Earnings Call Transcript - BTCY Q1 2024

Operator, Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to Biotricity’s First Quarter Fiscal 2024 Financial Results and Business Update Conference Call. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Debra Chen, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma’am.

Debra Chen, Investor Relations

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Biotricity’s first quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. As a reminder, Biotricity’s first quarter fiscal 2024 ended on June 30, 2023, so all figures presented for this period will reflect that end date. Earlier, the company issued its earnings press release, which highlighted financial and operational results. A copy of the press release is available on the Investor Relations section of Biotricity’s website, and the full financials have been filed with the SEC on Form 10-Q and posted on EDGAR at www.sec.gov. Before beginning the company’s formal remarks, I’d like to remind listeners that today’s discussion may contain forward-looking statements that reflect management’s current views with respect to future events. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Biotricity does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements except as required. At this point, I’m pleased to turn the call over to Biotricity’s Founder and CEO, Dr. Waqaas Al-Siddiq. Please go ahead.

Waqaas Al-Siddiq, CEO

Thank you, Debra, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today. I welcome you to our first quarter fiscal 2024 teleconference. As reported in our earnings press release, we experienced a very solid quarter with a year-over-year revenue growth and improvements in key operating metrics. Specifically, our recurring technology fees, device sales, and gross margins all demonstrated positive growth while maintaining a firm grasp on cost reduction and expense management. I can confidently assert that we are making strides towards positive cash flow given the consistent results we observe from quarter to quarter. From a market perspective, the increasing interest and demand continued to drive the adoption of our suite of products focused on chronic cardiac disease prevention and management. Our efforts in commercialization and development have yielded tremendous progress in remote monitoring solutions for diagnostic and post-diagnostic products. The expansion of our sales force has expanded our geographic reach, and I’m pleased to announce that as of June 30th, 2023, our sales have launched in over 35 states in the U.S., contributing to a remarkable 46.9% year-over-year revenue growth. Notably, our gross margins have also seen significant improvement, rising from 59.6% during the same period last year to an impressive 63.5%. We accomplished all of this while also announcing that we reduced our SG&A by 22% to $3.5 million. Through diligent cost structure management, automation, and utilization of our proprietary AI technology and strong growth across the board, we achieved a reduction of our net loss by 33% year-over-year to $3.6 million, or $0.069 per share from a net loss of $5 million or $0.098 per share. At Biotricity, our responsibility as a management team and my role as CEO is to innovate and create transformative healthcare products while ensuring financial discipline, driving margin and revenue growth to deliver value creation for our investors. This approach has been consistently demonstrated on a quarter-by-quarter basis. The results we’ve achieved this quarter serve as a testament to the successful execution, hard work, and dedication of our exceptional team. Turning to our BioSphere platform model and complementary products, we’re thrilled to observe continued growth. Our Biocare app has garnered thousands of downloads, and Biotres continues to attract industry-wide interest among both new and existing customers. Earlier in the quarter, we announced a significant milestone between Bioflux and Biotres products. Biotricity has monitored over 2 billion heartbeats for atrial fibrillation, a leading cause of stroke. Over the past two years, our efforts have benefited over 14,000 patients diagnosed with afib, providing early intervention and resulting in cost savings exceeding $330 million. By preventing late diagnosis and subsequent strokes, Biotricity has also facilitated savings exceeding $1.3 billion. Our commitment to innovation remains unwavering as we harness data intelligently to explore novel avenues for enhancing healthcare outcomes. Through cutting-edge research and development, we’re not only redefining medical diagnostics and patient care, but also pushing the boundaries of what AI-driven solutions can achieve. Just last month, we announced that we are expanding our AI technology development in remote cardiac care. We are leveraging our proprietary AI technology to provide a suite of predictive monitoring tools to enhance new disease profiling, improve patient management, and revolutionize the healthcare industry for disease prevention. This comes as we also announced that we have strengthened relationships with both Amazon and Google. The healthcare AI market opportunity is projected to grow to $208.2 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research. Our company has already established a strong foothold, having built a powerful proprietary cardiac AI model that combines Google’s TensorFlow, AWS infrastructure, big data, and a continuous learning engine. This combination allows us to rapidly improve our cardiac technology. In the near future, we believe the capabilities of our cardiac AI model will allow us to support healthcare professionals in handling exponentially more patients while identifying the most critical data. This will enable healthcare workers to elevate the quality of care while serving a larger number of patients. As growing patient numbers further stress the shortage of healthcare professionals, our technology could help alleviate this pressing issue. We have engineered our technology to not only improve patient care and outcomes, but to do so in a manner that supports more patients. This has led to increasing sales of our remote cardiac monitoring devices and the ramp-up of our subscription-based service, increasing our recurring revenue over the past few quarters and charting a clear path to profitability. With that, I’ll turn the call over to our CFO, John Ayanoglou.

John Ayanoglou, CFO

Thank you, Waqaas. Given the insight that you provided in your discussion of key operational matters, I am going to review the first quarter fiscal 2024 highlights, which are unaudited. Our Technology-as-a-Service subscription-based recurring revenue from our Biotres and Bioflux devices continues to grow at a healthy pace. Revenue for the first quarter ended June 30, 2023, increased 46.9% year-over-year to $3 million. Our gross profit percentage was 63.5% for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, as compared to 59.6% in the corresponding prior year quarter. This increase in gross margin was largely attributed to an increase in margin related to our technology fees and reductions we were able to achieve in processing costs from providing these services, some of which relate to efficiencies gained through the use of AI. Given consistent gross margin on technology fees of approximately 70% or better and an evolving revenue mix where technology fees are expected to comprise an increasing proportion of revenue, we anticipate continued improvement in overall blended gross margin over time. Technology fees comprised 92% of the quarter’s total revenue. Gross profit totaled $1.9 million, up 56% from $1.2 million a year ago. Net loss attributed to common stockholders for the three months ended June 30, 2023, was $3.6 million compared to a net loss of $5 million during the comparable quarter in the prior year. As we have mentioned in our call in June, our revenues come from two sources or segments. First, our technology fees, which are recurring subscription service fees generated by our monitoring diagnostics and BioSphere services. For the first quarter fiscal 2024, our technology fees rose 47% to $2.77 million. In part, this strong growth reflects our extraordinary customer retention rate of approximately 98%, which, in one simple number, speaks volumes about our excellent customer and cardiologist-friendly support services, superior device hardware and tech services, ease of use, and superior diagnostics. Our second revenue segment is device sales, which are the sales of our proprietary hardware, which, like our software, is all designed in-house. In the first quarter fiscal 2024, device sales comprised 8.3% of our total revenue and were reported at $252,000. We are continuing to work hard towards achieving positive cash flow. As we discussed in our fourth quarter year-end call, we are starting to notice things taking a turn for the better in our financial growth. Indeed, all of our fundamentals are pointing upwards. I will now turn the call back to Waqaas for his closing comments.

Waqaas Al-Siddiq, CEO

Thank you, John, for that report. In summary, there’s a lot to be excited about as we look into the future of Biotricity and the addressable markets that we are involved in. Our AI segment has begun to accelerate. We’ve strengthened relationships with Amazon and Google, validating our position, leadership, and commitment to AI development in remote cardiac care. In the future, we envision our cardiac AI models’ capacities will empower us to assist healthcare experts in efficiently managing a significantly higher patient load, while discerning the most vital data points so that we can enhance disease profiling, improve patient management, and revolutionize the healthcare industry by centralizing these data points for disease prevention. Looking towards the rest of calendar year 2023, our focus remains threefold: to increase sales of our remote cardiac monitoring devices and suite of products, ramp up our subscription-based service and accelerate our recurring revenue, and as such, draw a clear path to profitability. That concludes our opening remarks. I’ll now turn the call over to the operator for questions. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Kevin Dede with H.C. Wainwright. Please go ahead with your question.

Kevin Dede, Analyst

Hi Waqaas, thanks for taking my question. Appreciate it. Nice to see the sales ramp up. I was wondering if we could dig into the top line a little bit commentary that you and John offered and some digging suggests that that device sales and fee revenue are pretty consistent measures of the mix, but what isn’t clear are the types of devices that are dominating the device sale mix and the relative service fees that you’re seeing on those specific devices.

Waqaas Al-Siddiq, CEO

Yes. Great question, Kevin. I mean, we aren’t really breaking that down yet. We will, I think, in future quarters. What I can tell you is that the bulk of the revenue is still Bioflux. We have Biotres coming up. I will refer you back to the press release that we did a couple of months ago where we broke out how much of that revenue in terms of SaaS revenue was related to Bioflux and Biotres. But that mix is still about the same. Of course, Biotres in your product has only been around for a year. Bioflux has been around for four years, so it’s still going to make up the bulk of that revenue. But as the other products pick up rates and they become more available in the market over time, they will become a better mix. And that’s when we will start breaking that information out and making it clear because it’s still early days for some of these products, and we want to make sure that we have a handle on it internally before we start talking about exactly which one relates to what.

Kevin Dede, Analyst

Okay. Fair enough. Appreciate that. The past couple of calls, Waqaas, you’ve really centered in on the ability to deliver AI-enhanced solutions. And I’m wondering in this era of cost containment, how you’re emphasizing your R&D expenditures, vis-à-vis what had been a strategic imperative of expanding your product portfolio to address ancillary cardiac issues such as nephrology. So I was just wondering if you could just sort of help us think about where you’re putting your development emphasis.

Waqaas Al-Siddiq, CEO

Yes. Absolutely. So what we’ve done is, as you know, we’ve launched a bunch of products in the last six to nine months, right, grown our TAM, and we’ve been really focusing that development effort has already been sunk in, and we’ve already invested those dollars. So now we want to see the fruits of that, right? As those products become commercialized for a longer period, we’re going to see more of that revenue come in, right? In the meantime, we are focusing on two things in terms of our R&D dollars, right? One is, in the automation perspective, and in terms of cost management, like you identified, we’re focusing on stuff that is enhancing ultimately the product, so we can expand the product and go faster. So there’s still product-related, right? So when we take a look at what can we automate from a workflow perspective and where can we apply AI, some of the improvements that we’re seeing on the margin side, and some of the stuff that we’re seeing on the expense reduction side is directly related to efficiencies that we are applying within the existing product portfolio, right? And so taking AI, taking automation, applying it to enhance the workflows and provide better support and better data into our existing products so that they are effectively operating at a more efficient level, right? One area that we’re investing R&D dollars into, and why we do that is because it’s direct drive, right? We know if we spend X number of dollars, there’s a measurable result that we will get, meaning our cost reduction will go down, right? So when we’re thinking about an initiative that we have, we’re saying, hey, if we do x, right, if we implement this automation, this is a practical example, we know that our COGS will come down by 3%, right? So that’s something that is a direct drive, and we know what that 3% means and we know what that cost means. Then the other area that we’re looking at for R&D is we are continuing to invest in areas, and of course, we’re looking for, last call I talked about our NIH grant, right? So when we talk about nephrology and some of these other areas, we’re looking at areas that can help us collect low-hanging fruit revenue and where we can take our technology, enhance it, and then apply it in another market, right? And where we can, we will go in and try to find grants or R&D projects or work with universities and see where we can further reduce that cost, but it’s a very – the investment on the R&D is very much driven directly by, okay, how can we commercialize or how can we increase revenue or how can we apply the product in a market where we know that we can get direct drive revenue from? So it’s a very focused approach in our R&D, because now that we’ve built the platform before we had a – and the vision was building the platform, we invested dollars for two years to build that platform. That platform is now built. Now it’s about enhancing and applying it in areas where we know we can get revenue back from.

Kevin Dede, Analyst

Okay. Thanks. I appreciate the color on that. Now, a little on the business development, I always go back to this topic. You mentioned coverage of 35 states. I’m wondering if you are comfortable sharing what your targets are for the balance of the fiscal year, just so we can sort of keep an eye on that. Or if you’re more comfortable maybe offering the number of physicians you hope to address or the number of clinics, some sort of quantifiable measure that we can monitor.

Waqaas Al-Siddiq, CEO

Yes. So we’re not usually providing guidance on that stuff. What I can say is that what we are seeing is we’re announcing as we grow that network and as we optimize that network, I mean, obviously our goal is to have 50 state exposure, and I would say in some parts, because we’ve added distribution relationships, that we do have that presence. But what we’ve been really focusing now on is building out our sales force, making sure that the key markets have been addressed. And I think what’s going to happen, and we will certainly announce this when we have a veteran on it, which is to say, okay, as we build out these distribution relationships, we will put concerted effort in trying to march towards 50 states. So distribution partners have people in, and they essentially have 50 state coverage. But when you do a distribution partner of size, you have to work with different groups within that division and different reps. And for us, we focus on areas where we’re not covered. So I think what we can say, and how I can answer it is that, look for us over the next couple of quarters as we work with some of the relationships that we’ve made, how we’re going to expand that state coverage, and we will announce that and notify everybody. And our goal, of course, is to get to 50 states as quickly as possible and focus our primary direct sales efforts in the areas that we have the most opportunity.

Kevin Dede, Analyst

Okay. A couple of financial questions, maybe John will chime in too. The gross margin, absolutely great sequential progress on that. I’m wondering how you think we should see it from a sustainable perspective. I know John mentioned approaching, I think, the 70% margin, I think I understood that. I’m just wondering what sort of time frame we might expect that to happen.

Waqaas Al-Siddiq, CEO

So I think the piece that is happening is that before we weren’t even identifying this stuff. So as you see that we get a handle on these things, we’re going to provide more and more color. The thing is, as we’ve announced in the last few press releases, our revenue mix of SaaS versus device sales – device sales have a different margin and SaaS has had consistent margin, right, of approximately 70%. So we will start announcing that, and in terms of how long it will be, I would say that eventually, once you are 99% of your revenue being SaaS-related and 1% being device, essentially your margin steady-state rate is going to be your SaaS rate. We still have about 9% or something around that revenue that we have to build up towards on the SaaS side to get to that steady-state. And can we predict and tell you when we expect to do that? I would say no, but I think that going from now forward, every quarter, we will announce that mix. And you will see that margin creep closer to that as a steady-state margin.

Kevin Dede, Analyst

Okay. On the OpEx side, cost controls – and you eliminated almost $1 million of OpEx from the March quarter. I’m wondering if you think this reduced expense level is sustainable?

Waqaas Al-Siddiq, CEO

So what we’ve done, and I think that this is a fantastic quarter, and I think it’s going to be indicative of what we are doing going forward. Cost-cutting, I wouldn’t call it that. What we have done is optimize our operations to focus on a commercial team, which is focusing purely on sales, and a corporate team, which is focusing on account management and operations and delivering services at a certain efficiency level. We grew to a size, and there’s these always milestones for companies, and they are, I think, milestones for reasons. And we achieved a milestone, which we were at a $10 million revenue run rate, and it allowed us to look at the organization and apply more processes and procedures. So moving forward, the ratios that we are seeing in this past quarter, we expect to continue those. If we’re growing, our costs and our expenses are going to grow, but the ratios we expect to be maintained. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. Gentlemen, we’ll turn the conference back over to you for any additional or closing remarks.

Waqaas Al-Siddiq, CEO

Thank you, everybody, for joining our conference call. If there are any other questions that pop up, or if you have any other information that you are looking for, please feel free to reach out to us, we are always available. You can reach us via our website or through email or through LinkedIn or any of our social channels. Thank you again, and we’re very excited about the rest of the year.

John Ayanoglou, CFO

Thank you so much.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. That does conclude today’s conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.