Atomera Incorporated (NASDAQ:ATOM) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Francis Laurencio: Yes. Cody, there’s no change, really. We’ve — I think we’ve addressed this in earlier calls. And this is about a level that we feel comfortable with. . We certainly don’t want to go significantly lower, but we were very light in terms of any capital raising in Q3. We — we’re active in the market only on just a couple of days. And so that reflects, really, our confidence in what lies ahead. Obviously, at $3.5 million, actually, our non-GAAP operating expense for the year at about $16.5 million implies about $4 million a quarter in terms of non-cash — sorry, cash — gross cash usage. And so going sort of too far below that 1 year is not something that we ever like to do.

Cody Acree: Is there a baseline of stock price that you wouldn’t want to be engaged in your ATM?

Francis Laurencio: No, we’re never going to give that kind of guidance. I mean, obviously, we control what we can control, and there are sometimes things that happen in the market that will affect our stock price that are disconnected from the fundamentals in the business. But look, we often get asked about the timing of making significant announcements, and we have on occasion and certainly, this is true with STMicro, open to a lot of speculation of why did this come right at the earnings call, and we signed the deal the day before the earnings call. So we announced — if we announced a transaction next week, that was a material event for the company, we would announce it then. And so I think that’s been our disclosure practice, and it’s not in any way kind of intentional.

It’s — we’ll get that information out there. And to the extent that, that is something that affects the stock price, well, that’s a good thing. We can certainly control execution. But a lot of things that have happened in the market over the last 6 or 9 months, I think, have been very much across the industry and the stock market.

Cody Acree: Appreciate your time.

Mike Bishop: And just a couple of questions coming in on the Q&A chat. So first one is regarding STMicro. And the question is how many EPI tools in the initial installation of MST at STMicro?

Scott Bibaud: Yes, it would be very typical for someone to install in just 1 tool for the development process. You can run a lot of wafers through 1 tool. They’re not going to be pressed on capacity to be able to do those wafer level qualification or the silicon validation test that I talked about, that should be fine. As they go to production, then it will really depend on the ramp rate for what volume they need. But in all likelihood, they’ll have to add a lot more machines as they get to higher volumes. But we — yes, we don’t have much insight into that right now. We do know that the first installation is on a single tool.

Mike Bishop: Okay. And a question about JDA 1 and timing. So — and I think folks are judging if ST takes this long, what would timing for JDA 1 should they choose to go to production, what is it about? As long do you anticipate as it’s taking STMicro? Or what are your thoughts on that?

Scott Bibaud: That’s difficult to call because it depends where they slot in the technology in their development cycle. This is — they’re obviously working on their next-generation process. And so this would go into whatever that is defined as being — and I don’t know how far down the road they are with it yet. . So if they’re pretty far down the road and they slot this in, then it would be sooner. I think it would be fair to say though, all of them have to go through a similar type of process that we showed on STMicro, where they have to do silicon validation, get to a final PDK and wafer level qualification and then take that to production. So it will be in a similar type of time frame.