Liquidmetal Technologies Inc (LQMT)

[rige]

Bruce;
I’m pleased to update our operational progress, we remain focused on accelerating adoption of our technology and scaling the business. To accelerate adoption we continue to work closely with strategic customers to prototype parts in automotive, medical and consumer markets. These parts demonstrate and refine our full production capabilities including molding, finishing and quality management. In addition new products are underway to pilot the use of lower cost alloys, lower cost molds and China based production. These new capabilities provide broader and more competitive solutions to meet challenging customer requirements.

To scale the business we are readying our new building a 41,000 square foot facility in nearby by Lake Forest California for Volume Production, we expect it to be operational in early third quarter. Our Lake Forest facility will support volume production of 3 distinct technologies,

First our flagship Cold crucible injection molding systems are in active use, these systems provide exceptional control over oxygen and other impurities that affect the performance of amorphous metal parts, parts are produced in high volumes with remarkable dimensional precision within microns, with a high strength and corrosive resistance that is unique to Bulk Metal Glass, we have extensively characterised the properties of our primary alloy LM105 which is produced to meet strict material chemistry specifications, our simplified production process and rigorous quality control make our cold crucible system attractive for the most demanding customers including medical device manufactures. During our last quarter we completed additional biocompatibility studies that demonstrate the promise of Liquidmetal technology for implantable’s including designs that exploit the exceptional wear resistance of our materials.

Second we are about to receive our First Two hot crucible die-cast machines leveraging technology developed by EON, these systems produce high quality Liquidmetal parts using low cost alloys and the machines can make parts that are upto 3 times larger than our cold crucible systems. They’re finding immediate interest in the many new applications that are enabled by this technology and have customer prototypes in China on identical machines. Today we offer customers China based volume die-cast production and we expect to offer U.S. based production within the 3rd quarter of this year. Our injection molding and die-cast systems are complementary addressing distinct market opportunities.

Finally we plan to add metal injection molding or MIM production to our manufacturing capabilities, MIM is a mature technology that is similar in some ways to liquidmetal. Metal parts are injection molded in a multi step process that is more difficult to control than Liquidmetal but with significantly lower material cost, in general a good MIM part is not a candidate for Liquidmetal and vice-versa. Customers seeking precision metal parts will be well served by our unique ability to guide them through the cost performance trade off addressed by each of our 3 production technologies. Members of our staff have deep MIM experience and expertise and have already found customer interest, we expect our Initial MIM cell to be operational by the 3rd and 4th quarter and will begin quoting China based MIM production shortly.

These efforts allow us to present customers with industry leading capabilities to address applications from low cost to very high performance in China, United States and Europe.

With that i’ll hand the call over to tony to provide the financial update.