Presentation:.
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Research Frontiers’ Investor Conference Call to discuss the Fourth Quarter and Full Year of 2018 Results and Recent Developments. During today’s presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] This conference is being recorded today.
A replay of this conference call will be available starting later today in the Investors section of Research Frontiers’ website at www.smartglass.com, and will be available for replay for the next 90 days. Safe Harbor announcement. Please note that some of the comments made today may contain forward-looking information.
The words expect, anticipate, plans, forecasts and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions that are part of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
These statements reflect the company’s current beliefs and a number of important factors could cause actual results for future periods to differ materially from those expressed. Significant factors that could cause results to differ from those anticipated are described in our filings with the SEC.
Research Frontiers undertakes no obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements to reflect new events or uncertainties. The company will be answering many of the questions that were emailed to it prior to this conference call, either in their presentation or as part of the Q&A session at the end.
In some cases, the company has responded directly to email questions prior to this call or will do so afterwards, in order to answer more questions of general interest to shareholders on this call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference call over to Joe Harary, President and Chief Executive Officer of Research Frontiers.
Please go ahead, sir..
“Have there been any failure of any of the windows?” No. Short answer. In many, many years of operation, there hasn’t been any failures that have been reported to Mercedes by their customers, and in other applications as well. And I think, that covers most of the emailed in questions.
So now, what I’d like to do is, ask our operator, Erica to open up the conference to any additional questions that people participating today might have that we haven’t already covered..
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Thomas McCarthy from Raymond James. Please state your question..
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Our next question comes from Claire Horton [ph]. Please state your question..
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[Operator Instructions] At this time we have no further questions..
Okay. I’d like to make some closing remarks. We have a number of growth areas for our business in automotive. Our largest market right now is automotive and the focus has been on reducing CO2 emissions and we can save 4 grams per kilometer of pollution.
And with the new standards coming in Europe in the next few years, this amounts to a savings of about €380 per car in and avoided penalties from the regulators. There’s also a pronounced movement towards electric vehicles. Our SPD-SmartGlass technology can increase the driving range of electric vehicles by 5.5%.
And electrification is a the cornerstone of Audi’s future and they recently announced that they will debut 30 electrified vehicles by 2025. Their parent Volkswagen Group, which also owns such brands as Porsche and Škoda, sold over 10 million cars in 2018, but only 40,000 of these were plug-in electric cars. That’s less than 0.4%.
Volkswagen announced today that they plan to produce 22 million electric vehicles by 2028, a 47% increase from their previously announced electric vehicle targets. Today we spoke about not one but four new car models using our SPD-SmartGlass technology.
I can assure you that this is not the only new cars we will be speaking about in the next few conference calls. 2019 and 2020 are expected to be the big beginning of highly significant years for us in the automotive industry.
Trains are doing well and could be our second biggest market over the next few years, but there’s some possible and exciting major developments and programs in the aircraft market that could keep aircraft as our second biggest market next to automotive.
And with the introduction of a wider and less expensive film and competition among SPD filmmakers; Hitachi and Gauzy, all markets will benefit. And it also opens up for the first time the very large potential architectural smart glass market. Our licensees have made substantial investments in the coming success.
They see it coming and are acting upon it. Many investors also have seen the success coming. New investors have established large positions in Research Frontiers. Existing long-term investors have also added to their positions. They also see our coming success and have acted upon it.
Almost all of the warrants issued in connection with our February offering were exercised more than four years before they were set to expire, bringing in over $1.1 million in additional capital to our company. Investors in the September offering have also begun to exercise their warrants to increase their position in Research Frontiers.
We all see the successes in multiple markets that are rapidly coming. We are working hard to expand upon these successes and there’s no shortage of opportunities for us or our technology, and we’ll look forward to sharing this success with you, together.
I also want to thank everyone for participating on today’s conference call and your support over the years. Thanks again..
This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for attending..