Vancouver's Enwave Corp. (TSX-V:ENV), which does business in 26 countries, today announced an agreement with a Welsh company that may help the venture expand operations in the U.K.
CEO Brent Charleton, however, downplayed the transaction as one that will have little immediate impact on his company's bottom line. He is more excited about a deal signed in June.
That pact meant “the U.S. Army approved multimillion-dollar funding to acquire a large-scale version of our machinery to be placed at an industry partner," he said.
The June deal was a royalty-bearing commercial license agreement with Bridgford Foods Corp. to make certain military-ration products using EnWave’s Radiant Energy Vacuum dehydration technology.
"It basically means that we're going to have material amounts of, first, a cheesecake ration inclusion going into their programming in 2024," said Charleton, who was a BIV Forty Under 40 in 2019.
"There are a handful of other applications: egg-based, that are under development, and which could be material for us in terms of new machines being acquired in the next one-to-three years."
Enwave's sales have been on the rise. Its most recent quarterly earnings report showed $4.635 million in revenue in the first three months of this year. That is up more than 200 per cent from the $1.498 million generated in the same three months in 2022.
The company's quarterly loss, however, also increased: to nearly $2.7 million from $2.386 million in the same quarter one year earlier.
Charleton chalked up the increased sales to more deals being made, more machines sold and more royalties generated through the sale of products made using Enwave's drying technologies.
Enwave's share price was up 5.8 per cent today, to $0.28, on what was a flat day for the Canadian market overall.
Its shares, which are thinly traded, have been a poor performer, and are down more than 58 per cent in the past year.
Charleton said he has heard that at least one New York hedge fund has been liquidating its position in his company's shares. Other investors may be unhappy that Enwave wound down its cheese snacks business and that it sold those assets, he added.
Enwave was excited about its dried cheese-snack business when its Moon Cheese product line was relatively new, and had a trial run at Starbucks Corp. (Nasdaq:SBUX) stores in 2015. The coffee giant stocked Enwave's Moon Cheese snacks in 3,400 of its U.S. stores.
A pun might be that the cheese-snack business dried up, and the company deemed it not to be worth continuing.
