Acutus Medical, Inc. (NASDAQ:AFIB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

But I don’t think that will be felt significantly through the rest of the year. With respect to AcQMap, that will have an impact here in the first quarter. Takeo referenced the $300,000 to $400,000 impact in Q1. The encouraging thing to us is that we now have the requisite raw materials in-house to start manufacturing AcQMap. Our manufacturing teams are actually working six days a week to catch up on necessary supply. The issue is that by the time they’re manufactured and sent through sterilization, we won’t be able to distribute them and fill existing open purchase orders by the end of the first quarter. We do expect to fill those open purchase orders largely in the second quarter, and would expect most of that to be resolved in Q2 and Q3.

I would say again, similar to AcQGuide MAX, the derivative impact here would be as we open new accounts where we have been doing that with smaller than typical stocking orders to ensure that we are keeping necessary inventory on hand to serve our customers who are on quarterly commitment contracts as well as BIOTRONIK’s demand.

Marie Thibault: Got it. And if I could ask a follow up there. Thanks for clarifying the Map and the Max for me. Just sort of the long and short of some of these supply issues, have you detected any reputation damage? Have you found that users are hesitant to come back in any way? Just trying to understand whether there could be lingering I guess effects on Acutus’ reputation from any of this.

David Roman: So we have not. We were very proactive in managing the supply shortages. And as soon as we saw this starting to materialize, I think it was late September-ish, that we started to get a sense that this is going to be an issue. We were very quick in communicating with our customers. We did actively approach accounts who had what we deemed to be excess inventory on the shelves and actually we’re buying back inventory from some of our accounts who had inventory levels that were above their normal utilization rates and looking to redistribute those into accounts who had short-term requirements. So we were very proactive and nimble in managing both the inventory that we had in hand as well as working with our customers in a very collaborative way to maximize the inventory they either had on the shelves, or do everything in our ability to find inventory for them to be able to perform AcQMap procedures.

Marie Thibault: Okay, that’s helpful. Thanks so much, David. I’ll jump back in queue.

David Roman: Thanks, Marie.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Margaret Kaczor of William Blair. Your question please, Margaret.

Margaret Kaczor: Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. And I wanted to start with the AcQBlate FORCE Sensing Catheter, just how should we think about that launch? Is it going to be I guess a limited release and a full release? How quickly is that going to happen? And as best as you can, whether it’s within guidance or general commentary, I guess how many of your current accounts or cases do you think are going to want to use that unidirectional device versus wanting to just wait for bidirectional?

David Roman: Yes, it’s a great question, Margaret. So the way we think about our first launch of AcQBlate is it falls very much into the category of significantly improving AcQMap ease of use and physician experience. We have actually made a ton of progress over the past 12 to 18 months in better integrating AcQMap with other ablation catheters with Tacticath, Smart Touch or Medtronic’s DiamondTemp products, so the integration is significantly better than what it was. However, what you’ll often hear from a lot of accounts is we are really interested in using AcQMap more, but we want to be able to use it on a €œstandalone basis,€ meaning with an integrated ablation catheter and ablation catheters are very much physician preference products.