VerifyMe, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRME) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Adam Stedham: So I’ll talk about the Precision Logistics first. So if you look at our Precision Logistics business, our Precision Logistics business, our gross margins have been going up and that’s quite deliberate. Now you mentioned the distribution between premium and proactive. So absolutely, that contributes to gross margin because our premium customers, we don’t have the freight moving through, so it runs at a higher gross margin. But it would be overly simplistic to say that the gross margin improvement is because of that change alone. In addition to that, when you look at the shipments and if you look at our customers, when we talk about more ideal customers for us, the amount of margin is based upon the weight, the distance, the additional services that you want, the specialty handling, how quickly the shipment takes place, so we’ve done a lot of work to identify the ideal customer profile, the customer that we provide the most value to them and therefore, it will provide the most significant contribution to our shareholders and the company by servicing those customers.

So we focus on those customers and focus on pricing that service correctly within our — within the Precision Logistics business as well as growing the premium. So, both of those have grown the gross margin in that business. As for Authentication business, the Authentication business typically runs at 80% plus for our gross margins. With that said, if you look at our historical ink pricing, our historical ink pricing, which has resulted in relatively lower revenue numbers than what we had desired. We have changed our ink pricing a bit. It has lowered the gross margin some. It’s taken us back to a gross margin that is very aligned to the specialty ink markets. So we think that our margin is exactly aligned to our position in the marketplace.

And so the ink margin, itself gross margins are going to be down from historical, we think the revenue will be up from historical. And then the last contributing factor, I’m giving you probably more detail than you want, but it’s a complicated question is as we’ve integrated the Trust Codes technology stack instead of using a third party for our technology stack, it will improve the gross margin on the codes and on the business. So some of the gross margin for Authentication will be determined by the product mix of whether it’s ink, QR codes, tracking, tracing, but historically, it’s been 80% plus.

Jeff Porter: Okay. One follow-on. We’ve got a stock price of about $1 of market cap of $10 million, which I think is the same or less than you purchased PeriShip for a couple of years back, trading at less than 0.4 times sales, positive EBITDA company and I think we’re kind of stuck in this small cap value trap in the market where there’s scant attention being paid to these companies. Do you have any plans to raise the profile of the company in terms of doing some promotion or Investor Relations so that we might get a healthier stock price?

Adam Stedham: Absolutely. The stock price is a primary focus of mine. At the end of the day, I work for the shareholders and so I want the stock price to go up and we are working with — we have several plans, yes, to raise the profile of the company. You bring up a good point that in general, we find ourselves in a position where a lot of companies are undervalued. I very much believe that our current market cap does not recognize the value of the company. With that said, though, I believe that the best way to get the value up is to get the performance up. And I think that Q3 was a step in the right direction. I look forward to continued gains in performance. And I think if we deliver the growth — the revenue growth next year that we anticipate as well as the gross margin improvements and then following on to the overall earnings improvements next year, that will have a significant impact, but we do need to combine that with an effective IR campaign.