We've had a flurry of SEC filings in the last few months (10-KSB, 10-QSB, 8-K's, Amendments to 10-QSB, and S-8s). All of them necessary and important to understand the financial condition of Braintech, but preparing and publishing these disclosures and statements are time consuming and expensive. To be sure, we are exploring methods of realizing the same transparency to our owners and shareholders (such transparency, I believe, is key to effective communications) without incurring the expensive legal and accounting fees involved not to mention the executive time. I am just not sure it makes sense for any micro-cap company to be public these days. We have incurred approximately $85,000 in the last few months in the preparation, legal and accounting costs of these SEC filings. We could have and should have applied these scarce resources to building the business. Anyway, today I want to talk about the future of the company.
For the last several months, we have been laser-focused on developing relationships with new companies in the consumer and military and defense sectors of the economy. The bottom line is to secure new contracts. This is uncharted territory for us, an initiative to expand our borders beyond the growing industrial base we have established through our strategic customer ABB. We've gone looking for companies that have the same qualities and great products in distribution that can take our technology and, by working with our team, can produce some ground-breaking work that will benefit us both. I'm pleased to report there are companies receptive to what we have to say and offer and we're making progress, albeit not at the pace we always expect. We have initiated our "90-day executive action plan" for this purpose. We are putting pressure on our sales and business developers to produce. There are no guarantees, but we're cautiously optimistic of forging into these new markets in 2008. When we do, this will be a completely different company.
We have a great relationship with ABB and are in the third and final year of our Global Exclusive Channel Partnership Agreement for industrial automotive and general industries products. We want to strengthen what has essentially become a TrueView product partnership. We're proud to have established such a brand and sustain a productive association with a global giant and hope we can continue this beyond 2008.
As I wrote about in the letter released with our 10-KSB filing for 2007, we achieved a break-even point in our operations and had our best year in terms of revenue. Those are good benchmarks for us and though we're happy, we need to increase and diversify those revenues while maintaining our margins and thereby create the operating leverage we mention so often. But we also intend to grow the company and we will need more investment to reach our objectives.
As part of the process of our year-end accounting review, the books were reviewed and, unfortunately, we found accounting errors relating primarily to non-cash stock and stock-option compensation in the first three quarters of 2007. It happened because we didn't apply new accounting rules that have come into effect in the last several years. It did not impact the overall financial health or cash flow of the company, but we did have to restate our financial statements for the opening three quarters of 2007. I can assure you this will not happen on my watch as we instituted a new procedure by forming an advisory board with one advisory member with substantial accounting experience on the advisory as well as on the Company's new Audit Committee.
We've put 2007 in the rear-view mirror. Our vision is on a bright horizon and we've moving steadily to reach it.
All the best,
Rick Weidinger
CEO & Chairman Braintech, Inc.
P.S. By-the-way, things are looking up. The A1 TEAM USA car, powered by (but not paid for by) Braintech, won last week in Shanghai, China. Look for us to be on the podium in London on May 4, 2008.
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Rick Weidinger Addresses the Investment Community
