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Earnings Call: Q2 2022

Aug 2, 2022

Operator

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Kopin second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press Star, then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing Star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rich Sneider, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Rich Sneider
CFO, Kopin

Thank you, operator. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. John will begin today's call with a discussion of our progress in executing our strategy, and then I will go through the second quarter of 2022 results at a high level. John will conclude our prepared remarks, and we'll be happy to take your questions. I would like to remind everyone that during today's call taking place on Tuesday, August 2, 2022, we'll be making forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on the company's current expectations, projections, beliefs, and estimates, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements.

Potential risks include, but are not limited to, demand for our products, operating results for our subsidiaries, market conditions, and other factors discussed in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements made during today's call. With that, I'll turn the call over to John.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Thank you, Rich. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us to discuss our second quarter 2022 operating results. We are very pleased with the results of the second quarter of 2022. Total revenues were up 20% year-over-year, driven by about 30% growth of our product revenues. In addition, our customer-funded research and development revenues remain strong, which we view as an indicator of our future growth opportunities as we expect most of these development programs, which are positioned to production in time. Our revenue from defense products were particularly strong, growing 87% year-over-year in the second quarter. During the second quarter of 2022, we announced additional orders for our displays for F-35 pilot helmets and imaging systems for armored vehicles.

In July, we announced a production order for our Brillian high-brightness color displays for helicopter pilot helmets. During the second quarter, we also announced the expansion of our industrial customer base, adding a new Korean 3D automated optical inspection system customer. They use our spatial light modulator or SLM as a critical component in their system. With this particular win, we're now supplying our high-speed, high-performance SLM, which are based on proprietary ferroelectric liquid crystal displays to all three leading Korean 3D AOI equipment manufacturers in addition to other market-leading manufacturers in China, Japan, Germany. These announcements are very important in several ways. To add to our already strong backlog of orders, but equally important, those programs represent the variety of microdisplay technology Kopin offers.

We believe we are the only company in the world that offer active matrix liquid crystal displays, ferroelectric liquid displays, and organic light-emitting diode or OLED displays. We are working with partners to develop inorganic light-emitting diodes, displays, or commonly named MicroLEDs. All our microdisplays, as a reminder, are displays built on silicon. Just as important as our breadth of display technologies to meet customer needs is a variety of advanced specialized optics which we offer, and which provides our customer with an integrated turnkey solution. This allows our customer to offer high-quality visual solutions to meet the variety of needs in the market. For example, our new patent-pending all plastic Pancake optics enables smaller, much lighter weight VR headsets and also metaverse headsets compared to the optics used in the headsets today.

We believe our all plastic Pancake optics are the first in the world. Providing critical components for metaverse headsets that are thinner, lighter, comfortable, and easy to use has been one of our critical objectives. Our all plastic optics, Pancake optics, provide not only the clear advantages mentioned before, but most importantly, they provide a very sharp image with good eye relief. We believe combining our all plastic Pancake optics with our 2.6K OLED microdisplays, representing a perfect match, providing magnification of 30,000-50,000 times while maintaining a very sharp image. Our goal has always remained the same, which is to lead in these two critical technologies areas. They are essential for great VR/AR experiences. This is a good place to put the importance of microdisplays and Pancakes in the proper context.

These two technologies are analogous in importance as lithium battery technologies to the electric vehicle industry. Our second quarter growth occurred, and we're still with global supply chain issues. While we are pleased with that growth, it did come at a cost. As our press release indicates, we've incurred more costs to keep our customer running and our operations running than we would normally expect. Typically, a defense product design has a life cycle about 5-7 years. Given the supply chain issues and our limited visibility as to when the supply chain issues will get resolved, as a contingency, we redesigned several products with alternate semiconductor components so we will have flexibility and a backup plan. This has increased our engineering and part costs, and we also incur costs for those alternative semiconductor components as we acquire those semiconductor components.

The positive news is based on discussion with our vendors now. It appears the supply chain issues are improving, and we believe our operation in the second half of 2022 will run closer to normal. Furthermore, we expect that our second half revenue will be higher than our first half revenue as our defense business is set to be stronger. Now, let me provide an update on the progress of developing our micro OLED product line. We're currently designing multiple backplanes for partners and customers, and we're also in discussion with partners for more advanced OLED designs for use in virtual reality and augmented reality systems. What has drawn customers to us is our unique industry-leading 2.6K OLED display and deep knowledge of the display and optics as a system.

Customers, of course, like high resolutions, but they also value its 1.3-inch size because it enables better optics. The 2.6 display is really a display on a chip. We named it DoC. It has embedded MIPI circuits and digital processing circuits, which make the interface with standard video signals simpler and much less power consuming. One additional technical advantage and advance we have is that folks are now beginning to understand the value of voltage drive in OLED displays as opposed to current drive. Kopin designed our 2.6 OLED display using voltage drive, while most others use current drive. Voltage versus current drive are now hotly debated in the industry. Our analysis indicate that voltage drive results significantly in lower power consumption, especially as microdisplay resolution increases.

Kopin micro OLED displays have been shown to be using significantly lower power than OLEDs by other customers, other suppliers. We are now in discussion with folks to put the advantage of our 2.6 display design to higher resolutions, such as 4K HDR displays. As we have previously discussed, our OLED product line is based on a fabless business model. Using our model, we either sell finished OLED microdisplay to our customer by working with our OLED foundry partners, or we sell our highly advanced proprietary backplane wafers to OLED OEM partners who complete the microdisplay for sale to their own customer base. This business model provide us more flexibility to meet customer demands. Turning to our research and development activities. We continue to make excellent progress in developing a microLED display. This is a customer-funded project that has many partners.

These consortium partners working on different elements of displays is how we created our current LCD in the early 1990s, with the $50 million funding from DARPA to us. To be clear, this is a long-term development project, but if successful, the display opens us tremendous opportunities. In summary, customers' demand is strong in our core product lines, especially in our defense sector. We're aggressively managing our supply chain challenge. We'll continue our momentum on innovating and advancing our technology for Metaverse applications. We continue to see strong interest in developing products targeted for Metaverse. We feel we're very well-positioned to capitalize the opportunities it presents.

We're very excited for the growth of Kopin as we see a wave of rapidly growing interest in our microdisplays and optics across AR, VR, and MR products and applications, first in defense, then enterprise, and now starting in consumer sectors. Our technology advances, our current market conditions are very favorable, and we believe Kopin is well-positioned to capitalize. Now we turn the call to Rich to discuss the financial aspect of this quarter and the full year.

Rich Sneider
CFO, Kopin

Thank you, John. Turning to our financial results. Product revenues for the second quarter ended June 25, 2022 were $9 million, compared with $6.9 million for the second quarter ended June 26, 2021. A 30% increase year-over-year. Funded research and development revenues were $2.8 million for the second quarter ended June 25, 2022, compared with $2.7 million for the second quarter ended June 26, 2021, essentially flat. Total revenues for Q2 2022 were $11.9 million versus $9.9 million on the prior year, an overall 20% increase year-over-year. Cost of goods sold for the second quarter of 2022 was $7.9 million or 88% of product revenues, compared with $6 million or 87% for the second quarter of last year.

The slight increase in cost for the product revenues as a % of net product revenues for the three months ended June 25, 2022, as compared to the prior year, was primarily due to manufacturing inefficiencies caused by supply chain disruptions. R&D expenses in the second quarter of 2022 were $5.1 million, compared with $3.7 million for the second quarter of 2021. The increase in the 2022 second quarter R&D expense as compared to the prior year was equally split between R&D, internal R&D expense, and customer-funded R&D activities. The increase in internal R&D was primarily due to an increase in OLED development costs and the redesign of certain products to incorporate alternative semiconductor components as a result of the shortage of legacy semiconductor components. The increase in funded R&D was in support of customer-funded activities related to defense programs.

SG&A was $4.3 million in the second quarter of 2022, compared to $4 million in the second quarter of 2021. SG&A increased for the three months ended June 25, 2022, as compared to the three months ended June 26, 2021, primarily due to an increase in compensation, information technology, and travel costs, which were partially offset by lower bad debt expense and stock-based compensation expense. Other income/expense was an expense of approximately $141 thousand for the second quarter of 2022, compared with $104 thousand of income for the second quarter of 2021. During the three months ended June 25, 2022, we recorded $150 thousand of foreign currency losses as compared to $101 thousand of foreign currency gains for the three months ended June 26, 2021.

Turning to the bottom line, our net loss attributable to controlling interest for the quarter was approximately $5.6 million or $0.06 per share, compared with a net loss of $3.8 million or $0.04 per share in the second quarter of 2021. Net cash used in operating activities for the six months ended June 25, 2022 was approximately $11.4 million. As John and my discussions indicated, supply chain issues affected our manufacturing efficiencies, which increased costs and negatively affected working capital flow in the first half of the year. In addition, as we discussed, we received a production order for our Brillian displays for rotary wing aircraft, and we expect another program to transition into production in the second half of 2022, and these may require additional working capital.

Accordingly, management deemed it prudent to partially fund our working capital needs through the use of our at-the-market equity offering program, or ATM. During the second quarter of 2022, we sold 1.7 million shares of common stock for gross proceeds of $2.1 million before deducting broker expenses of $100,000, excuse me, pursuant to the company's ATM. Going forward, we are reviewing other funding alternatives. Kopin's cash equivalents and marketable securities were approximately $18.6 million at June 25, 2022, as compared to $29.3 million at December 25, 2021. We have no long-term debt. Second quarter amounts of depreciation and stock comp expense are attached in a table to the Q2 press release.

The amounts discussed above are based on current estimates, and listeners should review our Form 10-Q for the second quarter of 2022 for any possible changes and additional disclosures. With that, operator, we'll be happy to take questions.

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. The first question comes from Glenn Mattson with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please go ahead.

Glenn Mattson
Managing Director, Ladenburg Thalmann

Hi. Yeah, thanks for taking the question. First, Rich, you just touched on it. I'm curious about a little bit about kind of the cash burn and where you sit today. I guess you know you expect a stronger second half, some of these new orders coming through and continued strong defense. Do you expect you know but then you also commented kind of like also having to build working capital. Is your expectation that you'll be continuing to burn at a rate at this level or that it would be a burn but not as bad or that you know it would flip to positive in terms of the cash flow from operations? Just what's your sense in the second half? Thanks.

Rich Sneider
CFO, Kopin

Yeah. The first half we look at as an anomaly. We had supply chain disruptions in the end of the first quarter that carried into the second quarter. What happened is the receivables got collected during the second quarter but then had to get rebuilt at the end of the second quarter. When you see the cash flow statement coming out, what you'll see is the change in the receivables is really what caused the issue. We expect that to moderate. We've rebuilt the receivables, so our working capital looks more normalized to what it should be. You're not gonna have those working capital fluctuations we don't expect in the second half.

With improving operations and the fact that we're not gonna have this anomaly of the receivables getting burned down, we expect the cash flow to be better in the second half.

Glenn Mattson
Managing Director, Ladenburg Thalmann

Okay. I'm curious about the decision to do stock sales at that level and what kind of signal it sends. You know, I understand that it's just to grow more comfortable around preparing for these bigger orders. Also, you know, on top of that, could you maybe elaborate? Have you done any more sales since the quarter ended, or you know, you also kind of mentioned that there's other options for capital raising activity if need be. Can you just kind of elaborate on that? Thanks.

Rich Sneider
CFO, Kopin

Sure. Yeah. I mean, nobody was really particularly happy exercising at that price, the ATM, that we had at the end of the quarter. We did think it was prudent. You know, there was a lot of talk about recession. We really weren't sure where the supply chain was gonna go. As John said in his prepared remarks, the good news is it looks like, from what we're hearing, the supply chain issues for us at least seem to have been, for the most part, sorted out for the rest of the year. So we, you know, we took a lot of actions just in case. You know, we redesigned, some of the boards that we use in the, products. So this was incremental development costs we hadn't anticipated.

We bought alternative semiconductor materials, which now looks like we probably won't use. At least in the short term. There was just expenses associated with making sure that we could fulfill our contractual obligations. We don't see any of that in the second half of the year. We have in the past, you know, when we had sufficient time to do other types of funding, usually around getting prepayments on long-term contracts from customers, and so we'll continue to explore those opportunities. I think the other important factor is that, you know, sitting here today, we have two programs, F-35 and FWS-I, which are in solid production, and we have three emerging production programs. We are sole source to all those programs.

Maintaining a very strong balance sheet is very important so that those programs continue. For those reasons, we thought it was the right move to go out and exercise the ATM.

Glenn Mattson
Managing Director, Ladenburg Thalmann

Yeah. Clearly.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah, I think, Glenn, to give you more things, I think, yeah, we are looking at other ways, but our customers, because we are sole source out to them, they also are some of them are actually helping us to alleviate some of those parts procurements and all that stuff. So we'll have much better performance next half.

Glenn Mattson
Managing Director, Ladenburg Thalmann

Great. That's it for me. Thanks for the color, guys. Yeah, the defense business seems to be going really well, and so you know exciting to watch that continue. Thanks.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah. Well, we are winning. I mean, we have a lot more orders coming in, and this is certainly the most important thing, the technology and orders. We do have them, yeah. We're sole source , some of the orders.

Operator

The next question comes from Kevin Dede with H.C. Wainwright. Please go ahead.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Good morning, gentlemen. Thanks for having me on the call. A couple of things. I guess one is tied to inventory. You know, I understand the supply chain issue and sourcing. Inventories seem to be up, right, sequentially, where they were probably depressed in the March quarter. I know, Rich, you just said that you probably acquired material you won't sell. What do you suspect happens with inventory and the tie to margin just through the balance of the year?

Rich Sneider
CFO, Kopin

We expect improving growth margin, and the inventory level we would expect to maintain where it is. We don't see any major fluctuations in inventory levels at this time.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

The defense product or projects that aside from the FWS-I and F-35, can you talk to the three that you mentioned, Rich, and I guess where you see them in terms of their development cycle and perhaps going to, you know, full production?

Rich Sneider
CFO, Kopin

Yeah. We would expect all of them in full production in the first half of next year. You know, as we mentioned, one is the Brillian display for rotary aircraft. Another is an international weapon sight, similar to, in some respects, the FWS-I that we currently sell. As we said in the press release, the recent unrest, the chaos in Europe right now, is actually sparking demand for those types of products. We're getting positive feedback from customers on future orders on those. The other one's kind of a unique targeting system that we sell that I really can't get into a lot of details about what it does.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Okay. Fair enough. Has the chaos in Europe spurred development? It's interesting when you look at the sequential change in research and development down $2 million. You know, I left the March quarter call thinking that military development might increase. I guess I just was hoping you could help me understand that.

Rich Sneider
CFO, Kopin

Well, again, you know, we recognize revenue based upon percentage completion. As John mentioned, for instance, the MicroLED program is a consortium of companies that are developing that display. So in some respects, our revenues are tied to how well they complete their tasks. To the extent that they get stuff done and we move further down the road, we recognize more revenue. It's really. That's why it's always difficult to project that funded R&D line because, as I said, particularly in the MicroLED, we're relying on a number of other subcontractors to perform.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Is that the lion's share then, Rich, of that line?

Rich Sneider
CFO, Kopin

Well, it's a good piece of it, and then part of it is the fact that the Brillian display that's going to production was winding down.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Okay. All right, that helps. John, can you talk a little bit about the MicroLED development and our partners in Japan and China? I'm wondering if you'll be able to transition that technology and its development into defense-related products, given that a lot of the development, or at least it seems to me from the outside, a lot of that development is happening outside the US.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah. This is a consortium. This is a technology and early demonstration of MicroLEDs. This, of course, is run from here, but they are also run in the U.K. Consortium has a lot of activities in the U.K., which is our, actually through our facility in U.K. and then in Japan, and partially also in China. Almost all the activities are really reside in U.S. and U.K. right now, and Japan.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Okay. I know you said it's long-term development, but I, you know, over the past year or so, you've added some interesting tidbits on it. Could you maybe hone in on the timeline a little bit better, you know, where you think it might get to commercialization?

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah. It is targeted to, at this point, this is actually the product in mind, targeted to, defense and enterprise applications. The first, and then eventually go to consumer. It's a very aggressive target. If we succeed, and I can't say that we definitely succeed, it will be the most advanced MicroLED built in the world.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Is it too early to offer some type of timeline?

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah. I mean, we are optimistic, of course, but we have a bunch of very good people working on it. I think if anybody could succeed, we probably have a good chance.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

The balance of DoD stuff that you folks haven't spoken to, you know, I understand the issues in Europe, but is there any way to sort of quantify how projects sort of in the wings and in development might be moving forward more rapidly?

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah. Well, Kevin, this is Kevin, right?

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Yeah.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah, it's Kevin. I think we did announce not too long ago about some activities that our imaging system for armored vehicles. That's very critical. I really think all the geopolitical tensions happening is everybody need new imaging systems for using armored vehicles. Again, we're sole sourced there. That activity is actually going full steam. As you well know, I mean, our working capital obviously has increased because there are a lot of production, new programs go to production, a lot of activity in R&D, some of them are internally funded. That's normal when we're actually in the winning cycle right now.

ATM is just one of our options for raising more money, and I think we'll continue to do so.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Okay. There was a $2 million development order for the in-vehicle imaging. Is that the one you're referring to, John? It appears that it was the second.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

System development order.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yes. Yeah, that's exactly. Kevin, you're right. That program, to me, I'm very excited about that program because I really believe there will be a major pipeline of revenue for us as we're so sourced and we're working with a huge customer.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Right. I just to kind of get back to timing, John, I mean, apologies for harping on this, but would you suppose or is it fair to assume that this second order came in faster than it would have had there not been issues in Europe? If so, how much more or how much faster do you think it came in?

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

I can't speak to that because there are a lot of activities going on. I better not comment on them.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Okay. All right. Can you talk a little bit about the metrology market, John? I mean, I know you mentioned that you have three customers, I guess, in South Korea. But I'd love to hear your perspective on, you know, fab development in the US. I know that's a highly controversial topic right now, and it would be really interesting to hear your vision on how, you know, foundries and semi manufacturing might expand in the US and how that could benefit Kopin.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Yeah. This is a very interesting, insightful question. As you well know, every country is trying to build up a new semiconductor fab. You probably read, even this past weekend, there are articles that semiconductor chips are getting three-dimensional. They're stacking up chips together on top of each other. We are seeing a situation where people no longer look at putting chips in 2D format, in a 3D format. This is what we call 3D metrology. Currently, it's still a very emerging business. The market now is divided into three parts. Kopin, through our fully owned facility, FDD, we own about 40% of the world market.

TI, using a DLP, owns 40% of world market, and the rest of them are using laser and other stuff, the small ones. We have about 40% of market share of an emerging business which turn everything from 2D to 3D. As you can guess, everything's going to go to 3D. It will take some time. People don't like to change their factories, but it will happen. The new factory definitely needs it. Yeah.

Kevin Dede
Managing Director and Senior Technology Analyst, H.C. Wainwright

Okay. Thank you, gentlemen, for entertaining my questions. I appreciate it.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Okay.

Operator

That is all the time that we have for questions, and I would like to turn the conference call back over to Dr. Fan for any closing remarks.

John C.C. Fan
Founder, Chairman, CEO, and President, Kopin

Thank you for joining us today, and hopefully hear about it till next time.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.

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