So, guys, we're gonna go ahead and get started here. Very fortunate to have the CFO of Impinj, ticker is PI. Very high growth, very interesting company, transformative in its nature. Fortunate to have the CFO, Cary, with us. So Cary, I don't know if you wanna take two minutes to just talk about your business overall, or you want me to just go into Q&A? I'll leave the choice up to you.
Yeah, I can give a quick overview.
Okay.
So, first off, thanks for having us today, Harsh. It's been a great day. Impinj is a leading RAIN RFID provider, and what that means is we make the digital evolution of a barcode. An endpoint IC that is readable at up to 30 feet away without line of sight. It is readable at speeds up to 1,000 items per second. It is energy harvesting, meaning battery-free, and it's smaller than a grain of sand. And we see companies put this on anything that is important to them to track, to trace, or to keep count of. Our largest vertical today is retail apparel. It's about 80 billion units and 30% penetrated, and we see a long tail of opportunities in supply chain and logistics, in general merchandise, and many verticals beyond.
Okay. Great. I know that you've had some inventory issues, some inventory digestion process that's going on underway at your company, particularly in the endpoint IC business. Can you give us a sense of where you stand on that, and also how you feel about the retail apparel business, which I think is one of your largest verticals?
Yeah. So first, a bit of background. We like to run the channel at 6-8 weeks of inventory. After an incredibly supply constrained 2022, we entered the year on fumes. So we began rebuilding the channel in the first quarter, and then again in the second quarter. We had expectations for a demand recovery in Q3 that didn't materialize. So when we got our inventory counts for June in early July, we realized that instead of ending Q2 at 6-8 weeks, we ended at 10-12 weeks.
Yeah.
So we're now in the process of burning that channel inventory down as fast as we can. Our goal is to take 2-3 weeks in Q3 and the balance in Q4, and our expectation is to exit this year in a clean inventory position.
Okay, so the plan is to exit calendar 2023, clean, and that's what you guys communicated-
Yep
- beforehand, I think also.
I think we're on track for that.
Okay, on track for that. Once you—let's say we look past all this sort of consternation that's going on, what do you think is a good idea for me to think about in terms of your long-term CAGR or the CAGR of the RFID business?
Yeah. So over the last 10 years, we've had a unit CAGR of 25%-30%. That growth has been largely with retail apparel, and that is using inventory visibility use case, using a handheld reader to track items at a store level. Retail apparel is an 80 billion unit opportunity per year. It is 30% penetrated right now, yet we have the dynamic where most retail companies are moving forward with a RAIN deployment, yet most retail companies are not 100% deployed at this point. So we think there's a lot of growth left just in the, in our original vertical retail apparel. On top of that, we're layering in retail general merchandise. Walmart's leading the way here. Retail general merchandise, by comparison, is a 325 billion unit opportunity per year.
We think it's less than 1% penetrated at this point. We're just getting started. Logistics is the third vertical we're focused on. Here, UPS is leading the way. Logistics is a 400 billion unit opportunity per year, and again, we're less than 1% penetrated. So when I step back and I look at growth in our oldest vertical and layering on growth for two larger verticals, I think we can achieve that historical 25%-30%-
Okay, great
% unit figure in the future.
Actually, you segue into an area that I want to talk about. You talked about logistics vertical-
Mm-hmm
... which I think you have, you've locked down a pretty sizable, pretty large customer. Can you maybe provide an update on how things are going there? And then also, what is the appetite for adoption? Not just for them, because they're locked in, but for others in the space, and maybe just some general benefits that come from going to RFID for this particular large customer or others in the logistics industry.
Okay, yeah. So, so there's a lot in that question.
Yeah.
Let me unpack it.
Sure.
In any RAIN deployment... I'll start at a high level.
Yeah, sure.
So in any RAIN deployment, the long pole is always it takes time. We are changing how customers track and count and trace the items that are most important to them, and that's not a decision that anyone takes lightly. It typically starts in the sales cycle with a lengthy pilot. Once an ROI is proved out at the pilot stage, a recommendation is then taken, not to the procurement team. It typically goes to the C-suite or to the board before a go decision is made. And then once the go decision is made, the rollout is very pragmatic.
They first start with a small portion of their business, but they can run the deployment in a very controlled environment, and they can prove out the ROI that they saw at the pilot, prove it out at scale, and then they roll out broadly across their organization. And that broadly is typically, again, follows a pragmatic approach, going, you know, by geo or by brand and retailers or by product lines and retailers. So it is a long process from sales to deployment. Yet the benefit that we have is that once someone makes the decision to go, they typically don't turn back.
Okay.
Now, as we go into the logistics space, it adds another level of complexity because we're not talking, we stop talking about a deployment that's primarily based on handheld readers. Instead, we go to fixed or autonomous readers.
Okay.
That creates a little bit of a longer time on the systems infrastructure deployment. As we look at our second-largest North American logistics company, they are deploying at a very rapid pace, but it's still tough to go from 0 to 100% in a year. We think that's a multi-year journey.
Okay. Okay, great. I believe you have one airline under your belt, and I think, I think that process took also a couple of years. As you go from, let's say, the first deployment to a second deployment, is there a meaningful shortening of time to deployment? Because your guys know how to tackle problems, the installers know how to tackle problems, so on and so forth.
Yeah, it's a great question, and yes, the first deployment always takes the longest.
Okay.
Then in subsequent deployments, there's learnings that can be applied, and that process will inevitably go quicker. I still think it goes back to, though, that we're changing the way they run their business, and these will, all these deployments will always take time. Now, the benefit, though, for us being patient, is that we, we end up with a customer that is incredibly happy by the efficiencies that they're now enjoying in their business. And, and in so doing, Impinj is rewarded with a recurring revenue stream that is our Endpoint IC business.
Of course, yeah. Talking about sort of the three markets that you've got going for you, which is retail apparel, seems like logistics, and then seems like general retail is starting to happen.
Mm-hmm.
What do you think are the green shoots that might happen for you in the next year or so, or year and a half, two years, in other industries outside of these, or, or maybe subsectors of these industries? So, so new areas of opportunity.
Yeah. I'd say first, you know, in the next 3-5 years, I expect substantial growth from just those three verticals.
Okay, of course.
The apparel, logistics, and general merchandise. In fact, the long-term targets that we released a few months back-
Yeah
... were all based on just those three verticals.
Okay.
But I do see significant opportunity beyond those verticals as well. I see opportunity in automotive, I see opportunity in pharmaceuticals, and I see opportunity eventually in food items. All of those, those verticals have use cases that are in operations today, yet Impinj really hasn't had the bandwidth to lean in in a meaningful way to those verticals like we have with apparel or logistics-
Okay
... or general merchandise. You know, food is particularly exciting. Food is a massive opportunity that we're starting to see investment and conversation around today, and that investment is occurring much earlier than we anticipated. Now, most of today's investment is focused on what we think of as the logistics side of food, so tagging the box of lemons rather than the individual lemon. But it's again exciting that that's happening right now because once we start talking about that individual item, that lemon, we stop talking about an opportunity that's counted in billions, and we start talking about an opportunity-
Yes
... that's counted in trillions. So that's further out into the future. Very encouraged by what's happening today, but it'll take us some time to get there.
You've got something interesting that you introduced, I think, last year, Authenticity.
Mm-hmm.
Which is a very cool sort of feature for a variety of different applications, pharma included, and then retail, of course, like high-end, very high-end retail. Could you talk about what that product does?
Mm-hmm.
Not necessarily how it works, but what it does for a customer and for a retailer. And then also, what is your expectation of that sort of a market, and how, what's the business model around it?
Okay, so Impinj Authenticity is a product that can validate an item as genuine, thereby taking or reducing counterfeiting, which is a huge problem for brands across the globe. It's a three-component solution, two of which we have in market today, and one, which is a new solution. So it starts with our Impinj M775 Endpoint IC. This is an IC that has a ISO-standardized cryptographic engine in it, along with a unique key. Then it is an algorithm that goes into our readers today that can enable a challenge-response dialogue with that Endpoint IC.
Mm-hmm.
And then the third, which is the new revenue stream for us, is the authentication service. So that's the ability to authenticate that item within milliseconds. Think of it as a cloud-based solution that will eventually have margins that are SaaS-like from Impinj. So we have the endpoint IC revenue stream today. We have the systems revenue today. This is a new opportunity-
Okay
... for us as we move into services. Now, we just launched this product late last year, and we're very encouraged by the reaction, the receptivity we've seen so far. We expected the first use case would be in performance apparel and footwear, and we're seeing that.
Okay.
We're also seeing use cases in areas that we didn't expect this early on. We're seeing use cases in medical, pharmaceuticals. We're seeing use cases in specialty food, and we're seeing use cases in tax tracking. Think tracking items at duty-free stores. So all of those are happening much sooner than we thought. We shipped, you know, think of it as hundreds of millions of chips in the first half of this year, primarily in the second quarter of our M775 into partners ahead of these pilot use cases.
Okay.
Those use cases or those pilots are now underway right now, and we're waiting to see how the results play out. At this point, I'm not modeling authentication services revenue this year.
Okay, okay.
I'm optimistic that in the future, we'll be able to include that in the-
So, but seems like industries are coming to you. They're hearing about the solution, and would it be fair to say that? So if I was to turn the question around and ask you, what kind of industries are you seeing interest from for authentication?
Yeah, I think it is those industries.
Those are the, those are the most common. Okay.
I think in apparel, in high-end luxury goods, we'll see it eventually. The pharmaceutical and the medical devices is the most interesting, because this is an opportunity. Pharma's an opportunity that we see on the horizon, and perhaps this is a catalyst for that industry going forward.
Fair enough. And then you've got another interesting product that is your technology called Loss Prevention.
Mm-hmm.
It's being deployed with a, what you refer to as a visionary European retailer. Could you talk a little bit about what the benefit of that particular technology is, what it does for the customer?
Mm-hmm.
Maybe even some of the basic difficulties as to why some other people can't... Maybe your one competitor that you have that's public, why they can't do it, or some of the attributes that you have to be able to do it, that are difficult for others?
Yeah. So Loss Prevention is a platform solution for Impinj. And when we say platform solution, it's a solution that leverages both our readers and our Endpoint ICs. And we're the only player on the market that has both the readers and the Endpoint ICs. So first, it is what we call Protected Mode, which is a functionality in the Endpoint IC. That's the ability for a reader to send an 8-bit PIN to the Endpoint IC, telling the pin to the tag to turn off. And then, it is the functionality in our reader in the form of an algorithm, that enables that item that is walking through the door to be detected as stolen out of the sea of thousands of items that are at the front end of a store. So that's a solution that is made possible by the Impinj technology.
Now, we've deployed it with our European visionary retailer. They are now on the third phase of their deployment.
Okay.
So their first deployment was roughly a $6 million systems deployment. It was deployed in the middle of 2021 to one of their smaller brands. That deployment went very well, and they rolled it out to their flagship brand. That was an $18 million deployment that concluded in the second quarter just recently in the second quarter.
Yeah.
Think of that as about a 4-quarter deployment, and they've since made the decision to roll out to brands 3 and 4 in the third phase. That deployment kicked off also in the second quarter and is ramping right now. So suffice to say, the deployment's going very well from their perspective. We think there will be other retailers interested in it. We think there's other retailers watching it. Right now, the deployment is focused on you know hang tags and you know in-label tags. We think eventually this goes as an Endpoint IC as part of the garment, and that's where our Protected Mode comes into play. Because with Protected Mode, we protect the privacy of the consumer.
I got you. Okay, great. Let's talk about, let's talk about food, which is sort of the big, you know, multi-trillion item opportunity for you guys. What are some of the impediments that, that you hear from your customers in terms of deployment? Is it just simply the price of the... Because your chip's like a penny something, right? So, it can't be that alone, but the tag itself is a couple of pennies. Is it still the price of the, the product or the tag, or is it something else, or is it hundreds of millions of farmers across the globe? You know, what, what do you hear?
I think, so today we hear the most interest in food is, as the package, tracking it.
Okay.
And that is really to trace the item traceability at the logistics side. You're right, when we start talking about the individual food item, cost comes into play. The all-in additive cost at scale for our Endpoint IC, for the antenna, and for the actual tag, is probably $0.035-$0.04 at high volumes. In order for us to tag food items, we probably have to get that cost below $0.02, probably $0.015, would be my guess in this post-inflationary environment.
Okay.
There was a bogey put out several years ago, of it had to get to a penny, but that was before-
Okay
... you know, inflation really kicked in. So I'm safe saying it's below $0.02. It's probably around $0.015. That is not a scenario where we just have to take cost out or reduce our price. Actual, real innovation needs to happen before we can get there, and it's innovation across the entire ecosystem. So think of Impinj's role as how do we make the Endpoint IC even more sensitive, thereby requiring a smaller antenna to get the same read range, taking cost out from that perspective.
And then, from the rest of the ecosystem as well, is how do we take that inlay, the antenna and the Endpoint IC, and put it into the packaging, where it's not an additive tag, it's not something that's added separate, it's put into the bottle cap of my bottle of water, or it's put into the bag of chips? I think that type of innovation is required to hit that price point.
Okay, so let me understand. Take out the paper part of the tag. Is that what you're referring to?
Yeah, or leverage the paper part of the product packaging to begin with.
Got it. Understood. Fair enough. That's, that's kind of most of what I had.
Okay.
Cary, thank you so much for coming here-
Yeah
... and spending time with us, and thanks for hosting this.
Thank you.
You know, thanks for making yourself available for this session.
Thanks, Harsh.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much. Take care. Yeah, please. Did somebody have a question here? Okay, thanks. Thanks, guys.