Biotricity, Inc. (BTCY) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript
Published at 2022-02-15 21:19:03
Good day, and welcome to Biotricity's Fiscal 2022 Third Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Debra Chen [ph]. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Company Representative
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Biotricity's fiscal 2022 third quarter earnings conference call. As a reminder, Biotricity's third fiscal 2022 quarter ended on December 31, 2021. So all figures presented for this period will reflect that end date. Yesterday, we issued our fiscal 2022 third quarter results press release, which highlighted a number of financial results. A copy of this press release is available on the Investor Relations section of our website and the full financials will be filed with the SEC on Form 10-K and posted on EDGAR. Before beginning our 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 could 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: Thank you, Deborah, and thank you everybody for joining today. I welcome you to our third quarter fiscal 2022 teleconference. We just completed our first quarter as a NASDAQ listed company and achieved many exciting things on our journey towards becoming the all-in-one go-to solution for cardiac diagnostics and disease management. It is always important to note that cardiac disease is the number one disease killer in every country in the world, owing to its inherent chronic nature, which is to say, cardiac disease rarely resolves on its own or reverses with pharmaceuticals as the cardiovascular system has limited regenerative capacity. Cardiac patients are typically lifelong in duration. However, diagnosis and regular checkups in cardiologists' offices is expensive, medically inefficient and as we all know now in a COVID environment, inconvenient at best. Inefficient because an electrocardiogram is a snapshot of a moment in time. Ongoing monitoring is required to assess cardiac health and any changes that occur as patients are typically asymptomatic and issues are intermittent. For moderate to severe cases, remote real-time monitoring is a life-saving tool that can often flag irregularities that justify bringing the patient into a cardiologist office or an ER. We set out to build a complete solution that fills some of the gaps in cardiac care and we are well on our way to achieve that with the recent and upcoming product releases. While our technology and its implications for preventing surgeries and saving lives is exciting and now commonly accepted, I sometimes have to step back, take a breath and remind myself, how lucky we are to be alive at a time when technology is truly transforming the state of healthcare. It fuels my passion for this business to win, disrupt, succeed and transform cardiac care. Now let's talk about our third fiscal quarter's progress. Our December quarter was truly pivotal. In late December, we successfully closed a $12 million non-dilutive debt financing on favorable terms. It provides us the capital required to pursue our expansion, commercialization and marketing initiatives and to finance annual recurring revenue subscriptions. $1.6 million of which are existing debt on less favorable terms that was coming due. While all of our hardware and software design in-house, we are well aware we live in a competitive space. So we plan to move aggressively to solidify and increase our leadership position. Operationally, we achieved solid growth despite the many challenges of Omicron, clinical closures and its impact on productivity. Sequentially, we increased revenue modestly to $1.9 million. However, I must note we broke our string of 10 quarters of triple-digit year-over-year growth with just a terrific metric. However, on a full fiscal year basis, we believe we can get back to that level of extraordinary growth for this and future fiscal years. We also had several game-changing product introductions as well as the important FDA approval Biotres, which has greatly expanded our total addressable cardiac market and positions us well to make 2022 a pivotal year. Biotres not only expands the company's product portfolio, but opens a new market and increases the total addressable market from $1 billion to $5.7 billion. It is scheduled to be widely available starting in April. As important, we launched Bioheart, a cardiac monitor now directly available to consumers. The device offers the same continuous heart monitoring technology used by physicians. Bioheart allows patients to manage heart conditions with retrospective snapshots and long-term data collection in a true state-of-the-art manner. It opens a new marketplace and revenue stream for Biotricity and expands our total addressable heart monitoring market by another $1.24 billion, giving us a total addressable market of $6.94 billion versus $1 billion from just two quarters ago. It can be purchased at www.bioheart.com or on Amazon for $199. Bioheart's launch is groundbreaking and an important step in reaching our ultimate goal of building a complete cardiac ecosystem, to serve individuals with heart health issues and their cardiologists. I'm proud to note that Bioheart was brought to market in less than a year ahead of schedule and in time for the holiday shopping season. I'll now spend a couple of minutes covering our near and long-term operational strategy. First, I want to note that unlike many other companies, we are insulated from any chip issues related to our growth plans. This is a function of strategic planning when we saw things tightening up. Next, currently, we have over 325 centers enrolled in 25 states, up from 323 respectively, we reported last quarter. This growth is slower than I prefer due primarily to COVID headwinds already discussed. While we do not report on details of our sales staffing for competitive reasons, we plan to expand our footprint in our Bioflux diagnostic program as quickly as we can identify top quality people and bring them in. Strategically, our ultimate goal is to collapse cardiac services within clinics and hospitals into one ecosystem, the Biotricity ecosystem, so that doctors are using our ecosystem to not deliver just diagnostics, but diagnostics, disease management, remote management and telemedicine all in one place. Importantly, we only pursue markets where we are confident reimbursement exists. We've already spent capital to acquire our existing customers. So as we offer new and additional monitoring products and services, the lifetime value of those customers increases at little to no increased marketing spend, which adds an important component to our scalability, upselling, especially as many of these customers' medical needs evolve over the years from diagnostics to disease management and holistic care. Technologically, we are combining AI with data and predictive capabilities to create better and faster analytics and needed delivery for more pervasive and preventative patient monitoring and lifestyle management. Ultimately, we envision Biotricity becoming the largest complex cardiac cloud platform from diagnostics all the way to disease and lifestyle management. Before turning the call over to John to cover the financials, I'll note that in early December, we published a comprehensive shareholder letter, providing our roadmap for 2022 with milestones, a product roadmap, growth strategy and goals. It demonstrates our commitment to communicating transparently with our shareholders. With that, I'll turn it over to our CFO, John Ayanoglou.
Thank you, Waqaas. Financially, as Waqaas mentioned, an important third quarter achievement was our successful $12 million capital raise with non-convertible debt that also extinguished $1.6 million in less favorable legacy debt. On December 31, our cash position of $16.8 million was its strongest level in company history. We have the strongest balance sheet we've ever had to date. Sales and revenue are always top of mind for management and internally we actively target reaching positive cash flow. On the revenue side, we continue to build our professional sales force incrementally and geographically. While Biotricity will always be an R&D company, to an extent we balance R&D investment against resources, value-added and our strategic consideration to extend our technological leadership in the remote cardiac industry. The December quarter highlighted the resiliency of our model and dedication of our employees, despite the highly virulent Omicron and its cascading impact on staffing, clinical research and supply chains. We reported revenue of $1.93 million in fiscal Q3 2022 versus $1 million a year ago for a 93% year-over-year increase. I'm not going to belabor the details of Omicron and its impact. We're all aware that the headwind is real. However, Biotricity has risen to the occasion, and experts predict Omicron's impact may fade in the weeks ahead. While Omicron's impact may fade, the rates of cardiac disease are not fading. They're not decreasing. So you can imagine the kind of growth they're capable of achieving without these headwinds. We expect a certain pent-up demand as things normalize. One advantage to these headwinds is the big boost that has given physicians and patients to adjust, adjust the telemedicine and remote patient monitoring generally. Our gross margin in Q3 was 43%, with our cost of revenue of $1.1 million. So we reported year-over-year revenue up 93%, while our cost of revenue rose just 29% as our business scales. Similarly, we reported G&A of $4.66 million or 40% higher than a year ago. Again, revenue increased 93%, demonstrating our financial discipline and solid operational execution. Further, we reported R&D expense of $900,000. That's a 32% increase year-over-year, again against a 93% increase in revenue. The bottom line was Biotricity incurred a net loss attributable to common shareholders of $7.34 million versus $4.12 million in the corresponding quarter of the prior year. Loss per share was $0.149 and $0.111, respectively. However, current quarter net loss included a substantial nonrecurring charge of $1.3 million. Excluding nonrecurring expenses, our net loss would have been $6 million and our adjusted loss per share would have been $0.122 per share for the current quarter. We ended the quarter with the strongest balance sheet in our history, with $16.8 million in cash and a current ratio of over 4:1. We remain on track to show strong full year revenue growth. But the real firepower begins when we have our Biotres and monthly Biocare or subscription lines and they ramp up as they run in parallel to our powerful Bioflux growth. As a result, we are comfortable projecting full fiscal year triple-digit growth rates for the foreseeable future. We're more confident than ever that our technology pipeline will produce major growth over the next few years as we build our cardiac ecosystem to further penetrate and monetize the patient population that we have already touched with our cardiac technologies, a small portion of the cardiac patients that need these services. For our most advanced remote cardiac monitoring solutions, we expect our services will follow those customers throughout their lifetime to monitor and protect them and ensure they are provided with technologically sophisticated superior chronic care. Doing so within a recurring revenue business model is a powerful means to scale the business. At this point, I turn the call back to Waqaas for his closing comments. Thank you. Waqaas Al-Siddiq: I guess I shouldn't complain about our third quarter's 93% year-over-year revenue growth. However, be certain we have our sights set high for the fourth quarter, full year and into 2023 and 2024, especially on a full fiscal year basis. Our outlook is primarily driven by our Bioflux product. However, we believe all of our new and upcoming products that complement Bioflux, providing patients and cardiologists more and better custom choices based on their individual needs, will continue to build our revenue, brand value and shareholder value. In a classic case of the hold being worth more than the sum of the parts, while our Bioflux is an important product, our other products round out and support our cardiac ecosystem. Accordingly, I'm more excited about our sales, revenue and growth outlook for the next 12 to 18 months than I was three months ago. At this point, I would like to open up the call for questions.
Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question today comes from Allen Klee of Maxim Group. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello. Good quarter. Question, can you talk about the traction of signing up cardiologists like how many you have signed up now and maybe what that translates into the number of patients that they represent and the strategy of upselling to them now that you have an array of products? How you are going to go about that? Thank you. Waqaas Al-Siddiq: Sure, Allen. Great question. So, we've obviously talked about how we've grown the clinics and grown the cardiologists. I believe, the last I checked, we have about 1,500, and that translates to about 2,000 patients. Per cardiologists, you're talking about three million patient lives. And in terms of selling into the existing accounts, part of our product portfolio and development of our product portfolio was really about applying this vertical integration strategy, which is to sell into the existing account, as I mentioned earlier in the call. And so, our sales force that is already maintaining and managing these accounts, while bringing in new accounts, will go into the existing accounts and upsell them on the Biotres product when that becomes available on April 1 as well as chronic care. We've already started doing a little bit of testing with our key accounts, getting the reimbursement process, getting those nurses trained because one of the things about rolling out new products, even though they are part of the same ecosystem is understanding are there any workflow changes? Is there anything else that we need to add? Is there a feature that we did not think about that we need to add? Of course, we did, our processes have to do a minimum viable product and then do a limited market release. So, we've gone through the MVP side, and so now we're in a limited market release. And the strategy is using the existing sales force going to the accounts, upsell them. They are familiar that this stuff was coming down. We spent the last six months telling them about it. So, it's not like it's something brand new that they have not heard about it, they're not unaware of it. But the rollout, the uptake, how long that's going to take, those are data points that we will have more information on for next quarter.
That's great. And my last question, just I think, you mentioned your expansion of the number of states that you're going into. It seems like this could also work internationally. Is that something you are considering? Waqaas Al-Siddiq: Yes. International, for sure, is definitely something that is a data point for us now. Just to preface that, the Bioflux product is a real-time cardiac monitor, right? So real-time cardiac monitoring does not exist really outside of the United States. Everybody is still on the passive holter market. So, the Biotres product is more a product that is for international. We have so much greenfield and so much open space in the United States that we certainly do not want to distract ourselves with an international expansion, but it's not something that we are ignoring. We have started conversations. We are looking at strong distribution partners in different countries, especially countries that recognize U.S. FDA. So, we're not burdened with an added expense of having to go through a new regulatory process. So, for this year, the strategy is let's go find out the low-hanging fruit, which countries. Let's go find the big medical device distributors who already have a footprint there and building those relationships. So that's definitely an action item for this year and a part of our strategic focus for the year.
Great, thank you so much.
[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Tim Moore of Zacks Small Cap Research.
Yes hi. This is Tim from Zacks. And I just have a few questions. You've got a lot going on in some interesting achievements, especially over the past six months with the ramp-up of the sales force and the FDA clearance on Biotres a few weeks ago, and you are also beginning to roll out the monthly subscriptions. So, I'm just wondering if you had to rank them and anything else as part of the complementary suite for maybe the largest sales contributors when you kind of look out 24 months from now, maybe to March fiscal 2024 and year. What would you say the biggest pivot would probably come from if you had to kind of predictive future? Would it be more from the monthly subscriptions? Or do you think Biotres could have some pretty good traction? Waqaas Al-Siddiq: It's an excellent question. I think talking high level, I think, either of those. Whether it's monthly subscription or Biotres, I think, either can be the heavier weight. Both have the chances. The question is really going to be about what is easier to uptake and integrate. So, when we talk about monthly care, it's a little bit of revenue, but you need volume of patients, right? And you need those patients to come in, you need to register them and there is a whole workflow component around bringing those patients into the ecosystem. Biotres, you've got a nurse, they already know Bioflux. They already know our diagnostic system, it’s going to be easier to train, but again, that is a rotational exercise. So, if I was a betting man, I think, monthly care – it would be weighted towards monthly care. But I preface that with saying that Biotres will be easier to uptake just because from a revenue perspective and a rotation perspective it's a workflow that is very similar to Bioflux that nurses already trained on it and you don't have this component of having to onboard a patient and bring them into the clinic and get those economies of scale going. So not – I understand it's not exactly the answer probably you were looking for, but I have my bet, but I think either could win.
Good. That's helpful. I know that you just mentioned upselling and cross-selling by the sales force reps that you're hiring. It doesn't sound like they'll be dedicated. They're going to simultaneously sell Bioflux in the monthly subscriptions. Is there anything you think you can do to accelerate the sales force hiring? I know in the filing last night it mentioned 33% growth, the sales force during the intervening months. But are you doing pretty well or comfortable with your hiring, planning and budget in the next few months and quarters? Waqaas Al-Siddiq: Yes. So there's a number of items that we're looking at as every business is variable. So I'm happy with how we are hiring. It's also about getting – it's not just about hiring, it's about getting people that are quality people into the organization and getting them up to speed as quickly as possible. And there's a certain capacity that you can do for a size of a company. And then, at a certain point, you just – you can't hire and get them up and running as quickly as you would want. So I'm happy with the way we're going. Our focus is still to continue to grow the sales force. But simultaneously, you mentioned about the sales force looking at vertical growth versus horizontal. The exciting part, I think, from our perspective is that as we roll out, our ecosystem already gets updated. So the sales process and it's very much assisted for existing customers, meaning we can ping them or they come into our system all the time. The system itself will promote and upsell, so it will not really distract and take a lot of time away from sales guys and going into new accounts. But with the same breadth, as we roll out into new accounts, the way our ecosystem is designed, you get everything. Now whether or not you opt or use it as a secondary component and how you get built. But it's not that you have to log into four different things because you're having four – you're using four of our product lines. All of the product lines live in one portal. So if you are there at, as a Bioflux user, you can use the Biotres from there, you can use monthly care from there. You can use everything from the exact same ecosystem. And that's – we've designed that in a way so that when we bring on new customers, they have access to everything, even if they don't use everything.
Okay. Good. That's helpful clarification. And I know you alluded to earlier in your remarks being insulated from the chip supply chain shortage. And it sounds great for the devices. So maybe I was just wondering since you already kind of addressed that topic, could you share any green shoots or any early indications in the last couple of weeks, if any of the Omicron overhang is starting to abate? And if you're hearing anything or seeing anything on folks going back to visiting clinics, I mean, I'm not a good sample size by now. My wife and I are both going for annual checkups later in February, and we've been waiting. Are you seeing anything paid in the last week or two? Waqaas Al-Siddiq: No, it's a great question. We are seeing things stay. We are seeing things opening up more. I mean the thing – the good thing about us is we are seeing how clinics were opening up. And through the pandemic, we've seen the cyclical thing. I mean heart disease is not going away. You're not going to switch your cardiologist because of Omicron. You may not go in your cardiologist office is closed. But if it's an emergency situation, the cardiologist will always take care of you. So you're really not – and that's a good thing about it's really deferred, and I think John spoke to it a little bit as well on the call is. It's a deferral. It's not really that – that patient is no longer going to the doctor's office or they're going to go somewhere else. It's really just a shift and what we have seen in the last I would say the last four weeks is we've seen things opening back up. We've seen – like in January, we saw it was worse where the clinics were going through different spells of closures and whatnot. But now we've seen things open up. We see that people are going back into the clinics, and we're seeing that activity come back to normal.
Great. Now that's helpful color and I was on my questions.
[Operator Instructions] We can now go to Chet White of Helios Alpha. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi. This is Chet White with Helios Alpha. And I was – if you can just give a little bit of color on the size of the TAM for monthly care? It seems like the Biotres added a pretty meaningful expansion of TAM, but monthly care has potential to be materially larger. And then if you could just comment on when that – will itself become generally available for the sales team to move that forward in mass? Waqaas Al-Siddiq: Great question. So we talked about the last six months and about the Biotres already on the call. I was talking about how that's increased our TAM. So I mean, in the last six months, we've gone from a $1 billion TAM to $5.7 billion TAM and then to a $6.9 billion TAM. Monthly care is a 35 – is this $35 billion to $50 billion, depending on where you're looking and who's quoting it, and depending on whether or not you're including devices or not including devices? But I use a conservative number; it's a $35 billion market. The big player in that space has been Livongo, but of course, this diabetes. Nobody has touched it in the cardiac space. We are the first to do that. And in terms of availability, that system, we've already gone and done some trials and testing already. We're already active in it. In terms of general availability is probably going to be the last half of this year, I'm expecting it – so if you take a calendar quarter, it will be available starting July 1st.
Excellent. And just if you could add a little bit of color on the use of proceeds for the most recent debt that you raised? Waqaas Al-Siddiq: Yes. So that capital, we raised it for – to basically supplement our equity dollars, we provide devices to our customers, and we do not want to spend equity dollars to finance inventory. So this is our capital injection to deal with financing inventory. We also strategically did it at the end of December because from a macro and a macroeconomic perspective, I saw most of what's happening coming, right? I saw that the inflation was up. I saw that supply chains were getting tighter. I saw that capital markets would probably dry up or at least go sideways for a while and that the markets would go sideways. And so I do not want to be in a position where I had to touch the capital markets for at least a year. So bringing this capital in has supplemented our equity dollars. It's non-dilutive, and it's positioned us in an incredibly strong position where everybody is going to go through a year, which is going to be very tight. We don't really have to touch the capital markets.
Excellent. Good going and very nice quarter. Thank you.
As there are no further questions at this time, we'll turn the conference back over for any additional or closing remarks. Waqaas Al-Siddiq: Thank you, everybody, for joining the call. I hope this was helpful and you got the information that you're looking for. As I always say at the end of our call, we are always available. Feel free to drop us an e-mail or contact us through our investors at biotricity.com, and we'd be happy to answer any additional questions.
Thank you. That does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.