Peraso Inc. (NASDAQ:PRSO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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David Williams: Hey, good afternoon, gentlemen, and thanks for the — letting me ask a question here. Just kind of wanted to touch on the funnel that you have in your presentation. And can you just kind of walk through that and help us understand, I mean you’re getting some really nice growth here in terms of the funnel and things are moving through. Just hoping for maybe a little more color on how you’re seeing the funnel, how things are developing. If there’s anything that’s moving there that’s either in line or maybe out of line with what your expectations are? Thanks.

Ron Glibbery: Well, for sure, Dave, the way the markets are shaping up is — and again, I think the theme generally is congestion of Wi-Fi, right? And so basically, obviously, the market that we’ve talked about for several quarters is, let’s call it, North American fixed wireless access, right? And that’s more suburban rural and that’s the WISP that we’ve been talking about. And so that constitutes a certain segment of the pipeline. We are now — we are starting to see some consumer electronics. And the value — against kind of the same value proposition is that high data rates, but again, in a congestive environment. And I think we obviously realized now that millimeter-wave does a great job in a congested environment. And so we’re seeing — and so some actually quite nice volume opportunities in consumer electronics.

So that’s constituting a certain portion of our pipeline. Other opportunities are in transportation. We’re seeing some opportunities in transportation, mostly in Asia, I would say, specifically. So that’s part of that pipeline. And then, of course, the aerospace and military. So I would say those are the kind of the main drivers for the pipeline right now if you will. We’ve also got — I mean, this is public information. We also have a very good relationship with Richardson RFPD and that relationship is really paying off and really uncovering some terrific opportunities for us. So that helps with our pipeline as well, both in North America as well as around the world. So that’s been a great relationship as well for our sales pipeline.

David Williams: Great. Fantastic. Thanks. And then if you think about your millimeter-wave inventory that’s either in-house or maybe sitting at your customers, what is it going to take do you think to get through this? How much is sitting out there? And you said that you think maybe first part of the year, is there anything that gives you hope maybe that we could see something kind of kick in at the end of this year? And I guess, just trying to understand the inventory impact and how long it’s going to take to really digest that?

Ron Glibbery: We were at Las Vegas WISPAPALOOZA three weeks ago. And I think that — so the good news is that guys like Ubiquiti, who are the market leaders in fixed wireless, had seven or eight products on display. And so that was — and I mean, the feedback we did get from WISPs was that those 60 gigahertz products are — they call them bulletproof, right? I mean they worked really, really well and probably exceeded expectations. The problem is there’s more of an education process that’s going on in that market. And so Ubiquiti’s done a fantastic job of starting to promote it. In fact, we’ve done some kind of videos with their distributors now. So I would say really more into Q1, Q2 is when we’re going to start to see the new orders come online, right?

Because they just — it’s taken a little longer for them to reach their volumes than they were hoping. And obviously, with the whole inventory correction where people were already ahead of the curve, we’ve got to bleed through that. So I’d say hard to imagine over the next eight weeks we’re going to see a lot of orders, but hopefully into later Q1, early Q2, we’ll start to see that shift. Does that make sense to you?

David Williams: It does. Very helpful. And then maybe, Jim, just thinking about the balance sheet. Obviously, you’re a little low on cash there, but you’ve got some nice buildup in inventory and the working capital. So it would be good to do that, get freed up. But I guess in the near-term, what do you think are the — I guess how are you feeling about your liquidity here? And are there any puts and takes, things that we should be thinking about as we kind of parse through it?

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, sure. No. I mean it’s an important question here. Yeah, cash flow is low at the end of the quarter. But fortunately, as I highlighted in my script, about $3.7 million came in from EOL alone between the end of the quarter and I think up to the last week. So that’s definitely given us a lot more breathing room and visibility and particularly the prepayment to fund wafer purchases, which we have been making, which I think speaks to our confidence in our business. We didn’t — we had held off on some back in the summer, but turn the faucet back on there. Right now it’s a function of building inventory to ship to memory orders, both — we kind of look at them internally as EOL. And then there’s still regular production running as well.

So like I said, we shipped what we could in the third quarter to fulfill orders. Our customers have been very supportive of taking inventory and in addition, accelerating payment terms to generally pay within 10 to 14 days, which is huge to improve our working capital. We are expecting to bring the burn down there and obviously talked about some of the painful cost reduction actions we took specifically last week, which was difficult. But unfortunately, we had to reduce OpEx and burn, but we remain optimistic about prospects and are still chasing I think, a quarter or 2 had talked about opportunities for funded development, et cetera. The current macroeconomic environment uncertainties have really slowed those down. But we are still looking to chase one of those down and have a need to — business need to bring folks back to support those.

But looking out here, I think I will say in our 10-Q we’re funded into the first quarter. We’re obviously taking actions to address that. But the EOL, having the visibility of those orders here in the next kind of six to 10 weeks or six to eight weeks will be critical as we assess it. We are always alert to financing opportunities as well as any company in our position should be.

David Williams: Okay, great. Thanks so much, gentlemen. I certainly appreciate the time.

Jim Sullivan: Thank you, Dave.

Operator: Okay. We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. There are no further questions in queue. This concludes today’s conference and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

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