Duos Technologies Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:DUOT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

But then you also have car owners and sometimes shippers. They are interested in having portals at, if you will, the entry and exit point of their large maintenance yards or areas where they load and offload cargo. So for example, there are chemical companies that have large onloading and offloading yards and they’re interested in having their cars kind of scanned as they come in empty and scanned as they go heavy to increase the overall safety of that hazmat and cargo movement.

Michael Latimore: Got it. And then I guess just last — I know it’s still early days, but on the subscription model, what kind of contract lengths do you think are reasonable here and gross margins?

Chuck Ferry: Yeah. We kind of started with — most of the customers or the car owner customers were talking about probably a minimum of three, but mostly around the five year period. With some of our Class 1 customers, they’re more interested in the longer term, maybe even 10 to 15 years. So, I think more work needs to be done this year. Another question you probably should ask me is, what does the pricing look like? We’re still working on that. I would tell you that we’re probably going to end up where a portion of it will be a fixed fee to kind of gain access or license to individual portals. And then some sort of a per car fee basis and then we may actually separate out different types of cars in that format. So, that’s something that we’re still working with our railroad SMEs, we have in our company as well as some of the initial subscribers that we’re talking with.

Michael Latimore: Okay. Sounds good. Thank you. Best of luck.

Chuck Ferry: Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it.

Operator: Our next question is from Christopher Penn with Penn . Please proceed with your question.

Unidentified Participant: How are you guys doing?

Chuck Ferry: Very good. How are you, Chris?

Unidentified Participant: Doing well. Couple of questions. How do you guys sit and say, well, back story, talk about the derailments, derailments happen all the time, but they’re very popular in the media now. If you guys get in a situation where there’s explosive demand for your guys project, not project with the products? How quick can you guys gear up manufacturing to meet the needs?

Chuck Ferry: Yeah. No, that is a good question and is an excellent problem for a company like us to have. Look, I’ve led other companies that have scaled up very rapidly. Part of my military service, I was involved with exercised where we had to scale it very rapidly for certain things. So internally geared to the company and in close to work nation with our Board of Directors and some of our shareholders. We have plans in place where we can very rapidly scale up. In terms of manufacturing, we’ve developed a good solid network of vendors, suppliers and local manufacturers and fabricators, largely here in the United States and then heavily centered here in the State of Florida. And so those plans are in place to scale up. Likewise, I think we have a good solid plan to scale up with additional capital if that demand does in fact present itself for us.

Unidentified Participant: Good. And then what about new business in different applications? I know you guys focused a lot on the Class 1 stuff, but what about like in coal mine detecting open doors on cars? I don’t think they need a full RIP system. But I guess, I have first seen experience with the industry railroads and I know that’s a common issue that can lead to derailments that something you guys have thought about?