna remind our audience that as we start to go over this presentation, you're welcome to drop any and all questions into the chat, so that way you can get them answered today by Mickey and Mike. You're gonna have your experts be able to answer your questions directly. This chat will be monitored by Vislink, so go ahead and drop your questions in there, and we'll take them into review and just pick the best ones from there. That is something to keep in mind as we go through this presentation.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Great.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Mike, are you available to take us on to the next slide? Looks like he might not be able to hear us. Mickey, we do have this next slide here.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Sure.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Would you be able to take that over for us?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah, absolutely. The revenues for Q3 were $7.1 million compared to $6.8 million in Q2 in the prior quarter. Prior year quarter, we did $11.1 million. In that $11.1 million, we had about $4 million as part of that military program in Afghanistan. We saw incredible growth in our sports and entertainment for two reasons. One, post-pandemic, we've had a resurgence in live events, and it's not just your traditional live events, but the insatiable demand for all types of content we see in many forms. Secondly,
The technology improvements or new products that we added allowed our customers to upgrade their technology and do a technology refresh. The combination of that allowed us to grow significantly in the sports and entertainment area. In the first responder market, it was challenged. As you remember, last year in the U.S., the defund the police efforts were very strong. We've seen that pendulum swing the other way now. We saw our order book for government and first responder happen quite extensively in the last couple weeks. We expect to see that continue. Everything that we hear from our government and state and local customers is that the budgets are there, and they're looking to deploy this new technology.
From a new technology perspective, we introduced our AeroLink product, which is our new downlink, both COFDM, 5G, and mesh product. We introduced that in March, and the amount of interest in that is tremendous. As an example, we have over seven programs that are in our funnel that are over $500,000 in valuation. To put that in context, between 2016 and 2021, we had a total of three programs above $500,000. Right now, we have seven, double what we had over the last five years. We're really excited about what this product brings to us and the opportunities that it brings for our customers to do their jobs more efficiently.
Our Q3 net loss attributed to common shareholders was $2.7 million or $0.06 per share, and that was compared to $676,000 or $0.01 per share last year, same quarter. Our EBITDA was negative $1.9 million, compared to $1 million positive for Q3 2021. We're not happy with these results. A lot of activity, which you'll find out more, to continue to position ourselves for A, growth and for B, profitable growth. Our margins remain strong at 49%, and we ended the quarter with $24 million in cash. Do we have Mike back yet?
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
[Inaudible]Yes, we do.
Fantastic. All right, Mike, we're gonna have you take it away to slide three. We are ready for you.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Sorry, Mike. You have slide three. You're up.
Michael Bond (CFO)
Good morning, everyone.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Good morning.
Michael Bond (CFO)
Go-to-market efforts. This has given us an increased ability to address specific verticals and customer markets. We've also integrated Mobile Viewpoint and Vislink product portfolios and engineering teams. We've revamped our service organization and pricing model to improve customer experience and increase revenue, and we've gone about starting some cost reductions to reduce our break even further. Our goal is to reduce our break even by another 10%-15%, and we expect that to yield results into first quarter of next year. Some of the measures we're taking are headcount reduction, footprint consolidation. We're consolidating some of the factories and final test and assembly areas that we have to reduce footprint, reduce real estate costs, and we're streamlining our process and procedures.
We are, though, adding some additional resources in our sales area, in our go-to-market model, and, we're augmenting and beefing up our engineering teams, so we can continue to introduce new products. This year, we'll go on a very ambitious project to convert to a new ERP system. Right now, we have three separate systems. We'll convert that to one. That will help us drive efficiencies across the organization. We are successfully completing a pilot run of our new product, AeroLink. This positions us very well to execute on increased opportunity that we'll see, that will fill our funnel over the next couple quarters.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Okay. On the new product announcements, we had some incredible products announced this past quarter. Our 5G 4Live. What that does is bring 5G, the new 5G, private 5G, to our solution set.
We're the only company in our industry who has bonded cellular 4G, 5G, proprietary COFDM solutions, and 5G private networks. Now we'll see this roll out in many ways. I think it will be country by country. There are some countries that have spectrum available to use 5G private networks, and we're actively involved in those. We had two trials in the past quarter, one with the Commonwealth Games in the U.K. and one with a Premiership Rugby event in the U.K. We're very confident with our again adding this. This will be a product that evolves over time as private 5G networks become more available. In addition to that, we introduced our Cliq.
That's a new OFDM mobile transmitter that is used for many use cases, including drones, body-worn cameras, helmet-worn cameras in some cases, but it gives a lot of flexibility both in MilGov markets as well as in live sports and entertainment to create, again, those real immersive and clever shots that can bring a whole new perspective to the event or also bring information to make decisions with. Lastly, example of our AI capabilities. We developed our AI Clipping Tool, which is basically a software tool that allows you to. The AI will watch a game and then create the highlights from that game and immediately send those out on your favorite social or even mint and NFT. It's very exciting what we're doing both from the hardware standpoint, but more importantly, from the software that rides on top of that.
On the live event production side, we saw our revenues grow 42% quarter-over-quarter from prior year. That's because of our new products that we've introduced over the last year, as well as live events coming back in a bigger way, and new events, new types of sports. As I said earlier, the demand for content is insatiable, and we allow content producers, content owners to do that in a fashion that people love and enjoy and can really experience the event in a much different way. We see new opportunities where tier ones are not only ones producing content, but tier one-two events, tier three events. You see high schools, you see so many different types of content creation that's happening. As I mentioned, our technology and equipment refreshes.
The other demand that we're seeing that was accelerated through COVID, and to put it into perspective, the broadcast industry has been slow to adopt IP, but COVID accelerated that adoption of IP. When you have an IP world like the IT departments have had for the last 20 years, when you have an IP world that voice, video, and data can just be a bit in the stream, it allows you to do a lot of things like remote production, which we saw take off during COVID, which means you don't have to be here to produce an event like this.
You can have people, announcers in one part of the world, you can have camera people in another part of the world, and you're able to produce a live event without having everybody on the event with a truck that's rolled out. That's where we see a huge opportunity. That's where we're seeing pickup across our entire product line is around what's called REMI, and that stands for Remote Production. Whether it's AI-powered multi-camera systems, 5G streaming, or REMI technologies, those are all, you know, you know, there's a couple of things about, live production and live events. They tend to be recession-resistant, but also this micro tailwind that we have around REMI, around 5G, and around cloud allows us to continue to grow in whatever markets happen.
One of our new announcements was our TerraLink REMI, which is an encoder that delivers multi-camera remote production capabilities, and then the Cliq, which I mentioned earlier. On the MilGov side, our revenues were 50% lower. As I mentioned, this was primarily due to the military order that we had for Afghanistan in the third quarter of 2021. It was offset a little bit by first responder business, but our first responder business is not back to the levels of pre-pandemic. We are seeing very good signs. The federal state and local agencies are in buying mode. I was just most recently at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Dallas, Texas, and I can tell you that the interest to use technology, again, a market where IP and IT technology still has a huge opportunity to grow.
They wanna use technology to help them do their jobs more efficiently. There's been pressure on headcount in a lot of the agencies and a lot of the departments. The ability to use technology to help them do things more efficiently is certainly in demand. We deliver tactical insights needed to ensure mission success. We take air-to-ground videos and are able to get those in the hand of commanders or mayors to make decisions very quickly on the ground. Our AeroLink, which we introduced in March, has been a tremendous success, as I talked about earlier, and we see building on that because now that we have the infrastructure in place, whether it's downlink transmitters or receive stations, and then the software on top of that is where the excitement comes in, that we can provide very unique advantages to our customers.
Michael Bond (CFO)
We continue to pursue a M&A strategy, a growth strategy, both organically and inorganically. We are exploring opportunities that would be complementary to our business and accretive to our financial model. Some of the sectors that we're looking at are AI-based automated video recognition, airborne video capture and transmission solutions, and C4ISR, which is Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, and Surveillance, as it relates to the communications network of the military. We're looking at various opportunities in those sectors. We're also looking at sports analytics, and we're seeking market multiples as we're seeing market multiples decrease, and that's gonna give us additional and ample opportunity to look for inorganic growth opportunities in the future. We think those opportunities present us with attractive valuations in the future that will help us look for additional opportunities in the M&A space.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
You know, I get a lot of investors that ask about, you know, what's our strategy? Where are we headed? We have a technology strategy. In addition to the things that we've talked about through our go-to-market and our engineering and our capabilities on the operations side, we have a technology strategy to drive software and services growth. The way we view, historically, we've been largely a hardware company, providing hardware to our customers. Now, the opportunity is to take that hardware and make it more intelligent. We're doing that as our operating system, the LinkMatrix, which we acquired in the Mobile Viewpoint acquisition, which gives us the ability to remotely manage, control, and more importantly, automate a lot of the different workflows for our customers. When you look at what our customers do, whether it's military, government, the workflows are very similar.
You have content capture. That means 4K cameras, 1080p HDR cameras, 60 frames per second, digital stitching. You take that to the contribution. How do you get that to where you need to edit it or where you need to view it? It's either through our COFDM solutions, proprietary, or through bonded cellular, which is the public networks, or through private 5G, which we just introduced. Those are all compressed at H.265, which is the most recent compression technology that's used throughout the industry. There's applications on top of that, like camera control or intercoms or video return. All those things are part of that.
Specifically for sports, news, and entertainment, the ability to produce it in the cloud, to do post-production, to add graphics and things like that, and then ultimately to play out on whatever type of format's needed. We have the transcoding capability to do that, and then ultimately, how to transport that around their networks. We have gear and ability to do that. Now it is all managed by our LinkMatrix solution, which heretofore we didn't have that capability. Now we have the opportunity to remotely manage and support our customers and also to provide a revenue source there for us and support them in the field in ways that we couldn't before.
On top of that, bringing our AI capabilities to allow them to make their workflows more efficient, to be able to find the exact content they're looking for based on the need. There's many ways that we can help our customers become more efficient through using machines to evaluate things as opposed to humans. Giving humans a much better, more concentrated view of what needs to get done and what the opportunities and the content that's available to do that.
Michael Bond (CFO)
We think we're positioning ourselves for profitable growth in the future. Over the last couple of years, we've executed on a turnaround strategy to position the company for consistent earnings growth. We've reduced our break-even point from over $50 million a couple of years ago down to around the mid-$30 million mark now, and we're continuing to push that further. We've reinvigorated our go-to-market capability to support our global, blue-chip customer base in sports, news, and entertainment. We've also, you know, pursued heavily the federal, state, and local markets for MilGov. We've invested heavily in R&D. We've launched five new products in less than three years. Some of those products are the Quantum Receiver, the IP Link 3.0, the DVE 6100 encoder, the IP Link Portable RF Transmission System. Lastly, and most importantly, we've just introduced the AeroLink.
We've streamlined our headcount and operating footprint and increased productivity over the last couple of years. We've rationalized our product portfolio to focus on higher margin, higher revenue products. Mickey and I, when we first came here, we made a decision to exit about 70% of the products that we had at the time. Most were redundant, and that was a significant amount of overlap in our product portfolio. We've secured access to necessary capital over the last couple of years. As you know, we did a transaction last October, where we added significant amount of cash to our balance sheet. We now have approximately $25 million-$30 million on the balance sheet, and we're in very good shape financially. We've closed on the acquisition of Mobile Viewpoint and successfully integrated with Vislink all aspects of the business.
We've brought the bonded cellular and artificial intelligence technology that they brought to bear, and we put that inside our product portfolio and integrated into our product sets. We launched several jointly developed Vislink MVP products. We've launched the 5G 4Live, the Vislink Connect, the BaseLink 5G, and the Cliq transmitter. We've also introduced an AI Clipping Tool. We've established LinkMatrix as the operating system for all our Vislink devices, and that's now the operating system that our customers can use to manage our total solutions. I'll turn it back to Mickey.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Thanks, Mike. You wanna walk them through the preferred dividend?
Michael Bond (CFO)
As everyone knows, effective on November ninth, our board of directors declared a dividend of one one-thousandth of a share of preferred stock for each share of the company's common stock. That dividend will be issuable to all shareholders of record on November twenty-first of this year. That Series A preferred stock will vote together with the outstanding shares of the company's common stock as a single class concerning one issue, and that is the reverse stock split. A special meeting will be called of the shareholders to vote on that reverse split. We expect that meeting to be held on January eleventh of 2022. Sorry, January eleventh of 2023. Each outstanding share of preferred stock will have one million votes. Therefore, each common share will receive 1,000 votes.
All shares of the preferred Series A stock that are not present in person or by proxy at the opening of the polls of that special meeting will automatically be redeemed by the company.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Looks like we just lost Mike's audio, unfortunately. We can pick it up in the slide, if you could, Mickey.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Sure. All right. As Mike went through, we have two proxies actually coming up. One will be for the board and the auditors. That'll be the one December twenty-seventh, and then following that will be.
Michael Bond (CFO)
As everyone knows, Vislink received notice of a delisting on May 20, 2022 from the Nasdaq. That notice was due to the fact that we had a share price below $1 for 30 consecutive days. The company was given 180 days to cure that deficiency. We believe the prospects of raising the share price above $1 is very challenging in the near term, and we think the best avenue would be to effect a reverse share split. A couple reasons why we think that a reverse split is appropriate. We think delisting would cause a further decrease in our share price. We think a reverse stock split does not entail dilution to our current shareholders. Clearing the possibility of delisting, we think would reduce some of the downward pressure on our stock price.
Many of the institutions that we know would not invest in a company that has a share price below $2. In retrospect, we think that a reverse stock split is the right, appropriate thing to do at this point.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Looks like we did get Mike back, thankfully.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah. Yeah.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
You guys are truly the spirit of tag teaming here.
Michael Bond (CFO)
Yeah.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Finish each other's sentences.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
You know why we're optimistic about the future of our business. First, we've got a blue chip customer base in growing markets. As I said, you know, independent if there's a macroeconomic headwind around a recession, the markets we're in tend to be recession resistant. But I think what's more important that in these markets, there's a digital transformation happening where they're using technology to help them make their business more efficient. We think there's a tailwind of digital transformation that allows us to continue to grow independent of what's happening at the macro level. We've optimized our operating platform for profitable growth. As we talked about, you know, we are very focused on profitable growth.
We've made a lot of changes in this business over the years to be able to make ourselves more efficient, to reduce our costs, to reduce our break even, and we continue to do that with our most recent announcement in the third quarter that Mike talked about. We're introducing new products at a record rate. Mike showed the five large products that we introduced, but with those, there's a lot of enhancements that go with those and also other products that we've done. Customers love the new products. It's evident by our sales are up 42% on the live production side. Our AVDS sales funnel, that's our Airborne Video Downlink Systems for military and government, is the highest it's ever been on record.
We're very excited about the work that our teams are doing of bringing new products to market to serve our customers, and our customers are rewarding that. As I mentioned, digital transformation across both markets that we serve is hot. Our product portfolio leverages all the newest technologies, whether it's artificial intelligence, whether it's 5G, whether it's cloud. We take all those integrated into our solutions to bring that efficiency to our customers. As Mike talked about on the M&A side, we see inorganic growth opportunities at attractive valuations. We're very focused to make sure that if we deploy capital from our cash base, it's very focused on something that's gonna be accretive and is gonna be complementary to our customers and serve our customers in a better way. This business has over 50 years of heritage creating and deploying complex communication services and solutions.
Our customers are here because of our team. The team at Vislink is passionate about what they do. They're passionate about the markets we serve, whether it be live production content or those in uniform. We are very pleased and very considerate of the fact that we have this very noble mission, and we believe in our team. The team has done a phenomenal job through very difficult situations, whether it was during the pandemic in 2020, coming out of the pandemic where everything needed to be delivered at once, through the challenges that we've had in the supply chain and continue to work through every day and focus on meeting the needs of our customers and helping them do their jobs more efficiently. You know, as I said, we're optimistic on our future.
We believe in this business, we believe in our people and the team we have in place. I talk to customers on a regular basis, and our customers want us to continue to succeed. They see a huge opportunity for the services that we're offering. They're giving us feedback to that, and we want the opportunity to continue to do that. I wanna just close it at that, and then Gabrielle will open up to questions.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Fantastic. Well, thank you, Mickey and Mike. That brings us, as Mickey said, to our live Q&A portion of this broadcast. Just a reminder, if you've got any questions that you might have come up with as you were watching the presentation, go ahead and drop it in the chat, and it is being monitored by Vislink. We'll go ahead and review those questions and get them up here for answering. This is your chance to get any and all of your burning questions answered by Vislink. We've already got a few questions here ready to go. We've got one here from Marian Coman. "What are your plans for regaining compliance with marketplace requirements?" Can you take us through that?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yes. Ideally, you know, we have until this extension and then potentially another extension, but we believe that a reverse split is the best approach now. There's over, I'm told, over 400 companies, microcap companies that are under a dollar. A lot of companies are in our position. As you saw in Mike's slide, you know, we have over, you know, we're trading well under our cash level. We think we're undervalued, but, you know, every CEO thinks they're undervalued, so that's not investment advice. You know, certainly being under a dollar is a challenge for us to get above a dollar to be Nasdaq compliant. We think the best thing at this point, at this juncture, what we see is a reverse split.
Now, I know at our last reverse split, I said this is the last reverse split that I wanted to do. Believe me, we didn't think we'd be in this position when we did that. This is an impact that's happening across the market with microcaps. Then for us as a company, we have to view what is the best situation for us, because many of these companies will be delisted. I know there's a lot of frustrated investors on this call right now that heard us say we're hopeful that was our last reverse split. I think things are different in the sense that the market is well down. In the previous reverse splits before the one that we did, you know, markets weren't necessarily down.
We've been investing prudently, we've been cost-cutting where possible, as you can see from our breakeven that we brought the company through, and we've been doing things from introducing new products, increasing our ability to extend our reach to customers. We'd like to continue with this mission as a public company, 'cause a public company gives us access. We think there's upside there. We ask our investor base to consider this. We can't give our opinion on which way to go, but certainly we will go in the direction of our shareholders. This is your company. We're here at the pleasure of the board, which is here at the pleasure of our shareholders, so we will execute as deemed appropriate by our shareholders.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, Mickey or Mike, I'll let you take either or of these. From Byron Weaver: How do government orders look? Mike or Mickey.
Michael Bond (CFO)
I can answer that.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Sure.
Michael Bond (CFO)
We're seeing a very robust sales funnel for government orders at this point, and we typically term that as MilGov, military government. We're seeing a great uptick in business, potential business with government first responders, particularly because we've just introduced our new AeroLink product. That AeroLink product is being embraced very well by the customer base, and we expect a very strong sales funnel with that and our other products in 2023.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah. I might add to that. This is not just a U.S. solution, it's a global solution. Ministries of Defense throughout the world are interested. We've had several coming to our offices to do evaluations of the product with our engineering teams, as well as many have been looking at it independently. As I said, our funnel is the highest it's ever been in the last six-seven years. We're very excited about that. Obviously, as challenges, social injustice happens throughout the world, the need to have technology and systems in place to proactively deal with that, we see that happening throughout the world. We think this solution is coming at the right time in the market, and our customers, based on the interest that they have in it, are supporting that.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, you know, we've got another question in the chat from Susan, and she wants to know: Who are the decision makers in the buying process ultimately? Your product offer is compelling, but I can imagine that some in the industry may be hesitant to change.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah. We focus on the aviation departments within these organizations 'cause our bulk product is about air-to-ground communications and then taking that information and doing things proactively. That can range from, you know, large groups at the agencies that are making decisions across the entire agency, all the way down to a sheriff's department where the sheriff will award the business. It's wide variety, and we do it through both our partners and our direct channels that we have in the market.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
This next question is from Nelson Morgan, and he wants to know: What will you do to increase transparency with the shareholders, especially in terms of contract announcements? While we see the press releases about use at sporting events and conference displays, he says it's really hard to quantify how these are reflected on the balance sheet until these earnings reports and calls. How would you respond to that?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Maybe-
Mickey Miller (CEO)
That's a great question. We get asked that question a lot. We'd like to share everything. Unfortunately, you know, there's a big event that's happening in the world right now, which we're participating in, but we can't say anything about. Yeah, as you can imagine, many people in the live tier one events wanna be able to sell their branding rights, sell their content rights, so they don't like people, you know, riding on the tails of that. We're limited in what we can say there. Secondly, you know, for a lot of militaries, a lot of governments, particularly governments, you know, they don't like to make large announcements.
If there are announcements around, you know, where there's been a vote among the city councils, for example, Miami-Dade, we received a $1 million order from Miami-Dade for upgrade of all their aircraft as a part of their large program that they announced at the end of last quarter. That's a great example, but many times it's limited on what the customer is willing to announce and what they'll allow us to announce. At the same time, you know, we push our sales teams to get that information, but at the same time, we want our sales teams going out to find new orders, not necessarily badgering our existing customers to have them to allow us to do a press release.
It's a balance, and we're trying to work that, but obviously in a lot of cases it's not to the level that a lot of some of our investors would like.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, I know in the earlier in the presentation, you mentioned Afghanistan, so I just wanna ask to further elaborate, what was your involvement there?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah. Is Mike still on?
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Yeah, Mike's still with us.
Michael Bond (CFO)
Yeah, I'm still on.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Mike, do you wanna take this one?
Michael Bond (CFO)
If you can hear me. Yeah. We had a very good, our contract with the army, an area of the army called SOCOM, which typically buys equipment for Special Forces. We had a contract where they were feeding in a particular type of receiver into Special Forces in Afghanistan. With the fall of Afghanistan, we concluded that contract with the army and with SOCOM. We stand ready to do more of that type of business. But at this point, you know, absent that type of theater of war, we're not gonna see a lot of orders with that particular product at the moment. But again, we still try to find other ways to work with, you know, our military partners and customers to continue to increase sales.
With the end of hostilities in Afghanistan, that ended a very big piece of business that we did last year.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, you know, Mike, as a follow-up to this, maybe you could answer, this question we just got about how are you planning to make up for the military business shortfall that caused the quarter's decline?
Michael Bond (CFO)
Yeah. We're as Mickey had mentioned, you know, we've just introduced the AeroLink, and we've, you know, kind of fashioned a new go-to-market team in that sector. We're seeing, you know, there was a lag, there was a defund the police effort last year, and that caused a lag to a certain extent in the orders that we were experiencing in the government first responder side. Now we're seeing that lag diminish, and we're seeing, you know, some really robust interest in our new products and our offerings. We think we're watching the sales funnel fill up. We think that we'll see, you know, a real uptick in that government military business, mostly government in the next year.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, you know, we have a next question here. Maybe Mickey, you can take this one. It seems like we've been hearing about the benefits of 5G for consumers just forever, right? When will it start impacting the backend production side of business, and where do your 5G products fit in this?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah. I think it's gonna be country dependent. In the U.K., for instance, they've allocated 400 megahertz of 5G private 5G spectrum, and what that allows is for a broadcaster to set up a private 5G network, which they can uplink the videos and then bring those to the cloud or distribute them any way they want. In other parts of the world, particularly here in the U.S., private 5G is largely around what's called CBRS, which is only 150 megahertz, which isn't public. It's privately owned. There are some unlicensed bands, but anybody can propagate on those bands and such that there's a potential for interference. In that case, broadcasters are very concerned about using private 5G. What we do see happening for tier two events is the public networks being used.
If you can imagine, if you're a Verizon or an AT&T, you're focused on the downlink. What you care about the downlink is us, as consumers, we wanna get a feed right down. We don't have a lot going up. In our use case, it's more about the uplink 'cause we're taking video, compressing it, and sending it up. You need bandwidth going up. What we do for that in the public networks is our bonded 4G, 5G cellular capability, which allows you to bond two to three to four to seven different bands together to be able to get that uplink.
We see that as an opportunity for growth, and then combined with our REMI products for a lot of people to produce events and completely have maybe one person at the event, filming it, or that could be handled by an AI as well.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, you know, we got a question here about the new small Cliq transmitter you just launched. So Mike and Mickey, you're free to respond, but just what are the use cases for it and the sales that we're seeing?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah. We are in the process. We've announced that. We're working with customers on final definition and final prototypes. That will be introduced in volume at the end of first quarter into second quarter next year. The use cases are vast. Everything from drones, 'cause it's very small, compact, to shoulder cameras. The stability that's happening with POV cameras, that's point of view cameras. If you can imagine in the past, POV cameras were very shaky. It wasn't very pleasant to watch them. That stabilization through the development of a lot of the sensors has improved dramatically. With that and our transmission capabilities, it's allowing both body-worn cameras as well.
Again, these aren't yet to where our goal is to get them in a helmet, but it allows them to have multiple feeds, whether it's from a helmet, say, a motorcycle helmet and a shoulder camera, as well as small applications where they wanna get a camera very concealed camera for surveillance. This allows them to do that. With that size and format and power, it allows them to have a low power unit in a small package that they use in whatever variety they want. I mean, today we have solutions that are used in bases, on a Major League Baseball game, and this continues to evolve that capability.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, you know, you've mentioned that you're actively looking at M&A opportunities on the last few calls. When do you think you'll be able to announce one?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
You know, we're not gonna make an acquisition just for acquisition's sake. We're very active. We're in a lot of discussions. We see multiples coming down. That's the price-to-earnings multiple. You know, whereas before they were well in the teens, we're seeing that come down a bit given the recession concerns. You know, we're being prudent on how we wanna allocate our capital and we're seeing how things evolve. I don't wanna put a timeline. Our goal was to be able to announce one before the end of the year, but we're not gonna sign up to terms and conditions or a price that we don't think is in the best interest of our shareholders. We're patient, but we're also very active.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Gotcha. Well, you know, are there any recent customer wins that you can publicly announce?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Well, Miami-Dade was big, certainly. We shipped that in the third quarter. Again, that was a $1 million-plus order and included some of the services things that we talked about today. We have. You know, it's funny, the ones I'd love to talk about we're under NDA with, and they're not.
Michael Bond (CFO)
Yeah.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
I know it's frustrating for a lot of people.
Michael Bond (CFO)
Like some of the biggest sporting events in the world.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
We're not allowed to announce them. I mean, there's one that's going on right now, which we have deployed a tremendous amount of gear that's gonna do amazing things for the content, that we're not able to share.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Okay, not publicly announced, but there are some.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yes
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
... amazing things in the works. Okay. Well, we have one last question here. Maybe Mike can take this one. Where do you expect to finish up in sales by year's end compared to last year?
Michael Bond (CFO)
We don't give guidance ordinarily, but we do see a pickup in sales. Again, we're seeing a robust sales funnel filling and most of that is for 2023. We do think that we're gonna continue to, you know, increase in sales over the next quarter or so, and we have very strong hopes for the coming year, for first quarter, second quarter. Again, we are seeing, you know, very robust customer activity. We do think we'll kind of stay on the same path that we've been on through the remainder of this year, and then we'll see an increase in an uptick in sales and increase in customer activity entering into 2023 and beyond.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Fantastic. All right, well, we do have another question that just popped in the chat, and it's just about where are we with cameras, with NFL helmets?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
We still have an iteration or two to get there. That's our goal, to ultimately get there. The challenges are this: You have to have an encoder and a modem that's low enough power, low enough in size and density, to be able to provide at least a 1080p HDR signal. This Cliq that we've introduced is closer to that type of product, but we need probably one to two more iterations to our ultimate goal. I said a while ago our goal is to do that before Tom Brady retires. We'll have to see if that happens depending upon this year.
You know, we still have some work to do, and that's working with our semiconductor partners to be able to get the products that allow us to have a lower power, very dense type of product that provides the solutions that our customers are driving for. That's our goal. With everything that's happening around, the software on top of it, as well as having bonded 4G, 5G, having private 5G in COFDM, we'll have many different ways that can be pushed to the cloud and content created.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, fantastic. That concludes our Q&A. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions so far. You know, just as we conclude this call, I wanna ask, Mickey and Mike, any last thoughts you wanna leave with our audience who's watching right now?
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Yeah. I'd like to say, look, we're as unhappy as anyone about where our stock price is today. We've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, but it hasn't translated into results for you and us as shareholders. We're very focused on that. We're here to build a big business that makes a difference, as we've said when we started. We're still very focused, very committed to make that happen. The reverse stock split request, we understand it's not something we wanted to do, but at this point in time, we think it's the best thing for the company given where the market is and where that timing on the market coming around may be. I, you know, I know a lot of people are not happy with it. I'm not happy with it. Mike's not happy with it.
We're gonna continue to work with our team, who are working hard every day to support our customers and deliver them solutions that allows them to grow and generate new revenues and new content. We get it. We're continuing to work hard to make it happen for you, our investors. This is your company. We wanna make you proud of your company and what you're doing, and we'll continue in earnest to work hard at that, and we appreciate your support.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Well, thank you, Mickey. Mike, any last thoughts?
Michael Bond (CFO)
No. Thanks. I do wanna echo Mickey's thoughts, though. We are not satisfied nor content with where we are today. You know, our mission when we came to the business a couple years ago was to change it fundamentally to create a better value proposition for you, the shareholder, such that we could all benefit from that. You know, our mission's not done. Mickey and I will not stop. We won't rest until we've, you know, created a business model that works, that increases the value of the company and hopefully increases the value of its shares. As Mickey said, at this point, you know, we're not happy coming back to the shareholders and asking for another reverse split.
You know, at this point, we don't see a better alternative, and we do wanna keep public shares in the hands of our shareholders, and we think it's the best way to do that at this point. We're, you know, obviously we're not happy, but we're gonna continue to work very, very hard for you, the shareholder.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Thank you, Mike. Well, believe it or not, that wraps up today's conversation. A big thank you to Mickey and Mike for joining us today to talk about the quarter's updates and answer all of your Vislink questions. Hopefully, you got some of your questions answered. We learned a lot. We appreciate your time.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
Thanks, Gabrielle.
Michael Bond (CFO)
Thank you.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Of course. As always, if you wanna learn more, check up on current updates, events, please visit www.vislink.com. I've been your host, Gabrielle. Thanks for tuning in.
Mickey Miller (CEO)
We'll have a new website coming up in the next two weeks.
Gabrielle Bejarano (Host)
Fantastic. A website update to boot. Thanks for watching.
Michael Bond (CFO)
Thank you very much.