ENSURGE MICROPOWER ASA (ENSU) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to the Q1 2026 investor presentation for Insurg Micropower. Thank you for joining. It's exciting to come here every few months to share the progress that we've made, and it's truly impressive, I believe. It's a testament to the focus that the team has, the exceptional capability, and the organized, disciplined way that we're going about our product development as i think about some of the hardest technical feats in the world right now when it comes to physical sciences i think batteries with respect to the movement of electrons and how challenging that is is up there with nuclear and other very very challenging technical technical undertakings and it's uh to to sit here and explain what we've done over just a few months. It is really a proud moment, and I'm very excited for this team. Forward-looking statement as required, and I will let you read that on your own. It will be published here shortly. So, 2021, 2026, Q1, really, we laid the foundation. It was a foundational time. In February, we reset the company, really focused it on product. We had had shifted from the company's legacy focus on semiconductor process engineering at the expense of the product we really focused on the product the cycle data the capacity retention the technical performance data coming from the product is the currency that matters to our customers that's what we have to measure our technology by that's what sets the root cause analysis of everything that happens upstream and then we can organize and go tackle each particular item that then goes and results in our technical performance. So laying that foundation in terms of the people, the roles they play, the tools they have, the staffing that we must do, the focus on results is so critically important. And I think the results that I share with you today and which you can see in the report are certainly testament to this focus. We cannot do, it is impossible to do battery development and have a successful battery at the end of the line without focusing on it first and having the people organized. So with the new leadership on board, I'm very pleased to see that our thesis, our focus is starting to pay dividends. The performance we have is record in company history. The cycle life, the capacity retention of a stacked layer, the company has never seen this before. And this is very important and very exciting for us to see that this technology is truly viable i remember in my first meeting in norway back in october only seven or so months away ago when i first joined the company and just having joined the company in september i said that i believe the physics worked and i believe that still today and the data we have shows that and that is what is so critically important about what we do we are taking stepping stones towards something that is that is monumental in the world this is a technology that will truly change how we interact with our devices, how AI is delivered to us at the edge, how we can actually get things done in a seamless, wonderful way. It takes energy at the edge. And that's exactly what we're doing. And it's really quite an exciting place. So for us to have record performance data and bring that to you today, this is a major step in the right direction of an exciting technology and a promising opportunity. The Corning Ribbon Ceramic Cathode, This is early data, single layer, but what we're seeing is flat capacity retention. The battery experts in our building, when we saw this first data come through and then we saw it again and we saw it again, we looked at each other and we knew that there's something special here. So we're very excited about our work with Corning and on the Ribbon Ceramic. The customer pipeline continues to expand. This is an area where, frankly, it's an opportunity for us to spend more time and obviously more focus as a company. We will be focusing resources, dedicating resources on this because we need to go from a place of being reactive to customer input and customers coming to us. We have everything from pet health to sensor technology to medical to hearables. There's a lot, a lot coming into the company. Our job now is to be strategic and say what are the best segments we want to be part of, who are the right customers, and where do we go deploy the technology. We continue to be in active negotiations across a number of different companies. It's important for us to be strategic about what the right companies are for us to focus our time on. And I would say lastly, and we continue to do this, is on the resourcing side, the human capital, the people in this building, the talent we have is our single largest lever toward progress. And we have hired in some excellent people. We just had some wonderful people just join us this past week. and we're making immediate progress with some excellent people because they're deliberately coming to us. They want to be part of what we're doing, which is special and unique and the first of its kind. It's extremely hard, but that's why we're here and we're attracting wonderful people. So very grateful to those people who have really been excited to join us and I'm excited to welcome more people in the future. So what is the rest of 2026? This is consistent with what I've said before and that is this is a year of commercialization shipping products to repeat to for with repeat performance is a critical next step these two vectors of capability in batteries there are a lot of great battery technologies that have not been able to repeat themselves the repeatability of that battery technology is critical and that's why we've invested operational and manufacturing expertise that know batteries in addition to the engineers Because these two vectors in terms of technology and operations and manufacturing, those two things are so critical toward the performance and repeatability that is required for any battery. The next, absolutely securing partnerships that is so critical as our lifeblood. And as I mentioned, we're excited to have to be deliberately focused on the right partners. This is not my first rodeo, certainly. And in my past, I've had lots of different first customers. and what's important is they're a partner out of the gate and we can't you know to go prime time with big major customers that's super important we need customers that are going to work with us along the way the third element here and this is a critically important part of the company this is the first time we're actually tackling the fixed cost basis of this company the fixed costs amount to 50 percent of our cash burn every month and so anything to change that is extremely meaningful so this is an area of deliberate focus by our operations team myself and and other members of the company we are actively going out and reducing this fixed cost structure it's not easy it's certainly a multi multi-period effort but the building lease equipment lease these are major items that we inherited that we have to tackle and we are excited to get to get make some progress on that because anything to reduce the the building facilities related costs of an oversized building as well as an equipment lease these are two levers that make a big difference and we look forward to having more progress there but again these are multi-period efforts q1 achievements i think i mentioned a lot of these already but i'll feel i'll continue to to drill in so i think the key thing is that when we fit switch to a product-led organization leaned out the organization in february unfortunately reduced staff that allowed room to bring in expertise that we needed to focus on what matters which is our immediate product milestones and bringing product performance and repeatability to you as our investors and our customers the customers do continue to expand we're seeing a lot more use cases and that's quite exciting we continue to have negotiations and progressing those on a on a complex multi-year multi-phase development program we're excited about this company and other companies that are that are right there with them and we're progressing um progressing well on the product this is our when we think about what is important it's the product performance it's shipping product to customers getting through the the the the capacity retention to make sure there's not leakage out of the cell why build lots of layers when you have leakage out of one layer you've got to solve it at the layer that's exactly what we're doing so this performance improvement toward this proof of concept stage gate is the signal that we need to focus on and continue to drive it and the team is driving toward it and very in a very focused way uh the initial results as i mentioned where the corning relationship had got off to a great start and we're continuing to progress with them they're material science experts and we're very happy to be working with them the discipline I think I spoke about late 2025 and how important it was to have a culture of discipline this is this execution is starting to bear fruit every Friday I have every engineer report to me what their work stream is what the status is what their blockers are how what can I do to support them what resources do they need how do we prioritize their needs versus other work streams this allows everybody in the building to have a shared understanding of what is our priority how do we help each other how do we uncover our issues so that we solve them immediately that kind of culture of truth telling and and purposeful connection and collectivity is so critically important for then getting to the root cause of what our challenges are when it comes to that leakage you'll see the performance improvement in the next page and that is exactly next couple pages and that's exactly what we're doing week by week by week and every day prior to our friday meeting our meetings that then drill in even further into each of those areas so there's transparency across the organization there's organization and importantly there's discipline we're following the industry standard product development process that our customers do and what's right now in front of us is our proof of concept phase gate i would say we've achieved a major component of that now we're focused on repeatability and and and bringing that product to customers The team, this team rebalance was critically important in bringing the right expertise in the building, while also bringing the current expertise, the people who have given their years of service to this company, bringing them along and helping them evolve into this new model. And I'm really pleased with a team that has really low ego, really focused on what matters, and everybody's working together, and I very much appreciate that. One area of the team that also needed shoring up was our data infrastructure. To move to the cloud, to have actual real-time data analysis, at the end of the day, what is battery performance? It's the data we need to then analyze to then go and do root cause analysis upstream. So having a modern data architecture where machines and people can talk to each other real-time. When people are maybe out of the building, they can talk to the machine and they can also get the data. they can analyze the data using the best tools using ai these are the things that we're bringing to the company by bringing in the right talent and bringing the right resources and tools and modernizing an infrastructure so that it can do what we need it to do when it comes to the battery and i have to admit that the talent because we have such good talent and we're attracting good talent, that's going noticed, that is becoming noticed by the industry. And so we do have a talent retention risk that if there's one thing that I get very concerned about always, it's the people. I very much care about our team. And losing people is never easy. And I'm concerned that there are some high risks in the industry. But again, it's about our value proposition and bringing people who have the grit and the heart and the commitment to doing the hard stuff which is electrons and battery development at a very small scale and I wouldn't be anywhere else because it's the hardest challenge I can find and the people I've had surrounding us and surrounding me feel the same so you know we're locked elbows ready to go but there will always be that person who gets an offer that's going to be can can pay more than what we're able to do but again we're focused on the team the values we have the focus we have and the mission we have in front of us and i'm still very excited about that and and and so is the team uh manufacturing first principles this is again as i mentioned we're dealing with electrons electrons are part of a molecule right part of an atom we're talking about the very fundamental essence of our physical world here and so the movement of these electrons the movement of these these very tiny elements that we're talking about between lithium uh all of the the nitrogen the the oxygen all of the the cobalt and the the phosphorus all of the different elements that we engage with or our materials engage with the manufacturing process of this is equally important to the cell design and so this manufacturing expertise getting down to first principles of our laser etching well why was the laser off well we have to understand then with the focal point of the laser so getting down to the specific root cause of why something happened and then bringing that back to the first principles is what we're seeing in results right now being standard across manufacturing this is manufacturing 101 to be honest having processes that are documented that are followed and that are actually then changed if there's an engineering change then that process goes along that disciplined process this may sound very boring but it is so critically important to that repeatability because when you have beautiful results that you got in front of a customer but you can't go back and find how and why you got it you don't have results and so what we're doing is we're paving the way so these results when we lack repeatability we can quickly go back and see what that root cause is. So all of this adds speed and time, speed and acceleration to results. Now to the financials. So we had a bit of revenue in the quarter from some strategic development activities, which we're pleased about. Our EBITDA for the quarter minus the restructuring expense is about on par to this time last year, but without the restructuring expense, we're substantially lower. And then Q4 was certainly higher. But if we look year over year we're about par but do consider that part of that was restructuring expense the meaningful thing here is that by moving from a mass volume manufacturer let's manufacture as much as we can we're focusing on well actually let's manufacture good stuff let's manufacture high performing product we don't need to manufacture as much so our material spend has gone down considerably as well as we did a major cleanup of the building and we were able to now use materials that are in the building rather than having to go out and buy new materials so just doing inventory control and and cleaning up the shop that we have we've been able to save substantial amounts of money and we will continue to do that because it's about being lean it's about the 5s which is about sort and being clear and and and and being very um yeah orderly about our manufacturing to Japanese framework, we will continue to be very careful about the money we spend on our R&D materials. And lastly, as I mentioned prior in the last page, this building renegotiation is critically important. We've taken advantage of the fact that the building changed ownership in April. And immediately, even prior to that with the new owner, we were signaling and having conversations about what we needed to do. There are shared interests, I believe, and it's a timeline question of now being able to find a we certainly have our line of sight to possible locations now it's a matter of planning the relocation the great news is the COO has tons of experience we already have a general contractor ready to go the team is ready to go we have line of sight of a new building now it's now renegotiating this exit so timing is TBD but believe me it's a high priority item because these fixed costs have to be restructured and as I mentioned they are 50 percent of our cost burn and one or two levers make a substantial impact so let's get to the meat of the story here so this is what it gets all of us excited here and that is if you see this graph what you want in a battery is for the battery life to continue over the length of the product so i'm sure all of you have smartphones if your smartphone battery in about a year and a half starts to die well that's because its cycle life has degraded past an appropriate threshold so here at 250 cycles think about that as almost a year of service of an equivalent device that you charge every night so obviously we want to increase that number we want this curve to be flat flatter certainly but the rate of change the rate of improvement from where we were to 50 cycles that's not even two months of a product to 250 this almost order of magnitude difference this is a substantial improvement and it really is uh the industry benchmark is 80 but for a new battery 70 is certainly permissible 250 cycles is a marker a mile marker for us we're obviously shooting for a lot more but the rate of change by being able to say what we fixed, and now this is what we have. Now we know what we need to fix to get to the next one. So the performance-driven development allows for us to then find those areas of improvement and then go after them and do them. As I mentioned about our program reviews, having that full visibility, the team then collectively provides input. And what we're getting is new creative ideas from people who were otherwise quiet before and that to me as a leader is something that I love more than anything is getting these wonderful ideas from PhDs who are experts in their field they had just been quiet so now we're bringing the collective wisdom of the team together and that's that's for me is is is where we get these wonderful levers to then move our performance in the in the right direction so obviously continued development is underway but I wanted to share this with all of you to show that we're on the right track, we're making meaningful improvements, and the physics do indeed work, and now we're focused on repeatability. When it comes to corning, what we're doing is we're taking a material and turning it into a product. So these little boxes at the right are our cycles, our cyclers. So the material, we put our battery technology on it, we put it into our cyclers, and we show this data on this field on the chart in the middle. If you see a trend line there, it looks about the slope of zero, practically flat. And we've gotten over 100 cycles, again, a very important indicator toward physics that work and a product that has the potential. We're excited about what we're doing with Corning. It's an excellent partnership. And we're working on encapsulation and other opportunities to bring this into a full-fledged product. We're also collaborating and looking at commercial pipeline and how we bring this to customers and already making extremely exciting progress there as well so very pleased about the progress we've made in this in this quarter and the other thing that's quite nice about this is that cell after cell after cell the data looks very similar so as we call it in battery talk it's clean it's very interesting to see the repeatability here and how we're able to have that when we have a single ribbon ceramic lot the repeatability is is very interesting so again focus of ongoing improvement certainly we're in the early innings here but uh reason to be to be excited and certainly encouraged about the progress so consistent with what i've shared with you before uh and i believe dating back to my very first meeting with investors the product development process is the backbone of any hardware product getting a product to market we can't race to the finish line because then then it's it doesn't help anybody so building value building progress one step at a time these are building blocks that are so important as i mentioned before the the process the engineering for the the manufacturing process having a process that's defined and then the operator doing that process is actually doing what was defined that discipline is new and that discipline is what allows us to then have the traceability back to say ah this cell didn't perform that way how do we root cause it and we can go back to the process so all of this development is proof of concept in a sense that we can't have a proof of concept product without having both the product performance as well as the manufacturing repeatability because we have to have that lockdown before we get into engineering validation engineering validation is when you ruggedize the product you put it through more more rigorous testing you start to see the end use application and you integrate those ambient conditions of that product is there vibration or temperature or packaging or use case or whatever that might be altitude whatever that might be those those are that the complexity starts to build on itself design validation is when you have design freeze it's a production intent design you start to have production intent tooling you start to ramp that up that's when the high volume manufacturing definition is so critically important because then you start getting into production validation and that high volume manufacturing so all of these steps have a purpose and there's always the purpose for being doing right by the stage you're in and that is our focus here and we're not right now what matters is quality and I know that there's a lot of desire for speed out there. And believe me, I've heard that before and I've seen that, but that will not help us. What is so critically important right now is quality of execution. And believe me, we're working as fast as we can, given the resources we have. So what we've accomplished, the innovation stage is what happened before I got here. And I would say I arrived at the tail end of innovation. What I've done is converged us rather than divergent ideas and new ideas that are that are being generated every day i'm converging those great ideas toward a workable repeatable high performance product and that requires the perform the testing the definition the both in terms of the product and the process we are we are focused on these evaluation agreements certainly those are helpful but what i'm focused on are really long-term meaningful customer relationships which require this platform validation so the platform validation is so important to being able to have a product that we can ship that is predictable and that when it shows up to the customer's site and they can't get to it for two weeks we know how it's going to perform when they actually go and test it so all of these discipline steps right now may be very boring to the outside world but i i have to tell you how important they hour to the customer and delivering a predictable repeatable product right now we're also then preparing for that long game that design validation step what does that pilot line need to look like where does it need to be what incentives do we need to get from government to be able to get that pilot line at a better cost we're doing all that right now because we don't want to do that too late a lot of the stuff we want to do in parallel so that is work that that is ongoing uh and uh and certainly uh the the customer development programs right the the engagement with customers being focused on what their application is we have had discussions with customers ranging from a 15-day dispensable battery to a battery that's in uh in situ in a pet to a sensor for for different people humans and pets and and robotics so the discussions are vast And now our focus, our next steps are to really focus those and prioritize the highest value opportunities. Speaking of, we continue to have really impressive marquee customers, marquee companies coming to us with various ideas. This shows this demand in the market is truly something that I've seen markets where there's demand, and this is beyond that demand. And on top of this, we're looking at where our battery becomes a solution to a much higher value application. These are not just batteries that you find at your grocery store. These are batteries that are going to perform something very meaningful and unique for a customer that will enable AI and enable greater functionality and the miniaturization of these units. So lots to come here. I'm excited now that we have the table stakes performance out of the product. We have the ability to now and the right to have a conversation with these customers because what they want to see is data. And now we show the data and now they're more actively engaging. Our financials, as I mentioned, they're relatively flat year over year. We did change the capitalization of the R&D because I believe in transparency. And I think that we might as well will show that as to what we're spending on R&D. as I mentioned we had a nominal amount of revenue in the quarter and considering that we had restructuring charges given the shift to the product-led model in Q1 these are actually then substantially down year over year pulling that out as I mentioned the shift to the product-led model in terms of quality versus quantity has allowed us to have a substantial reduction in our R&D materials and we anticipate that that's going to continue to be on the right trajectory The critical thing for us now is that if you look at that number, 50% is fixed. 50% comes from long-term agreements that are years, years, years old that need to be restructured to the company of the size that we are so that we can be nimble. we can invest that money in people rather than in rent, rather than in heating and ventilating a building that's too big for us. So that is a key, key priority for us. And we're actively focusing on that to continue driving down these costs for our investors and to drive us into the lean capital model that I know we can achieve. So to wrap up, Q1 was about laying this important foundation and what we're seeing at the end of that foundation are the results that matter the results of the foundation show that we're on the right track we are focused on reliable delivery already we're seeing certain reliability out of our product we are sustaining our product we are engaging our partners and we have sustained partner engagement there and that is a focus as you'll see for q2 and beyond we are positioning the company to scale and that also means which partners are the ones that allow us to scale so it's better for us to spend time now and be strategic about what are the right partners let's not just go out and get a partner that's that's somewhat arbitrary what really matters is who are the right partners and so we've taken a pause not a pause but we've really taken a moment to focus on who are those partners so we're continuing the negotiation with certain partners we're also now speaking with some very interesting partners that believe are in the right direction for us from an engagement model that all allows the company to scale scalability and hardware anything having to do with capital is a table stakes because the last thing as investors you want are five customers ten customers and ten different products and ten different product lines you don't want that complexity you want the minimized hardware capital spend, minimized pilot line, and minimized streamlined hardware for the maximum amount of applications. So that scalability is a term that you'll probably hear from me a lot. Hardware scalability is so critically important. And when I've been part of hardware successes in the past, it's largely due to scalability and having the right product at the right time in the right market and the right scalability, the right cost structure and the right foundation to scale and we will continue and we've certainly demonstrated our ability to have disciplined execution and that's something that we will continue in the next quarters so what you'll see what is our what are our priority areas for the rest of the year it's it's the the platform validation when there's a lot of stuff going on and the world is noisy the signal to that noise the real important thing that is so critically important is that product and validating the product and when i say platform i mean our battery platform within that platform are our products that we are you're focused on so having defined product requirements we can't build everything for everybody that is also not something that anybody can be successful at doing so we have to validate something toward customer applications or or market applications that are scalable and having that that product definition and locking in those specifications is that critical for that next step past proof of concept into engineering validation the commercial side is absolutely top of mind critically important for us as a priority area for the rest of the year this customer demand translating that into scalable meaningful long-term partnership engagements that is the fun part that is the part that we are doing having these taking evaluation agreements which were just samples to be evaluated turning those into meaningful discussions around what do their what do these customers want to achieve with a battery how do what value do we bring that also then translates into pricing we need to understand these applications for our financial model down the road and lastly the scalability right the platform partnerships that can unlock scale the the capitalization so that we can retain our talent and have these long-term thought of fixed cost restructured these are long to the fixed cost restructuring will take some time and will take a couple quarters at best so we need to actually have that capitalization to do that and it's there is fruit at the end of that process the the restructuring opportunity is on the order of about 45 percent to be able to reduce the cost structure because of the level of fixed costs we have the ability to then reduce that is truly substantial and it is why we're spending our time doing it. It will take capital to do that. The manufacturing processes, making sure that these are scalable, that is so critically important. And lastly, this infrastructure, when it comes down to the manufacturing process, the manufacturing tools, the data infrastructure, let's not underestimate the importance of a modern data infrastructure that can enable AI, can enable seamless communication between engineers and engineers to the machines and to the data. This seems like it should have been done already. This is something that is table stakes and is something we're investing in to bring this to the modern times and actually have AI as an enabler for our battery development. So all this to say, we're excited about what comes next for Insurg. We're powering what comes next here at Insurg. We're developing batteries, moving electrons in tiny micro form. This is something that is a challenging manufacturing effort, but something that we've proven is capable. And now our job is to make it repeatable in customers' hands with a fixed cost structure, a cost structure that is scalable, a product that's scalable, customers that are scalable, and a model that will allow us to be the leading battery company in the world. Because what we're doing is enabling the first of its kind, the first to market. we're enabling new markets for ai driven devices something like this hasn't been done before the level of excitement that can come from this development is truly world world shaping and and life-changing for people across patients who have an implantable across companies that are trying to move goods with smart sensors to militaries with micro drones with with all sorts of opportunities energy right now energy in small form putting electrons in the box we're putting more electrons in the box than any company in the world right now arguably and so what our job and what we're excited to do is bring that to the world where we're on that path we're with the right people and we appreciate your investment and we are looking forward to what comes next for the company so thank you very much for your support i know it's been longer than many of you have wanted i'm here to tell you that it's worth it because the the opportunity ahead of us is monumental and this technology is real the technology has so much promise and what we're doing next is putting time and people and opportunities together and realizing that opportunities so i'm on a mission to bring a new category of batteries to the world for a next generation of devices and i'm so grateful to all of you to be on that mission with me and to my wonderful team here at insurg who spend their days with me as we we drive toward this mission and i i really look forward to what comes next for this company so thank you very much very much appreciate all of your time and i look forward to answering questions in another setting but very much appreciate your time today and thank you very much.