Research Frontiers Incorporated Price & Performance (REFR)

Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Paul. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year of twenty twenty four investor conference call. First of all, we've been asked by our largest shareholders to try to make these quarterly calls shorter and more focused. So we'll try to do this with your help. And my remarks today will be relatively brief and it's certainly easier to keep things short when the news is good. Let's start with our financial results. Revenues were up 47% to 1,336,000 This was an increase of $426,000 in royalty income over last year. This was driven by a 48% increase in royalties from the automotive market and an increase of 57% from aircraft. Total expenses this year were down more than $165,000 which is a 6% reduction in an inflationary environment. Our expenses are the lowest they've been since 1996 and we have focused on operational efficiency consistently throughout the year. The total improvement in our bottom line this year was $597,000 and this gets us closer to profitability. Our net loss for the entire year was $0.04 per share compared to $0.06 per share last year. This is the lowest annual per share loss since we went public thirty eight years ago.

Moving from our income statement to our balance sheet, we had $2,000,000 in cash as of the end of twenty twenty four and working capital of $2,500,000 Cash went down by $482,000 for the entire year or an average of $40,000 per month. Our burn rate is much lower than ever before. We have no debt and sufficient working capital for more than the next five years. Both our domestic and foreign patent portfolios currently extend to 02/1937. Moving now to highlights from our business this year. 2024 marked notable growth in our Ferrari business and McLaren business, as well as the introduction towards the end of 2024 of the Cadillac Celestiq with its amazing SPD SmartGlass roof. SPD remains a highly popular goes in option on the Ferrari and Puros the Ferrari Purosangue and multiple McLaren car models and is standard equipment on the Cadillac Celestiq. Commercial airlines have begun to put SPD in their cabin windows, most notably in both Boeing and Airbus aircraft as decision making has moved from the OEMs to their airline customers. We also have steady business in small, medium and large VIP corporate jets as well. We see the growth coming from the addition of new vehicles in 2025.

Some of these were expected in 2024, but the launch of the entire model was delayed for reasons unrelated to our SPD SmartGlass. We're also working on major high volume projects for 2026 and the volumes for these projects could dwarf anything that we or Gauzy have spoken about publicly to date. We also expect that you'll see the introduction of more architectural projects this year, both with the traditional method of replacing the glass with SPD SmartGlass and also retrofitting SPD SmartGlass to the inside of homes and buildings to make the building envelope smart. No one else out there can retrofit smart windows. This retrofit application promises to make it less expensive and less disruptive to building occupants to convert existing buildings from having ordinary glass to SPD SmartGlass and will speed up the sales cycle considerably. Our licensee with this patented retrofit system has built an impressive manufacturing facility with high capacity supporting this retrofit application. Next year, we can see market expansion from other areas as well. Let me now speak about the recently announced Black Particle, which many of you have asked about. This is something that the smart glass industry has sought for decades.

We and Gauzy have had sustained efforts on this, working together since day one. And even prior to Gauzy becoming a licensee, Research Frontiers has been searching for the right materials for decades. It might be helpful now for me to explain a little bit about the physics behind SPD technology. There are nanoparticles that are randomly suspended in capsules filled with special polymeric and non polymeric liquids. When an electric shield is applied, these special particles line up and allow light to pass through. When they are unpowered, they naturally return due to Brownian motion to a random state that blocks light. The current particle appears blue because they are very, very efficient at blocking all areas of the visible spectrum except for blue light. And that is why when you have an SPD window inside, it will look black because there's very little blue light in interior lighting. But when you move that same piece of glass outside, the blue light in daylight is the only area of the visible spectrum that is transmitted. And that is why SPD windows appear to be sapphire blue when it's outdoors and you're looking through it. This is where the significance of the black particle comes in now.

So if we could also block blue light in this process, the window would appear gray or black. And I want to reiterate that black SPD that has been shown behind closed doors at Gauzy's booth at CES in January were R and D samples. And even though there were R and D samples, they had an impressive range of light transmission and other optical characteristics. More work needs to be done to refine things and we are making excellent progress. Now speaking from decades of experience, we know that there is a big difference between seeing a black particle, having it stay black when it's put into a liquid suspension and then putting it into a film. The samples at CES accomplished all of these things beautifully. They were very well received by the special customers who saw it. The next step is going from R and D samples to engineering samples. These would be closer to the final product. After the current engineering sample stage, we then go into mass production. I've been asked how long does it take between engineering sample stage and mass production stage and that's relatively easy to explain. The SPD film coater that Gauzy has near Stuttgart, Germany has been designed to be quite flexible in how it's configured.

That means that almost every relevant variable that you can think of between film coating width, SPD emulsion coating thickness, line speeds, etcetera can be adjusted in mass production on the existing line. The specially designed coating head itself on Gauzy's SPD film coater is also capable of handling many different materials. If the final engineered materials are close in rheology such as viscosity and flow characteristics to the current SPD emulsion using the blue particle, then mass production of the black particle SPD film can happen very quickly thereafter. Typically, there are some adjustments that are always made whenever you change a material that you're coating and the production experts at Galaxy and at Research Frontiers are quite adept and experienced at doing this. Now from a market perspective, the black particle is a nice alternative to the current one, but is by no means a necessary item. The current blue particle also can be made to look black or gray with post production steps after the film is made and in areas like sunroofs or skylights where you're looking up at the sky, the sapphire blue color may actually be preferable. For areas like side windows in cars, planes and homes and offices, black or gray may be preferable, and those are the primary areas where we believe that the black SPD can result in meaningful market expansion beyond what we're doing now.

Once again, this is not a necessary condition to commercial success, but it is extremely desirable and can expand the markets for SPD glass as I explained, something that the smart glass industry has been trying to do for decades. We have said that we can at this point and at the joint we said what we can at this point and the joint announcement that Gauzy and Research Frontiers made at CES is the extent of what we could talk about at this time, especially on an open call where competitors to our licensees have access. But stay tuned. With that, I look forward to answering the questions that I've not already answered in the course of my presentation. I'll read some of the additional questions that were emailed to us. And I'm in some cases combining several questions into one. One question is, I'd like to know where our income comes from, Asia, Europe, The United States, etcetera. So most of and Rod, thank you for that question. Most of the revenues and the sales are occurring in Europe and in South America from the licensees there. We do have also licensees headquartered in Asia with production both there and in Europe and of course The United States.

So, you have a mix around the world of production and that mix may shift more demonstrably towards The United States as the architectural application comes online and also as new cars that may be domestic come online as well. We go to the next question here. Judy asks, I'm hoping for the best but expecting the worst. If the administration goes ahead with its planned 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican auto parts, can you indicate if the retail price of the SPD pipeline vehicles will be affected? No, I don't expect that this is going to have a meaningful impact on our revenues based on these tariffs. And thanks for the question, Judy. First, that as a former economist at the U. S. Central Bank in the 1980s, my personal view is that free trade is usually the best solution. However, that only works when there's a level playing field. And I think the tariffs are meant to create that as well as address border security and the flow of fentanyl into The United States. My guess is that if these other countries handle the border security and fentanyl issues, the tariffs will revert back to where they were.

And to answer your specific question, I don't believe that these tariffs will have a significant impact on our automotive and other business. Over the past few decades, there have been high import duties in some areas of the world on cars, for example, And that market typically is not affected mostly in the premium car area. So tariffs will have an effect, we believe, on less expensive cars that are more price sensitive. But I do not believe that it will affect our business or our revenues meaningfully. John Nelson asked, are there any design ins for LTI's architectural retrofit product that you can talk about? Yes, we have double government projects and some commercial projects that we are targeting and focusing on right now, and I'm actually meeting next week with them about it. And the other question was indications that Ferrari and your other car customers could expand usage to windshields or windows. And yes, 2025, I believe, will show SPD and other areas of the vehicle besides just Sunroof's job. So thanks for that question. Jared Albert, some of the questions we've already answered. But any real world indication that there's room for SPD in a PDLC sunroof world outside of the super expensive aspirational kind of vehicles and the timeline for the architectural retrofit?

Well, I mentioned that we expect the retrofit to generate revenues this year. And in terms of your question about cars that use PDLC, first of all, we are working with carmakers that are not the super expensive ones that you referred to in your question. So yes, we do expect that there is plenty of room and probably a preference because I think the automakers are beginning to see based on what we're talking to them about that the PDLC sunroofs are not doing the job that they anticipated in terms of blocking heat and glare inside a vehicle. So So very much so, I believe that if anything those PDLC set roofs are already wired for SPV as far as I'm concerned and there will be a lot more cars like that using it. Okay. Well, we've discussed a lot of the questions so far that have been emailed to us. I'm going to ask our operator, Paul, to open up the conference to any additional questions people participating today might have that we haven't already covered. And in the interest of time, please try to keep them limited to questions of general interest. And if you want to get into more specifics, we could certainly do that by email or calls offline.

And our first question comes from Jeff Harvey, an investor.

First of all, the fourth quarter was about half the third quarter. What was the reason for that?

A lot of our revenue comes from automotive and a lot of carmakers cut production in the fourth quarter to clear out what's on the factory showroom for the next year.

Okay. Given the fact that you've gotten some airlines to put the windows in and Gauzy announced last time that 50,000 cars or something. The problem we have as an investor is nobody knows about this company because neither you nor Galze have been able to put out any press releases about new business. I mean, what can we expect going forward this year to let people know about Research Frontiers? Because there certainly aren't any analysts that are going to follow this company until there's something that's worthwhile for them to take a look at. And I mean, we've been stuck in this mode for a long time and I realize that you have legal obligations with these companies. But can we expect if you get an architectural contract that you could announce something like that? Yes. Thanks for the question. I'd like to see you go to some investor conferences and talk about your company.

Right. Well, we will start to do that and we've been lining some up. But getting back to your original point about trying to say things about projects. Obviously, we have to defer to the request of the customers, but we've been pretty good at getting information out. We talked about Ferrari for the last two years before the car was even introduced with McLaren and Mercedes and Cadillac. In some cases, they've done the talking, in some cases we have. And Gauzy and Research Frontiers have it in our best interest to announce what we can. So, we've been working together on that as well.

Thank you. As much as you can. Thank you. We will. We want to do that too. It makes it easier to sell more cars later too.

And our next question comes from Michael Forrester, an investor.

My question has to do with the Black SPD developed by Gauzy and I guess Research Frontiers. Is Gauzy going to apply for a patent or is Research Frontiers going to apply for a patent on that black particle SPD?

Since a lot of this work was done jointly, we obviously want to have a stronger patent protection as possible. But I'm not going to talk on an open call about IP strategy because most companies will do a combination of both and that's probably no exception here.

Well, the history as I see it is that the SPD film is part of the what Gauzy refers to as solar powered smart glass.

That's different. Solar no, that's different. Solar powered smart glass is the combination of photovoltaics with smart glass. So that would apply to any type of smart glass that they make, PDLC or SPD. It was demonstrated at CES. We've had other licensees develop a combination of transparent photovoltaics and SPD. And because our power requirements are so low, it's very feasible to do that. And some of the retrofit applications are also using some proprietary systems to make these things self powered. So, if you think about what that means in a retrofit, you may not need an electrician to ever come to the site. You just pop this into the window frame and you're done. So, that's going to be an exciting time when You mentioned that the patent expiration is 02/1937, which is only twelve years away. Currently. When is the last time Research Frontiers applied for a patent?

We have a pretty extensive patent effort. So we spend quite a bit of money protecting.

Most of them are before the year February. Michael, I'm not going to go into IP strategy. Sometimes you protect things with trade secrets and sometimes you protect it with patents.

But I asked a specific question. When is the last time Research Frontiers I'll have to look that up. We have things in the works too.

And our next question comes from Chuck Michaels, an investor.

Perhaps I missed it, but on your website, I looked on your website and I saw financials for the year, but I didn't see this year versus 2024 versus 2023, But I didn't see anything for the last quarter. Do you have quarterly financials somewhere I can look at?

No. So the 10 K only reports yearly. You can derive the quarter from those numbers and comparing it to the nine months. But the 10 K and the financial press releases have to follow a certain format according to the SEC. So that's what we did.

I see. So can you tell us what the loss was for the quarter?

It was lower than last year this quarter.

Can you tell us what it was?

I'd have to look it up because we don't break it out that way. But if you want offline or you could derive it from comparing the nine month loss and the twelve month loss.

Okay. To subtract one from the other. Our loss per share was $0.04 for the whole year though, which is the lowest it's been since we went public.

Yes, I saw that. That's great. Also, I had the question you had mentioned some hopefully rather large sales coming through in 2026.

How confident That's not to say we won't have large sales in 2025, but in the context of what I said, what we're expecting in 2026 may dwarf anything we've ever talked about or Gauzy has ever talked about.

Yes. So And by the way, they have their conference call on Monday. So I urge everybody to listen to that as well. I'm looking forward to it.

Right. I am as well. Okay. So how confident are you on the timing on that? Do you have any give us any information regarding that?

Well, I mentioned it on the call, which means I'm relatively confident that what I say on these calls is going to happen. It doesn't always happen. I mean, we had the CEO of Ford announce on CNBC that our glass was going to be in the Lincoln Continental and it didn't. So sometimes things happen between the cup and the lip. But for the most part, they happen on the time in the way that we expect, not always on the timetable though.

Right. I understand. And likewise, I know you've mentioned a number of quarters about a car, one or more cars coming out in the near future and they don't seem to come out either. I don't know if that was the Lincoln or if that's something else.

No, no. This is something else. Lincoln was many years ago when they were rebranding their car. We expect these cars to come out. Like I said earlier in the call, they were delayed past twenty twenty four when we thought they were coming out, but not because of SPD.

And our next question comes from Avi Gross, an investor.

On the topic of tariffs, royalties of like 10% or 15% paid sometime on top of the tariffs or not like if you're shipping a module to a car company abroad? So, typically and that's a great question, Avi. Thank you for asking it. So, all of our license agreements have a definition of net selling price. And the net selling price is basically the revenues minus some minor things, but it's basically revenues, it's not profit. And you do exclude out things that don't go into the licensees pocket, like for example, shipping costs and things like that. And when you get down to tariffs, you would exclude taxes and sales tax and tariffs and things like that from the calculation of the royalty. However, there is a sublimitation that limits how much they can deduct for all of those things I just mentioned. So, if you add up shipping costs and tariffs and other things, if they go above a certain level, the licensee cannot deduct that from the calculation. So if we're talking about 25% tariff, a very small piece of that is going to be deducted, if any. So like I said, they're not going to affect our royalty.

It may affect at the lower end cars how many cars are sold in general. But when you're in the premium market and let me give you a simple example. In China, for example, which was the largest market for Mercedes and BMW and Audi, the cars would typically sell for a multiple of the MSRP, not because necessarily of tariffs, but because the distribution was set up to create certain market leverage, so they could command charging a lot for these cars. And they still sold very well. So at the high end, I don't expect there to be much movement in terms of what the tariffs are doing. And I also, as someone that's a student of politics and a student of economics, don't think they're going to be that longstanding. I may be wrong. I don't want to make the same mistake and say they're transitory that they said about inflation because that didn't happen. But I never said that either and I never believed it was. But in this case, I do believe that they will be somewhat more temporary than people expect.

We do ask that you Our next question comes from John Nelson, an investor.

Hi, Joe. Couple of questions. First, I have one that I always ask is any progress on the sun visor development?

There is both on the OEM side and in the aftermarket side, but I have to leave it to the licensees to continue their work, work with their customers and get the product down. But, it's something I believe a lot in.

And up and comer in the commercial jet market is Embraer. Have you do you have any contacts with them? Are they aware of your product? Yes, very much so. Matter of fact, some of the early expansion that our licensee in the aircraft market Vision Systems had done from being just European based to being worldwide was because of Embraer. And their transport category regional jets are great. And do you expect any of the new vehicles for 2025 to be in the middle market for cars?

Yes, I do. Okay.

Good.

And then just lastly, last conference call, you mentioned work on holy grail patents. Are they related to the black particle or is this something Well, black is certainly the holy grail. And when I talk about that, it's what the whole industry has been trying to get. So, we're very excited about the black particle. We're experienced enough to know that what we showed at CES was remarkable. I mean, if you saw this up close and personal, you would be extremely impressed with it. But we have to go through the from R and D sample stage to engineering sample stage to mass production. And assuming the viscosity and the flow characteristics of the emulsion are similar to the blue, I don't want to minimize it, but it may be simply as easy as pouring more a different material into the bucket and coating it. There's always adjustment, so I wouldn't expect that to be what really happens. But it shouldn't be that difficult of a material to translate up into mass production.

And our next question comes from August Berlin, an investor.

Hey, Joe. How are you?

Hey, August. How are you? Doctor. Berman, I must say. Sorry.

Hey, Collyn, just wanted to see, with regard to the 2025, are we talking about introductions or do we know if it's more about revenues from the new vehicles?

I kind of equate them for the following reason. In the early days, there would be several years lead time between when an automaker wanted to think about putting SPD SmartGlass in a vehicle and when they would put it in because there was testing, Mercedes went through what they told me €5,000,000 of testing and built special chambers and now they use it on all their materials. But in the case here of nowadays, there's only a very short time period that's often necessary between when you decide to put SPD SmartGlass in a vehicle and when it goes in. It could be a year, year and a half. I mean, we've been working with some of these companies for that period of time. So, I think you'll expect introductions in 2025. Got it. Assuming that cars come out. That's always the big assumption.

Far as coming out.

Right. And okay. I think maybe part of the frustration last year, if you're just looking at the thousand filings, I'm mentioning Daimler as STD and then I'm looking at the web and seeing that the 2020 S Class has been delayed, so I already kind of took the connected off there. But do we are we still expecting the Asian Novo to come out as well in 2025?

Yes, we are.

And our next question comes from Allen Ginsberg, an investor.

The structure of the royalty agreement regarding the black particles, do you expect it to be similar to the royalty agreements that you have in place right now?

Yes. I mean, that's something that we and Gauzy are going to determine, but I don't see a real need to change the royalty arrangement. We get a 10% to 15% royalty from the customer with the blue material. And you would think that because the black is a better thing, we would get more. But on the other hand, they would probably sell a lot more of the product or sell it at a higher price. So our royalty could go up just with the same percentages in place.

But your protection is similar with the black particle as it would be your intellectual property protection as it would be in your other products. Is that correct?

Yes. We're very focused on protecting IP, as you could tell. We have two fifty patents and equal number of patent applications. It's quite a bit.

And our next question comes from Alan Yucobov of Kingsview Partners.

Alan, how are you? And I'm sorry we haven't been able to hook up. I spoke to your partner when you had called, but wasn't able to get back to you. No problem. Just a quick question. But you're here, so let yes. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Can you hear me? Yes. We were selling revenues were up 47% for the year, and that's great. And you're saying you have momentum in all the multiple all the markets for this year. Right. And if you duplicate that number, it's terrific. I know you're going to have some lumpy quarters from time to time, whatever reason. Right. If you see momentum in all these markets, do you anticipate the possibility of a profitable quarter this year? Could you share that if you have a solid quarter? Yes, sure. We almost hit profitability this past year. So I'm certainly looking forward to achieving a truly profitable quarter in the coming year. A lot of it depends on the timing. If a car comes out at the end of the year versus the beginning of the year, that affects our royalties. But and also if the architectural retrofit comes out, that could significantly increase our royalties. So we're very focused on that. And the 2026 event that you mentioned or the potential for 2026 is something can you give us any more details for which markets is that going to address or is it multiple markets? Well, I would say that the most predictable market we have is automotive.

So if I'm projecting out to 2026, it's probably on an automotive project and multiple ones actually.

And our next question comes from William Brazel, an investor.

I'm good. But I want to go back three years ago, because back in February of twenty twenty one, this stock was at $3.96 Today, it's up 4.72% to $1.33 And one of your earlier callers talked about the problem with the stock prices, nobody knows about Research Frontier. That's not the problem. The problem is if you go out and do a roadshow now, you'd be wasting your time and the company's money because these broker dealers will not be interested until you have significant revenues and they will contact you and wanted to have a dialogue. I mean, we need $500,000 1 million dollars in revenue is not going to bring them to the table. I mean, I'm surprised that we're not based on what I knew three years ago, you're not in the hundreds of millions of dollars and obviously that would take care of the stock price. And that's why I'm disappointed and I'm wondering how much longer this is going to take to have that kind of significant revenue, if you can talk about it at this point.

Sure. Well, I appreciate it. And I'm also in agreement with you that the real money is going to come into Research Frontiers as an investment when we have much higher revenues.

That's true. We need contracts. And the problem is, it's hard to be confident in that when I've been waiting for these significant contracts for three years.

Right. And I've been I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying there. We are working and Gauzy is working as hard as we can to land these contracts sooner to be able to talk about them sooner, so that the stock price appreciates sooner. And of course, the least thing I'm worried about is revenue. It's really what can we say about it and what and those are the things we're working on right now. But I appreciate the question and I am in agreement that our stock price will do much better when we could talk about more of this stuff and have higher revenue.

Because I know these companies and you have a fiduciary responsibility as a publicly traded company to make those announcements on a timely basis when you do have a significant contract. So, I'm not worried about that happening. But, I do hope it does happen sometime soon.

Right. Well, we try to have as many things in the works so that we could have more and more of those.

Okay. Well, I'm hopeful. Obviously, I've been hanging on.

Thank you very much, and I appreciate the trust.

Okay. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. I think we've answered a lot of the questions. And if we haven't fully answered the question anyone's questions, please feel free to either email us or call us. We're happy to talk to you. I'd like to make a few closing remarks now, if I could. For the past several years, we've seen a constant increase in revenues year over year and a steady reduction in operating expenses without a reduction in operational or other business accomplishments. The reason for this is simple. We have a highly desirable and the best performing smart glass technology in the world. And by increasing revenues, reducing expenses and preserving the best aspects of our asset light business model, we're steadily moving towards being cash flow positive and profitable. Because of the nature of the industries we're in, winning a project today often results in many years of business. The typical car model has a seven year life and the typical aircraft model much longer. We go elephant hunting and nobody is better at this than us and our licensees, and it creates steady revenues from each of the programs that last for years as we land these programs. In areas like architectural, the numbers can be even bigger by virtue of the sheer magnitude of the size of the glass market for buildings and homes.

Also, the sale cycle can be much shorter than aircraft and automotive, especially now with the SPD SmartGlass retrofit application. Several of our competitors who have raised massive amounts of money and inevitably spent even more than they raised, Notably, companies such as VUE and HAYLEA went bankrupt this year. Another company just got delisted. Part of this relates to the limitations in their technologies. And part of this is that they were only able to approach one market. And part of this was simply not paying attention to key areas of their business. But by preserving our asset light business model along the way, we're well positioned to reduce risks, apply more of our resources towards technology and market enhancements and expansion. We can also leverage the expertise and production capacity and capital and technological resources of a large list of diversified licensees by working with them closely from a technological and business development perspective. This will allow us to have a strong presence in multiple industries that others can't, such as automotive, aircraft, architectural, marine and consumer electronics. And with predictable and lower expenses, we can start to pay dividends to our investors more quickly. I thank you very much for your continued support as we travel together down this road together.

And if you believe that the future is smart glass, and I believe all of us here do, and you like diversified asset light companies and a management team focused on efficiency and driving the company towards profitability, then you've come to the right place. Thank you very much.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for attending.