Earnings Transcript for CLIR - Q4 Fiscal Year 2023

Operator: Good afternoon, and welcome to the ClearSign Technology fourth quarter and full-year 2023 conference call. [Operator Instructions]. I will now like to turn the conference over to Matthew Selinger of Firm IR Group. Please, go ahead.

Matthew Selinger: Good afternoon, and thank you, operator. Welcome, everyone, to the ClearSign Technologies Corporation fourth quarter and full-year 2023 results conference call. During this conference call, the company will make forward-looking statements. Any statement that is not a statement of historical fact is a forward-looking statement. This includes remarks about the company's projections, expectations, plans, beliefs, and prospects. These statements are based on judgments and analysis as of the date of this conference call and are subject to numerous important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties associated with the forward-looking statements made in this conference call include, but are not limited to, whether field testing and sales of ClearSign's products will be successfully completed, whether ClearSign will be successful in expanding the market for its products, and other risks that are describing ClearSign's public periodic filings with the SEC, including the discussion in the Risk Factors section of the 2023 Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2023. Though as except as required by law, ClearSign assumes no responsibility to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or actual outcomes and does not intend to do so. On the call with me today are Jim Deller, ClearSign's Chief Executive Officer; and Brent Hinds, ClearSign's Chief Financial Officer. At this point in the call, I would like to turn the call over to CFO, Brent Hinds. So, Brent, please go ahead.

Brent Hinds: Thank you, Matthew. And thank you to everyone joining us here today. Before we begin, I'd like to talk about our most recent news, which was the completion of our capital raise. In short, we successfully raised approximately $9.3 million in gross proceeds through two separate offerings

Jim Deller: Thank you, Brent, for the financial overview. As always, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us on this call today and for your interest in ClearSign. On today's call, as usual, I'll review our business segments starting with our process burners, followed by boiler burners, and then discuss the outlook for the coming year. I do not have a lot to report regarding our China operations. We do have some new developments in technology and government validation in addition to business progress, including both successful startups and new sales that we will cover in this call. As Brent discussed earlier, we have also just completed a capital raise. I will discuss this, and particularly what that means for our business, and how that positions ClearSign for the future. Before I start, I wanted to a quick update on our open position on our Board of Directors. We do have a highly qualified independent director identified, and we anticipate completing our engagement in the coming days. As always, we will issue a press release with the details as soon as this is completed. I will now turn to the developments in the process burner line. We have a number of significant developments, some of which are tangible and have resulted in press releases, which I will elaborate on today. Others are more subtle, but nonetheless encouraging and are worthy of discussion. I will start with what may be the most meaningful announcement we have made for our long-term business. On February 13, we announced that following a year-long process of setting operational site equipment review and feedback from industry and other stakeholders. And that assessment of the economic benefit, the California regulators established two new Best Available Control Technology, or BACT thresholds, based on the long-term performance and proven NOx emissions of ClearSign process burners. These two categories were process heaters with a single burner and process heaters with multiple burners. While this designation does not stipulate the technology to be used, it does set the performance levels of which future regulations and permits should be justifiable by both industry and regulators. That being said, the regulators do separately maintain a technology clearinghouse register that list the technology proven to meet the BACT's performance. And as our burners were used to set these new limits, they are automatically included on our register. What is also significant is that there is not a BACT program in every state. In fact, there are only two in the USA

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Amit Dayal, Wainwright.

Amit Dayal: Thank you, and good afternoon. So Jim, you gave some color on some of the items that are in the pipeline. But from a dollar amount perspective, how much would that translate into -- I guess if there's a backlog number you could share, or maybe some color on how big the pipeline is as of now?

Jim Deller: Hi, Amit. Good afternoon. It's good to hear from you. Thanks for your question. I think we need to be careful when actually putting a strict dollar figure to a pipeline, because things do move around. But there's some significant developments I think are worthy of note. So we referenced in the call that there are end-user customers. These are global refiners that are requesting ClearSign to be included in the evaluation of projects that they have placed with engineering companies working for them. So this is the end uses basically pulling ClearSign into their projects for assessment. I can't put dollar figures on that. I don't think it's appropriate. But one of those is in the order of the large order that went into the LA areas. Now there's -- for everyone, an inquiry is not a guarantee of the sale but it is an expression of interest. It is included in sales pipeline. But what's significant is that we -- I think, for the first time for ClearSign, we actually have the end users making a request and go into their engineering companies and asking them to come to ClearSign to make sure that we're included. Up until now, it has always been us pushing our technology out. So those are, in my mind, very significant for our pipeline. The other comment I made that it is also worthy of note, the hydrogen producer coming to ClearSign can take it on themselves to request that we go through the process to be evaluated for inclusion in their approved vendor list. In significance of the same reason again, this thing -- a global customer, very typical customer in the field, now come into ClearSign to make sure that we're available to them to use as a supplier to them for their needs. So from a different way, we've got a lot of general interest, but those are the big changes to me. And they all shift back into 2019, when we set out on this path of commercialization and laid out a plan. There were some milestones we identified. And getting to the point that we have, like the end user customers pulling and asking for our equipment to be included, has the engineering companies recommending our equipment. Those are the key milestones we've identify then. So to finally get to that point now, I think, speaks volume for the developments here at ClearSign.

Amit Dayal: No. Understood. Thank you, Jim, for that. So in that context, right, looks like interest is building. You have back to validation as well. You've completed this financing. So is part of the financing going to go towards just building a sales team internally? I know you have channel partners, but how are you taking a little bit more control of the sales process with all of these developments?

Jim Deller: We are developing our sales capability. Just for our business structure, that is -- it's not only internal function. There's also through partnerships and outsourcing. We're getting to the point that our technology has been recognized in the industry. From a sales perspective, right, there are a very effective way of making sales in the industry, especially for smaller companies is to engage with third-party common consultant, sometimes sales agents, but third parties that that may carry a rep and a number of products. They're talking to the end users and customers all the time and very familiar with the projects in the area. Up until now, it has been -- ClearSign has not been appealing to them, because we were not well known in the industry. And from that perspective, we've been a hard technology to sell. We're now in the process. We've got interest from those third parties. So just as an example of what this development does is allowing us to expand our sales team, but to do that efficiently through leveraging these third-party companies and engaging with them to benefit from their contacts and their personal relationships with the customer. So it's having the technology developed, but also being able to engage others, in addition to the developments in-house that we're making, I think, are really bolstering up our sales capabilities overall on a holistic level.

Amit Dayal: Understood. Thank you, Jim. Just one last one. So for the four quarters of '24, how should we think about sales ramping? I'm sure there's going to be some lumpiness as you make deliveries, et cetera. But are you expecting revenues to just be distributed a little unevenly throughout the year? How should we think about the cadence of revenues this year?

Jim Deller: So at a practical level, I think that's really what's meaningful. We don't want us to start making , but the revenue as a result of work, right, as a result of products being shipped to meeting the obligations of those projects. We've shipped and started up the burners in the California refinery, but we announced this successful start-up improving the emissions of one of those heaters that was installed or shipped late last year and startup in January. We've recently shipped burners for the second heater and started that up -- shipped in March started up in just the last few weeks. That was very successful, waiting on the formal documents confirming the third-party assessment of that. But those product shipping will drive revenue. And then we have -- the large order that I mentioned is being fabricated as time to ship out to California. Shipping those burners is going to be a key milestone for us along with some boiler burner projects. But those are going to be the major events that are in process at this time. But as you say, Amit, it's at this time with a number of orders that we have and especially some of them being very large orders with very significant milestones, is it is going to create some lumpiness.

Amit Dayal: Understood. That's all I have, Jim. I'll take my other questions offline. Thank you.

Jim Deller: Thank you, Amit. It's good to talk to you.

Operator: There are no more questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Jim Deller, ClearSign's CEO for any closing remarks.

Jim Deller: Well, thank you, everyone, for your interest and taking the time to participate today. We look forward to updating you regarding our developments and speaking with you on our next call.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.