Hello, my name is Pardeep Sangha, Head of Investor Relations at INEO. Thank you everyone for joining us today. Welcome to INEO Tech Corp's fiscal Q2 2023 conference call. Joining me on the call today are Greg Watkin, Chairman, President, and Founder of INEO, as well as Kyle Hall, the company CEO. This call is being recorded. We will be having a Q&A session at the end of the call. You can submit your questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. I trust that everyone has received a copy of our fiscal Q2 results press release that was issued this morning. 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.
Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors, many of which are outside of INEO's control that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance, or achievements implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors are further outlined in last week's or sorry, this morning's corporate press release and our previous quarter management discussion and analysis. We provide forward-looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about 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 change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except if it's required by law. With that, let me turn the call over to Mr. Greg Watkin, Chairman and Founder of INEO.
Thank you, Pardeep. Good day, everyone from snowy Vancouver. We truly appreciate everyone for joining us today. Before we begin, I need to remind the audience that we are not able to disclose the names of some of our retail partners due to non-promotion clauses in the agreements with these companies. For the benefit of everybody on the call today, we will do our best to provide commentary on the nature of our rollouts without actually naming the retailer. On today's call, our CEO, Kyle Hall, will provide a financial summary of our results and an outlook for the business. First, I'd like to provide some brief commentary on the quarter and an update on our recent sales activities. I'd like to start my commentary by thanking all of our employees who've been instrumental in our continued growth and success.
We have a small team that works very hard every day to make INEO Media Network a reality. Our team continues to evolve and perfect the technology, 2023 will be the year of execution as we focus on rapidly expanding our customer network. I'm very proud to report that INEO's outlook continues to be good. The company is actively working with several large retailers and has a growing pipeline of opportunities. Where some companies struggle to employ new technology with retailers, INEO has been welcomed with open arms by our customer base as we work to transform the retail media landscape with our INEO Welcoming Systems. We did it again. For Q2 2023, I'm pleased to report a 50% increase in quarterly revenue compared to Q2 of last year.
Even more impressive is that INEO experienced a 92% increase in gross profit in Q2 2023 compared to Q2 of last year. We're extremely excited for fiscal 2023 as we continue to expand our network to our large retail customers. Thus far, INEO has not experienced any recessionary impacts. I'm pleased to report that the company is growing faster than ever as we begin to see our network of systems increase on a massive scale. I'd like to provide an update on two key developments. Since we last presented to investors, we've been busy on several fun-fronts. First, I'm very pleased to announce that the company is ahead of schedule on its 2023 welcoming system deployment plans.
Since the beginning of the year, we've expanded our retail media network with the addition of more than 50 new locations in the United States. These deployment plans are with our major retail partners, who together have over 3,000 retail locations across the United States, including a major office supply retailer with more than 1,000 locations. We've been focusing on expanding our retail media network in major cities. We've completed significant installation bases in New York City and Los Angeles. In addition, we've deployed systems in nine additional states, including Tennessee, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, and Florida. Second, I'm pleased to report that our strategic partnership with Prosegur is progressing very well.
We have pilots installed or committed in five prominent chains in the U.S. in multiple markets, including pharmacy/drug stores, department stores, agricultural supply chains, sports, franchise stores, and a warehouse club. We successfully completed a pilot with Jumbo, Cencosud, a major South American grocery retail chain. The pilot has now converted to a customer order, and we will soon be shipping units to this retail. Prosegur has also been making progress in Canada, having landed trials with a major retailer of auto parts, accessories, and sporting goods, a big box hardware store, and a pharmacy/drug store chain. We're very happy with the Prosegur results. The team has been presenting and pitching to a number of retailers around the globe. We're confident in Prosegur's ability to land these large international retailers and look forward to sharing those customer wins in the future.
Overall, INEO is continuing to increase its sales activities with a very robust sales pipeline, including both our direct sales efforts and through our partnership with Prosegur. With that, I'd like to turn it over to our CEO, Kyle Hall, who will review the financials for the quarter and provide additional commentary on our outlook.
Thanks, Greg. Hello, everyone. I'm gonna read through the results of the financials now. I'll read them closely so I don't get them wrong. For Q3, our results are as follows. INEO achieved revenues of CAD 386,000 during fiscal Q2 2023 compared to revenue of CAD 257,000 generated in Q2 of 2022, an increase of 50% year-over-year. This was driven by higher sales in our loss prevention products. There was just a note to everybody looking at the holiday quarter. There is some seasonality in there for us. As much as our loss prevention products are still growing for us, they fall off a cliff in the middle of the month because no retailer is ordering any of those products for the last two weeks.
We did see a good uptick in advertising, yet, it's still just a growing piece of the puzzle. INEO achieved gross profit of CAD 181,000 in fiscal Q2 2023 compared to gross profit of CAD 94,000 in Q2 2022, an increase of 92% driven by the revenue mix, greater amount of high margin loss prevention products, and advertising starting to kick in. For the fiscal Q2 2023, INEO had an adjusted EBITDA loss of CAD 856,000 compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of CAD 762,000 in Q2 2022. The increase in this loss was completely attributable to the cost associated with the financing we just completed. Financing via short form prospectus is expensive in Canada. We had well over CAD 200,000 in legal fees alone.
If we take out the cost of the financing, our expenses were actually down for the quarter. We're quite proud of that. We've had our eye on the expenses, making sure that every dollar we spend is well spent. As at December 31st, 2022, INEO had 76,143,709 shares issued and outstanding. As at December 31st, 2022, INEO had CAD 2.35 million in cash and cash equivalents, compared to CAD 1.7 million in cash and cash equivalents as at June 30th, 2022. That concludes the financial update. I'll now move to some business highlights from the last quarter. We filed a patent on our INEO Gate product back in 2021.
In October, we extended that through to a worldwide PCT filing, meaning it gives us priority rights for the filing of that patent in any of the PC Treaty markets, including the United States and Europe. Now we're into the process of getting that patent through in all those different countries, but we're well positioned with that to protect our technology and our design capabilities in those markets. On November 17, 2022, we completed the public offering of units, private placement of units, and unsecured notes for gross total proceeds of CAD 2.74 million. We did this via short form prospectus. We're using the net proceeds to exist, to build out our manufacturing and deployment of the systems.
I think everybody well knows what our capabilities are and where we're going with this, but it's really to deploy INEO Welcoming Systems for future customers, as well as, you know, we have some working capital and general corporate purpose needs. The financing really strengthens our balance sheet to allow us to continue to execute on the agreements that we have with these large retail chains and accomplish our growth plans for 2023. As Greg mentioned, we're ahead of schedule early in the year, this is attributable to us being able to deploy the capital as needed. The finance represents a key component of our rollout and our expansion plans across the globe for the year. We're very appreciative of shareholders who helped us in this financing and participated with us.
The fact that we're able to close this under such challenging conditions, it's really a reflection of the faith that the investors have placed in us. We acknowledge that and really feel rewarded by the investors that we have with us. Another piece for the quarter was on December 30th, we added Eugene Sailer to the board of directors, and he's also the chair of the audit committee. Eugene brings a wealth of finance and technology, public company experience to the board. He's a seasoned finance executive, with 25 years of proven management experience across a diverse set of industries, but a lot of high tech and some retail. Eugene really fit the bill for us and what we needed in terms of some experience in that area.
Subsequent to the end of the quarter on January 11th, I attended the National Retail Federation show. You can see me on the right there looking very dapper, I might say so. We showcased the first radio frequency identification version of the INEO Welcoming System, RFID, as the industry calls it. We were demoing right on the show floor. We were taking products that were labeled with RFID tags, think razor blades or Pampers diapers. If you walk by our system, the system would detect them, and it was showing the product that was exiting the store on the screen. It was a big wow factor for the show. It built a lot of excitement.
It was our prototype model that was on the floor, but since then, Greg and team have been building it out, and we're getting ready to ship it within a month or two here. It's generated a lot of excitement within the retailers to be able to add not just that we're detecting a product leaving the door, but we're actually showing which product's there, and we're recording that within the database which products are leaving the store. Giving them much more data and much more knowledge of what's going on at the exit of that store. I wanna talk about our product portfolio now, 'cause we've been talking about, you know, different products that we've released and announcing a few.
The INEO Welcoming Pedestal is the core piece of the Welcoming System. It's our original product. It's a theft detection, digital advertising, digital analytics product. That's our core flagship product, and that's what we're pushing out into retailers in the large numbers right now. We saw an opportunity last year to pair it with what we call a Welcoming Gate, a traditional system that could work in doorways where we didn't have room to either put in two screens or where there wasn't enough traffic for two screens. Why go the extra expense if we're not able to monetize the extra screen? Let's put in a just a traditional unit.
We came up with the Welcoming Gate, which we have a patent on, patent filed, patent pending, it's been a huge hit out there. We wrap it's got, you know, graphic capabilities on it pairs really nicely with the Welcoming Pedestal, it gives us great theft detection capability. We got some requests coming from some of our customers that they love the form factor of the Welcoming Pedestal. It just looks so elegant at the storefront. They're asking, "Well, can we put this elsewhere within the store?" We kind of pushed back at first saying, "Well, it's kind of expensive to put elsewhere in the store.
It's got a lot of things going on inside it that you don't really need just to use as digital signage. They love the form factor of being able to insert a pedestal, you know, 15 feet inside the front door, at the end of an aisle, that type of thing. Greg and team worked to remove some of the electronics and remove some of the capabilities of the Welcoming Pedestal and turn it more into using the form factor and the footprint of the pedestal to create what we call a Welcoming Greeter. It gives us an opportunity to put in more signage within the store, within the same retailer.
In that vein, we also have the Welcoming Player, which is a device that Greg and team built to sit between the screen and the bracket that holds it to the wall or the pole stems in the ceiling, and it talks to our system. What we have here is a system that all these components, we put these in here, we can control the signs, the messaging on any screen anywhere else in store. If you think about our cost of deployment, it's really about, you know, we get the Welcoming Pedestal and the Welcoming System in there, adding an extra screen is minimal cost. Minimal cost after you've already deployed the basis of the system. It's given us the opportunity of increasing our revenue per store, per location, and really building out our suite of products.
It gives us a complete set of products that, you know, if you look at the digital out-of-home, the place-based advertising, you have different form factors all over different signs, but it gives us that ability of building this out across a retailer. You can think about us as having a pedestal at the front entrance with a gate to detect theft and give signage and messaging there. As you walk into the store, you can come and encounter the greeter. You walk throughout the store and out other areas, and you see a media player running a sign over top of a different area. But we also have the Duo system, which is a double-sided one. Kind of hard to show in a picture how do you show both sides.
We also have the Duo system, which we announced, and we filed patents on that one as well. Maybe, Pardeep, I wanted to go through with everybody just a little bit about why we're so excited about having our systems in the retail and what we see as the, one of the major wins in our sales here, really pushing us along. That is, the retail media market. If you look at anything in terms of advertising right now, retail media is like just... It's outpacing everything else in terms of mentions and mind share. I just wanna explain a little bit to everybody how we fit into this.
If you look at the worldwide advertising market, these are some big numbers, you know, $689 billion. You know, TV, which used to be the bulk of advertising out there, it's dwarfed now by what is called digital advertising. Out-of-home, which is place-based signage where traditionally we would have more fit in there if retail media hadn't taken off so much. It's still one of the few growing parts of the market. A little bit smaller, but it's growing. The others are all in kind of secular decline. Digital is still growing. You look at those numbers as it's going up year-over-year. Flip to the next slide, please, Pardeep. If you look at the...
If you wanna really break down that digital advertising, that $689 billion, where is it going? Huge chunk that's going to paid search, Google primarily. Huge section to social media, primarily Meta. Now there's this new segment called retail media, which is now 18% and growing rapidly. It's basically the demise of cookies, the demise of being able to target effectively on mobile devices. Advertisers are looking for where can they get the most bang for their dollar, and they started lining up, "Let's advertise on the Walmart site. Let's advertise on Target. Let's advertise with the retailer where the products are actually being sold." It's growing rapidly, and it's a huge chunk of the market.
If you wanna really see what it looks like on a retail site, look at the Walmart site, and you see that little sponsored ads everywhere. Those are all paid for. You search basketball on the Walmart site, you'll get a couple of hits, but everything else that's being shown there, those vendors are actually paying Walmart to display those ads. Same as on Amazon, same as on Instacart, same as on every other retailer right now. That's where they're making a lot of money. Flip again, Pardeep. They also have banner ads. You'll see these within the site as well. It's not just sponsored, but there's banner ads, and there's placement of ads. If you look at what these ads actually look like, they look a lot like the signage that goes on our systems. Flip to the next sign, or slide, Pardeep.
This ad on the right is a Molson ad that started playing on our liquor store network just yesterday. You size it and place it and all the other ads that are run on our system, they look very much like the ads that are being placed on retailers' websites. That same ads within those same retail media networks. Flow into our signage network in store. There's a lot of talk in the industry about where is that going right now. Retail in-store media is the next frontier. All of these retailers, these are the biggest and best names in retail. They all have their own retail media network. They're all pushing very hard at generating advertising dollars. This isn't inside money and co-op trade dollars. This is pulling from national ad budgets.
They're taking revenue away from Meta. They're taking revenue away from Google. The revenue from the advertising is flowing right to these retailers. Flip the next one. Why the retailers really focus on it. If you look at grocery, the margins may be 20% at best. Home improvement, maybe 34%. Retail media, huge margins. Just a little bit of movement for them on the retail media side, and it changes their profit profile massively. Walmart reported in 2022, or sorry, in 2021, $2.2 billion in advertising revenue. It accounted for almost 32% of their profit all came from the retail media network.
This is why retailers are so enamored with us because we give them more inventory to sell, which they can sell actually in store. They want that, flip to the next slide, Pardeep. 85% of all shopping is still done in the store. These aren't quite to scale, but if you look at retail sales on the left, $4.5 trillion in retail sales, $850 billion of that online. It's a small number compared to what's sold in store, right? Whereas on the advertising side, on the retail media, right now it's all being spent online, and in-store is just starting. It's just starting to take off. They've moved from an out-of-home environment where advertisers say, "Let's place signs on signage around the city. Whoa, there's signage at retail.
We need to advertise there too." It's coming, the industry is talking about it, and it's growing. This is what's gonna fuel our systems and why we get so excited about getting placements with these large retailers, because they're already making money from advertising, and we know they're gonna flow it in. The consumer or the packaged goods industry, when they were asked the survey, you know, where have you bought advertising retail media networks? A year earlier, you would not have seen in-store display ads or in-store video ads even on here. It's now getting mentioned. They're toying with it, they're playing with it. Even though the numbers are really low because there's not a lot of inventory out there, the revenue or the ones that are trying it and want to do it are there.
Retail media in the store hasn't been a big thing for a couple of reasons. Flip to the next one, Pardeep. It's because it's very hard. There are some failed starts out there. People put signs in stores, and they didn't have enterprise-grade hardware. What happens if the sign goes down? What happens if it goes offline? What happens if, you know, you got a blue screen up there, a blank, you know, blinking cursor? Stores aren't gonna be happy. Customers aren't gonna be happy. The retailers aren't gonna be happy. Nobody's making money. You have to have enterprise-grade hardware, and that's what we have. We have built a system that is monitored, it's durable, we can maintain it, and we've proven it out that our hardware is exceptional. It works really well.
The other side is the software to run it. As much as we talk about the hardware, we're actually really a software company. Everything we do on the software side is what really makes us, and that's the usability piece that the retailers use for our software for either the analytics, for the loss prevention, or for the digital advertising. It's all about us being really good at running a content management system to schedule and put advertising on at the right time, at the right place, on the right store, the right screen. We're really good at that. The next piece is being able to integrate to these retail media networks. We integrated, you would've heard us talk about Hivestack and Vistar and Broadsign earlier. We integrated the out-of-home industry's programmatic people.
Now we're in the middle of interfacing with all of the retail media companies, the ones that are running the online aspects of this, so that they can actually just, at the click of a button within the retail media interface, say, "I wanna assign that ad to the front store of those 1,000 stores," and have it come right into our system. Our open API infrastructure that we've built, allowing us to talk to every other system and integrate with systems, it's key for us going in the future. The last piece that we really got right, that a lot of companies haven't, is the business model. How do you create a frictionless business model for the retailer to move ahead and deploy systems and be able to generate this revenue off of it? That's where we're winning right now.
Why isn't it bigger? Because companies haven't done this, but we have actually done it. We're in a great spot, and that's why we're getting these trials and why we're getting rollouts right now. You know, the other side, this is U.S.-specific spending. If you look at the, you know, it's obviously a big rise in the spend of digital media. If you look at the green number, the pace of change is going down, even though the numbers are getting larger. Law of large numbers, correct? The overall % of digital ad spending going up, in-store is new frontier. You will hear a lot about this.
You'll hear it from us, but you'll hear about a lot of it in the industry about, you know, in-store, placing signage in store, connecting signage. Walmart Connect is Walmart's division. They're already doing it in some regard. There's signs going up throughout their stores. Target's doing it. Different retailers are doing it. We are in an enviable spot because nobody else can place signage at the front door like we can. Nobody else can secure that space because everybody else will interfere with the loss prevention systems. We give them the ability of putting signs at the front door. That's why we are very intriguing to these retailers and to the retail media companies, and why we feel we're in a great spot to grow. I'll finish my TED Talk there.
If anybody has any questions on them, please let me know. I'll just now kinda whip through the, you know, the end of my presentation. You know, our key objectives for the year. We're tied to rollouts right now. We have to get systems out there. We're in good shape over January, February in doing that. Financing allowed us to do that. Now it's about having the systems in and having that revenue increase. Expanding into other geographic markets, we're doing a good job, you know, hitting cities throughout North America. Greg told you about a big initiative that we have in South America, in Colombia with Cencosud. It's just on the verge of, you know, getting the roll-up started and taking off there.
A great digital advertising market in that, in that country. We're looking forward to that, and that's with our partner Prosegur. Of course, supporting Prosegur around the globe. They've been wonderful. Their team has been strong, putting systems out there, getting us the meetings, and we feel really good about where that relationship is going. You know, the overall outlook then. You know, if we, if we look at our aggressive deployment schedule and ramping up of the locations that we have contract across the U.S., that's really gonna drive things. You know, we're at a tremendous milestone right now where the retail media network that we're installing in these cities is getting to a critical mass.
It's getting to the point where it's of interest to the retail media companies. We'll see that revenue start flowing into it for the retailer and for us, of course. you know, the next phase is really, you know, commercializing our technology with the large wins with large retailers. We've got the footprint ramping up in terms of the customers that we have under contract. Now it's about getting more of them out there and accelerating those revenues so that the revenues we see in the latter part of the year continue to grow like we've seen in the last few quarters. you know, the technology's been proven out. I think without a doubt the technology's been proven out.
You know, it's validated by our global partner, Prosegur, but also with the large retailers that we're dealing with right now. It's a real healthy pipe-pipeline that we have. You know, the direct sales that we've done ourselves, but then the sales through Prosegur. You know, it's across multiple areas. You know, grocery, home hardware, apparel, you know, wholesale clubs. I mean, Greg's mentioned a few of them, but it's moving where we want it to go. As the retailers continue to invest in retail tech, and they are investing, analytics is also a piece that we don't talk a lot about, but analytics is really key to us because it's also key to the advertisers and be able to report on metrics and numbers. Retailers are investing in the customer experience.
They're investing in advertising, they're investing in analytics, and it's gonna be really important for the future of the modern retail environment. With retail media being such a huge generator, it's well placed for us to be able to take advantage of these and get, you know, our systems in there, but get our revenue to where we want it to be. You know, the current overall economic environment, you know, it's challenging in some regards, but the retailers that are worthy, they're still investing. We're not seeing any decline in sales activity because of what's going on in the macro, you know, environment. In fact, I think, you know, some retailers, we saw Loblaw's report last week that they probably made money in an inflationary environment.
you know, given that we're operate in an advertising model but also a SaaS model, you know, our revenue growth will lag our deployments, right? We have to get these systems in the market. We usually get them in there. We get the analytics collected for a couple months to get the traffic, then the advertising starts getting added to the systems as we go. it's where we want to be, but as advertisers understand where these systems are, they're gonna become more important to every retailer and partner that we have. In summary, you know, we're optimistic. Our outlook for the year still looks great.
Our Prosegur as our distribution partners is doing what we want, and we're just happy to report on them, add additional opportunities as they come along. With that, I wanna thank you all for joining us today, and we look to forward to providing an update again next quarter, and I'll hand it back to Pardeep for some questions.
Thank you, Kyle and Greg. We will now open the call to questions. Please send your questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. We will be giving priority to questions from analysts. Just to start off, we'll start off with a question of Gabriel Leung of Beacon Securities. Gabe asks, "What has been the early feedback from customers, your retail customers with their initial deployments? And what sort of, you know, monthly ARPU can you sort of expect coming from these sites?
I'd like to speak to that. You know, it's been very, very encouraging and I'd say overwhelmingly positive, specifically as it relates to our major office supply retailer. Something I found very curious in talking with the customer, and actually really rewarding, is that the new systems are being referred to not as an EAS system. They don't talk about, oh, it's that EAS system at the front door of the store. They call it an INEO. That's, that's really encouraging when you've got the customer say, "Oh, yeah, you're with the new INEO system that's going in at the retailer." That, that's been very encouraging for us.
The systems themselves, they've garnered the attention of the senior executive team and have been part of the ribbon-cutting ceremony and the relaunch, rebrand of the system. The response in the network from our customer base has been overwhelmingly positive for the systems we're putting in.
Also another question from Gabe Leung of Beacon Securities. When do you expect the revenues to start flowing from your initial retailers wins with Prosegur? I guess the Prosegur one is the Jumbo Cencosud that you're just starting to install.
Yeah. Jumbo Cencosud will start as the systems get in there. We've had 3 test systems in there for a little over a year, Took a little bit longer than we expected. Just I think, you know, some communication, travel capabilities into South America, but it's moving now. There's usually a couple-month lag, like I was saying, between the time we put the system in till the revenue kicks in. We will have revenue from that in the next quarter. It's moving in that direction. Overall, you know, with the rest of the Prosegur installs, you know, we're growing, right? We're demonstrating we're growing. It's just a matter of getting the systems out there and the growth is there.
actually for the, for the benefit of most of the, probably the people on the call today, maybe just give a, 2 minutes on Who is Cencosud?
Mm.
What is Jumbo? I mean, I don't think many people know who that Cencosud is.
South American retailer, big in Colombia, big in Chile, a couple other countries there. They have a division called Jumbo. If you walk into those stores, you would not be able to place them with our best looking retailer, grocery store chain that you have here, in terms of the presentation of products and size of the store and the modernness of the store. It's quite impressive. They've one location in, and we're expecting to get close to 50 locations with them. Probably not all this year, but, at least half of those will be in this year.
Another question from Gabe Young of Beacon Securities. Based on the deployment timetable, when do we start sort of seeing the increasing ramping up of offline revenue?
Yeah. Like, we're growing it. I know everyone wants to see it faster. We do expect some acceleration. You know, this quarter, we were slightly impacted by the seasonality of the loss prevention over the last few weeks in December, which made it not quite as high as the last quarter, but it's still up significantly. As the product mix changes and as advertising takes more of that, we'll, you know, there'll be less seasonality with it. We, you know, we launched into January, and we had a great month. What we're seeing is, you know, continual increases in all of our lines of business really. Even the older the loss prevention stuff is still growing for us.
'Cause every time we put in lo-, you know, in your Welcoming System, we usually get some of those products. We usually get the byproducts of, from being able to sell the supplies that go with it. Gabe- it's hard to say exactly the answer to the question, but I think we're demonstrating it's growing. It's just a matter now of how fast we can grow that.
Next set of questions from Daniel Rosenberg, analyst at Paradigm Capital. Could you provide an update on your sales team? Any plans to hire or invest on your sales team? I guess maybe just add to that, you know, Prosegur is doing a lot of that sales activity for you, so maybe just comment on that as well.
Yeah. We don't see that we need to hire anybody to secure the retailers. We're proving that we can do that on our own and with Prosegur. We have more than enough to tackle that. Of course, we'd love to sign up everybody. We're gonna work on keeping sign up everybody, but we have enough to keep us busy here in the short term. On the advertising side, the large retailers gonna handle a lot of that on their own, so we're not gonna have to hire anybody there. On our liquor store network, I think you saw that we put out press release last year for Adapt Media and Western Media Group, and so they have larger sales forces.
They have the ability of, going through, you know, the, the media, the agencies, and booking advertising. We kinda outsourced it in that, in that sense to those companies. We end up paying them a percentage, a fee off it, we don't have to hire anybody either. I think it's an efficient model, and it's working well for us so far. Greg, any follow-up on that?
No. I think you've summarized that well, Kyle.
Okay.
Another question from Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm Capital. just with regards to new customers and, when you look at those new customers signing on, what sort of is the uptick for additional products than just the Welcoming System? For example, the Greeter or the Player. How, you know, how much interest is there for additional products?
You know, the prime entry is the Welcoming System, the Pedestal, of course. You know, we're getting invited in because we're really good at the loss prevention, at the analytics, and the placement at the front of the door for the advertising. That's why they're inviting us in, is because welcome us in the store. Once we get in there, then they start realizing there's other opportunities, right? You know, can we get another system in here? Can we get a sign over here? We're just really at the beginning stages of that. We're getting requested. The demand is coming from us. We're not really even pushing that in yet. We've got enough to do, enough busy to do.
As we said, incrementally, it doesn't cost us much more to put them in each location once we're already in there. We are gonna start working more at getting secondary and third and fourth and fifth screens into locations. I don't have enough data to really give you much color on that right now.
Okay. Last question from Daniel Rosenberg of Paradigm Capital. When you're deploying customers, signing up the customers to deploy, what is the typical length of a contract? Is it annual with a renewal or how does that work?
We'd love to get multiyear contracts and annual renewals on them. It's really a retailer by retailer thing. You know, we negotiate as hard as we can, but we, you know, we're dealing with some very large players, so we end up fitting into how they structure contracts typically. All of the... Everything that we've done has a kind of an evergreen mode to it. It can be renewed until canceled. You know, we haven't disclosed any individual contracts, of course, because we can't. Every one of them, I would say there's nothing out there that says it's done at a certain time and we're done. It's always an ongoing evergreen capability.
Yeah. I think to add to that the typical longevity for systems out there is measured in the eight, 10-year range is very, very common for systems deployed to our customers, and we expect that our systems will be consistent with that.
We have systems that have been in some of those liquor stores in Vancouver now coming up on 4 years, and, they're still functioning, they're doing well, and they're not even our latest, greatest, technology. Obviously we've made things better and upgraded things over the years, but they just keep running.
Okay. Questions here from Neil Bakshi, analyst at Canaccord Genuity. You know, he's wondering about the run rate of expenses, and if you can comment more about the one-time items in the quarter, such as the financing expenses, if you can comment on the run rate for expenses?
No, I made a little commentary on it in the, in the prepared remarks, but doing a finance in Canada, a small financing is painful. It's, you know, the legal cost alone over $200,000 and the broker fees and the, you know, commissions and everything that pay out of that. We've got auditor fees, yeah, it adds up in a hurry. We think we've had a very sharp eye on expenses throughout the year. We, you know, kept our team fairly small. There's lots of push that, you know, if we had more people, we could do this, and that, but, you know, you have to bite off what you can do at the time and keep aware of where you're at on it.
You know, the exact number I don't have in my head, but, you know, we're approaching probably for the quarter, the extra expenses because the finance we're closing in on CAD 300,000.
Okay. Basically your adjusted EBITDA number would have been CAD 300,000 less if you adjust for those financing.
Exactly. Exactly.
Neil Bakshi from Canaccord Genuity, another question here. Can you comment about the company's balancing between the growth and narrowing its EBITDA profile? You know, it's got a quite aggressive outlook, aggressive expansion, but at the same time kind of trying to get to EBITDA profitable as well at some point. Just wondering about that balance between growth and EBITDA.
Greg and I modeled this so many times and Greg's got some amazing spreadsheets. You know, the faster we go, the faster revenue comes. Faster we go, the faster cash goes, right? You kind of have to balance it between the two because we're deploying capital, we're deploying systems, right? We've struggled with that balance a bit, but we think where we're at right now, we're in a nice sweet spot that we can, you know, absorb the capital that we need to deploy to put the systems out there and have the revenue then ramping up. We probably went a little faster than we'd expect in the fall in the first few months here.
Our one customer really front loaded a lot of stores, which we thought were gonna be near the back of the year a little bit. Like I say, the faster they can, they go in, the better in terms of the revenue. It's just we have to be careful because that's where our cash goes, right? It's more on the capital outlay than it even is our expenses.
Okay. Question here from private investor, Gilles. This one's probably more directed towards Greg. If you can elaborate a bit more on your RFID technology and product and how this all fits together and what the roadmap there is.
Actually the RFID project is quite interesting. Kyle alluded to it a little bit about in terms of the technology that we've put into our systems. RFID has been one of these things that evolved actually from one of our major retailers who came to us. It's nice when the customer's coming to you asking for additional features, different types of screens, and helping to build out the product line. What RFID, to answer your question, what it allows us to do is to give you direct tracking of specific items on there so customers are better able to manage their inventory, better to able to identify items.
For example, we introduced at the NRF show in New York an RFID-enabled system such that if a product is going out the door which has not been deactivated, i.e, you put an RFID tag on something to identify what it is, and if it hasn't been deactivated at the till, we actually flash up a picture instantly on the screen so that you know, the person who's walking the door with it realizes that product has not been deactivated, that we're able to better track that stuff. The customer's got better track of their inventory. There's a whole bunch of really good benefits for the retailer on this, and we're happy that our technology is gonna play a key part in that for reducing the shrink of products going out the door with these customers.
Right. Also a question here from Gilles, another one. With regards to Prosegur, you know, you managed to do a lot of work with Prosegur building its pipeline in the U.S. Prosegur does not really have a strong presence in Canada. How does Prosegur develop in the Canadian market? Can you comment on that?
Prosegur actually, they don't have a lot of brand awareness, right? People don't know much about them, they have a good presence in Canada. They actually have 2 hunter-type salespeople that are out chasing new business for them. They're growing their capabilities here behind them to support those 2 individuals. They've got a few other team members they've added in the Canadian market. We're actually impressed with a couple of trials that we've gotten out of them in the Canadian market. I would not say that they're lacking in this market at this point in time. We expect to have some good customer wins come out of it in the short term.
Yeah. There's been several questions here from 2 different people asking about Q2 revenue lower than Q1 revenue. That's sequential. I mean, year-over-year growth is 50% year-over-year growth on revenue and sequential Q1 versus Q2. I think you already addressed this. You mentioned about the seasonality and the Christmas time. Maybe just comment on that again, just 'cause it seems like 2 questions. This comes up 2 times here on the list.
Yeah. The loss prevention, which is still, you know, a majority of the revenue as the advertising, the SaaS is ramping up, it literally stops the middle of the month. It just stops. There's no retailer ordering loss prevention products in the run up to Christmas and the week afterwards. We expect that those will be very strong advertising parts of the market, and that's going to help us long term, and we should not see as much of a slowdown next quarter. If anything, we should see a ramp-up as we have more screens out there and advertising is a bigger part of the mix. Yeah, it's one of those things that, you know, just kind of have to roll with a little bit. January out of the gates took off on us.
you know, there is that pent-up demand, retailers getting back to it. We're not reading anything into it. I mean, we would love to have reported, you know, another 20,000-30,000 higher as well, it, you know, it does fit the model.
If we look back over the last 5, 6 years of our financials and look at Q2, this is typical this time of year that retailers just are not going to be spending a lot of their energy on loss prevention type systems around that time of year. This is a historical pattern, so there's nothing abnormal about this at all.
Okay. Question from private investor, Gareth. The latest press release indicated that you've shipped more units in the month of February than the previous year. Is that February month a one-off, or would you expect this rate to continue?
Yeah. Maybe just a little clarity. It was January and February we shipped. Go ahead, Gareth.
Yeah. We, we expect this to continue to grow. The team has risen to the challenge. We're getting things better organized to be able to deliver our systems faster, and we expect an increasing velocity in putting systems out to our customers.
A follow-on question from Gareth. Can you just provide some more color on the current split between INEO and Prosegur in terms of installed number of units out there?
There's definitely more units installed by us directly. Obviously, the Liquor Store network, the legacy network that we approved out our systems on. Our, our U.S. customer, our large U.S. customer is the one really rolling out a lot of those systems right now. But we're on that initial uptick from post year 2. Probably, I would say March will be their biggest month ever. We expect that to continue up the year as, you know, we're just maturing through those pilots into the next phase of either testing or rollouts.
Prosegur, just for clarity, Prosegur has more pilots out there than.
Yes.
INEO direct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They do. We focus most of our new customer, you know, wins or business development through them, whereas we had that one big customer of our own that we wanted to keep under our own umbrella, but the rest we put under them.
yeah. This Sarfraz, also private investor also had a similar sort of question about the 50-plus retail locations. Those are direct channels, right? They're not the Prosegur ones for now, but the new installs primarily.
The large majority of those are direct, but there's some through Prosegur too.
Yeah. Another question from Sarfraz, private investor. Can you just comment about the SaaS and ad gross margins, with direct and also through Prosegur? Just provide some color about your two, you know, I guess sort of ad streams, SaaS revenue versus ad revenue.
Yeah. you know, long term, we would love to be virtually like 100% in SaaS, right? The retailer takes care of all the advertising. We just get that monthly fee. Some of them need to warm up to it. Some have to get their retail media online integrated. We see long term that that's where it's gonna flow. you know, how do we characterize it? Do we characterize it as advertising or SaaS? you know, in some retailers it might have a revenue share bent to it, where, you know, they're booking the dollars and sharing it back.
In the end, as long as we, you know, we have the number we want, whether we call it SaaS or advertising in the contract, I think we will have to formalize how we report that in one bucket so that everybody understands what it is.
Right. Some questions around that I've seen here. A couple questions around cash flow and stuff. I guess, you know, you raised the CAD 2.7 million. Much of that went out for the financing and stuff. Can you just sort of comment on your outlook for cash and cash flow for the next couple of quarters?
Yeah. You know, I mentioned earlier how, you know, our cash needs, obviously, you know, corporate needs and expenses on one, but also on the deployment of systems. The deployment of systems is one that we can turn on and off in a heartbeat, right? If you don't deploy any system, you don't use any cash. We don't obviously wanna do that because that's our future revenue. It's again, just creating that balance between the two. In terms of our corporate expenses, like I said, we have a small team. We're very vigilant on where the money goes. In terms of that, it's mostly the cash use will be around those deployments. Prosegur helps in that regard on all the customers that we put out through them, they obviously fund the hardware.
We get direct reimbursement for any of our costs on those and the hardware. That's a good model for helping us defray costs or cash burn. And that's why all those, you know, a lot of those pilots, almost all those pilots except for our big customer that we have ourselves right now are going out through Prosegur, then it relieves the need for us to spend cash.
Good. Last question here from private investor, Giles. With regards to, this is probably more a Greg question, R&D spending and kind of what are your R&D plans for 2023?
Yeah, we continue to invest in RFID with the evolution of our products. We've got five engineers on our R&D team, which is quite a small number when you look at all the pieces of technology that we've managed to put together. We've developed a complete ecosystem with a broad range of products based on feedback and guidance from our customers. We will continue to invest in it because this is where all the good ideas come from. You know, our customers coming to us and asking us for RFID, for Bluetooth Low Energy, Beaconing, et cetera like that. We keep our ears to the ground and our team small and continue to roll out the advancements in the technology to keep us ahead of anybody who might try to enter into the market.
Okay. That's it in terms of questions. I'll turn it back over to Greg and Kyle for any last comments.
Yeah. you know, thank you everybody for joining us again. It's been a pleasure answering questions and presenting to everybody. you know, we're, as I said earlier, we're open to, you know, any follow-up anybody has. If they want a little bit more clarity, please send us a note. I just wanna thank shareholders who have supported us from the beginning and through the last few financings. It's made a world of difference to us to get this company to where we want it to be. We're not happy with the share price obviously, but it is what it is within the market. We think all the things we have going, there's a great story here and it's gonna get very exciting in the coming quarters. Pass it to you, Greg.
Yes, I do. I wanna thank all of our shareholders who have supported us and continue to support us. I can say our end of the bargain is we will continue to work as hard as we can every day to build INEO to what we know that it can be. Thanks.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you, everyone.