Saw the AGM last night - didn't have time to submit any comments at that time or to dig into a couple of their comments, but you folks seem to have covered most of it!
I few times I paused the video and jotted down some notes from the slides; unfortunately, the notes are sitting in my kitchen while I am sitting at a bench at work.
One thing that struck me from one of their slides is that all three training/pre-clinical sites are selected and as of June 15, all were still in the contracting phase. Also, one of the three is in Europe. Britain would help with language barriers, but it only said Europe on the slide. Dr. Advincula could be a great asset if he had an expanded role with Titan at Columbia as the second U.S. site, and his focus appears to be geared a little more to the GYN side than the surgeon in Florida who had recently had our attention with 10K prostates completed robotically. Dr. Valvo is right in Rochester, a reasonable drive from Toronto, which could make them a very convenient choice. He has over 7000 robotic procedures under his belt.
Apparently they have since signed the contract with FH/Nicholson and made that announcement. Honestly, I am hoping they can delay the announcements of the other two. As much as we would all love to hear more good news, we are currently locked into the $.11 price range by the offering, so more good news can't move the needle that far yet. Once the offering is fully wrapped, there is a better chance that good news will affect the PPS in a positive manner.
I did find it curious how Mr. McNally stood next to Mr. Randall as if he expected Randall to veer off course and might need to be kept on track, or might need to cut him off if he went down the wrong path! Kind of kidding there, but it did seem unusual. He certainly didn't feel the need to do that with the others. Maybe this is a reflection of his confidence in his team, which seems to mirror our thoughts on each of them as well. Reading the bios on Dr. Genova and Mr. Jensen, it looked as though both were very strong at their selected positions, but hearing them talk, even with prepared notes, still showed their own confidence in what they bring to the table, and that should inspire further confidence in shareholders as well. These two are the guys that will get the i's dotted and t's crossed. They presented a clear path (at a high level) to regulatory approval. I did find it interesting that the last data dump to the FDA would occur a couple months after initial 510K submittal, but apparently that is fairly normal. Maybe it gives them time to react to early feedback on the submission and tie up any loose ends while keeping the overall schedule as tight as possible.
The design changes discussed seem to be well underway; I did not get the feeling they would have any impact on the timeline, especially given the repeated mention of this being Gen 1 of SPORT. The foot pedal tray position should not be an overly complicated change (might need to shift some internals in order to move the pedals further from the surgeon). The camera revisions are likely to be more complex but everything will still move forward with the existing hardware until the new subsystem is ready to deploy. Their big advantage here is the modular design of the system so that they can replace a camera and maybe download updated software to support it, but it will have been well tested prior to deployment and other pre-clinical activities do not need to wait for one module to be swapped out. Mr. McNally repeated referred to Design for Manufacturing, and they really appear to have taken DFM to heart and are now at a point where they can already reap the benefits of such a design strategy.
Overall thoughts... Good meeting and good presentation. Nothing substantially new or groundbreaking, but a solid affirmation that the positive things most of us believe are well aligned with reality, and I will move forward with solid confidence in my investment.
