Clear Blue Technologies International Inc. (TSXV:CBLU)
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Earnings Call: Q1 2022

May 31, 2022

Operator

Welcome everyone that's starting to join us here. Sorry for the delay. We had some technical difficulties, but everything looks like it's working now. We'll just give it just a minute, and then we'll get started. Okay. I think we can probably get things moving now. Welcome everyone. Thank you very much for joining us this morning for the Q1 2022 earnings call. My name is Natalie, and with me today I have our CEO, Miriam Tuerk, and our CFO, Farrukh Anwar.

Just a few housekeeping notes before we get started. If you have some questions, we would love your questions, so please put those in the Q&A at the bottom of your screen and I'll track those, and then we can ask them at the end. If you have any technical difficulties throughout the presentation, please just send me a message through the chat and I will try to help you if I can. Today I'm going to hand things over to Miriam to get things started.

Miriam Tuerk
Co-founder and CEO, Clear Blue Technologies

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our Q1 2022 earnings call. Today we're going to provide you with our best ability and view of how Clear Blue is doing, how things look going forward in this current macroeconomic environment, and specifically to Clear Blue's business environment. Please always remember that these are forward-looking statements, and there is always some degree of uncertainty as relates to that information.

Today, as we frequently do, we're going to go over Clear Blue, its business and its markets. We're going to discuss our results for Q1, and then we're going to give some view in terms of our future outlook. Hello, Farrukh. Thank you for joining us once again. Farrukh is our CFO, as you may know, and he's been with the company now for about a year and a half, and we're very thrilled with the progress we've made from an operational perspective and a finance perspective by having him on board. Good morning, Farrukh.

Farrukh Anwar
CFO, Clear Blue Technologies

Good morning. Good morning, everyone.

Miriam Tuerk
Co-founder and CEO, Clear Blue Technologies

In terms of what Clear Blue is all about, we're all about small power. Most of the world focuses on something called microgrids. When you know, see a big solar plant on the side of the road or on top of a building, those projects are microgrids. Clear Blue's products are called nanogrids and Pico-Grids because they are focused on smaller power applications that are mostly industrial and commercial in size. They still support mission critical loads, and mission critical applications, but we are specifically focused in the nanogrid market, and that makes us very unique and different from almost every other clean tech solar company that you will see in the marketplace.

When you look at mission critical applications, whether it's solar streetlights or smart city infrastructure, whether it's telecom infrastructure from a satellite Wi-Fi microwave perspective, or whether it's internet access and connectivity for satellite Wi-Fi or for Internet of Things devices, power consumption has gone down. We're getting much more efficient at the power that these devices are using. However, they are still critical to our infrastructure. In fact, more and more today, as the world is much more electronic and dependent upon these technology efficiencies, they are becoming much more critical in the marketplace. The need that we are filling is the ability to deliver easier, lower cost power infrastructure.

We do that by basically eliminating dependence on the electricity grid, which is not that resilient anymore, even when you're looking at markets where they were previously perceived to be highly reliable, like North America. Today we have in Ottawa, Ontario and Peterborough, Ontario, still people who have no power. The concept of having one electrical grid that everything is connected to just doesn't fly anymore. Smart off-grid power provides that grid independence and grid resiliency. As with an electric vehicle that runs off of a battery and you can't add gas, solar off-grid systems have limited energy. Having the technology and the predictive analytics and the smarts to deliver reliable power with that off-grid solar system is a critical need of these applications, and that's what Clear Blue is all about.

We bring that power reliability and advanced management, and through that, we enable growth and expansion of our, of the world's smart infrastructure in a way that would not be possible without our technology. Clear Blue delivers smart off-grid wireless power. Basically what we do is we sell an off-grid power system. It's an entire electrical power system. It's got the energy generation in solar, it's got energy storage and batteries, and then it's got our proprietary technology, which is the brains, the electronics, power and control. Every site we deploy anywhere in the world, and we're in 37 countries and have almost 10,000 systems deployed, we manage and operate those systems. We're delivering energy as a service.

We don't just sell the hardware, we operate and manage these systems for our customers, and we do it to support mission critical devices. Our core technology is the brains of the system, and it consists of two key components. The first is we make a small box, we call it a controller. It's the size of a Kleenex box, and it has all of the power, energy generation, energy storage, and energy load powering capabilities of the system, coupled with basically edge computing and communications to make it a very smart device. Every one of those systems everywhere in the world today communicates wirelessly with our central integrated cloud platform. Through that cloud platform, both we and our customers, and we do it almost 98% of the time, we run the service for our customers, so we operate it.

We manage and operate that system for the customer. We use sophisticated data analytics and predictive data capabilities in order to assure energy performance and operation and make sure that everything works. What does that result in? This is a picture of a Clear Blue system on the right and a typical system. This is a newly installed system from last year, system on the left. You'll see a couple of big differences. The first is that the system on the left is highly complicated. It's not well designed for small power. You'll remember that chart that I showed you at the beginning where we are nano and pico. These systems are big, complicated, require a lot of manual intervention. You've got to switch the breakers and wire everything together.

We've taken all of that and we've put it in our smart off-grid controller, and you can see that this system has four of them. This little box here replaces everything that you see on the right-hand side and more. Through this device, we make it very simple and easy to install. No super knowledgeable trained technician required in order to install or operate the system. More especially, no in-person management. If you send a technician to this site, there's nothing he can do because all of the breakers, all of the remote switching, all of the configuration setups, and every battery has a different profile and every solar panel has a different profile and every load has a different profile. All of that configuration and setup is done remotely and electronically.

The bigger thing that is more interesting is that the system on the left requires 40% less power sources. We're talking less batteries and less solar than the system on the right. When you can eliminate the number of solar panels you need, and when you can eliminate the amount of battery energy storage that you need, you deliver a very compelling cost savings. The system on the left might be something like 20 solar panels and 8 batteries, and our system will be something like 12 solar panels and 3 batteries. In the current economic times, the ability through technology and innovation to deliver material cost savings in upfront CapEx and ongoing OpEx is something customers are keenly interested to do.

From our perspective, our business outlook and the opportunities and the demand in the marketplace have not changed because of what's been happening in the macro environment. The last point that I will make on this is that the system on the left, because it doesn't have predictive analytics, it doesn't have the ability to operate reliably off of a solar-only system. So instead of being a completely electric, you know, vehicle that's 100% electric like a Tesla, you know, the system on the left, even if it's solar, is going to have to be hybrid.

You're still going to need gas to supplement your solar because you can't predictably reliably manage power through all the energy changes and energy source changes that you have throughout the year in any part of the world. A little bit more about our intelligent power management. The software platform we use is called Illumience. A couple of the key things that we do are, first of all, energy and weather forecasting.

I f today we have a dark, cloudy, rainy day in the rainy season in Nigeria, or it's a snowstorm and a dark, rainy day in, you know, Boston, Massachusetts during, you know, November, December when it's very gray and dark, through our energy weather forecasting ability where we can see how much energy the system has, we can look at how much we think it's going to be able to produce over the next few days and marry that against the weather forecast for that area, we have the ability to manage through difficult periods. Maintenance, troubleshooting and remediation is something that we hope the customer never has to deal with, but it gives us hugely powerful tools. The ability to fix things, to troubleshoot things, to remotely diagnose things, and just repair it for our customer.

Oftentimes really avoiding a problem as opposed to fixing a problem. Battery life cycle management is all about how much energy we have. Will I make it through the next 4 days from a short-term reliability perspective? Will this system last 5 or 10 years, or is my battery going to die in 12 months and I've, blown my OpEx out the window? Then the last is unique to Clear Blue, our ability to forecast potential energy. If we have a customer, such as IHS Towers in Nigeria, who might want to turn their radios up and transmit more end-user service level from a higher telecom capability, they'll come to us and say, "Hey, how much energy is left in the tank?

Is there available energy for me to do more than what the system was actually designed for?" Clear Blue is different, number one, because we deliver the lowest TCO capability. The upfront cost of our system is 40% lower than a comparable solar off-grid system. Our ongoing operations is much lower as well. Sorry, I hit the button too quickly there. Apologies. Go back. Slide, do as I ask. Thank you very much. We have energy and weather forecasting with remote troubleshooting and tools. The last piece, which is very important, is we have a service team that actually operates and manages the systems for our customers. Through the value of that, Clear Blue has global brands that are our customers, and this list of customers is just something that we are very proud of.

For those of you who know me, you'll know that I've got a bit of experience under my belt, and to get this type of customer list is something that other companies wish for and work hard for. The reason we've been so successful is because we took a very different approach, and we have unique technology and have MTN and Orange and Meta, which is Facebook, and Boston Scientific and Route 347 New York State Department of Transportation, City of Toronto and Hamilton. All of these customers are our customers. They're global brands, and not only did we sell them the system, but we continue to operate and manage a service for them on a go-forward basis. That has resulted in strong global traction. We should update this graph. My apologies. We didn't update the number of units deployed.

We'll have that on the slide and the website when we get it updated and fixed today. Basically, one of our biggest and strongest competitive advantages is the historical data that we have. We've processed more than 10 billion cloud transactions. We've got more than 8.7 million days of operation and more than 9,600 units deployed in 37 countries around the world with hundreds of customers. This gives us a traction that no customer, no matter how big.

No competitor, no matter how big or small they may be, when and if they decide to launch a capability the same as what we would have or close to what we would have, we are ahead of them, and catching up to us is something that will be very difficult because it's the data and the history that makes us smarter and smarter and smarter. One of the things that we did after the quarter ended, and you've heard me talk about the satellite Wi-Fi business for the last year a bit, is we launched our new product, which is our Pico-Grid product. I want to spend a few minutes just telling you about that product so that you're aware, because we're very excited about what this product means to us for a number of reasons.

The first reason is that this is a huge market. The satellite global internet market was estimated to be almost $3 billion in 2020, and it's growing to reach about $18.6 billion by 2030. The reason for this, as you will all know, is that Elon Musk and Starlink and Viasat and Hughes and Amazon and Google, many, many, many companies are launching new satellite service offerings because the satellite technology has moved from very expensive and slow speeds to very inexpensive and high speeds. I have a new Starlink system at my cottage and in a remote area of northern Ontario, water accessed by a boat, and instantaneously I have faster internet services. I can stream systems. I can do 4 or 5 Zoom calls through that service with no problem at all.

The ability to do this in a cost-effective manner means that you can now get reliable telecom infrastructure to the 3 billion-plus people who do not have reliable internet access in the marketplace. However, most of the places, even my own house, which could have the hydro go out, don't have reliable power. Delivering a solar off-grid, very reliable managed power module together with those satellite, Wi-Fi or IoT applications is the critical requirement of the marketplace, and it needs to be simple and easy, ships in a box, a small 12-inch by 12-inch box, easy to install and managed for the customer, both the satellite service provider as well as the end customer. That's what Pico-Grid is all about.

We call it Pico-Grid because it's the next order of magnitude size down from Nano-Grid, and I'll show you an example. This is our co-founder, John Tuerk, our chief power officer at Viasat. You can see an image here of our Pico-Grid product. Our new Pico-Grid product is the first install pilot. The solar panel is actually not in the picture, it's on the ground. This is our new Pico-Grid product. This little box here replaces everything that is in this big box behind it. In this big box behind it, this cabinet, you've got a couple of batteries, you've got a charger, you've got a 48, 24-volt converter, you've got a 24-volt 12 converter, you've got a PoE injector. A bunch of technical equipment that is used to power three or four very low power devices.

What we built in Pico-Grid is all of that in a small integrated system. This little box here actually includes a battery, it's got lithium cells, and we've got the BMS capability. It includes all of the charge control capability, it's got all the remote management smarts, and capabilities, even more than what we have in all of our other products. It will be managed by Clear Blue and operated by Clear through our Illumience's cloud service with all the predictive energy forecasting and potential energy analysis that we do for all of our other customers. It can support three or four anywhere from one to four different small loads. A little Wi-Fi access point, a small IoT measuring device.

It is completely packaged in a single box that can ship anywhere in the world. We believe that there's going to be significant demand for this product. It's going to be a much more off-the-shelf packaged, self-service module than our NanoGrid, where every project needs a little bit of engineering and more hand-holding, and we see significant demand in the marketplace for it. What we are very excited about is the fact that we were able to announce Viasat as a first seed customer with this product. We've been working with them for a while, and as you would have saw in the last couple of weeks, we announced the first rollout of their Community Internet.

They have a new satellite service coming online called ViaSat-3. They plan on addressing that 3 billion people underserved internet market with ViaSat-3 and delivering something called Community Internet services, and those Community Internet services need the power product, and we've been working with them to develop Pico-Grid for that market. Now I'm going to move into our 2020 results, and turn the first piece over to Farrukh. Farrukh, can you take it from here and talk about our revenue?

Farrukh Anwar
CFO, Clear Blue Technologies

Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Miriam. That was pretty impressive. All right, revenues and guidance step change. Q1 2022 was a strong first quarter for Clear Blue. Historically, our Q1 has always been 6%-9% of annual revenues. Q1 2021, the previous comparable quarter, had a very large order, including a one-time tower order, which made it an outlier against the historical norm. When compared to our historical norms, Q1 2022 showed significant growth and would fall in line with the guidance for fiscal 2022 of about CAD 10 million in revenues. You can see the table that we have up on the screen. You can see Q1 and the annual revenues. Historically, Q1 was 6%-9%, and then you can see where we are at in 2022.

If you take out the outlier from 2021, we still are projecting, around CAD 10 million in revenues. Because of that Q1 2021 outlier, trailing four-quarter revenue was actually down compared to the previous period at CAD 5.9 million. Next slide, please. All right. Our sector and regional results. On a trailing four-quarter basis, our telecom vertical has grown significantly over the past few years, with CAD 4.58 million for the trailing four-quarter ended March 31, 2022.

While the revenue for this vertical is a solid growth metric, the negative variance is mainly due to a significant initial deployment of a customer in Africa in the comparative period. Excluding the impact of the initial deployment, revenues have improved in this vertical significantly. On a geographical basis, Middle East and Africa has performed extremely well, which mainly comprises of our telecom business and has moved in line with the movement in the telecom vertical. Next slide, please.

Miriam Tuerk
Co-founder and CEO, Clear Blue Technologies

Bookings are up about 32% from year-end. In 2020, we began reporting our bookings at the end of each quarter to provide as much information as we can to you, our investors. We define bookings as all of our future contracted Illumience and EaaS deferred revenue, as well as committed orders and contracts, projects where we have purchase orders and/or deposits, and of course, which are not included in revenues. At the end of Q1, our bookings were up 32% from year-end to a total of just over CAD 2 million, and CAD 1.5 million of that will be delivered in the next year, with the remaining thereafter.

Farrukh Anwar
CFO, Clear Blue Technologies

Awesome. Thank you, Miriam. Gross profit. Gross margin for the quarter posted a nice high margin of 41%. For the trailing four quarters, the margin was 34%. On a trailing four-quarter basis, the company has registered an improvement in gross margin from 27%-34%. The company has been making significant efforts in R&D, all of which have supported improvement in gross margins. However, as we know, there are significant supply chain and logistical challenges in the global market right now. Management expects that margins in the near term will be in the low thirties, growing to the mid-high thirties over time. Next slide, please. Operating expenses. During the previous 2021 comparative period, the company had COVID-19 related grants from the government, which contributed to a reduction in operating expenses.

As a result, expenses appear to have increased significantly over the previous period. Other notable increases for the quarter are due to amortization of intangibles related to the completed R&D projects and higher travel marketing related expenses that occurred in Q1 2022 as customers returned to more in-person meetings and conferences. When these COVID grants and R&D amortizations are normalized out, operating expenses actually increased by CAD 167,000 or 13% for the quarter. The increase in operating expenses is in line with increased business activity and related revenue growth for the quarter and trailing four quarters ended March 31, 2022. Company salaries, wages, and benefits have increased due to lower government COVID-19 subsidies, as well as higher headcount to manage increased business. Next slide, please. Adjusted EBITDA.

For Q1 2022, EBITDA loss remains consistent for the trailing four quarters at around CAD 3 million, while for the quarter the decrease in EBITDA is 104% due to lower gross profit resulting from lower sales as well as some increases in non-IFRS operating expenses have registered modest increases. You can see over here that although our revenue reduced for the quarter by 65%, but because of higher gross margin for the period, the gross profit actually just reduced by 32%. A s I said earlier, our operating expenses are slightly higher, so non-IFRS operating expenses slightly increased, so that's why we can see for the quarter 104% decrease in adjusted EBITDA.

Miriam Tuerk
Co-founder and CEO, Clear Blue Technologies

When you look at the trailing four quarters ended March thirty-first, you can see that the 2022 trailing four quarters is CAD 5.9 million versus CAD 7.2 million, and there's an 18% delta in the revenues of the periods. The non-IFRS adjusted EBITDA is only down 3%, again, because gross margin's gone from 27%-34% and expenses in the period are almost totally flat, only CAD 5.01 million versus. Actually they've gone down, CAD 5.01 million versus CAD 5.044 million. Generally what you can see is the profit generated from the revenue that we receive is going higher and higher.

As we move forward through the rest of this year, this year is expected to be more normalized in terms of revenue, as we're forecasting about guidance is around CAD 10 million. The improvements in margin and keeping OpEx relatively flat, if not down, it bodes well from an adjusted EBITDA perspective. In terms of the quarter, from a summary perspective, we feel we're positioned for another growth year. Our Q1 results are actually the second highest in history. They support our guidance of around CAD 10 million, and growth profit is very strong. It supports our gross margin guidance of being in the low 30s% for the next twelve months, even taking into consideration all the challenges we see in supply chain and logistics. We announced a number of partnerships in the quarter.

A new partnership with YachtCloud, an MOU with iSAT Africa for CAD 2 million, selected partner by GCES who we've been working with for a number of years now. In addition to that, we launched some new products for our Illumient business, and that was just to the end of March. From an outlook and guidance perspective going forward, we do see that 2020 is poised for growth. Subsequent to the end of the quarter, we announced Viasat, which was very exciting and key strategic partnership for us. We are going to be their solar smart off-grid provider for Community Internet. What we announced is the first rollout for their initiative in Nigeria. We launched our new Pico-Grid product. It's currently in field trial mode. We are hoping to be able to start shipping commercial versions of the product hopefully in Q4.

Might be in Q1, but around the end of the year. We had a Bloomberg interview a few weeks ago, and I was very honored to have been asked to join. Had only five or six minutes, but we had a very strong reaction in the stock market and I think that it just shows you the level of interest and support we have in the market and the fact that the current stock price is really reflected based upon the macroeconomic factors, not really company factors. Additional to that, we announced yesterday and previously we did, subsequent to the quarter closing, secure a small funding round to improve our cash position. We did it in two tranches, and it was a non-brokered private placement. Total proceeds were CAD 1.6 million.

In this difficult market, we were thrilled to have been able to get that support from our current investors and a number of new investors, and we thank each and every one of you for your continued support for Clear Blue. In terms of our outlook, we think 2022 is still going to be a solid quarter. We do see the strong macroeconomic headwinds, and we are being pragmatic to understand that there may be impacts to our business. Smart off-grid solar is a great market to be in during this market downturn. Our product delivers a significant and compelling cost savings to our customers. In these macro headwinds, the focus on that benefit is significant and is driving continued demand for Clear Blue in the market.

Our products support mission-critical infrastructure, telecom, cell communication, satellite, Wi-Fi, and public sector infrastructure projects, and these are all strong sectors that are continuing to move forward in the marketplace. Our forward four-quarter guidance continues to project growth with around CAD 10 million in revenue. We have good financial stability moving into Q2 with gross margins targeted 30%-35% and improved pro forma cash position. We have done a small right-sizing to reduce our ongoing expenses, and the net result of that is a reduction of about CAD 70,000 a month in our burn rate. We have more new products on the horizon for both Illumient as well as the official launch of our GA version of Pico-Grid.

We already have a number of early orders and field trials with key customers in 2022 for Pico-Grid with more demand there. We're actually having to tell the marketplace to hold while we complete the product. It's not the market demand is there and we just need to get the product finished. With that, I'd like to now open it to any questions. As Natalie said at the beginning, if you have any questions, please post them in the Q&A box, and we will attempt to answer them.

As always, you can reach out to me. Sophic is our IR partner. They've been working with us for almost a year now, and I think it provided us with great guidance on how to improve our communications to the marketplace. At any time, I would also encourage you to reach out to Nick if you have any conversations you'd like to have. Natalie, do we have many questions?

Operator

Hey, Miriam. Thank you. We've got a couple of questions here. The first one we've got is, "What does the future hold for Clear Blue with regards to M&A? Specifically, what types of companies would be complementary to Clear Blue product offerings?

Miriam Tuerk
Co-founder and CEO, Clear Blue Technologies

I've always said that, the decision for this company to go into the public markets gave us access to capital, and it would behoove us to use that. There is significant opportunity for us to, at the right time, with the right deal, and the right deal is a critical thing, to grow through M&A. Most of our competitors who may have a product in a new vertical or slightly different up the value chain or down the value chain do not have the ongoing, as-a-service business model and value proposition that we have. If and when we do an M&A transaction, there is significant value to be unlocked by bringing our technology, our value proposition, our business model to other businesses. We have been looking at M&A transactions for the last two years. I call it dating before you get married.

Obviously, we've not announced anything because nothing has worked out. We continue to look at M&A transactions. We generally look at M&A transactions which will allow us to expand into new markets, expand with potentially new products or new pieces to the supply chain. When you go back to that first slide I showed you where you said we're microgrid, and the other market is microgrid, and we're Nano-Grid and Pico-Grid. We're very focused in that market, but that's a huge market, and there's lots of opportunities, so there might be an acquisition that has some pieces of that that we don't have yet today.

It would allow us to move up and down the value chain in terms of the solutions we provide to our customers. There are a myriad of opportunities. We continue to look at some of them, without taking our eyes off of our own opportunities and our own growth path. We do expect at some point that we will have a successful transaction that we think is of significant accretive value to our shareholders. If and when that happens, we will be announcing it moving forward.

Operator

Thank you, Miriam. The next question is probably for Farrukh . It is, "How should we think about the company's cash position?

Farrukh Anwar
CFO, Clear Blue Technologies

Thank you, Natalie. Our cash position is much stronger today than it was at the end of Q1. Just wanted to give you a little bit of context. Since the COVID pandemic started, we've successfully grown our business with a cash balance ranging from around CAD 450, 000 to CAD 3.5 million. We've done this by tightly managing our cash cycle. Even during tough global economic challenges and supply chain management and shipping issues, we've still managed to tightly manage our cash. We've ended Q1 with around CAD 450, 000 of cash. Since then, we've successfully announced two tranches of a non-brokered financing for gross proceeds of around CAD 1.6 million, and we've also completed this financing during a very tough period, as you all know, in the markets, which speaks to the confidence investors have in our business.

Operator

Great. Thank you. Following up on that, what gives you confidence that you can navigate the current tough economic environment with your current balance sheet, without raising more capital in the market?

Farrukh Anwar
CFO, Clear Blue Technologies

Yeah, thanks. We've got a strong balance sheet. We've got around CAD 3.3 million of inventory, which, a majority of which is, like, finished goods. We've also recently undertaken an expense management, as Miriam mentioned, and a management exercise to reduce our expenses, our operating expenses, and that has helped us in reducing our cash burn. Employee headcount has been reduced through natural attrition and some restructuring. Management and a number of employees have accepted cash reduction compensation in exchange for equity.

Our innovation and R&D efforts, which have been built into our product, have also helped us in operating in saving operating costs. These activities will bring the company to a positive EBITDA at a lower revenue threshold than previously planned, which we had communicated in November 2021 to be around CAD 10 million-CAD 15 million, around CAD 15 million-CAD 20 million annual revenue level. With all of these measures, I think, we are poised to have a positive EBITDA at a lower revenue level. Thank you, Miriam. Natalie.

Operator

Thanks, Farrukh. Miriam, I think this one's probably for you. Can you help us understand your near-term revenue trajectory?

Miriam Tuerk
Co-founder and CEO, Clear Blue Technologies

In terms of the revenue forecast, I think first of all, we all have to take into consideration the current macro market pressures and what's going on in the market. Our sales funnel has not reduced. It's strengthened. We still have all activities with all of our customers moving forward. We're comfortable with revenue guidance of around CAD 10 million in revenue for the next four quarters. We had previously said we had expected 2022 revenues to exceed CAD 10 million.

With the current economic uncertainty, we still believe we have a good line of sight for around CAD 10 million in top line on a four-quarter basis. It's important to keep in mind we have not lost any projects, and it's just a function of customers are placing more smaller orders in this environment. They're being more cautious. We at management here are adjusting our outlook just based upon the current macro environment to make sure that we're communicating well to the marketplace.

Operator

Okay. Thank you. The next question here is, you previously indicated that a large order could be announced in Q1. Can you provide an update on that?

Miriam Tuerk
Co-founder and CEO, Clear Blue Technologies

Yes. We have not lost any projects to competitors, and none of our projects have gone away. That being said, we do see customers moving more cautiously. They're parceling out their projects in a smaller way and spending their capital by breaking them into smaller, more frequent phases as everyone begins to move more cautiously. We had previously expected a large order in Q1 of this year, and we now see that that order and others that we had in the funnel that had the potential to be very large have been broken down into smaller, multiple orders, some of which all still shipped in Q1 but just didn't result in us being able to announce, "Here's this large, you know, purchase order.

Operator

Okay. Thank you. Back to the financial side, how should we think about your margin profile?

Farrukh Anwar
CFO, Clear Blue Technologies

Thank you, Natalie. Trailing four-quarter gross margin has increased to 34%, up from a gross margin of 27% in 2021. We continue to expect that for the next few quarters, gross margin will be around 30%-35% range. In the medium to long term, management expects that the gross margin to be higher in around 33%-38% range. Gross margin, like our revenue, should be looked at on a trailing four-quarter basis. Since we have reduced our cost structure and cash burn, we expect a lower level of revenue can bring us to EBITDA breakeven compared to the CAD 15 million-CAD 20 million, as I said, revenue level.

We have, you know, we've had provided to the investors around CAD 15-22 million guidance in the past, but, you know, we are continuously trying to, you know, reduce our costs and expenses and reduce our cash burn. That's why I think, you know, with this, it's going to help and bring us to a positive EBITDA sooner.

Operator

Thanks, Farrukh. Okay. If anyone else has any additional questions, you can put them in the Q&A now, or you can follow up with Miriam or Sophic Capital later. I'm not seeing any additional questions come in. I think with that, we will start to wrap things up here. Thank you very much, everyone who joined us today. The recording and the presentation will be available on the website later today. Thank you, Miriam, thank you, Farrukh, for providing some great insight on Clear Blue's future.

Miriam Tuerk
Co-founder and CEO, Clear Blue Technologies

Thanks, everybody.

Farrukh Anwar
CFO, Clear Blue Technologies

Thank you, everyone.

Operator

The recording has stopped.

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