RNIN's prospects looking brighter: Q3 numbers

October 29, 2010 by Dave Haynes

My spidey senses were tingling this week, as I was thinking Wireless Ronin must be about due for its latest SEC filings. Sure enough, they’re out.

You would hardly look at them and get bouncy, but the Minneapolis company is doing miles better than it has been in the last couple of years. Given how much money it has burned through – about $70 million in losses now – it pretty much has to if the company wants to remain in the game.

From the filing:

Wireless Ronin reported revenue of $2.7 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2010, a 148 percent increase from $1.1 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2009.  As of September 30, 2010, the Company had received purchase orders totaling approximately $1.7 million for which it had not recognized revenue.  The year-over-year increase in revenue came primarily from the Company’s marquee customers, Chrysler, Thomson Reuters, YUM! and ARAMARK, in addition to new client orders:

• Received order totaling $1.2 million from Chrysler as it officially launches its retail branded tower salon to dealers as part of its standards program;
• Completed 37 Burger Studio installations, which more than doubled the total number of ARAMARK sites;
• Selected by Snap Fitness, the fastest-growing franchisor of compact, state-of-the-art, 24/7 fitness centers, to deploy RoninCast ® software in all 2,000 locations across the United States; and
• Received a Thomson Reuters Infopoint ® order to be deployed at 50 sites for a financial services institution with over 3,000 locations.

Also …

Darin McAreavey, Wireless Ronin’s vice president and chief financial officer, said, “Our cash burn for the third quarter of 2010 of $1.5 million was the lowest quarterly cash burn in the Company’s history and sequentially down from $2.4 million from the second quarter of 2010. Now that we have successfully executed against our cost optimization plan, we believe we can achieve quarterly non-GAAP EBITDA break-even with revenue of under $4.0 million per quarter. We continue to believe that with our recent cost savings and our current cash reserves we will be able to fund our operations well into 2011.”

The company says it has cash and assets on hand of about $10.2 million. That’s down $5 million from a year earlier, which sounds bad but not considering how quickly the company HAD been going through it.

Turning it around and hanging in there still depends on some suspect stuff like the Snap Fitness deal. In the earnings call with analysts, the RNIN guys pretty much skip right on by that one and give one-word answers about the solidity of that deal.

But give the execs credit for making real progress when a lot of industry people (me included) have not seen much of a future for the company.