Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ:DMRC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Charles Beck: It happened mid-February. So we’ll have 1.5 months of kind of regular spend in Q1 before the action took place. And then we’ll have about $1.5 million of cash costs in Q1 related to this event.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And then on — so on that $7.4 million of annual cash savings, that’s all in relation to that workforce reduction? Or is there other pieces and parts?

Charles Beck: That is all related to the workforce reduction.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And then on the Walmart new use case that we were talking about last quarter, you talked here on the call about the soft launch of retail experience. I don’t know if that was suggesting. That was what the Walmart use case was. But just if you could update us on where we’re at with Walmart and then what the current thinking is on when we would hear about what that use case is?

Riley McCormack: So on the latter, that’s up to them. What do you mean by updating you on where we are with Walmart? I don’t understand the first part of your question.

Unidentified Analyst: I just mean in terms of rollout in terms of usage at Walmart in terms of when we might hear about what the use case is just all of the above? Anything that can be shared about that.

Riley McCormack: Yes. I’ll just repeat what I said in the call, which is it’s our best interest to work with the industry on this. So that’s up to them. But again, important to make clear that just because you don’t know about it doesn’t mean there’s an activity going. I don’t know me that just mean in general, right? I don’t think any of our partners are necessarily messaging to all they’re taking care of their own business. So when Wall Street finds out about it may be at a very different time than when important other stakeholders find out about.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. And then just last of all. On the service revenue and the year-over-year decline in Holy Grail. Just maybe talk us through that? What was driving that decline? And then maybe what are the current expectations for Holy Grail moving forward? I know France being the pilot project there, but just any other thoughts on how we should think about that service revenue going into.

Charles Beck: Yes. So this has nothing to do with Holy Grail. I mean there’s a lot of the same stakeholders involved, right? But Holy Grail, there was — it was a Phase III trial and we got service revenue as part of that. That’s a lumpy onetime service revenue. We’re not — you heard Charles say, our focus is on subscription. That is where we’re going to be at 80% gross margin next year with growth from there, which is incredible in terms of just versus the SaaS universe, right? So our focus is on subscriptions. But we provided along with some really small licensing revenue to Holy Grail for this pilot that was Holy Grail grilled was services work. So there was just the timing of that different phases, Phase I, Phase II. I don’t — I mean, for a couple of years, there’s been Holy Grail services work. But our goal would not be to have a bunch of Holy Grail services where we want to sell Digimarc services. That’s the focus.

Operator: . Our next question is from Matt Collard with PCB Advisory .

Unidentified Analyst: Charles. Congrats on a strong year in ’22. You introduced in your comments, Riley, about the value-added reseller. And I guess, I just wanted to understand, do we think of that? Or should we think of that as a license at the individual product level in terms of? Or is it the platform level?