LPTH

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to LightPath Technologies' 3rd quarter 2026 earnings conference call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be opened for questions. This conference is being recorded today, May 7, 2026. The earnings press release accompanying this conference call was issued after the market closed today. I'd like to remind you that during the course of this conference call, the company will be making a number of forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations, involve various risks and uncertainties as discussed in its periodic SEC filings. Although the company believes that the assumptions underlying these statements are reasonable, any of them can be proven to be inaccurate and there could be no assurances of the projected results would be realized.

In addition, references may be made to certain financial measures that are not in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. We refer to these non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our SEC reports in certain areas of our press releases, which include reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures and associated disclaimers. CEO Sam Rubin will begin today's call with a strategic overview of the businesses and recent developments for the company, while CFO Al Miranda will then review financial results for the quarter. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a formal question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference over to CEO Sam Rubin. Sam, the floor is yours.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon to everyone, and welcome to LightPath Technologies' fiscal third quarter 2026 financial results conference call. We report today our latest quarterly results with continued momentum of strong top-line growth, continued build up of our backlog with a strong book-to-bill ratio and improvements in our EBITDA and overall financial performance. All of this is a result of a strategic shift we put in place and have been working to execute on over the last few years. A strategy that leverages our core technologies coupled with carefully curated acquisitions that allowed us to shift to a vertically integrated provider of high-value infrared optics and camera systems. A shift built around higher revenue and higher gross margins. The third quarter carried that momentum with record revenue, broader customer adoption, a deeper system backlog, and just as importantly, stronger margins and cash flow.

The LightPath of today looks very little like the component supplier we were a few years ago. We now cover the full stack: proprietary materials, optical assemblies, and complete imaging systems. In a moment, I'll touch on that shift, then walk through the programs driving the backlog, the Amorphous acquisition, and where growth goes from here. First, BlackDiamond, our proprietary chalcogenide glasses, including those licensed from U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Those anchor the platform as a domestic supply chain secure infrared glass that is both an alternative to germanium and offers significant advantages in overall system performance. This aligns with the fiscal 2026 NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act, which requires U.S. defense programs to move off of glass and optical components sourced from China, Russia, and other covered nations no later than January 1, 2030.

Since acquisition cycles starting now, many of our assemblies, cameras, and imaging systems are already engineered to those requirements, positioning us as a natural supplier of choice and well ahead of the rest of the market that is just starting to plan their alternatives to Chinese-made materials and optics. It has been roughly 1 year since we acquired G5 Infrared, the maker of the industry's leading long-range infrared cameras for surveillance and counter-UAS. G5 is a clear example of what our model can offer. Pair a strong standalone business with one of our unique differentiators, in this case, the in-house produced germanium alternative glass, and a secured vertically integrated supply chain, and the acquired company can execute at a level competitors simply cannot match. In the last year, G5 has booked more than $100 million of new orders, helped by border patrol and counter-UAS tailwinds.

We've publicly announced we are redesigning their cameras to use our BlackDiamond glass. Even before we have completed those redesigns, we already saw an influx of orders for those redesigned cameras. In fact, we are at a point that before we started any real production of the new redesigned cameras, we already know we will need to add more capacity to serve an even stronger demand in the near future. The capacity theme is something we're seeing across the entire business, and I will expand on that some more. It is actually a good segue into other parts of the business. Before I get back into the camera products and then to other programs, I will talk about the acquisition we did that we announced last quarter of Amorphous Materials in Texas.

Amorphous is a 50-plus-year-old manufacturer with complementary technology for glass melting of chalcogenide, particularly for large diameters optics. Amorphous was founded by one of the pioneers of commercializing this kind of material. I've mentioned it during the last call, but just to reiterate the importance of the technology, I will remind everyone that in optics, the further you want to see, the larger the optics needs to be. Until now, with our existing or prior glass melting technology, we've been able to provide BlackDiamond optics up to five inches in diameter. Amorphous now unlocks the ability to do larger sizes, up to as much as 10 inches and more later on. This has opened the market to large diameter systems, which we need for G5, but also critical in other long-range imaging systems, and in particular, satellites for missile detection and tracking. Back to capacity.

Acquiring Amorphous gave us an immediate boost to glass production capacity. Between what we have been doing internally and Amorphous acquisition, we pretty much doubled our glass capacity, and it is nowhere near enough. As we will discuss again and again here, we are investing in capacity in critical areas, and glass is definitely one of those. Having now two separate locations to make glass in, one in Orlando and one in Dallas, Texas, definitely affords more flexibility and expansion, as well as good contingency planning. To that extent, we plan to move Amorphous into a larger building nearby our Visimid uncooled camera operation in the coming months.

This is important because not only is demand for glass outstripping supply right now, even after doubling the capacity, but indicators are that this growth trend will continue, and we will need to continue to add capacity in the next few years. To that extent, in Orlando, too, we have been adding more glass melting capacity, as well as capacity and capabilities in other parts of the process downstream, that is, after the glass melting. This capacity and those capabilities updates is happening across the entire organization in manufacturing locations in the U.S. and Latvia. Of course, the cameras and assemblies business. This quarter that we're reporting in, they represent 44% of the revenue. More importantly, they represent more than $75 million of our backlog.

The assemblies and cameras are actually internal customers for our vertical integration, hence driving much, if not most, of this explosive growth in demand for glass and optics. This is just the case for the products that use BlackDiamond. As of today, while all of our assemblies use BlackDiamond, only two of the G5 cameras are based on BlackDiamond glass. The remaining G5 cameras were still using germanium. The acquisition of Amorphous was the missing piece in order to complete the redesign of those G5 cameras. Amorphous' technology of melting our glass in larger size was needed in order to use BlackDiamond in G5's bigger cameras, which is really the majority of their revenue by dollars. The same applies for larger assemblies.

Our optical assemblies business, which has been growing like crazy for the last few quarters, just like the G5, was limited by the size of the glass we could make. Amorphous' large diameter melting now is unlocking a significant business growth in both those areas of the business, assemblies and complete camera systems. How does this tie into the capacity discussion? When we look at our current cameras and assemblies business, and we say it is around $75 million of new orders booked, that is all before we completed the redesign and the new products that are now utilizing the large diameter BlackDiamond.

With the risk of stating the obvious, we expect that over the next few months, we will see another step function in growth in demand for our cameras and assemblies as we redesign them or design new ones utilizing this new capability of large diameter. This will, therefore, require us to prepare more capacity, which is what we're doing now. This includes not only additional capacity in glass and downstream process, but also growing our assemblies capacity, adding shifts, and in some places, adding space to be ready for that additional growth. All of that is happening now across all of our facilities in the U.S. and Europe. Additionally, to support this growth and better position LightPath, we recently announced two senior additions to the leadership team.

Doug Schön joined us as Senior Vice President of Global Sales, and Ryan Workman joined us as Vice President of Business Development and Product Management, both effective in early April. Doug is a retired U.S. Navy captain with over 25 years in aerospace and defense, having led global sales organization at Elbit Systems of America, Honeywell, and Collins Aerospace, managing portfolios north of $1 billion. His background in international defense sales and foreign military sales programs is exactly what we need as we scale globally. Ryan brings with him over 15 years in the defense and federal law enforcement sectors and has a particularly relevant track record at Silent Sentinel, which was later acquired by Motorola Solutions, our largest customer.

Ryan is the one that grew the U.S. business of this, of this customer of G5 Infrared to what it is today. Including securing significant counter-UAS and DHS border surveillance for contracts. That direct experience in our end markets, combined with Doug's enterprise-level relationships, gives us commercial horsepower to convert our growing backlog and strong technology position into sustained scalable revenue growth. Okay, before I move on to financials, I will give a quick overview on the major programs, but also point out that on many of those, there are specific line items in the U.S. defense budget, which was released 2 weeks ago and is available to the public to research online. Starting with the NGSRI, that, as you will see in the budget, is fully financed and even accelerating some of the program.

We are very pleased with our progress so far and continue to deliver everything according to plan and even better. As I described earlier in previous few times, the only updates we can share in detail about the programs or any updates that are shared by our customer, Lockheed Martin, or their customer, the US Army, which as of now has not had any major updates, we can't really update too much. SPEIR is on schedule, and we expect some new orders with the new federal budget now being released. Border Tower, we were expecting already some significant orders to be released. It seems DHS has not released the funding yet. That is not an indication in any way of anything changing to the worse or to the better in any way, simply has not moved forward.

Some of the smaller programs, such as some that I haven't really indicated by name. Counter-UAS, this is primarily the Air Force SEWADS programs, for which we received multiple new orders. Currently, around $30 million of our backlog is counter-UAS, again, primarily Air Force SEWADS programs. A new airborne system that we previously mentioned and that uses our BlackDiamond material to replace an existing system with far better performance now. This program continues to move quickly. We completed the qualification, an extremely important step, and are now preparing for an award towards the end of the summer or early autumn. Space programs, we have a few of those in the work. Most of them are early stages in design, and unfortunately, very confidential, so very limited in what we can share.

Lastly, the Apache program, which we do not have any new developments there is some uncertainty around it as we're waiting for to see the funding allocated to it. Okay, that's specific programs. Of course, as we continue to grow, just like with our press releases, it will become fairly noisy and overly detailed if we go into details about every multimillion-dollar program. We're likely gonna focus on the large ones going forward, with some updates on others as we can. To close phase 1 of the transformation, we've moved from components to systems and from commoditized supply to strategic technology leadership. We continue to swap constrained China-linked materials for domestic, scalable, proprietary alternatives, and we are converting that edge into program wins, large contracts, and long-term relationships with top-tier defense and industrial customers.

The next phase, rapid scaling over the next 3 years, backed by our strong war chest of cash, is now beginning and is aimed at capturing meaningful market share. I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, Al Miranda, to talk about the actual numbers.

Thank you, Sam.

Go ahead, Al.

Oh, thank you, Sam. I will keep my review to a succinct highlight of the financials this quarter. As a reminder, much of the information we're discussing during this call was also included in our press release issued earlier today and will be included in the 10-Q for the period. I encourage you to visit our investor relations webpage to access these documents. Revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 increased 109% to $19.1 million, as compared to $9.2 million in the same year-ago quarter. Sales of infrared components were $6.1 million or 32% of the company consolidated revenue. Revenue from visible components was $4 million or 21% of the consolidated revenue. Revenue from assemblies and modules were $8.4 million or 44% of the consolidated revenue.

Revenue from engineering services was $0.6 million or 3% of consolidated revenue. Gross profit increased 161% to $7 million or 36% of total revenues in the third quarter of 2026, as compared to $2.7 million or 29% of total revenues in the same year-ago quarter. The increase in gross margin as a percentage of revenue is primarily driven by the increase in revenue from assemblies and modules, which generally have a higher margin. In addition, gross margins for infrared components have improved due to a more favorable mix and the resolution of certain manufacturing yield issues that negatively impacted the prior fiscal year.

Operating expenses for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 included a fair value adjustment of $3.4 million related to the G5 earn out liability, which will continue to be adjusted through the operating expenses until it is fully paid out. Excluding this amount, operating expenses increased $1.8 million or 30% to $7.8 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 as compared to $6 million in the same year-ago quarter. The increase was primarily driven by the integration of G5 Infrared and AM, increased sales and marketing spend, higher information technology spend to meet customer security requirements, and increased SG&A personnel costs associated with filling executive roles, as Sam mentioned, our salespeople, and incentive compensation accruals.

Net loss in the third quarter of fiscal 2026 totaled $4.1 million or $0.07 per basic and delivered share as compared to a net loss of $3.6 million or $0.09 per basic and delivered share in the same year-ago quarter. The year-over-year change in net loss was primarily attributed to the change in fair value of acquisition liabilities for the earn-out related to the acquisition of G5 Infrared. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of fiscal 2026 was $1.1 million positive compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.6 million for the same year-ago quarter. This represents our third consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA and was primarily attributable to the increase in gross profit driven by higher sales, partially offset by increased SG&A and new product development costs.

Although not perfect, we believe that adjusted EBITDA is a better indicator of core operating performance by excluding non-core and non-cash items. Cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, 2026 totaled $55.2 million as compared to $4.9 million as of June 30, 2025. Since the raise in December, we used $7 million for AM acquisition and $7.3 million went toward the year 1 earn-out for the G5 acquisition. I want to point out that a portion of this earn-out payment was required to be recorded in operating cash flows in accordance with GAAP. The operating cash flow looks noisier than reality because of G5 outperforming their earn-outs, which GAAP requires to be classified as operating cash activity.

If you set aside the GAAP reporting quirk related to the earn-out, then operating cash outflow year to date would have been $1.3 million. That modest outflow is attributed to working capital, specifically prepaying suppliers for long lead materials to support that growing backlog that Sam spoke of, and that's partially offset by customer prepayments. The $55 million cash balance on hand gives us plenty of runway to keep executing on our growth strategy and fund the CapEx and working capital needed to deliver to the growing backlog. Total backlog as of March 31, 2026 was approximately $110.6 million, an increase of 196% compared to $37.4 million as of June 30, 2025. I'd like to take a step back and give some perspective.

Since Q3 last year, on a year-to-date basis, we doubled our revenue from $25 million year-to-date last year to $50 million year-to-date this year. Our backlog is $110 million and continues to grow. This is a substantial amount of growth for a company our size, and I'd like to thank everyone in the organization for a great effort on delivering more and more to our customers every day. To our investors, we are well-positioned to continue to grow substantially. We have the resources and cash in place to deliver. Our internal efforts are all about execution to the plan of delivering on the backlog and the growth in the backlog. Our focus for FY 2026 and beyond supports the business opportunities that Sam described. We have a detailed go-to-market strategy that we are funding to target key high-growth areas.

Our prior year, current year, and future investments in manufacturing are and will continue to bear fruit in terms of quality and on-time delivery. As a result, in the coming quarters, I expect we'll see margin expansion. With that, I will turn the call back to Sam.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. From here, the work shifts to execution. We've built a vertically integrated platform around our own materials technology, one that sits squarely where the defense procurement is heading. The numbers make the point. Over the last 12 months, our revenue has more than doubled, and backlog indicates a continued trend. Doubling the size of a manufacturing business in 12 months is a big task and undertaking. Doing it again and continuing to grow at such rate is a monumental task. With that in mind, I would like to echo what Al just said and take a moment to acknowledge the hard work, dedication, and commitment of the entire LightPath team. You, my team, have been doing an incredible job getting us here and are continuing to do a great job preparing us for this continued growth.

Thank you for everyone involved in this. With that, I'll turn the call over to the operator to begin Q&A. Operator?

Thank you, Sam. If you'd like to ask a question, press star one on your keypad. To leave the queue at any time, you may press star two. We'll take our first question from Jaeson Schmidt with Lake Street. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Sam, just wanna start with your comments on the expectation for the step function in demand over the next few months here. Do you envision that being pretty broad-based, or is that really coming from, or concentrated in a couple of programs?

What I see is that right now, areas where I'll talk first about cameras then about assemblies. The cameras where we've been having this enormous backlog is mostly existing customers. These are customers that have integrated our cameras already a while ago into their pan tilt systems or gimbals, such, and are, you know, growing with the orders from them have been growing as those customers grow. In particular, Motorola, which, you know, we very much value the relationship and the business there. But it's really existing business that is growing linearly. As we now start switching over to the BlackDiamond and unlocking both more types of camera, but more specifically, really unlocking our availability and our capacity to I'm not even sure what the next limit will be, but it's not gonna be limited by material as everyone else's.

I expect many other customers to switch over to our cameras. The step functions there will be from taking a larger market share of the same type of product we've been doing until now, but simply that we are positioned in a way that, you know, we're the only ones that really can produce as many cameras as anyone wants. In the assemblies, it's a bit different. In the assemblies, we've been focused on a subset of the whole assemblies industry, if you would, or assembly available market, because we were limited by the size of glass we could do. We could not make long range assemblies or zoom lenses, if you would, that get bought by some of our competitors and many of our customers.

With this now capability and with some of the new materials we've been already commercializing over the last few months and haven't talked really about too much, we can now design and are designing a lot more new assemblies that are gonna take market share of areas we haven't played in. 2 step functions, both enabled by the same thing, but for different reasons.

Okay, that makes sense. I know it's still early, like you noted, thinking about sort of in-space communication or the space programs in general, how many engagements or conversations are you having these days with customers?

We have two that we are fully engaged in, meaning they're already fully designing with our products and everything. Sorry, three. Three of those. Three customers that are designing. I'm not sure what programs we have that are much earlier than that. I usually know of them when it comes to the point that they're actually engaged on technical dialogue or want to talk numbers.

Okay. That's helpful.

Those are not free space communication, just to be clear. Those are all camera systems on satellites pointed down to look for missile launches and detection.

Got it. Final one from me, and I'll jump back into queue. With these capacity expansion plans, how should we think about CapEx over the next 12 months?

Good question, Jaeson. The CapEx we're spending right now is capacity-driven. As the backlog grows, we're constantly reevaluating. That said, there are long lead times in the CapEx process, we have to get some things moving quicker than others. I don't wanna say exactly what we're gonna spend in the near term, but to put it in perspective, in Q3, Sam and I approved $6 million in CapEx to be spent in order to not only meet the current backlog, but what we think is gonna be beyond that.

Okay. Thanks a lot, guys.

Okay. Thank you.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, that is star and 1 to join the queue. We'll take our next question from Austin Moeller with Canaccord. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. Good afternoon, Sam and Al. Do you expect, like, you would receive more funding through the $54.6 billion for the Drone Autonomous Working Group or from the DHS budget dollars that were appropriate in the reconciliation bill? Would the DAWG funding shift revenue mix further into assemblies and modules and raise gross margin further for drones?

Okay. I'll start by answering the other way around. First of all, it will be mostly assemblies and cameras, definitely. By far, we're actually the more assemblies and cameras business we are, the less we're taking business in optical components because we would rather use that same capacity to make assemblies and cameras which are much, much higher margins, which answers really a second part of the question. In terms of the funding, I'd say it's all over. Drone, from the drone dominance, we are receiving already orders. We have a few million dollars of orders of optical assemblies that go into drones. I'll try next time to break that out and add a bit more color to it. We're starting to receive volume orders of optical assemblies that get coupled to cameras that go into drones.

We're probably, you know, the lead supplier in the U.S. for that by far, I'd say. From other areas from the NDAA and such, which part of funding, I think it depends. Existing programs, the programs of record, they come from the NDAA funding and such. DHS comes from the big beautiful bill mostly, and so on. In addition to all of that, what we're also working on and is a different type of funding, that is funding to support expansion of capacity. We are working. It is very early stage, but we're working with different parts of the government, Office of Strategic Capital and so on, to secure some of that.

It will not be in the near future, but it's definitely something we're looking at, for next fiscal year to support some of the expansion.

Okay. In some of our conversations with primes, it sounds like there's already an active effort where they're replacing smaller diameter lenses with BlackDiamond glass. What factors might keep them from swapping out larger diameter germanium lenses with BlackDiamond? Is it just a matter of time or are there technical considerations?

First of all, not everyone knows that it's possible. This is completely new. Even last week, I met a customer at the trade shows that still didn't know about that, even so we've been shouting it from the top of our lungs. There's quite a bit of education to be done. However, chalcogenide glass, BlackDiamond altogether, it's a softer material, so design aspects of it are different. It's not that it cannot be used for larger diameter lenses or larger diameter optics. You need to take different mechanics assumptions into account when you're doing that design, which is why we work very, very closely with the customers on those designs. We leverage our experience with the material to help educate them to make sure that their design is sustainable mechanically afterwards. Simply, it's a different strength of material compared to germanium.

That said, there's nothing inherently that prevents it from completely replacing or using it in all these same dimensions and uses. In many of them, it's actually much better because the co-coefficient of thermal expansion of our glass is very, very similar to that of aluminum or aluminum, depends which country you're in. That makes it much easier to mount it in terms of gluing it and hard mounting it into systems. It's mostly education of the customers is the short answer.

That's very helpful. Thank you. I'll pass it back there. Nice quarter.

We'll take our next question from Richard Shannon with Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.

Well, great. Thanks, Sam and Al, for taking my questions, and congrats on another good quarter here. I guess one way I wanted to talk about the capacity limitations you were having, you're trying to relieve with more investment here. How do we think about at a high level here, what your revenue ceiling is now and where can this go in the next, I don't know, two to four to six quarters as you're adding more capacity?

I will. Okay, I get this one. I would say that everything we have booked and we have in our backlog we can deliver. There's no risk there that we can't deliver it. What we're planning towards is more the second half of the next fiscal year and a increased expansion then. Our backlog is mostly for the next 12 months, the next fiscal year, but not completely. However, it's, you know, probably heavier towards the second half where we do need to add some capacity.

Okay, fair enough. I want to ask about the space programs. I know, Sam, that you mentioned that most of these are confidential, but just kinda at a high level here, especially some of the bigger ones that, I think you're hunting here. When do you expect to have decisions on these? Will this happen this calendar year? Is it more of a next year? Any way you'd help us scale kind of this whole space opportunity relative to some of the other ones like counter-UAS, border patrol, you know, Navy programs, et cetera.

Yeah. timeline, I have to admit, I am not completely confident on it because this is fairly new to us. We have not done anything of that type, meaning space programs and, with the tight requirements on the assemblies and the cameras for that. there's some learnings there. I would say that the timelines I'm seeing now on prototypes and on development are such that it would be at least a year before anything meaningful in terms of knowing where the wind is blowing even, is available to us. in terms of Sorry, what was the second half of the question?

Just scaling the size of the opportunity in space versus all the other bigger markets.

Oh, yeah.

You talked about, Border Patrol.

I think actually, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but during the investor day that we had in February, I gave some numbers there. I explained that typically a satellite like that is about $40 million-$50 million in total cost. A third of that is the entire optical system payload. Of that, we are just doing the telescope. We're not trying to do the complete camera system or anything like that, just the optical assembly, which is in the millions per satellite. You know, let's say below $5 million per satellite kind of thing.

Okay. That is helpful. Thanks for that, Sam.

The numbers on satellite are fairly well-published.

Okay, great. Thank you. Last question is for Al on the gross margins here. Obviously adding capacity adds a little depreciation, some other fixed costs here. Just wanted to know if as you're adding capacity, is there any different view kind of longer term what you think of the gross margins? I think you talked about, you know, getting to 40% and maybe even higher. Wanted to know how that has changed here with kind of the, you know, the new scale that you're targeting.

Yeah, great question. We still expect margins to grow. However, we are scaling fast, and there are some costs in the short term associated with that. It'll slow down our ramp from where we are today, the 36 to the 40, but not much. We're talking quarter or 2 slip in terms of that overall plan. From the investor's perspective, they'll just see improvement, but not enough for what we would want, you know, internally. Externally it'll walk up to, we'll continue to walk up the margin chain.

Okay, perfect. That's great perspective, Al. That is all for me, guys. Thank you.

This concludes our question and answer session. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Sam Rubin for his closing remarks.

Thank you. Before I leave, I'll just frame it one more time to give the complete picture. LightPath is really no longer a component supplier it used to be. We're a vertically integrated systems company, a record backlog, well-capitalized balance sheet, and a technology position that's aligned with the most pressing supply chain mandates of the defense industrial base. The NDAA deadline is real. Demand for germanium alternative in infrared systems is real. At this point, so is our ability to deliver. From here, our job over the next several quarters is simple to describe: execution. To execute. Ship on time, move backlog into the P&L, and let margins expand as volume is built. With that, I'll conclude, and I'll thank everybody for their time today and look forward to speaking to you again next time.

This concludes today's program. Thank you for your participation, and you may disconnect at any time.