Good morning, everybody, and welcome to an update on poLight related to the right issue process. Yes, my name is Øyvind Isaksen. I'm the CEO. Together with me in this webcast is also the CFO, Alf Henning Bekkevik, and also Joachim Hanche-Olsen from Pareto, who has kind of heading the process we have done together with Pareto. For today, the main purpose is basically to give you opportunities to ask us questions related to the process. As an introduction, I will go through highlights on poLight. In case there are new ones, I will quickly introduce poLight. I will go through the focusing on the market, status and some outlook statements.
Joachim Hanche-Olsen from Pareto will go through one slide about that, the right issue process in itself. In the end, we're gonna facilitate a Q&A session. Please use the team's chat function to ask a question. Joachim will read the questions, and then we will distribute who is answering between us three. Good. Yeah. poLight. You may have seen this many, many times before, but in case, as I said, there are new people participating. poLight, in poLight in one page, global player in tunable optics. We are working in many different application areas. Has been around since 2005, developed state-of-the-art tunable optics. We have a strong IP.
We are around 40 employees, extremely distributed, focusing on being where there are competence and being where we have customer and partners. Headquarter in Horten, outside Oslo, and employees in Finland, France, U.K., U.S., China, Taiwan, and Philippines. Been listed since 2018, 1st of October. If you're gonna describe poLight's technology in with 4 attributes, you would say extremely fast, high speed, realize very compact solutions, no pumping effects, meaning constant field of view in technical terms, and very, very low power consumption, being super important for many applications. I like to compare the TLens and the poLight technology to function in the human eye. The existing product we have launched to market for some time ago is called TLens, a tunable lens.
It's basically replicating the function of the human eye. Human eye consist of a lens and eye muscles. Eye muscles is squeezing, shaping the lens, changing the focus from you reading a book to focusing on infinity. We're doing exactly the same. Our lens material is a polymer which we produced in Horten and have developed over 15 years. And our eye muscles we produced as STMicro, which is basically a membrane, which when we put voltage on that membrane, bends. And if you see on the top left corner, that bending is then shaping the polymer which is underneath that membrane, meaning exactly as our eye is functioning. Changing a high voltage on the membrane, meaning focus in close, no voltage on the membrane, focusing infinity.
And this is typically a technology which is used to realize an autofocus function in a fixed-focus camera. Normally, when you do focusing on a camera, you are moving the whole lens stack up and down. A camera typically comprises many, many different lenses, like five, six, seven lenses, which is then being moved up and down in the conventional way of changing focus. TLens is a way of not doing that. It's basically adding a small lens, which we call tunable lens, which is taking care of all the focusing needed for that camera, meaning less complexity, much more compact, and significantly higher speed and other attributes, not talk about power consumption. You can see, if you look at the top right corner, there's a picture of a pen, and you can see then the TLens.
There are many TLens around that pen. You can see the size of this component is really, really compact. Our technology likes to go small, and it's a perfect match for small compact cameras. When it comes to the supply chain, we are basically fabless, but we do have some manufacturing activity in headquarter, and that is producing the polymer, the lens material. That's basically what we do. And also in headquarter, we have the ability to basically do what we do around the world, except wafers, from an assembly perspective, but at much, much lower volumes, more like sampling volumes. The polymer is produced. 1 liter polymer is, say, 1 million lenses, it's very scalable. We tend to prefer to do that ourself.
It's a relatively easy setup and very scalable. We don't have to kind of distribute the recipe of that polymer, which is a key component in our product. That's the lens. The eye muscles, our eye muscles is produced by STMicro after many, many years of development and qualification. We have now qualified those wafers. It comes out from the factory in Italy, an 8-inch dish wafer. That the 8-inch wafer comprises more or less, say 2,000 +, depending on which product we're talking about, eye muscles. These are being sent to our assembly partner in Asia, which is then assembling the TLens, which is comprising a back window, the membrane, which can be bending, and the polymer.
We sell the TLens, like a bare TLens with no packaging around, and we sell it also as a package device, easier to handle. For each TLens we sell, we also sell a custom-made ASIC to which is basically supplying the voltage to the membrane. Okay? We do sell to camera module supplier. Camera module supplier will then use our TLens in different ways. There are two examples being illustrated in the center bottom part of the drawing. It's either making TLens on top of a fixed-focusing camera, fixed-focus camera, or it's taking TLens inside the lens stack. That will enable more flexibility when it comes to sensor format. It will also enable more flexibility when it comes to size. That is, I would say, the most advanced way of doing it.
Even though we, our customer typically is the camera module supplier, we engage heavily in dialogue with OEMs, meaning the company owning the end product which the customer is using. Our job in that respect is to kind of convince the OEMs that this is a great technology, then they will kind of motivate the camera module supplier to use TLens in their solutions. As I said in the beginning, poLight's products and technology is well suited for many applications. Consumer side, on the left side, illustrated by smartphone, smartwatches, webcams, definitely a very interesting market. Augmented reality, meaning smart glasses, is definitely a sweet spot for our technology. I will come back to talk a little bit more on cases.
Industrial, as an example, barcode reading, also a super good area for our technology. Those three are today the main focus for the company. We do believe, and not only we believe, but the market believes, that augmented reality, which today is very much focused on products on the market today are very enterprise-focused. We another believe that this is a, an area which also will add to the, I would say, the consumer side. Adding, like, to the left picture, also glasses sooner or later. As you may, many of you know, we are already involved in several proof of concepts in the consumer side of AR. Those are the three, I would say, key areas. We have customer wins in all these segments.
What we also do see step by step in maturing more is the markets related to medical and also markets related to automotive. Those two markets is I would say most mature is the medical. Step by step showing us new opportunities, but also relatively recently we are actually engaging with I would say, big Tier 1 companies in preparing ourself for the automotive market. You know, a car have so many cameras both inside, outside, and this is a huge mega trend also. Not many years ago, this slide was empty. If you start on the left side, we have now design win in smartphone finally.
We have design win in smartwatches, with smartwatch phone actually, and webcam. That is the consumer side of our design wins. We then have two declared design wins on enterprise AR market, Magic Leap, Magic Leap 2, and then LLVISION, Leion Pro, which was recently announced. Then we have quite a few on the industrial side, like the Honeywell, the Superlead, the HIKROBOT, Seuic, and Teledyne, which are all, I would say, important design wins in the industrial segment, in this case represented by barcode/QR reading for supply chain logistic and also for assembly line machine vision application. Recently back from China, and we were invited to participate in a fantastic event in for Meizu.
Meizu have a huge event in Shanghai. They presented their three smartphones all related to Meizu 20. They have Meizu 20, Meizu 20 Pro, and Meizu 20 Infinity. Infinity took a lot of the or should I say, time during this event. It's the flagship phone. You can see that person on the presenting that phone on the right, top right, in my, the picture there. He's talking about the specs of the phone. This was, we just captured that picture during his presentation. It was, I have to say, a very special day for us.
When you saw that this presentation, it was a huge, several hundred people in this huge Mercedes site in Singapore... no, in Shanghai. They say that this is powered by poLight. Which was a fantastic experience, to be honest. He's talking about no pumping, he's talking about millisecond focus speed. This is what we also, when we present our technology, we emphasize on that there is no moving parts, there is no pumping, there's constant field of view, and also the speed. They kind of emphasize that. This is a selfie camera. It is, they claim, the most compact selfie camera, giving instant and smooth out of focus user experience. It's actually a fairly good spec of the camera.
If you would visit us one day, you can see the camera. It's extremely impressive small. It's 32 MP. So it's really compact. In this case, as you can see from the bottom right drawing, it's you can see that the top of the camera is the smallest part. You can see the nose of the camera is very small, which means that the impact on the screen is very limited, which is a good important point. The TLens is kind of hidden in between those two lens stacks, the top lens and the bottom lens stack. The TLens is kind of in between there. We have already completed the delivering of our first PO.
There are definitely uncertainty related to the volume, but normally these kind of flagship smartphone, which is kind of, they are using as kind of, "Look what we can do. Look how clever we are." Those type of smartphone typically are the low volume ones. We don't know, and they don't know how it will sell. Highly, this phone is highly integrated with the car, which they also launched the same die, same day, and operating system. This is gonna be interesting to see the response. For us, it's a fantastic opportunity, of course. It has been launched the 30th of March. When it will be available in the market, they haven't told, so we just need to monitor.
The only thing they've told us is relatively soon, whatever that means. AR, we have established an impressive position in the, I would say, in the mega trend. It's a big word, but if you look at where the innovation is happening these days for consumer side, it's very much related to this space. In a way, if you look at the smartphone side, it's more like all about, well, mostly about cost reduction. Also the OEMs in the smartphone side are, they do today see challenges in sales volumes. Cost smartphone is of course important, but it is also an area where the innovation is less, and the innovation I feel is more and more focusing towards more other devices such as AR when it comes to consumer.
Having a position in AR at the early stage is extremely important as we see it. Why TLens is so important is kind of the normal, I would say, attributes we have been talking a lot about. Compactness, low power consumption, extremely good speed, constant field of view. Very much important here, when you have a glasses on your head and you start moving your head, there needs to be no gravity impact, where we do not have any gravity impact. Also by design, heating in those glasses is an issue, so the temperature will change a lot during use. Then the actually by design, you can say the TLens technology actually do, which compensate for that, for that temperature effect on other components in the system.
In a way, by design, we are offering athermalization. In a way, super good fit. Different use cases as listed there. Today, AR, as I said, is enterprise driven. We are also involved in several cases, which is our consumer focus, typically released in more like 2026, 2025, I don't know, 2027, around there is what we are hearing from our customer, is that they are targeting to go bigger in the consumer side. This is from a picture from Las Vegas this year. Which was I would say a fantastic event for poLight.
We were having a lot of meetings and demonstrations and we could walk around in CES and see our product being used in different products, which is after so many years of fighting in this ecosystem is a tremendous feeling and achievement. Magic Leap was teared down by a company called Yole and this is why it was done public not so many months ago that Magic Leap 2 camera, which is if you look at the red arrow, is the upper camera, upper right camera, is using TLens. You can see they have teared it down. They have dismantled the camera module. They found a poLight logo.
Yes, it is a poLight product in Magic Leap. Magic Leap is a highly profiled company in the U.S. There's been massive investment in Magic Leap and is currently shipping with TLens inside. We have bought a few demos, and it's a quite an impressive glasses, I have to say. I also like the statement from Yole, on the left, bottom left side. "The use of this TLens device is key for functionalities in AR/VR headsets," comments the CEO in Yole System+. It provides a strong added value for new wave of AR/VR headset system. This is what we feel we are in a unique position in what everybody believes is the next big thing, and we shouldn't underestimate what this can mean for the company.
It's not gonna happen tomorrow from a financial impact perspective, but it's really about future-proofing the company. Magic Leap. Yes. Vuzix. Yes. Also have confirmed that they are planning to use TLens. Actually, in this case, if you look at the picture on the bottom right, you can see two TLenses being used in the Vuzix Shield. Expected to be launched in mid this year, they say. They're already shipping to development partners. We have been able to get Vuzix Shield glasses, so if you happen to be around, you could pop in and see them. We also have confirmation from XVisio about using TLens.
Our understanding is that XVisio had two versions, one Pro version and one non-Pro version, and due to customer feedback, it seems like they are converting the non-Pro version to also using TLens due to customer feedback over the last few months. LLVISION, this is also their claim will, gonna be launched sometime this year. The indication we have is mid this year. Whereas LLVISION I just met LLVISION in China. Super interesting company, very focused on the glasses. You can see they are using TLens on the camera on the center of the glasses. You can see what they say. 4th of April 2023, LLVISION confirmed releasing enterprise augmented reality glasses using TLens.
We were so lucky we got a statement from the Co-founder, Allan Liang, saying, "TLens has a millisecond level response time." What we typically promote with our technology. "It enables fast auto-focusing and remote video streaming experience for AR devices that need to move quickly." You know, you're wearing the glasses, you're in the factory or you're other, you move and that you need to quickly be able to change focus when people are moving and shooting at different things. This is also, they claim, very important for them to have a proper result from the AI, artificial intelligence algorithms. Also emphasizing the low power consumption, which is key for these kind of devices.
They say so far, which was a little bit surprising for us when we were there, they have already delivered the glasses to customer like TBEA, which is an advanced energy device manufacturer, SANY Group, a construction machine manufacturer, Airline Company, and Agili8, which is an AR solution company for healthcare in Australia. Already have a quite a nice footprint. Of course, most nicely also, they see us as a strategic partner and want to strengthen the cooperation with poLight going forward for different type of application. Quite impressive glasses, I would say. Really encouraging to see how far they've moved so quickly. I would say. LLVISION already announced, Magic Leap already announced as design wins.
XVisio on the right side, XVisio on the left side here, is to be announced as design wins. They're already announced as design-ins. Healthcare. Yes, as I said, even though I would say that it's not today as a part of the... You know, we have consumer, we have AR, we have industrial. Those are the three key areas. Healthcare is definitely a candidate for us as a fourth segment. It will take time to develop this market, but we do expect this year that we will have our first commercial design win. It's related to many as you know, a disposable laparoscope.
You can see the laparoscope, on the right side, the black tip there, which can be bended, and this seems to be, and claimed to be, the first disposable laparoscope with AF function, and they use TLens. It's a huge, strategic design win for us. We have seen many, many other companies wanting to start activity related to using TLens, in, in similar application. This company I mentioned is a relatively small company in the U.S., but they seem to be, having a, a good traction lately. They also have financed themself, in a very good way, so they are ready to ramp. It's gonna be exciting to see, when they release, how the uptake will be.
I don't expect it to be a big uptake in, or a big volume for us in the short future, medium future even, but I do expect it to be a market segment which we can play a huge role. We are also involved, as you know, with other customers who's planning also to use it in high-end devices for endoscope. This healthcare activity in poLight, that started basically with the very, very well-renovated research group in Norway, at the Kavli Institute in Trondheim, the mouses team, who developed a system for imaging the brain activity of mouses.
When the mouse is being kind of exposed to different external happenings, they could kind of see the response on the brain of the mouse. They are actually using several TLens stacked to image what's happening in the brain. That has created a lot of press. It's created a lot of articles where we are mentioned. It has created a lot of activity with similar institute as Kavli to doing the same. As I said many times, it's, even though it's a high-value kind of revenue for us, it's will never scale the company, but it is a part of building our brand and building our position in the greater healthcare area.
I think, even though today is small, even though no design wins, but I expect the first design wins to happen this year. Last slide from me. Outlook statement. Definitely growing pipeline in several markets. We are super busy as team. Luckily, we have a dedication in the organization which is impressive. After so many years of hard work, there are still a lot of enthusiasm and energy to make things happen. Smartphone design win, of course, is a fantastic happening for us. We, it's a key, it's a milestone and a key reference and not only for smartphone but for general speaking.
Everybody understand if you are selected with a hardware, new hardware technology component in a smartphone high-end case, that is in itself a reference, which should not be underestimated for all market segments. Time will show. We will do road show and demos, hopefully with the purpose-made kind of applications which we can benefit from the use of TLens when the phone is available and hopefully that will mean that other phone makers will also like to take the jump and move with this unique technology. As I said, AR, fantastic position. It's not gonna be walk in the park. We're already there with many players, there are new design wins expected this year, not only AR, also potentially on the VR side. Medical opportunity, just talked about it.
Do expect this year to be the kickoff. Barcode reading, design wins expected this year also. Even though small cases, they are important. Building our position there. I do expect more design wins in barcode this year also. Automotive, people are telling us that today the cameras in the car industry are basically with no focusing capability. They're telling us that sooner or later, there will be a need for autofocus technology in the car, both outside camera and in-cabin camera, inside-the-car camera. What they also telling us is that there are different reason why they need autofocus. One reason is that they are, the resolution is increasing in the camera, that will in itself force AF to be needed. They would like to move from glass lenses to plastic lenses.
There are drivers pointing in direction Describing the need. Why should we have a position in that industry? The fact that the incumbent technology in making them to focus is moving a lens stack back and forth, many claim that that is really a no-go in this kind of environment. Driving car, vibrations, they really would like to look at something else. One of the something else could be a TLens. It's gonna be a extremely tough market to penetrate, we are, I would say, receiving incoming calls wanting to engage with us, we have actually now ongoing POCs with the Tier 1 players in this area.
Don't expect anything kind of great news flow in the next, say, what should I say? A few years, because it will take many years to develop this. I'm mentioning it 'cause again, it's a part of future-proofing the company. You know, today the consumer is very concentrated around smartphone and other things, but like I said, in AR, you know, the volumes in cameras or in the car industry is huge. We are starting to build, I feel, and showing that, yes, smartphone is important, consumer is important, today's consumer is important, but we are involved in many other segments which will facilitate a successful case. It's not walk in the park, but there are super good opportunities. Joachim ?
Very good. Thank you, Øyvind. I guess this now moves into a brief call it overview on where we are in the rights issue process. As you have probably seen from the announcements on Newsweb over the last weeks, poLight is now running a NOK 135 million rights issue. This rights issue has been fully underwritten, meaning that the company will raise its NOK 135 million. The subscription period has already started. Shareholders that was registered in VPS as of 13 April was given preferential rights to subscribe for shares in the rights issue.
The subscription rights that the shareholders have been given are tradable, meaning that you can buy and sell them on the Oslo Stock Exchange, and they are listed under the ticker PLTT. Each subscription right gives the right to subscribe for and be allocated one share at the subscription price, and the subscription price has been set to NOK 10.45 per share. As long as the market price of poLight's shares is above NOK 10.45, these subscription rights will hold financial value. As referenced, the closing price as of yesterday, 19 April, was NOK 13.68 per share.
You know, as a shareholder and in order to capture this value, you must either, you know, alternative one, make use of the subscription rights by subscribing for new shares, and the deadline for the subscription period is the 28th of April at 4:30. Alternatively, you could also sell the subscription rights that you do not want to use for subscription. The trading of subscription rights will stop on Monday, at close of the stock exchange, 16:30. That's the latest you can buy or sell subscription rights. It is possible to subscribe for a higher number of shares than the number of subscription rights that you have. It is also possible to subscribe for a lower number of shares than the number of subscription rights that you have.
If you do that, of course, we would encourage you to sell the subscription rights that you do not want to use for subscription. Of course, also an opportunity for new investors looking to participate in the rights issue. The way for new investors to participate is to purchase subscription rights, again, with the ticker PLTT, and subscribe, or alternatively oversubscribe according to the purchased subscription rights. In order to subscribe in the right system, and there is more information about this in the links that you see here on Pareto's webpage and poLight's webpage. In order to subscribe, you can either use the VPS online subscription system, and that is an easy way to do it if you're a Norwegian resident.
Alternatively, you can fill in a subscription form and submit this to Pareto. I think, Øyvind, that's about it, about what we wanted to say about the rights issue and the process and where we are. Keep in mind these deadlines, you know, the subscription period ending on the 28th of April and the latest you can sell subscription rights, it's on the 24th of April. I think that's about it. With that, I think we skip to the Q&A. I think, given that I will just read out the questions, and you could sort of address them as we go along. If there are questions that are better suited for me to answer, I will address those directly.
Yeah.
I think the first question that we could take is what is the reason that the TLens only appears on the high-end phone and not not in the other products that were announced in the series?
Yeah. It's a good question. We have addressed that a few times also, during other quarter presentation. The quick answer is that, typically when you, when companies start with a new technology, they will always start with a certain model, and typically a model which is, can take the cost because new technology typically costs more. They also would like to use it in a model which they expect to be a relatively low volume. This is a very classical way of introducing new technology. That's the reason.
Very good. Thank you. The second question here: Can we expect another smartphone release with TLens this year? What is the status on the American smartphone OEM person there?
I think we give a general update on our Q1, 11th of May. I think, please wait. We give a, yeah, give an update on all market segments at that fine time.
Very good. There's one more question. In the prospectus, poLight was not aware of any significant changes in trends in production, sales, and inventory and costs and selling prices that affects the business at the time of the release of the prospectus. The question is sort of are there any known changes in these trends now, any sort of big stuff since the release of the prospectus?
No. No.
Yeah. Another question here, it relates to the fact that Investinor and Industrifonden have agreed not to sell subscription rights at a price that is lower than NOK 4.48. The question is, do you have any information about if they will sell at a price above that price, or are there any agreements with the underwriting consortium that the subscription rights will go to the underwriting consortium? I think I can address this. I think firstly, you know, we can speculate about what shareholders will do. I won't comment on the first part of this question.
The second part, there are no specific mechanisms in the underwriting agreements that sort of transfers these subscription rights to the underwriters that there are no such mechanisms. Yeah, I think basically that's about it on the questions. I will see there are popped up some more questions here. There's a question here: How is your financial outlook? It's a quite broad question. Do you have any sort of broad look on-
We have said I would like to refer to what we said before, meaning that 2025, we were hoping and targeting to be profitable. This is highly dependent on the ramp on the smartphone. But over and above that, I would like to kind of more comment on this outlook statements on our quarterly presentation 11th of May.
Very good. There is one question here. If you have three accounts that holds poLight stocks and want to buy, you want to buy shares, do you need to then buy three times through the VPS, or is it possible to do it in one go? Not quite sure, to be honest, but presumably you need to do it three times. I would check that with your broker.
Good.
I think that's about it.
That's about it.
Any questions?
Thank you, Joachim, for helping us. This has been a long process and a complex process, so good to have a specialist advice from Pareto Securities. Thanks everybody for joining the webcast. You know, if there's any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We will try to help you as good as possible. Hope to see you in our quarterly presentation in Hotel Continental 11th of May in Oslo. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.