Management Commentary
“In Q3, we achieved another record quarter at $18.8 million in revenue,” stated OSS president and CEO, David Raun. “Our strong performance in the quarter was primarily attributable to the continued strength in our European unit, Bressner, increased business in the media and entertainment space, as well as solid growth on the commercial side of our AI Transportable business.
“We ended the first nine months of 2022 with 16 new program wins, and 11 of them were for AI Transportables. Shipments to customers in the autonomous trucking space was the key contributor to our AI Transportable growth in Q3. Currently, two of our truck customers now rank in our top 10 customer list.
“Our pipeline of sales activity continues to grow in the autonomous trucking space, where we had two new wins with Embark Trucks announced last month. These two wins include one for our Centauri rugged PCIe storage expansion system, which has now been adopted by two autonomous trucking customers, and another for our latest autonomous truck SDS rugged server.
“During the past quarter, we invested considerable time focused on the compute and storage needs of the autonomous trucks in production. Although there is some commonality between the various market leaders on the road map to production, they continue to search for the ideal solution. To this end, we have been developing and sharing a proposed production road map that we believe provides a superior, cost-effective path. We believe we are uniquely well-positioned to deliver solutions that can leverage our innovative PCIe, NVLink®, ruggedization and cooling technologies for use in this space.
“Two of the wins during the quarter included a mobile 5G AI application which deploys an OSS SDS rugged server in trucks and vans for a cellular network market leader. These vehicles can gather and characterize data in real-time in the field, then transport the data back to the hub where it is uploaded to the cloud for assimilation with larger datasets. This major program is expected to roll out in over 100 cities nationwide.
“Our pipeline of potential major programs or pending wins has now expanded to 30, with 18 of these involving AI Transportable applications. We believe the combination of building our sales pipeline, strong activity with the higher margin military market and the other opportunities we are currently pursuing, should backfill potential revenue downside in our lower margin media and entertainment business that may be impacted by a technology transition to a lower cost, commodity type equipment and cloud-based solution as early as the second half of 2023.
“We are building relationships with several new prime contractors as well as working in parallel directly with the Department of Defense. We expect these relationships to generate more revenue and with less seasonality, as well as to significantly improve our margins and profitability over time.
“Key to our military business strategy was the introduction of our flagship platform for the military that we call Rigel. As acknowledged by multiple key customers and partners, Rigel is currently the fastest, most compact supercomputer available. The growing interest in Rigel and related design activity confirms that this powerful system can transform the use of real-time AI for the most demanding vehicle, maritime and aerospace edge applications throughout the military.
“As an example, we are working directly with the Army to fund an OSS solution targeted for land vehicles requiring high performance compute in compact form factors. We are also engaged with multiple primes and the DOD directly on a major compute upgrade that would add significant capabilities for a large airframe drone. With another prime, we are being proposed in multiple aircraft programs, including one similar to the multiple million-dollar contract we have enjoyed with the Navy for many years. We also recently learned that our inflight supercomputer was part of a successful key test fight where all the objectives were accomplished. We are looking forward to providing further updates as these opportunities and programs advance.
“We are looking forward to attending the Supercomputing 22 conference being held in Dallas next week. It is the world’s largest international conference for high-performance computing. We will be showcasing our AI Transportable products, including a demonstration of a disruptive additional capability of Rigel. We expect more information to follow in a press release next week.
“Looking ahead, we believe that we are well on track for a record fourth quarter and year. We also expect improved margins with the resumption of our military product shipments that were delayed in Q3 due to a version change. Given our expectation of $19.2 million in revenue for the current fourth quarter, we expect to close the year up more than 18% to a record $73.4 million in revenue.”
Outlook
For the fourth quarter of 2022, OSS expects revenue of approximately $19.2 million, which represent 5% sequential growth and 8% growth over the same year-ago quarter, and would result in record annual revenue of approximately $73.4 million.
Q3 2022 Financial Summary
Revenue in the third quarter of 2022, was up 18% to $18.8 million, compared to $16.0 million in the same year-ago quarter.
Core OSS revenue increased 15% to $10.7 million, representing 57% of total quarterly revenue. This was largely due to the growth of AI Transportables, including autonomous trucks, as well as the company’s media and entertainment business. Revenue from Bressner, OSS’ European subsidiary, increased 21% to $8.1 million, which represented 43% of total quarterly revenue. Bressner’s increase was attributable to increased market share, made possible by strong sales efforts, customer expansion and strategic inventory buys.
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