What is missing from this picture?

This snapshot from yesterdays' Cantor Fitzgerald Global Healthcare Conference is supposed to show how great Zebra Med is:

Notice anything missing from the busy slide?

Answer:  Revenues, even though Zebra Med boasts its own CPT code.  

Note also that the slide below is a complete lie.  Why?  Because Zebra software can't tell whether a Nanox.Arc image is "normal" or not.  Nanox.Arc is supposed to generate low-quality, short SID supine AP views, supposedly of chest or extremities, and artifact-filled tomosynthesis slices thereof with miniscule field of view.   Zebra has no such views/data on which to train its algorithms and cannot obtain them for any money anytime soon.  As of today, there is no evidence that any functioning Nanox.Arc device exists, so it will take years, thousand of working Nanox.Arc devices, and millions of dollars to generate the training data (millions of views) necessary to train Zebra's AI to perform even slightly better than a random coin toss. 

That is something that both the current and future Nanox CEOs pretend to ignore.

Arabian adventure: the case of the missing press release

On August 24, Benzinga reported:

Nano X Imaging Shares Spike Higher; Hearing Traders Circulate Co Has Signed 4-Year Distribution Agreement With Dubai-Based DHI

Signing a material agreement by Nanox is supposed to be followed by a 6-K or at least a press release.  But those never came. Let's dig into it a bit further.

Apparently, Khaleej Times had reported about a "DHI 2048 launch event" in Dubai, supported by UAE's Department of Tourism & Commerce Marketing and attended by ambassadors from the UAE and Israel, as well as officials from health ministries and various authorities.  At the event it was revealed that:

[Digital Health Innovation, or DHI, 2048,] the collaborative platform aims to install 2100 Nanox systems in public and private hospitals, train the workforce including nurses, and deploy artificial technology to create a robust healthcare ecosystem. The introduction of this technology is intended to promote the mission of providing a worldwide end-to-end medical imaging solution that enables people to have early medical detection and better health

Source: https://twitter.com/michaldivon/status/1430414620259504128/photo/2

What the press did not mention was that Nanox has effectively signed the agreement with itself.  Maybe that is why the 6-K never came out.

According to its website, DHI 2048 is an UAE "organization," formed by Nanox and Illumigin, which are both founded by the Chairman of Nanox.  The website domain was created only in July out of Israel (per ICANN lookup tool).  The website uses webflow, the same web platform used by Nanox.  The Chairman of the "organization" is Adiv Baruch.  In his position as a Chairman of Israel Export Institute, he has aggressively promoted Nanox in the past months.  For example, he told the Korean press at a signing of a Korea-Israel foreign-trade agreement in May that:

Nanox is a company with a proven innovative technology in the medical imaging market and is committed to the cooperation between Korea and Israel. It symbolizes cooperation in research and development (R&D), assembly production and sales between Korea and Israel. Such corporate activities will serve as the basis for Israel's innovation and Korea's growth.

At the DHI event he reportedly said:

Deployment of Nanox systems, trainings and state-of-the-art AI technologies is just a start, and we aim to further accelerate the growth of health care sector with the support of our regional stakeholders.

Why would he promote an obvious fraud?  Turns out, he is also a Chief Strategy Officer and a Director at the publicly-traded Cuentas (CUEN:Nasdaq), a suspect fintech out of Miami, where the new Nanox CFO, Ran Daniel, is a CFO.  Mr. Baruch also happens to be the Chairman of Powermat, the wireless-charging scam founded by the Chairman of Nanox.

Interestingly, while Nanox remained silent, Illumigyn issued a press release next day announcing that it and "Dubai-based company [not an organization anymore?] DHI 2048" will deploy 2,500 systems to improve women's health care in the Gulf Cooperation Council.  But the whole thing is just a press release - there is nothing special about Illumigyn's device, as the 510(k) summary reveals - with the major "innovation" being the use of white and green LEDs instead of white LED and a filter by the predicate, a far cry from the multispectral magic touted for years, the same multi-spectral nonsense repeated by Nanox (see, for example, F-1 filing, page 83).

Also interestingly, Zebra-Med, which is supposed to be acquired by Nanox in a toxic deal soon (toxic, because the number of shares issued is not fixed but depends on the stock price of Nanox), tried to get on the money-tree UAE band-wagon earlier by participating in the UAE-Israel Peace and Prosperity Roundtable in January.  Nanox' and Zebra's PR firm had rushed into UAE even earlier. 

This whole DHI thing is obviously a half-baked sham and makes no sense - a part of the "latest cooperation to strengthen the ties between the UAE and Israel," following the "Abraham Accords" signed in August last year and the "health cooperation" signed in April earlier this year.  It does not even fit in the Nanox narrative, where the "cheap" or "free" Arc was supposed to go to countries that cannot afford real medical imaging.  But at least pretending that DHI is a UAE company or "organization" makes sense, as apparently there could still be rules that prevent UAE entities from sending money to Israel, thereby creating obstacles for Israeli "tech" companies in grabbing UEA's "excess cash."  One has to wonder whether the next escalation in Arab-Israeli conflict will be precipitated by Nanox or something like Nanox.

As of today, the healthcare solutions webpage of the company of the Member of the Royal Family who signed the "cooperation agreement" with DHI "to streamline the adoption of best-in-class digital health products and innovative solutions from Israel" is still silent about medical imaging or Nanox or the "[over] Two billion dollars to be deployed in the next four years on healthcare equipment, training and AI based technologies.".  So is the partners webpage.  But Refinitiv's Zawya carried the UAE's press release (here in Arabic), so it must be true. 

Oh, and if someone knows what 2048 is supposed to stand for, please let me know.  Can it be 50 years after 1998, the beginning of the H.H. Sheikh's "Federal Group?"  Can't be, since the "message" in the brochure says 1988...  Jeremy points out in a comment below that 2048 is 100 years past 1948, Israel's birth year.

Update November 16, 2021:  An article in the Israeli press says Illumigin is looking for a listing (IPO?) in the United States at a value of more than $500 million.  The prospectus will be a great reading, as Illumigin has no prospects of ever becoming profitable - its product - a colposcope - is just a camera.

Fooling greedy foreigners is so easy

Nanox Chairman (and soon to be former CEO) lies to the Korean press again, inflating chip production estimates by 30x in the temporary "plant" and by 9x in the future "fab:"

The Cheongju plant has a partial production capacity of 300 wafers per month, and can produce 50-150 chips per wafer depending on the product line. Chairman Poliakine added, “The clean room size for semiconductor production will also be expanded to more than three times that of the Cheongju plant.” [google translated]

His statement contradicts the slides from the investment presentation at Jefferies on June 4.

Specifically, the temporary "clean room," which is not clean at all and located in an equipment parts manufacturing plant, was supposed to have a maximum capacity of 1,000 chips per month, not the 15,000-45,000 (300 x 50-150) he told the Korean press.  Similarly, he lied about the new fab, when he said production will be more than 3x, implying over 45,000-135,000 chips a month, while the investor presentation said 10,000 chips a month at full capacity.

Weren't Koreans supposed to be good at math?

By the way, those chips are neither semiconductor (they are supposed to use small molybdenum pins, not semiconductors) nor MEMS (there is nothing mechanical about them), and they are not functional.  Here is a snapshot again from the August Business Update proving that the temporary "clean room" is not clean at all, showing the chips all covered with dust specs everywhere.

The article also repeats the lies perpetuated by Nanox investor, Yozma group:

Nanox is a company that manufactures X-rays that can reduce radiation exposure time by one-half by shooting images with clearer quality than existing X-rays at 30 times faster. Its size and weight are one-fifth of that of existing devices, so it can be used in small hospitals and medical blind spots. 

All of the statements in the paragraph above are intentionally misleading.  As the 510(k) summary revealed, Nanox' tube is nothing more than an used and abused (and severely underperforming) dental x-ray tube that is underpowered and slow.  Nanox proposed devices are obviously larger than the portable x-ray devices that it underperforms.

A handheld x-ray device by Vatech Korea

Update:  A slightly different version of the same article also quotes the upcoming CEO, who was kicked out of his Chairman position at Hadassah Medical Center last year (he was also on the Board of Nanox when Nanox signed a suspect agreement with Hadassah):

New CEO Erez Meltzer said, “Once the acquisition of Zebra Medical is completed, we can create next-generation medical devices with imaging AI solutions. Zebra's AI and cloud can form a new AI-assisted diagnostic space," he said. "New cooperation opportunities are always welcome."

The new CEO will not be much different from the old CEO, based on the statement above.  Zebra's AI simply does not work with the proposed Nanox.Arc - the reason is simple - Zebra's AI has been trained on regular x-ray images, while there is nothing regular about the proposed Nanox.Arc.  For example, the chest images that Zebra has utilized must be standard standing/sitting erect PA at a sufficient distance from the x-ray source, while all the proposed Nanox.Arc can produce is an underexposed, close-range supine AP (and it is a good bet Zebra has no chest tomosynthesis training images whatsoever).  Maybe Zebra's team can deliver a miracle, eventually, but only after thousands of the proposed Arcs have been deployed and fully utilized and many, many years.