Good morning, everyone. Hello, my name is Pardeep Sangha, Head of Investor Relations at INEO Tech Corp. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today, and welcome to INEO's Q1 2024 financial results investor webinar. Joining me, joining me on the call today are Greg Watkin, Chairman, President, and Founder of INEO, and Kyle Hall, the company's CEO. This call is being recorded. We will be having a question and answer session at the end of the call. You can submit your questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. Please note, portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws. Risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors are outlined in our management discussion and analysis.
We provide forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information on management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. We don't undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any changes in our expectations or any events, change in events, conditions, assumptions, circumstances on which any such statement is based, except if required by law. With that, let me turn the call over to Greg Watkin, Chairman and Founder of INEO. Greg?
Thank you, Pardeep. Good day, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this call. For anyone that's been on our previous calls, you've heard this message before. For those of you that are joining the call for the first time, I must mention that unfortunately, we are not able to use the names of certain retail chains that we're working with due to non-promotion clauses in the agreements with these retailers. We'd obviously prefer to share the names of these companies that we're working with, but regrettably, we're not able to. For the benefit of our shareholders and analysts and potential new investors on the call today, we'll do our best to provide plenty of commentary on the nature of the rollouts without actually naming the retail chains. INEO continues to actively work with large retailers and has a growing pipeline of opportunities.
Additionally, the company has a combination of patented intellectual property and closely held trade secrets that provide strong protection for our business. INEO is a leading innovator in retail media systems, and to the best of our knowledge, there's no other company that provides a retail loss prevention system integrated with an in-store retail media network. On today's call, I will be providing some general commentary on INEO's progress during Q1 before handing the call over to Kyle Hall, our CEO, who will then discuss the company's quarterly financial results, recent business highlights, and our business outlook for the remainder of 2024. Much of our energy for Q1 was dedicated to the negotiation of updated commercial agreements with our large retail and regional liquor store network customers.
These new contracts were the first domino in the positioning of the company as a leader in the retail media space. With these updated agreements, the company will be able to develop our retail media and analytics sales. For context, these contracts with just our current customers represent an advertising inventory of more than 270 million customers and 22 billion advertising impressions per year at the completion of the build-out of our network. More importantly, we have a customer pipeline that we believe can reasonably increase the advertising inventory to more than 100 billion impressions per year within the next three years, with a reach of almost 900 million users. Our expectation is that these contracts will put the company on a path to be the leader in retail media networks and analytics and provide positive cash flow much sooner.
While this call is primarily to review our accomplishments in Q1, I want to bring you all up to date on our global distribution partnership with Prosegur. Subsequent to the end of Q1, we received and completed a major order from Prosegur to supply systems to one of their customers in Bogotá, Colombia. This was a good exercise to demonstrate our ability to scale the business as we produced, tested, and shipped 10 pallet loads of systems over a two-week period. This shipment represented just a few stores out of the hundreds of stores for this chain, and we look forward to the continued expansion of this network in partnership with Prosegur. This is a major step forward in the relationship between Prosegur and INEO as they expand their presence in Latin America.
For those of you that are interested, as I'm sure you all are, the shipment represented a sale of systems to Prosegur, and more importantly, sets us on a path for recurring SaaS revenues as we continue to deliver for this customer. With that, I'd like to turn it over to our CEO, Kyle Hall, who will discuss some key financial highlights.
Great. Thanks, Greg. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm just gonna go through the financials right now and just give you just a quick readout of the numbers, and then I'll get into a little bit more of a discussion. So for Q1 of 2024, so at the start of our fiscal year, our results are as follows: We generated CAD 365,931 of revenue for the three months ended September 30, 2023, compared to revenue of CAD 416,086 for the three months ended September 30, 2022. The change in revenue was consistent with what we saw last quarter. It really is just a function of the decision that we made just to focus on our strategic imperatives to expanding the INEO Media Network.
As we did that, and we worked to sign media partners and focus on our core, contracts that we had to get done, we intentionally de-emphasized the sale of the loss prevention products, which were the bulk of the revenue, over the last couple of years as we move into becoming a media company and selling advertising. INEO generated gross profit for the three months, ended September 30, 2023, of CAD 143,735, as compared to the gross profit of CAD 207,646 for the quarter ending September 30, 2022.
And you achieved gross margin percentage of 39.3% for the three months ended September 30, 2023, compared to a gross margin percentage of 49.9% for the quarter ended September 30, 2022. Net loss for the three months ended September 30, 2023, was CAD 695,623, or CAD 0.01 per share, compared to a net loss of CAD 597,178, or CAD 0.01 per share for the three months ended September 30, 2022. Adjusted EBITDA loss for the three months ended September 30, 2023, was CAD 551,027, compared to adjusted EBITDA loss of CAD 512,286 for the three months ended September 30, 2022.
As at September 30, 2023, the company had 76,143,709 shares issued and outstanding. That's the formal numbers to read out, and now I'll go into some of the business highlights. This will be a bit of a repetition for people who've been on the last calls. You know, we did a Q4 call about four weeks ago, but there are a couple of things here significant enough to repeat, and just for a couple of new faces in the crowd, want to just re-highlight some of this. In the last month or so, we announced ORCA, which is a major initiative that we have within our welcoming system, within the loss prevention side of the business. And ORCA stands for Organized Retail Crime Alerts.
If anybody's paying attention to what's going on in the retail market right now, you see a lot of, I guess, articles and companies banter, and it's appearing in earnings calls of all the major retailers about what's happening within the loss, the shrink market, they call it. Which is loss, you know, theft, shoplifting, and organized retail crime, especially taking a bite out of earnings of large retailers. It's becoming more and more of a problem with certain jurisdictions not prosecuting shoplifting as much anymore or not applying the efforts of the law proportionately for helping retailers to combat this. And so INEO's created technology to help the retailer. This has been driven by some of our customers actually asking for this.
And we're in a really interesting position here because we have the welcoming systems at the front door. We have our patented technology at the front door of the store. We know when the alarms are going off. We know when theft is happening, when theft is leaving the store. And so we are able to have a finite point in time, video capture of those events that the welcoming system does, and we are able to apply AI to those events and give the retailer much more knowledge and much more data on what's going on in the store, and giving them exceptional reporting, and lookup reporting that we can give them within their groups of stores, and larger areas of stores, so that they can actually get ahead of some of this organized retail crime.
We announced this, and we had a surge of wonderful feedback of calls from retailers that we're not even doing business with yet that are interested in our technology in this area. So one area we want to stress on it is we're not using facial recognition. We're doing pattern development, we're applying AI to these video clips that we have, and we're able to do that in a way that we don't have to store biometric profiles. And so we're quite a ways ahead of some of the concerns on the privacy side. And we'll have more about this in the future as we push the product out more mainstream.
But it's been a great thing for us so far, in the short time that we've had it out into the market. The next thing I wanted to talk about was just Cencosud again. You know, Greg mentioned it, you know, 59 systems shipped for 4 stores for Cencosud. And you know, emphasize what Greg said on it is, we sold these systems. We sold these systems for cash, and we're still getting a monthly fee out of them. So it's playing right to our model on where we wanna be and how we wanna operate going forward. Getting that SaaS fee, predictable revenue, secure revenue coming from the systems out in the field.
For those who are wondering how, you know, our pipeline is playing out, the sales pipeline going forward, Cencosud is a good example of what we're seeing and what we expect to happen within our pipeline. We installed three pilot systems with Cencosud Jumbo in mid-2022, so about a year ago. A year later, we have the results from that. We expect that we can shorten that sales cycle. You know, having large customers have our systems deployed, already having proven out the capabilities on the loss prevention side and getting into the media side and the retail media exploding right now. We think we can shorten that sales cycle, and we can move these further along.
But we have a lot of pilots that we installed in late 2022 and early 2023, that will now be coming up on that year mark, and we feel really good about some of these moving into full contracts. And so the most significant milestone that we've had over the last year is actually the new contracts. And again, Greg mentioned them at the start, and we talked a lot about these on the last call. And we really want to just reemphasize that this is the future of the company right here. You know, signing contracts with large customers, very large retailers, for five and six years, getting that long-term revenue runway that we need out of them, tying into our security for our revenue sources on the media side, essential to going forward.
And the landscape with what's happened in retail media, we're in a really good spot now with what we've done with these. You know, the right to deploy the additional screens elsewhere in the store so that we're not just the entrance, that we can sell the whole dwell time of the time the customer's in the store, that everywhere they are in the store, they see one of our screens. Just crucial to what we're, what our plan is and our movement is going forward. And then being the exclusive provider on those screens, not having competition in the store, selling against us, knocking down the cost per thousand that we sell the advertising for. And we're not like a billboard on the edge of the highway where there's five other billboards around it.
When we're in the store, we own all that space in the store, and we own all those customers. Greg mentioned it, 270 million annually, 22 billion impressions, just with what we've already got signed today. That's not even projecting for the new customers that we're gonna have. So it, you know, it's our job now to monetize that, and that's where we're moving to. But getting the exclusive right, it was fundamental. The right to assign the ownership of the hardware and the right to assign the ownership of selling the advertising, key for us to be able to bring on a partner, a media partner. We are not, in a fundamental sense, a media sales company. We're not the ones that have the infrastructure out there selling the advertising.
We need a partner to do that, and that's what we've been working hard on, and it's taking a little bit longer to get to the exact place we wanna be on it. We have a lot of choice still on what we wanna do in this area. We're gonna do the right deal. We're also... We're fundamentally aware that, you know, sometimes you have to take the deal at hand, but we're not at that point yet. We know we have to get the right deal and the right person, the right partner on this. And so, you know, we're gonna do it, and we're gonna have the right media company aligned with us. Media companies are used to this model. They pay to put signage out there. They pay to then deploy the signage.
They then pay and have teams to sell it, and they get their money back over time. It works very well with what we've done here, with the model that we set up. We're a technology solution that goes into the retailer, that then expands into a retail media solution. So, we're in really good shape with where we wanna be. You know, the updated contract structure is gonna allow us to, you know, really pair the demand that we have from the retailers for the in-store welcoming system, with the demand that we're seeing in the retail media market from the advertising area. Our goal, really, in the end, is to take this great technology that we have, deploy it in the stores with a partner, and get paid a SaaS fee.
That's where we want to be, and that's where we'll end up. Go to the next slide. Let's talk about the objectives for the year. These have not changed from the last call. You know, we're gonna increase our revenue by deploying more systems through our direct sales initiatives that we have with retailers out in the field. Getting better partnerships and more partnerships out there with the retailers. Two, fundamentally working with our partner, Prosegur, and who we're seeing good progress with right now. Cencosud is just the first one to drop. And rolling out more stores with them under a model that is sustainable for us, where funding is not all coming from us to put the systems in, and get to fully contract customer rollouts with their partners.
And then third, working with the media partners, leveraging our updated contracts to really monetize these, optimize them, get them into full maturity, revenue-generating mode, and decreasing our cash needs because the media partner will help carry the load on that. So, in closing, close this off, you know, we're a little bit short today because, again, we've covered a lot of this, and we don't want to talk unbearably about it all, but we wanted to be here for questions for everybody today. We wanted to make sure everybody knew where we were at and where we're moving to. But, you know, the overall market right now in-store retail media is still exploding. It’s getting bigger and bigger every day.
I'm sure if you, if you're following the trends on it, there's a lot of talk about in-store and, in-store monitors going in. There's a big show in New York, start of January, called NRF, National Retail Federation, and there's already a surge of talk about, retail media in stores, and we're already ahead of the game there. We're on track to be where we want to be and to be a very influential player in this space. The modern retail environment is still seeing massive investment in technology, operations.
Retailers are bringing their, their, you know, customer experiences in the stores and bringing those up to, you know, a much higher level than they've ever done to really, you know, combat e-commerce and combat the fact that, you know, 80% of the, the shopping is still done in store, and they're, they're fighting against each other to provide that experience for the, for the, the customer, and INEO is really well positioned to take advantage of that. You know, our partners trust our capabilities. We're garnering more and more opportunities every day. We, we've earned the trust out in the field. We, we do what we say we're gonna do, and we implement good solutions.
You know, our strategy of putting the welcoming system in and leveraging the vast capabilities of the technology we have in place, the patented technology that we have, as Greg said, you know, large moat around our business out there. It's allowing us to push into areas of producing revenue that we hadn't even thought of a couple of years ago. The ORCA initiatives, new things like we're doing with Bluetooth Low Energy beacons, where we're the first thing that's in front of the store, and we're lighting up the retailer's app as the customer walks into the store, and they're pushing marketing through their systems into their own apps, but we're the ones telling them those apps are arriving in the store.
We're doing RFID integrations so that we're detecting RFID at the exits, but also to tie into their inventory systems. There's a lot going on that, is gonna generate us revenue, but make us fundamental to these retailers' plans. It's all because we have this very simple proposition of putting in a very, very good loss prevention device in the door that gives us this world of everything else, retail media, RFID, Bluetooth Low Energy beacons.... We've created a real healthy sales pipeline, of direct customers and our partner, Prosegur, North America, South America. We're making significant progress. Our largest customer, 1,000 stores, making great progress with them. We have a very aggressive schedule for next year to put more stores in with them and really light it up.
So, overall, you know, the business is doing well. We're expanding faster, we're optimizing as best we can on the capital allocation side, and our ultimate goal here is to be cash flow positive in a you know very short amount of time. With that, I'd like to say I'll turn it over to Pardeep for some questions.
We will now open the call to questions. Please send your questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. Give a minute here for me to collect the questions. Question here is: Can you comment about the current capital liquidity cash situation of the business?
For sure. You know, I think if you read through the financial statements, you may have seen a few things in there. Obviously, cash position's a little bit low, but we've been managing the cash quite judiciously. If you've seen, you know, where we've come from in the last few months, we always said we had a bunch of levers that we could pull to maintain our cash without a lot more out the door. We did slow down some installations in the fall period here and over the summer to really get to the point where we want to be with the media partner, so that we get non-dilutive cash in versus having to go to the market. We did take on a little bit of debt.
We've got some very good partners with our customers and elsewhere. We're dabbling in that a little bit to just manage through to where we wanna be to keep our you know the level of sustainability and the deployments with where we committed to our customers. So, you know, it's an evolving situation, but a couple of the deals that we're working on, we believe when we close them, we'll be in really good shape. You know, our goal at the moment still is not to go back to the market. We will if we have to, but it's not our preferred path forward.
Can you comment about the company's debt levels, and is there additional capacity for debt to bridge the gap until units are sold?
Yeah. So, good question. We did take on a little bit of debt in the last quarter. Some of it, vendors, some of it, you know, just short-term loan coming in. We could take on more. Yeah, definitely. The cash flow that we're expecting over the next year will easily fund some added debt. We don't want to add too much debt. You know, it's not never a good thing, but we have a very clear path in mind to some of these deals we're working on, and our execution on those is key. We execute like we believe we're going to, we shouldn't have anything to worry about.
Can you comment on the progress of Prosegur in Europe?
Yeah, Prosegur has trials going in quite a few different areas. You know, obviously, we haven't announced where all these are. In Greg's comments earlier, we have non-promotional clause and all these things, and I'd love to be shouting at the top of the roofs where we put systems, but we've shipped a lot of systems out with them. We have not had one move from pilot to contract in Europe yet. We hope to be able to close one shortly. More happening in the North American market than there is in Europe. But we will have some business there. We, you know, we sell security tags and loss prevention products and systems there today within the loss prevention side that we've de-emphasized, but we certainly would love to have a Welcoming System deployment there.
Can you say anything about your pipeline and the number of systems you might expect to sell in 2024?
Mm-hmm. Greg, you want to take any or you want me to take them all? I just start talking, everyone, I apologize.
No, go, go ahead. Keep going, Kyle. You're on a roll.
Okay. We expect to put out with one customer only, 250-300 units next year. That, that's our largest customer and the deployment schedule we're on with them. Possibly more, you know, there's some, you know, aggressive talks happening in the background on how to do more, but that would be a comfortable schedule for us on top of everything else that we're already doing. We expect to have about the same amount within other retailers, too. So, you know, the low end is probably 250, the high end is probably 500, and it's probably somewhere comfortably in the middle.
Yeah. So can you also comment about the hardware sales? I mean, I think that you just shipped some units out to Prosegur. Those will show up as hardware sales in the Q2 quarter, or just give some clarity on that.
Yeah, I can jump in on this one, Kyle. You can save your voice for a little bit. Yes, with sort of the systems that we were shipping to Colombia, that was 59 systems, as Kyle mentioned, going into 4 stores. There are literally, I think, 300-400 stores in this particular chain. So that was a sale of systems for us, and it also gives us the pathway for SaaS revenue as well. So, you know, the best of both worlds for that, and we expect the successful installation of these systems and then the growth of that network. So that will be a source of systems shipping and revenue for us next year.
Can you say anything about the staffing levels over the next year or so, whether it's increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?
Yeah, we've got a very. We have a small team here at head office, certainly on the engineering side. I don't think we're going to need to scale that significantly. We've developed a lot of technology underneath that. If we do anything, it might possibly be in the production side as we start to build more business. Earlier or mid last year, we brought in some new machining capability at our production facility. That's come online to allow us to be able to produce faster. But I don't see us growing staff drastically over this. We've got a good, stable technology. We've got a good technology team, and if anything, it'll just be on a little bit of help on the production side.
We don't expect to need to hire any sales people because of our media partner relationships we've been working on. That gives us scale over there. Definitely, you know, they will carry the load on that. And, you know, we focus on what we're good at. We're a technology producer and a network operator.
Can you comment on the longevity of your systems that you have, the ones that you've already installed? Let's say, for example, Liquor Store Network, it's been a couple of years for those ones. What are you seeing in the field in terms of maintenance or longevity of these units?
Yeah. So systems that we've installed are, they're very reliable systems. We, I think, trying to remember the amortization period that we use for the system, Kyle, off the top of your head, do you remember what that is?
Five.
Yeah, five for the amortization of the systems. The reality is, the expected life cycle or lifespan of a typical system is going to be closer to 10 than it is for 5. It's very common for us when we go to put in new systems or deploy welcoming systems. You'll take out equipment which has been there for eight, 10, 12+ years, and we expect the same out of our systems that we put out there. And we've got a high degree of reliability on the systems as well.
We're coming up on 4.5 years on some of the systems have been in the liquor stores, and they just keep running. We, you know, Greg's team's built over-the-air updates, right? So the software has been upgraded massively since they first went in there, but the hardware capabilities, you know, we thought through a lot of things in the early stages. Some of the newer systems have some, you know, slightly upgraded hardware going in, but the old ones just keep running.
Any additional commentary you can provide on ORCA? What sort of feedback are you getting from some of the retailers out there, and what really excites the retailers on this opportunity with ORCA?
I think it's taken us slightly by surprise. So we deemphasized our loss prevention capabilities and how good we are on that, and Greg and I were examining it, and a lot of what we do now, we have this value proposition that we sell to the retailer on. And our entry point is still typically the loss prevention department, because they really have this need of, they've got outdated equipment, and they haven't had new capabilities for years. And so the base premise of the welcoming system going in, you know, we sell this value-selling model that we've created, gives them this amazing, you know, I guess, return and capabilities that they measure against on the loss prevention side, and then we overlay the retail media, right?
That becomes the home run once they understand it, you know, and we prove that we can do all these other things that we say we do. Now, we're layering ORCA on top of that. The neat thing about us, the fundamental thing is we're already in the store. We're already capturing video of loss prevention events, and what we noticed was the retailers were. They're looking at the loss prevention events. They've got their field loss prevention people and their store managers analyzing the five, six events that they'll get in every store per day, and trying to see whether there's similarities and what they can do to prevent this.
They're visually looking at this, and they're actually pulling out some good, so I guess, you know, data and comments out of it. But when we look at it, we could do so much more with machine learning and be able to compare these in real time and look at thousands of them against each other, and what can we decipher from that? So that's where the premise of ORCA came from, and as we implemented it, we said: Wow, we can do a lot more here. And there's a couple initiatives underway out there. There's a big one happening in Seattle right now, where the retailers are all getting together to share data on what's going on with organized retail crime.
They've created a system where they're gonna try and, you know, add write-ups for everything that happens in every store and share that around. And we stand up and say: Well, we'll provide you video of what's actually happening every time you have a loss prevention event. And it's amazing to see their eyes light up when they see what we can actually do with the capabilities of the system. It's data, right? And giving the retailer data to be able to act on and do things with, and getting rid of, yeah, we're losing product, but we don't know how or where or why, and might even know how much they're losing, but we're actually giving them a lot of the why they're losing it and how they're losing it.
I don't know, Greg. I guess I... I kind of... I'm talking a little bit marketing speak, maybe more on the technical side.
No, I think you really sum it up, Kyle. We're really excited about the opportunity coming up in Seattle and another city in the States, which is going to do likewise, you know, law enforcement, district attorneys coming together to have a real focus on it. So the underlying data to drive that is coming from our system, and it's gonna give us really good exposure with other retailers who've joined in as part of this initiative. And being able to see the capabilities that we've got with our system in there, we think that's gonna really help us with the growth of our pipeline. That being said, you know, we've got a good pipeline right now.
And, you know, we're gonna focus on executing on all the systems that we've got out there, you know, the several hundred that we need to put in, for one retailer, the growth with the systems in South America, et cetera. So we got a very strong pipeline, and we're gonna continue to grow, you know, to fulfill that, and then, you know, expand as necessary.
There are no further questions. Hand the call back over to Kyle and Greg for closing comments.
Yeah. I'll start off, and I'll hand it to you, Greg. But, you know, I wanna thank everybody for joining us. You know, it's been a couple quick calls in a row here. We promised you we weren't gonna hide. We were gonna be out here, answer your questions, talk openly about the business. We're very excited about what we're doing. You know, there are challenges. There's nothing that worries us, you know, fundamentally about what we're doing with the business. Everything's lined up well. We just have to move things along a little bit and execute them a bit more. But I wanna thank you for joining us and offering your, you know, support to us.
We plan on doing great things with this company and making a great return for everybody. I'll pass it to you, Greg, for final comments.
Yeah. Thanks, Kyle. But yes, indeed, I wanna thank all of the folks and investors who are on the call today. You know, every day we get up, you know, how can we improve the company? How can we make sure that we're monetizing it and, you know, seeing the growth of the company, making sure we're tracking in the right direction on behalf of our investors, and we don't take that lightly. This is our mission to make sure that we build a strong, successful company. Sometimes it's a little bit slower than we'd like, but you know, it took us many months to get the renegotiation of the key customer contracts. But with that in hand, it's giving us the ability to move this forward and take us to a really good place with the company.
Thank you again for all of your support from all the investors.
Great. Thank you, everyone.