RFI Q3 2024 CC, post 11:
Moderator: Our next question comes from Michael Kaye. Please state your question.
MK: Hello, Joe. I have a few kind of lightning round questions and it will be very short. Sure. One is...
JH: Okay. Let me give you the answers. Yes, no, maybe yes. How is that?
MK: Is Gauzy the only company that's making SPD film and do they plan to have a plant in the United States?
JH: You can ask the question about their future plans on their conference call next week. However, they are the only company. They bought the Showa Denko business from them.
So right now Gauzy has the supply advantage here. They don't have an exclusive license, but right now they're the only ones and they're doing a great job.
JH: When you see companies like Ferrari tell you that they want to put this in more and more cars and it's such a successful item, it speaks volumes of that. And we've been very blessed to have them as partners.
MK: And also, when will the sun visors be available that could be retrofitted to existing automobiles?
JH: We have multiple approaches to getting that into the market. Some are very near term and some are more intermediate and longer term. The intermediate to longer term ones and we're not talking about great periods of time are incorporating it into the shade band of the windshield.
So if you look on any car, there's something called the AS line and from a regulatory standpoint, you could do anything you want tint wise on the windshield above the AS line. So, sometimes you'll see a blue band across the car, that's usually the shade band and you could do what you want there.
And then there's the one where you could either have the fold down visor, traditional visor, but have the SPD functionality or you can have other iterations where it's an aftermarket or semi aftermarket item.
MK: But was the goal set in terms of when they'd be available to the public?
JH: Goals are always set and expectations are always set within the companies that are producing this. They're not things I could share.
MK: Yes. It's been a long time. Also, did you is Mercedes still involved in any way with the SPD?
JH: We have an involvement and so does Gauzy with Mercedes. And I think that a lot of the things that are on their wish list are things that we're going to be able to deliver. And when they see all of their other premium cars putting SPD on it, it just makes them realize that they had the 1st dance at the prom with the prettiest girl and maybe they should keep dancing.
MK: Do you anticipate even though it's laying behind that eventually the architectural market will be the largest for SPD even surpassing autos and aircraft?
JH: I think so. And I think the drivers of that is the constant reduction in the price of the film, the retrofit application and what that really does. I mean, I'll just give you one example of how it can grow very, very fast.
The GSA, the Government Services Administration, is the buyer of materials for the government. Our licensee that has the patents on the retrofit application is on the GSA schedule of approved vendors and they currently supply them with different types of advanced glass for the GSA to pick from and it comes on a menu.
So just like you go to a restaurant, you could order a retrofit window with X, Y or Z type of glass and that Z type of glass would be SPD. So we're kind of already very much with our foot,it's not our toe, in the door, it's probably our entire foot and maybe our torso and 3 friends helping to pry open the door.
So and that's the biggest customer in the world. So that's one area where if you wanted to see seller growth that could happen and just we were discussing some of the projections that could be astronomical for us and our licensees even in year 1 of that.
So something that I expect to be bigger. And then you have the more traditional ways of installing the glass and more traditional new construction and things like that. And that also is big because basically almost 70% of the world's glass is going to the architectural market.
MK: And the final question, even though you once said that the sweet spot in terms of cost and attractiveness to the car manufacturers had been reached, I assume the company is still trying to reduce the cost of SBD, so it will even have a...
JH: all the time. Yes, all the time. So there's 2 things you want to do. You want to decrease the cost of : materials that are going to the customer and you want to decrease the cost of ownership by constantly making it better, more versatile, more durable, etcetera.
So we're constantly doing that and just simple basic economies of scale because remember we're roll to roll web pressed process of production. We're not a sputter coated vacuum deposition process that doesn't really have economies of scale as View is painfully aware of. So our yields are high. The efficiencies of production are high.
The logistics are great because you could ship film anywhere you want in the world and then have it laminated relatively locally. So you don't have to ship fragile heavy expensive glass around the world. You can throw a couple rolls of film on air freight and get it there the next day without any real meaningful shipment costs.
So these are the things that really I think are the hallmark. And then I talked about another one today, which is the reduction in the cost of delivery through things like the retrofit application where you don't have to have scaffolding put up, you don't have to even have maybe electricians come to the site. So a lot of benefits there.
MK: Thank you very much. I appreciate your responses to those questions.
Cont'd |
