Burn Rate
posted on
Nov 16, 2018 12:19PM
This might help some people get a better understanding of "Cash" burn rate and "Other" expenses that do not burn cash.
Q1 Loss was $3.2MM, but you need to back-out non cash compensation ($792K) and amortization ($596K) to get the actual cash burn rate = $1.8MM. Note there was no meaningful capital equipment spend in Q1.
Q2 Loss was $4.6MM, but again back-out non cash compensation ($1MM) and amortization ($650K) = actual cash burn rate of $2.95MM. Note also the equipment capital spend in Q2 was just over $1MM. So without capital spend requirements, the burn rate would have been approx $1.8MM (essentially flat to prior qtr).
So actual average cash burn rate for Q1+Q2 (excluding capital) is approx $1.8MM per Qtr.
Since Q2, there has been more incremental hiring, but do the math and the quarterly burn rate should come in around $1.9MM (excluding capital and patent costs). Let's use $2MM as a conservative quarterly burn rate baseline.
Q2 ended with $10MM cash = 5 qtr's of cash at current burn rate = cash until end Q3 2019 (not including capital expense).
Q3 financials and MD+A will be interesting to read.
$3MM recently announced in income and paid for development = cash until end of Q4 2019.
Did POET get the next tranche of EDB funding in Q3? Looks positive because in the last financials this was mentioned and was reduced by $150K but was not yet recieved.
How much capital spend was required?
Between now and Q1/Q2 2019 is it reasonable to expect more existing customer or possibly new customer orders similar to the $3MM recently announced. I think so.
With potential EDB funds received in Q3 or by Year End 2018, and another similar $3MM announcement in Q1/Q2 2019, POET would have enough cash well into early 2020.
And this does not account for any increase in actual sales or warrant money income.
I am not concerned about cash at this time. Based on the recent news, there should be much more meaningful news to follow in the coming months that will hopefully raise the SP sufficiently for warrant money to flow back to POET.
Exciting times ...
POET 2018