Jack Vander Aarde: Got you. That makes sense. And then just maybe one more question for me. I think you mentioned you hired 3 sales associates in the Authentication segment. Can you just provide an update on your overall head count plans and sales and marketing head count strategy and goals in 2024 and kind of just where we are in your plan?
Adam Stedham: So we’ve hired 3 sales associates, 2 of them are in the U.S., 1 is in New Zealand for the [indiscernible] area. And — so we continue to — as we’re seeing market conditions improve in the — across the APAC region, we wanted to add capacity to take advantage of those more favorable conditions. The main marketplace and the largest marketplace in the world for what we do is the U.S. So that’s why we added 2 resources in the U.S. I could see us before the end of the year continuing to add to that. We believe that — we believe that the business operates in a way that it’s going to reach a tipping point. And this isn’t a business that is just slow strategic year-over-year growth. This is a business that is going to reach a tipping point and have quite the inflection. And so we want to make sure that we have the sales capacity available that’s trained and ready to address the market as it becomes more and more receptive to what we do.
Jack Vander Aarde: Understood. Well, again, congrats on the strong finish and look forward to Q1 Thanks.
Adam Stedham: All right. Thank you.
Operator: The next question comes from Fred Breaker, Private Investor.
Unidentified Analyst: I’d like to add my congratulations on your huge improvement over the past. Can you help me understand the significance of your recent press release on Manuka and Amazon and how this will impact the future?
Adam Stedham: Sure, absolutely. So first off, I would say — and thanks for the question, Fred. So first off, I’d say we’re excited. We’re pleased to support our customers as well as Amazon’s efforts to combat counterfeit. So currently, Fred, there are over 33,000 brands that participate in the Amazon transparency, and that’s been growing at a rate of about 50% a year over the last 3 years. If you look at our platform, it’s ideally targeted at customers who want to protect their brands in an online and off-line environment and our sweet spot are brands that sell more than 5 million units per year in total. Now that would include their sales in the Amazon marketplace as well as other distribution channels. So if you look at all of that, we estimate that each new brand that adopts our platform for traceability and Amazon transparency, participation, would generate an average of about $50,000 a year annual recurring revenue for VerifyMe. So as you start to apply the math and you start to look at the impact it would have is if we’re successful, and we believe we will be successful at adding these brands, it could have a very significant impact on our run rate ARR going forward.
So I look forward to providing more updates on our sales efforts, but hopefully, that can give you a feel for why we think it’s significant.
Unidentified Analyst: Do you develop these brands as far as acquiring their business? Or did the salesman do that? Or does it come from Amazon? Or how do you acquire these.
Adam Stedham: So we — our salespeople that we’ve hired will be — are selling directly. We were just at a trade show this last week doing that. In addition, we work with Amazon and there’s a certain segment of the marketplace that Amazon and VerifyMe are discussing targeting that it’s very specific that, that marketplace would be ideally suited for what we do. So it will be a combination of everything you said.
Operator: Our next question comes from Jeff Porter with Porter Capital Management.
Jeff Porter: Just got 1 question Yes, sort of thinking out loud here as we’re trying to develop the authentication business, and you mentioned you hired 3 salespeople. I’m just wondering, are there potentially strategic partners out there that have pretty big sales and marketing reach that touch our prospective customers that we might be able to do some kind of joint venture with or get them to sort of white label our product and really turbocharge our growth in that area. Does that make sense from a strategic point of view?
Adam Stedham: It does make sense, and it also accurately describes part of our go-to-market strategy. So if you look at it, when we talk about integrating our platform into industry-leading brands. What we’re saying is there’s a movement. There’s a U.S. movement, a global movement towards smart packaging. So we are we are working with one of the largest canning companies in the world. And as they’re looking to integrate our tech stack into their product that they sell to their customers to where they can have smart cans that allow them to provide consumers the information they want in this ever-growing digital world. We’re working with the largest packaging company in the world about integrating there. We’ve already talked about Amazon Marketplace.
We’re working with the leading producer of equipment for leafy greens and infant nutrition packaging. So exactly what you’re saying is exactly what we’re doing. We’re working with these companies. Think about think about the model that we want to have our technology inside, VerifyMe inside. So as they go to market with smart packaging, our tech will be inside of empowering the back end of what they’re trying to do. So that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.
