$POETF $POET CC Transcript 1: Suresh's Remarks 2:40

$POETF $POET CC Transcript 1: Suresh's Remarks

2:40 Suresh: “Thank you Brett. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of you participating on today’s conference call. We appreciate you joining us on short notice and for your continued support. The primary purpose of today’s call is to discuss the two announcements made by the company over the past week and the positive implications they’re anticipated to have on POET’s business and strategy going forward. Beginning with the most recent news, on November 8th we announced the successful closing of the sale of the company’s subsidiary in Singapore. As many of you are aware, at a special meeting held on October 24th, POET shareholders voted in overwhelming support of the proposed transaction, with over 99% of submitted votes approving the sale of DenseLight. The now completed sale with net consideration of twenty-six million US dollars in cash, is to be paid out in three tranches. As indicated on Friday’s press release, the company received payment of the first tranche and the amount was US eight million at closing. And we simultaneously initiated the transfer of thirty percent of DenseLight’s shares to the buyer. The remaining seventy percent of Denselight’s shares will remain in escrow and will be transferred in conjunction with POET receiving each of the two remaining payments, of thirteen million and five million respectively, which are expected to be made on or before December 31st 2019 and May 31st, 2020. In addition to injecting capital to support our continued development activity, I want to emphasise two other benefits from the now completed sale. First, as of the closing, POET is now no longer responsible for the expenses of DenseLight, which reduces the company’s operating expenses and the previous overhead costs associated with maintaining a large fab. Then, also concurrent with the closing, the company repaid in full the bridge-loan with Espresso Capital and other parties, which allowed us to dissolve previously associated security interests in the assets of POET Technologies, as these were serving as collateral for the loans. As such the company’s assets today are not subject to any material leans. The first of these points is particularly important to POET’s ongoing development activities. Unburdened by the day-to-day operations of an under-loaded fab, POET is able to singularly be focused on the optical interposer design and development which, during the course of this year at certain times, took second priority as we were contractually obligated to maintain the fab asset in good working order prior to the sale.



5:40 As we commercialize the optical interposer into a true technology platform our ability to focus additional resources will be critical to extending the platform to address new applications. Before continuing I want to take a moment to acknowledge the tremendous effort put forth by the team to successfully close the sale of DenseLight. Without this dedication, perseverance, and tenacity we simply would not be in the same favourable position that we find ourselves in today. Our vision for the company continues to be for POET to be a Global leader chip-scale integrated photonic solutions. POET has and continues to be in the business of disruptive technology creation and unlocking its value and potential. Our means to achieving this vision is through the optical interposer, which is a true platform technology providing a physical means to combine electronics with all the key devices that are needed for photonics: lasers, modulators, waveguides, and importantly, for the first time, multiplexers and de-multiplexers, in the same wafer-scale form factor. Individual components can be mixed and matched into various configurations to meet the requirement of different applications. The optical interposer is of course enabled by our unique integration of low-loss optical waveguides and passive devices that are compatible with semiconductor fab processes and they enable this chip-scale packaging to be completed. This enablement of a seamless integration of varied devices, along with the ability to fabricate and test at wafer-scale, is what makes the optical interposer platform so disruptive with semiconductor scalability providing a highly disruptive cost advantage. No other company yet is at a comparable level of wafer-scale integration in photonics, especially when taken into account the integration of all the required passive components.



7:42 I’ve outlined during our presentation at the Annual General Meeting in late September, we believe the optimal path to commercializing our interposer technology is to intersect the emergence of the 400G transceiver market. This path is also being reinforced by the strong pull from our tier one strategic networking customer for 400G solutions. Therefor our focus today continues to be on the completion of the development of the platform building-blocks for our customer-specific 400G implementation by the end of the year. This would be followed by co-development of prototypical 400G optical engines. We set ourselves some aggressive goals at the start of the year with the change in focus to 400G. While we experienced some delays in development, those challenges have been overcome and our progress has been steady and we’ve maintained positive momentum. More specifically, we had initially divided our funded development program into eight distinct platform building block deliverables. We have successfully delivered seven of these deliverables and are focused on completing the final validation deliverable this year. This has allowed us to systematically retire major risk elements from the technology and this is crucial to any new technology implementation, particularly more so an industry leading one.



9:24 I’m further happy to announce that since the AGM, we have now successfully demonstrated all passive waveguide designs needed for the interposer engine. In addition to the de-multiplexer, we now have beta designs for the multiplexers, splitters, couplers, spot-size converters, and other such elements needed for a complete engine. Notably we have also demonstrated low-loss coupling from our custom designed lasers to the interposer waveguide for the first time, which is fundamental to the functionality of the interposer. In short, we’re making measured but tremendous progress. This is all the more commendable as we, in parallel, have set up a wholly owned new entity in Singapore, moved essential assets and support resources to a new facility, and of course worked through the process of closing the DenseLight transaction. As we also discussed at the AGM in December, no matter how smart our strategy or our technical approach, success or failure usually comes down to one thing: the team. And with that I want to transition to the other significant announcement we made this past week, the appointment of Vivek Rajgarhia as president and general manager of POET Technologies…


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