Hello, everyone. My name is Pardeep Sangha, Head of Investor Relations at INEO. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today, and welcome to INEO's Q4 and 2023 annual financial results investor webinar. 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.
Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and 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 our previous quarter management discussion 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 changes in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions, or circumstances on which such statement is based, except if it's required by law. And with that, I'd like to open it up to Mr. Greg Watkin, Chairman and Founder of INEO. Greg?
Thank you, Pardeep. First off, I'd like to thank everyone for joining this webinar to listen to our corporate update. Before we begin, I want to remind those joining us today that we're unfortunately not able to use the names of certain retail chains that we're working with due to our non-promotion agreements with these large companies. This is an ongoing challenge with these retailers, and we'd really like to be able to name names. For the benefit of our shareholders, analysts, and potential new investors on the call, we'll do our best to provide commentary on the nature of the rollouts without actually naming the retail chains. I'd like to start today's call by mentioning our news flow in the last six months.
As you're all aware, we've been very quiet recently, and I want to assure you that the company's been very busy over the last few months working on key contracts. This has been a major strategic initiative, and we believe that these new contracts position the company to reach positive cash flow much sooner. In addition, we expect to be announcing agreements and providing updates more regularly to our shareholders. INEO continues to actively work with several large retailers, and we have a growing pipeline of opportunities. Furthermore, the company has its own patented intellectual property that protects our business. To the best of our knowledge, there's no other company that provides retail loss prevention system integrated with an in-store digital media network. INEO's an innovator and continues to lead this industry. On today's call, I will provide an update on our current rollout of progress with our retail partners. Our CEO, Kyle Hall, will then discuss the company's annual financial results and highlight some recent business initiatives, where we newly announced shipment with Welcoming Systems to Jumbo Cencosud. Kyle will also speak towards our recently announced updated commercial agreements, as well as provide an outlook for 2024. 2023 has been a pivotal year for the company in which we achieved the most deployments of INEO Welcoming Systems in company history, with an accelerating installation schedule. To accomplish this, a major focus for INEO during the year was to allocate resources towards the company's R&D and infrastructure to further build out our network's capabilities for rapid scale and expansion.
Working alongside our major retail partners, I can proudly announce that INEO has now successfully expanded its Welcoming System network to key major cities in 23 states, with over 108 installed retail locations, plus the ramp-up of installations in Bogotá, Colombia, and other cities throughout that country. I'd also like to mention that plans for additional rollout deployments in 2024 and 2025 are already in progress. One of our major retail partners would like to continue moving quickly in expanding the INEO Media Network across all of their locations in the U.S. For context, these stores represent approximately 270 million customer impressions and more than 22 billion advertising impressions annually, and we expect to deploy several hundred systems annually to this retailer over the next three years.
With that, I'd like to turn this over to our CEO, Kyle Hall, who will discuss some of our key financial highlights.
Thanks, Greg. I'm gonna read off these so I get the numbers exact for everyone, but I'm pleased to report that we had strong results for fiscal 2024, for the twelve months ended June thirtieth, 2023. For our Q4 numbers and our audited year-end, so this is our audited year-end, we achieved revenues of CAD 1.51 million for the year-end June thirtieth, 2023, representing an increase of 21% compared to revenue of CAD 1.25 million for the year ended June thirtieth, 2022. Revenue for Q4 2023, the three months ending June thirtieth, was CAD 308 thousand, compared to revenue of CAD 414 thousand, Q4 2022.
This decrease in our fourth quarter revenue was a side effect of our intentional decision to divert resources from our legacy loss prevention sales and refocusing them on our strategic business initiatives of deploying media networks for retailers. INEO generated gross profit for the year ended June thirtieth of CAD 373,000, as compared to profit of CAD 453,000 for the year ended June thirtieth, 2022.
... And our loss and comprehensive loss for the year ended June thirtieth, 2023, was CAD 3.3 million, or CAD 0.05 per share, compared to a net loss of CAD 3.3 million, or CAD 0.05 per share in June thirtieth, 2022. EBITDA loss for the year ended June thirtieth, 2023, was CAD 2.83 million, compared to EBITDA loss of CAD 2.88 million for the year ended June thirtieth, 2022. As at June thirtieth, 2023, the company had 76,143,709 shares issued and outstanding. Those are the financials. We're happy to take questions on those when we get to the end of the call, but now I want to go into some of the business highlights that we've had.
On our last webinar and in a press release earlier, we had recently told everybody about the new commercial agreements that we'd signed with our large national retail and our regional liquor store customers that are on our network. I'm gonna go into this in a bit more detail, but you know, the key numbers here to get into everybody's minds are 5- to 6-year contract lengths, exclusive right for the in-store advertising in these stores and these retailers that we signed agreements with. The right to deploy additional media assets within those stores and screens throughout the stores.
The right to assign the ownership of the advertising contracts, to be able to sell the advertising and assign that to a third-party media company, and the right to sign the ownership of the hardware itself to a third-party media company. I'll go into those in a bit more detail, but I want to talk right now about INEO Orca. We put this press release out, you know, a few weeks back, and we've been working on this in the background for quite some time. One of our large retail customers really has been a driver on it.
They want it, they liked what we proposed to them, and so we've been working on building it out and finishing it off, and it's taken us by surprise a bit on how much activity and how much response we've had to that press release. You know, U.S. retailers are really getting hit hard by theft right now. It's either, you know, a sign of the economic times, but it's also a bit of, you know, what's happening in law enforcement and resources of law enforcement and prosecution of shoplifting and then organized retail crime entering this stage where they're actually targeting certain products and stealing these en masse to be able to resell them and on the black market.
So it's really been pushed down to retailers to, to fight back on their own on this. So law enforcement's not helping all that much on some of it, and in order for them to prosecute, they have to build a very good case to get law enforcement involved, and they have to have done all, you know, basically all the work in the background. And there's quite a few companies out there that are saying they're doing some AI and some computer vision in this area, but we've got a very unique advantage. We have welcoming systems at the front entrance of the store that know exactly when loss prevention events happen. We get. Our systems alarm the store. They notify when loss prevention events happen. We capture video of those loss prevention events.
What we are doing is we're applying AI to those loss prevention event videos. We're meticulously analyzing the video from those loss prevention events, and we're comparing them against other videos from within that store, from surrounding stores, stores within the area, and we're able to give the retailer a very concise look of who is taking the product. I don't mean who, you know, Kyle or Greg, but I mean like, you know, identifying the situations that this is happening, the patterns that this is happening, and the system learns and adapts.
What we're able to do is by comparing like images within videos, and videos are just a series of images, we're able to distinguish patterns and clothing and people to be able to defer to the loss prevention team, give them exception reporting, where they can now say, "We've got this same person hit us in five different stores. This same group of people hit us in three different stores or in one store." I want to stress, we're not using facial recognition. We're not using biometric numerical profiling of people. We've got created a way using our video clips on the comparison of images, on a comparison basis only, to be able to do this with our AI capabilities. It's very unique, it's within privacy, and it's something we're running with quite hard right now.
It's going to create another revenue stream for us down the road as we really build this out. Some of our retailers right now, we've kind of rolled it in as we're trialing it out with them. But this is a platform on top of the media platform that we've built. It's a platform for analytics and AI recurring revenue that we're gonna be able to generate out of this. So then the other piece, I've talked a lot about that one. The other piece is the Jumbo Cencosud. INEO and Prosegur put a lot of pilot systems in the market in early 2022 and throughout 2022, and our partner, Prosegur, has done a great job of this. We've talked about this previously.
They helped get, you know, pilot systems, demo systems in front of a lot of customers, and we're now seeing those start to convert. The first big one to fall here is Jumbo Cencosud. Great retailer. Colombia division is Jumbo, is where we're dealing with, but they're throughout South America. They've got over 1,000 locations. Bright, big stores. You'd be impressed at how nice these stores are. They're really beautiful stores. We've only gone into four. We've got four stores on the first roll here are committed, but almost 15 systems per store, 59 systems in total going into these four locations. So the upside here is tremendous. We installed the initial pilot with Jumbo in, I would think, it was April, end of April, sometime, 2022.
So it ran for a little longer than we wanted to, but they've already been selling advertising on the three systems that we deployed. They've really put it through its paces on the loss prevention side and on our capabilities operating side. And after some long, drawn-out negotiations, Prosegur got an agreement, and so we're now moving on that. So we'll see more from this over the next year, but we're quite happy and very proud of this relationship and very thankful for our partners at Prosegur for pushing through and getting this to happen. Now, I want to go back into the contracts a little bit, to talk about exactly, you know, some of this detail and what it means to the company going forward.
We went through this quite heavily on the last call, so you know, might be a little bit of repetition here for some people, but I think it's well worth us really having people understand what we're doing here. You know, the update at the. The number one thing we had to do was we had to get longevity of these contracts. We you know, 2, 3 years is great, but we need to get some you know, certainty in the revenue runway that we would have and also the long-term security that would mean for any partner that we brought in, a media partner, specifically for the revenue sources. And so the 5 and 6 years that we were able to secure was crucial.
The next piece is getting screens elsewhere in the store so that we can sell that whole dwell time, so that we're not just selling the entrance and exit. Our welcoming systems are great. People see them, first thing they see as they walk in, last thing they see as they leave. You can also see them through the whole front entrance of the store, so we're getting the dwell time at the front of the store, but we want the dwell time for the whole visit. If somebody's in the store for 15 minutes, we want to be able to sell that whole 15 minutes, and so we want screens strategically located throughout the store that we can run advertising on and get those impressions. We've already started. We've already deployed the first store within one very large retailer now with extra screens.
They look great. We're now... That was the prototype to say, okay, where do they go? How do they fit? How do they look? And now we're gonna roll it back into all the stores that we've already deployed and all the stores going forward. It's quite significant when you think of the immersive experience of having screens all through the store, and everywhere you look, your eyes have the opportunity of seeing that advertising. With those screens, then, we need the exclusive right to be able to sell the advertising, right? We can't have competition on other screens in the store or other mediums in the store selling against us.
And so we were able to secure that as well, so that the infrastructure that we have in place can be monetized properly, can be filled properly, and we're not gonna be in a race to the bottom where we're you know, bidding against other screens. So very, very crucial to have exclusive right. And then the big pieces were the assigning of the ownership of the hardware that we put in the store. When we first looked at this, and we started talking to the retailers, you know, the model really was we would put the hardware in, and the retailers would fill it with the advertising from their trade dollars and the relationships they had with their brands. And the retail feedback was, "Yes, we're gonna do that." It didn't quite pan out that way.
As we started going, the retailers got very, very... I guess, the right word would be, they didn't want to share. They get all that trade dollars today. They were worried about having it just spread over more screens and more advertising mediums versus just getting, you know, what they get for end cap space and shelf space and all that, the revenue that they get from the brands on the inside today. And what we really, you know, came to so was, what we wanted for the retailer and we wanted for ourselves was the national advertising budget. So think of... Let's pick a big customer, Microsoft. You know, Microsoft will advertise with retailers. They'll put a lot of money into retail stores, but then Microsoft also advertises everywhere.
You know, whether it's TV, online, or billboards, Microsoft's advertising. We want a piece of that budget to come in and not just take from the other side. And so what we had to do was, we had to think this through and what was the right model. And when we also looked at who owns all these billboards out in the market and who owns all these screens, the large media companies do. And the large media companies buy the hardware to put out there, whether it's a billboard or a digital display somewhere. They lease the space, space to put it in, and they then sell the advertising on top of it. So the opportunity of partnering with one of these large media companies just became, you know, the right thing to do for us. So assigning...
Having the right to assign the contract of the ownership of the hardware and assign the selling of the advertising just made sense to us, and so we were able to secure that within these retailers. And for the last, well, it hasn't been just for the last few weeks, but for the last little while, we've been aggressively taking bids on media partners who want to participate with us on this business. We've got quite a few at the table, and we're at the point now where we're just getting down to the nitty-gritty of who is gonna be our media partner. So we should have some more to say on this in the near future.
But the updated contract structure really is what allows us to match the demand that we have for the INEO Welcoming System that the retailers want because of our great capabilities on the loss prevention side and analytics and even, you know, the media side, but match that with a media partner who is prolific in selling advertising and can really monetize these and take the financial burden off of INEO, of owning and installing all of these systems, have the media company pay for that. So that's my long-winded way of telling you where we're at on those. So open to questions if I wasn't clear. We're quite happy with where we've gotten to on those and where the company's heading. So let's find the key objectives throughout the year.
You know, we're working hard on direct sales of putting more systems out there with the key customers that we have, getting new customers directly, but also working with our partner, Prosegur, on rolling out more customers and getting more customers with trials started and getting those trials converted to full contracts. You know, particularly, as Greg alluded to, we have one large retail partner, thousand-plus stores, who is moving very fast. We're gonna put in a few more hundred stores next year with them, and it'll go for the next two or three years till we fill out all those locations. But it's gonna go fast. We've seeded the market well with the trials, and now we're moving to full contracts.
As we go forward, the advertising analytics, Orca, and what we do with the data that we get for the just the loss prevention events themselves, it means a lot to where we're going with the company. As retailers invest in the technology in systems out in the stores, there's money coming back into retail, into retail tech, and we are in a really good spot on that. CB Insights had something a couple weeks ago, with how the growth in retail tech is the number one area of expenditures for retailers in some categories. Really taking our new agreements and pushing those forward, that's where we're gonna be.
So if we, if we look at what are the, the core things that we're gonna do for this year, we're gonna, we're gonna deploy systems directly ourselves, we're gonna deploy systems with our partner, Prosegur, and then we're gonna work with a media company to monetize, and, and increase the revenue growth off of all those systems. That's the core... The three core initiatives. The media partner, as I said, we're, we're working hard on that right now. It will happen. It's just a matter of time on a couple of those. And I think, as we, as we get into the, you know, the new year, we're gonna see a lot of growth within our systems. And with that, I will turn it back to Pardeep for some questions.
Yeah, if you can just enter any questions into the chat function at the bottom of your screen. I'll give a couple minutes to get the questions queued up here. Great. The question here coming in says about the right to assign hardware. Can you just explain how that works in terms of CapEx investment recovery and getting patches installed in historically installed units, and going forward whether you're able to sell the... And when you install the systems, do you sell them at a cost or at a profit?
Yeah. You want me to take that, Greg, or? I'll take-
Yep, go ahead.
Sure. Okay. Yeah, so, yes, the idea here is we've already deployed quite a few systems in the market, and the media partner will assume ownership over those. So that will be a recovery on our side of capital. We're in the negotiations on that right now, and it depends, you know, the exact numbers, but we think we'll come out okay on that. Future sales of the hardware for more systems will not be at a loss. It will be, it will be, you know, a markup on our cost to produce these. In the end, we don't want it too high of a cost out there because we want to get more of these systems in, because the revenue really is about generating off of the media side.
But we will have income, and we will have revenue from the hardware sales to the partner. And then, of course, that will be, that will be all accretive to everything else that we're doing on the, recurring revenue that we get from the systems themselves.
We have another question here. Given the updated strategy with the media partner and the updated contracts, will you be providing some sort of revised forecast?
We have not given any official guidance out there or forecast at this point in time. I think as a small technology company, you know, we've shied away from doing any of that. What we're trying to do is give everybody the blueprint for where the revenue will be generated and allow people to generate models of their own. But at this point in time, we won't give an exact forecast for what we're expecting.
But just to put things in perspective, if I can just add something here. Your large retail partner in the US has 1,000 stores, so there's 1,000 locations, and you're currently 100 stores into that deployment. So, for, you know, something to look at, people can look at is can they look at, you know, there's 900 more stores to go. Is that one way to kind of think about this?
Yeah, that's a good way to think of it, Pardeep.
That, that's how investors can make up a bit of their own forecast if... Yeah.
Yep.
Okay, question here with regards to revenue per system. Maybe you can just talk about that. How does revenue per system work previously versus the new contracts?
Yeah. So off of the new model going forward, with the media partner, INEO will still own the technology, will sell the technology to the media partner. They will deploy it, just like they do when they buy hardware to put in a billboard or a screen elsewhere. INEO will operate that the system, the full INEO Media Network, you know, maintaining the hardware in store, monitoring the hardware, running the content management system for, you know, the media going on and off the system, running the analytics behind the scenes, whether it's INEO Orca or, you know, our general data that we capture in terms of number of alarm events, when the alarm events happen, people counting, that type of thing.
We will run that whole infrastructure on behalf of the partner, and for that, we will get paid a monthly fee. So instead of us having to rely on the advertising cyclical nature of the advertising, where the advertising sales are, we are negotiating a hard fee that we get paid on a per store basis. So it really it's truly now SaaS revenue. Our revenue streams are the sale of the hardware, the SaaS revenue coming in, and that's our model going forward.
Question on, can you comment about cash position and how you plan to finance future operations?
You take it, Greg, or you wanna take it?
Yeah, continue on, Kyle.
So with what we've putting out there in terms of the assignability of the contracts and the assignability of the advertising we've deployed a lot of systems out there. So there will be non-dilutive money coming back into INEO for the sale of those systems that are already in store, right? So that's money coming back into the company. Our cash position right now is we've got enough cash to do what we need to do. We've been very... We've always said that we had some levers that we could pull that would allow us to, you know, stop the burn, turn things around.
We have not progressed the network a lot in the last couple of months, so we hammered out those 108 stores to get to this point, to get to where we could do some deals. We slowed it down a little bit because we did need to conserve cash until we were able to consummate these other deals. But we still have a few levers we can pull there. We've got good partnerships, we've got good momentum on some sales sides of things. So we have enough cash to do what we need to do in the short term.
So the sale of the existing network units out there, that will generate some cash for you, right? To strengthen your balance sheet.
Correct.
Okay. Just, just kind of a question here about the stage of negotiations with the media partners. Maybe just provide some general color. I mean, you probably can't tell exactly what's going on here, but just some general color on the media partners and, and where you are with those, the stage of those.
Yeah. Greg and I have, you know, as we went into this, we started this in February, everyone, just so you know. It's this wasn't like a come-lately strategy. We started this back in February on where we thought we had to be by about this time in the year and where we had to progress things. You know, and as we looked at it and we said, "Okay, what do we need to secure the media partner?" And the first step was the contracts, right? So we worked really hard on those contracts and to get what we needed, but get what we needed in terms of what we needed in order for the media partner to come in and fuel this thing.
So, you know, Greg and I got those put to bed, you know, a few months, I guess, what, about three or four weeks back, is when we announced it. And in that whole time, we've been working on a side path of media partners. So we've spoken with many, and some really good conversations that we had, even as far back as February, that helped us, you know, structure what we were doing with the retailers and structure what we were doing for the future of the company. So we've had discussions going for quite some time. It's a matter of just making sure that we get what we need and it's the right partner to go forward. It's a bit of a balance, right?
We have these retailers that have needs, and we're gonna have the media partners have needs, and their needs have to overlap, and the classic Venn diagram with us in there too, right? So it's been, you know, I would say challenging, but, you know, Greg always says, he says, "This is fun. This is the fun challenge. This is business happening," right? We're making partnerships, we're making deals, and doing it with some good people on the other side. So can't say much more on where we're gonna end up yet, but we're quite happy with the options that we have.
One question about Jumbo Cencosud, if you can just provide some color there in terms of when to start generating revenue. I think maybe just could clarify about the working capital CapEx for these 39 systems. Like, you've already you know built these systems, right? These are already being shipped, right? So the CapEx has already happened.
Yeah.
Just provide some color on that.
Yeah. Maybe I'll, I'll provide a little bit of. Let Kyle take a break for just a second here. Jumbo Cencosud, we are in the process of producing those systems right now. We have another shipment which will be going out the door today. The deal on that one is, this is reducing our CapEx burn because we're getting cash for the systems, as Kyle was alluding to, with working with a media partner. We're working with Prosegur on this. We are also getting paid for the systems that are going out the door, as well as getting ongoing SaaS revenue from these systems. So that certainly goes a long way to helping with the cash burn, is when you get somebody actually purchasing the systems from us.
We receive cash up front for part of those ones, and it's helping us significantly with our CapEx burn.
Question on other partnerships. Do you foresee any other partnerships similar to Prosegur in order to expand in additional markets?
Kyle, do you want to comment on that one?
Yeah, yeah. We're not exclusive with Prosegur. Like I said, they've been a good partner, though, right? They've been good. We've lamented a little bit on how slow some of these pilots have taken to get to full rollouts, and we're working hard still to make that happen. There's the opportunity to do some things with some other players and non-competitive with Prosegur and possibly slightly competitive with Prosegur. We don't want to injure them in any way, shape, or form, but if it can proceed our business better, we will do a partnership with another party within either the loss prevention field or an adjacent technology type field.
We'd have to weigh the costs and benefits of it and make sure, you know, just the people that Greg and I are, and the way we do business, we'd be quite upfront and open with our partners to make sure that, we're, you know, it's a sustainable relationship, and our current relationships are sustainable with it.
... That appears to be all the questions that we have today. Any closing comments from either Kyle or Greg? I appreciate it.
Yeah, guys, we—I know some of this is quite repetitive because we only had that webinar a few weeks ago. We were acknowledging the fact that we were quiet for a little too long, as Greg referenced earlier. We're here. We want to answer your questions. If we haven't answered your question today, we're open to taking questions either through Pardeep, Greg, or I. We have no problem hopping on the phone, scheduling a call, to go into more detail. We've got some big things happening. I wish we could say a bit more on a couple, but, you know, those contracts were enormous to get through, and they're quite valuable, right?
So almost the value of INEO is now in those contracts, and the technology is valuable, but it's those contracts that are gonna move us forward in terms of the revenue generation and the future valuation of the company. And that'll come more to light over the next, you know, 6 months to a year for everyone. But we're happy to have everybody here today, and we, we're committing to you that we, you know, we will be transparent and open as best we can, and on these calls, we'll, you know, hop on as often as we need to.
Yeah. I, I just wanted to thank everybody for joining the call today. We're certainly not, haven't historically provided guidance in terms of revenues, et cetera, but as you look at the contracts that Kyle alluded to, and we talked about it a little bit earlier in the presentation as well. With the one major retailer in the States, we're talking about 22 billion advertising impressions that are available as inventory, and that's very valuable for the advertising partners that we're in discussions with to look at that, the totality of the inventory that we've got there. The same thing holds true with Jumbo Cencosud. We have very large amounts of inventory that we're now able to bring to the market. So that's the key thing for the company.
I'd like to thank everybody for joining us today.
Thank you, everyone. That concludes your call today.
Thank you.
Thank you.