Ocean Power Technologies, Inc's CEO Discusses Q2 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

I'll now turn the call over to Chuck Dunleavy, OPT's CEO.

Charles Frederick Dunleavy

Thank you, Brian, and thanks to everyone for being with us today.

First, turning to Slide 3. Let me briefly review our major accomplishments of recent months. It's been a very active period. We deployed our unique autonomous PowerBuoy for the Navy's Littoral Expeditionary Autonomous PowerBuoy or LEAP program off the coast of New Jersey in August. Having performed very well, including surviving Hurricane Irene, the LEAP PowerBuoy represents an exciting stage in the development and delivery of our autonomous PowerBuoys. The ocean trials of our PB150 PowerBuoy in Scotland came to a successful conclusion in October as planned. As previously discussed on our conference calls, we are very pleased with the performance of the PB150 and are now speaking with various potential customers and government entities, who may wish to utilize the PowerBuoy for commercial applications in the future.

Most recently, we announced an important collaboration with Lockheed Martin, plus significant progress in Spain as I'll review further momentarily. OPT will shortly retrieve its PB40 PowerBuoy device, which has been deployed at the test site of the U.S. Marine Corps Base at Oahu, Hawaii, following the successful completion of this demonstration project. During its 2-year period of deployment, the buoy became the first-ever wave energy device to be connected to the U.S. grid, survived tsunami wave conditions and achieved over 5.5 million cycles in operation.

In addition, the system features our new direct drive power take-off system, which is a major technology upgrade from our previous hydraulic power take-off. The U.S. Navy remains a valued OPT partner, and we are in discussions regarding the next stage of prospective commercial-scale wave power stations in Hawaii.

We ended the quarter with a backlog of nearly $9 million as compared to $7 million at July 31, 2011, and also with cash-on-hand of approximately $40 million. We are very optimistic about the future of Ocean Power Technologies and what 2012 will bring. But now let me go into a little more detail on our major initiatives.

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