Participants

Brian Prenoveau; Investor Relations; Kopin Corp

Michael Murray; President, Chief Executive Officer, Director; Kopin Corp

Richard Sneider; Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer; Kopin Corp

George Gianarikas; Analyst; Canaccord Genuity

Jaeson Schmidt; Analyst; Lake Street

Glenn Mattson; Analyst; Ladenburg Thalmann

Presentation

Operator

Good morning everyone and welcome to the Kopin Corporation fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. Please note that the event is being recorded at this time. I'd like to turn the conference over to Brian Prenoveau. Investor relations for Kopin. Please go ahead.

Brian Prenoveau

Thank you and good morning everyone. Before we get started, I'd like to remind everyone that today's call taking place on April 17, 2025 will be making forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on the company's current expectations, projections, beliefs, and estimates, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements.
Potential risks include, but are not limited to, demand for our products, operating results of our subsidiaries, market conditions, and other factors discussed in our in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Although the company believes that the assumptions underlying these statements are reasonable, any of them can be proven inaccurate. And there can be no assurances that the results will be realized. The company undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements made during today's call. In addition, references may be made to certain non generally accepted accounting principles or non-gap measures for which you should refer to the appropriate disclaimers and reconciliation of the company's SEC filings and press releases.
Kopin Corporation's Chief Executive Officer, Michael Murray, will begin today's call with an overview of Kopin's progress within the company's strategy. Following Michael, Kopin's CFO, Richard Sneider, will review the company's fourth quarter and full-year 2024 financial results. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Michael Murray. Michael?

Michael Murray

Thank you, Brian. Good morning to everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year earnings call. I want to begin by expressing my thanks and gratitude to our shareholders for their patience, as this year's audit took longer than anticipated. But we filed our 10-K and we're happy with our new audit firm who took on a significant task with adding Kopin late in the fiscal year.
Today, Kopin is reporting an all-time record year from both a revenue perspective and for orders since the disposition of our HBT business over a decade ago. The momentum from strong fourth quarter results, our existing order book and new contract wins in the first part of 2025, give us confidence that our strategic pivot, transformation and focus is gaining real momentum.
Before I provide insights into our future, I wanted to highlight some of the positive results from 2024 before turning the call over to Rich to go through a detailed analysis of our financial results.
I want to highlight a few areas I think are important to keep in mind. In our second year of our transformation plan, we achieved revenue growth of 25% year-over-year growth in 2024. fourth quarter revenue increased 71% when compared to 2023.
Our quality rates have greatly improved and now are more predictable. The cost structure in fourth quarter 2024 was much closer to a normalized expense level given the lower legal costs. And we believe automation in the manufacturing plants can further lever and reduce our cost structure.
As a reminder, the $46 million loss includes $24.8 million in reserve for the Blue Radio's litigation and associated legal costs in 2024. Excluding the reserve for litigation costs and associated legal expenses, the adjusted loss per share would have been $0.09.
We've continued to significantly narrow the loss and gain momentum to become cash flow positive.
Under our one Kopin strategy, we reorganized Kopin, Virginia and our European teams, which unify our focus, strengths, and capabilities while reducing redundancies. We also form new business development, program management, and quality teams.
Under the Fab light strategy, we brought online new OLED and micro LED vendors to strengthen our source of supply for US DOD applications while keeping our lower cost medical and consumer supply strategy intact.
We rebranded the company, launched a new website. And reinvigorated our marketing outreach, customer service, and support models. Indeed, I am very proud of our progress in 2024. And as we now look to 2025 and beyond, we remain very optimistic and excited about our future.
Despite the delays in defense budgeting processes, geopolitical and supply chain uncertainties, we reaffirm our belief that in 2025 Kopin will continue to grow and generate between $52 million to $55 million in revenue.
Now let me discuss everyone's favorite topic, tariffs. On the pricing side of our business, our government contracts allow us to seek price increases if the tariff affects our costs. On the supply side, our raw wafer inventory levels can support our demand in 2025. Further, Kopin began our fab-lite strategic initiative in 2023 with the goal of reducing our exposure to Asian supply chains. Since then, we've created dual supply chains for OLED on silicon displays specifically.
Which are already supporting customer demands. No company will be immune to the effects of tariffs. However, we believe Kopin is in a much better position than most due to these decisions.
Now in 2025 we will continue to execute on our one Kopin strategy as this supports and directs more resources to the rapidly expanding European and Southeast Asian defense markets. This focus should provide us with a lift in global opportunities and a more balanced pipeline for growth as we continue to witness additional and significant project funding in parts of Europe and Korea specifically.
As an early indicator of our progress, we are seeing an influx of new and challenging opportunities which fit our strategic plan, our priorities, and our capabilities. Furthermore, we are actively exploring strategic partnerships with leading firms in high growth markets and regions to expedite this growth.
Coupled with our engineering, production and program management teams, we must also execute more profitably on our current programs and anticipated new product introduction growth. Thus, our strategic initiative for 2025 is the implementation of AI assisted factory and process automation.
Improving manufacturing efficiency, increasing automation. And reducing redundancies are critical areas of improvement for our company. Several of these automation projects were funded and began development in early 2024. We believe these initiatives will be enabling higher factory absorption rates, better data-driven decisions. And lead to greater throughput in our current facilities.
As we capture more of our opportunity pipeline. Our ability to leverage our manufacturing facilities to handle greater demand, improve product quality while reducing overhead costs is critical for our success. We are excited to share that we expect a significant milestone achievement in our factory automation plan to be achieved this quarter as we introduce new AI enabled inspection systems.
We're making these improvements to increase our manufacturing capacity without significant headcount increases to create a cost structure that turns volume into profits. And to have capacity to achieve our goal of at least $75 million in annual revenue in 2027.
Our existing pipeline is very strong with programs that have congressional budget demands throughout 2030. Additionally, several of the program contracts we have are IDIQ or indefinite demand indefinite quantity, which allows for even greater revenue demands than we currently have on order.
Again, considering the recent tariff news and geopolitical tensions, it is important to note that our top three programs are built here in the United States. And much of our active opportunity pipeline will also be built here as well, whilst our NATO and European demands can be supported through our Scotland facility.
All of this to say that we're very excited about the company's prospects. And we believe that in today's geopolitical environment, demand for micro displays, optics, application specific solutions has increased steadily in defense, medical, and industrial markets. We're also incredibly proud of our expanding customer base. That is equally well positioned to deliver outstanding products and technologies to their end customers.
Now along those lines, recent reports surrounding the IVAS version 1.2 program being noted to Andrew have generated several questions about Kopin's ability and ambition to capture some or all of these types of opportunities. As a reminder, I've asked is a $22 billion US Army program aimed at enhancing soldier capabilities through a body worn mixed reality system, leveraging augmentation and virtual reality for improved situational awareness, lethality, and mobility. In January, it was reported that requests for information were issued regarding a technical update to the program, now called Soldier Born Mission Command, or SBMC.
Open has submitted our responses to this program along with contributing to several other tier one firms who have also responded.
We have quoted these firms with our microdisplays and in several cases we have included fully integrated modules which include displays, optics, drive electronics, and our neural software in some cases.
From the Kopin perspective, these are both positive reports about the overall program and our ability to contribute to it. But more importantly, the soldier worn visual acuity market in defense is maturing and growing at a rapid rate within the US and globally.
While SBMC remains a significant opportunity for Kopin, we continue to focus on developing our own integrated visual acuity system, or what we call IVAS now solutions, which allow warfighters both at daytime and a nighttime solution that works seamlessly with their fielded systems like the current versions of night vision goggles or NVGs and popular helmet worn systems.
These new products allow Kopin immediate access to significant market potential since there are millions of NVG goggles in use today, which require additional information sources to be visible through the goggles during operation. IVAS now utilizes currently available information systems and connections and data through the Android Team Awareness Kit, or ATA for short, and our Davas solution, which is being offered with the Wilcox Fusion CLAW system.
This new strategy was affirmed recently to be valued as Kopin was awarded a multi-million dollar research and development contract for a new XR off the visor optical prototype for the Army, which we announced recently.
Other exciting developments include our work on micro LED product portfolio and the progression to our neural display architecture, a highly advanced display that includes embedded sensors to track eye movement, position. And gaze while simultaneously processing the tracking data within an AI engine that resides in the back plane of the display.
The system adjusts the displayed information in real time to optimize user experience and performance in high stakes use cases. Current demonstrable silicon is an OLED on silicon. However, we also will offer this technology as a micro LED as well.
We believe that this display system will be a great fit for the next generation of defense visual augmentation system. It is also receiving significant interest from medical and consumer spatial computing manufacturers. As an example, our solution would reduce several internal cameras within the within the current Apple Vision Pro or Quest headsets, resulting in reduced size, weight, power consumption, while still offering great image quality, eye, and pupil tracking with dynamic controls.
We now have operational prototypes of this innovative hardware and software platform and expect to announce more details on that very shortly. Now, with respect to our order book, so far in 2025, we have announced further contract wins including a $14 million dollar purchase order for thermal imaging assemblies, which has an additional $5 million for materials procurement.
$4 million in orders for pilot helmet augmented reality systems, a $2 million follow on order for helmets and rotary and fixed wing pilot applications. And we've been awarded several million dollars in research funding for extended reality prototypes. We're excited about the tremendous opportunities that are in front of Kopin and believe the next few years will be an exciting time as we continue our pursuit to save lives.
Our technology ultimate leads to increase safety for our war fighters, which means more of our men and women in uniform come home.
Surgeons who use our CR3 headset from HMDMD will perform their operations more effectively, efficiently, and accurately, providing better patient outcomes. And firefighters who use our technology to see through dense smoke will find people in need.
We take that work very seriously and have an incredibly dedicated and passionate team that comes to work every day with this mission top of mind.
I'll now turn the call over to our CFO Rich Sneider to review our results from the fourth quarter and full year of 2024 in further detail. Rich.

Richard Sneider

Thank you, Michael. Turning to our financial results for the fourth quarter, total revenues from Q4 were $14.6 million versus $8.6 million for the prior year, a 71% increase year over year. Product revenues for the fourth quarter ended December 28, '24 were $12.6 million compared to $6.8 million in the fourth quarter ended December 30. The increase in product revenues as a result of higher defense product revenues, which increased by $6 million year over year. Almost 100% increase.
In the fourth quarter of 2024, funded research and development revenues for 1.7 million, a decrease of 60,000 as compared to 24 2023, essentially flat.
Cost of product revenues for the fourth quarter of 2024 were 10.6 million or 84% of net product revenues compared to 7.2 million or 106% of net product revenues for the fourth quarter of 2023.
The increase in cost of property as a result of higher volumes.
Which provided fixed cost leverage.
R&D expenses for the fourth quarter of 2024 were $3.1 million compared to $2.2 million a year ago.
This is primarily due to an increase in internal cost to establish OLED deposition capabilities in Europe and new display development.
SG&A expenses were $3.1 million in the fourth quarter of '24 compared to $5.9 million in the fourth quarter of 23. The decrease was primarily due to a decrease in professional fees of $2.9 million, most of which was legal expense.
Turning to the bottom line, the net loss for the fourth quarter of '24 was $1.9 million or $0.01 per share, compared with the net loss attributed to Kopin of $6.5 million or $0.06 per share for the fourth quarter of 23.
Turning to the full year results. Total revenues for the year were $50.3 million compared to $40.4 million for the year ended December 30, '23, a 25% year-over-year increase. Product revenues for the year ended December 28, '24 with $43.6 million compared to $25.9 million for the year ended December 30, '23. The increase in product revenues was a result of an 82% increase in defense product revenues. R&D revenues were 3% lower, again essentially flat.
Product revenues for 2024 were $36.2 million or 83% of net product revenues compared to $24.7 million were 96% of net product revenues in the prior year. Cost of product revenues decrease as a percentage of revenues in '24 as compared to '23, primarily due to an increase in unit volume of thermal weapon sites from higher sales in '24 as compared to '23, which resulted in a lower fixed cost overhead cost per unit.
The company also implemented several programs and hired additional resources to improve manufacturing quality and efficiencies. R&D expenses for '24 were $9.6 million compared to $10.8 million for '23, and 11% decrease year over year.
Funded R&D for 2024 decreased $3.3 million as compared to '23, primarily due to the completion of contracts for defense program awarded prior to '24. Internal R&D expenses for '24 increased $2.2 million as compared to the prior year, primarily due to an increase in display development costs and the costs incurred to establish European Foundry services.
Selling general administrative expenses were $22.8 million for '24 compared to $21.8 million for '23. SG&A expenses for '24 increased as compared to '23, primarily due to an increase of $1.4 million in legal and professional fees, $2 million in excise taxes partially offset by $400,000 of lower bad debt expense, and $200,000 decrease in non-cash stock-based compensation.
Net loss distributed to Kopin for the year in 2024 was $43.9 million or $0.33 per share compared with the net loss distributed to Kopin of corporation of $19.7 million or $0.18 per share for the year end at '23. Excluding the $24.8 million of litigation accrual, the adjusted net loss attribute to Copeland would have been $19.1 million or $0.14 per share.
Net cash use and operating activities for '24 were approximately $14.2 million. Coburn's cash equivalent to Marco securities were approximately $36.6 million at the end of the year. Listeners should review our Form 10K for the year end of December 28 for all the additional disclosures, and with that I'll turn it back to Michael.

Michael Murray

Thanks very much, Rich. Again, I would just like to thank our audit firm, our investors, and the great employees of Kopin for turning in a fantastic result in 2024, and we look forward to a great 2025. And with that operator, we'll open it up for some.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) George Gianarikas, Canaccord Genuity.

George Gianarikas

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I'd like to ask a little bit about, hey, neural display and, maybe you can outline any technical improvements and how close you are, you think we are to commercial deployments and commercial readiness. Thank you.

Michael Murray

Neural display right now is demonstrable. We are giving it signals, producing signals, and taking signals, which is a huge step. We've also been working on our software.
We look to produce neural display in a headset. And demonstrate it this year so that folks can see the capability actually while they're wearing the displays. So that's the next big milestone is actually putting this new technology into a headset so people can see it, feel it, and use it. And that's the next big milestone, George, and we're hopeful to announce a milestone in that area, I'd say this quarter or next.

George Gianarikas

Thank you. Maybe just as a follow up, just a question on the financials you've given guidance and revenue for 2025. I'm wondering you just maybe a little bit more detail on what you expect the OpEx development to be made a quite remark about Q4, being the milestone. So is it about $6 million a quarter we should expect, in OpEx in 2025.
Thank you.

Richard Sneider

What's your definition of opt ex? Some folks have cost of sales in it, some folks don't. So I just want to make sure. You use SDA and R&D.

George Gianarikas

Correct.

Richard Sneider

Correct. Yeah, so we should be in the range for SG&A of around $10 million to $12 million and then R&D fluctuates as it said, it's, around. About $2. 5 million for our internal and external. The funded R&D piece is always questionable because it's dependent upon the revenues itself. But internal, let me put it this way, our goal for internal R&D is 7% of revenues. Alright, that's what we're budgeting and we run 10% to 12% of SG&A. As I said, FRD, R&D expense is a little bit more difficult because it depends on the FRD programs revenue, but so --

Michael Murray

And as a reminder, FRD is funded research and development that we receive from customers.

Brian Prenoveau

Got it. Okay.

George Gianarikas

Thank you.

Operator

Jaeson Schmidt, Lake Street.

Jaeson Schmidt

Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions. Just curious if you've seen sort of any impact in customer engagements or kind of contract push outs with Doge and kind of the government changes that are going on. And I guess relatedly if it'd be helpful if you could comment on what you saw from an order activity perspective here in Q1.

Michael Murray

Sure. So we have not seen any impacts from government budget cuts. We do have many requests in for government funding, whether that be through the DPA Office, CHIPS Act, or the DIB. So those requests are not in plan, Jaeson. We're not projecting them to be in plan. But they are significant, close to, well over $100 million of requests actually.
But we are not forecasting those to come in until we have a greater view and more interaction. I have spent a tremendous amount of time on Capitol Hill the past few months, that's been public to help pursue those funding requests along with our customer, which is great, but we have not seen, to be clear. Pushouts or concerns for cancellations of our backlog or future business at this point in time because of Doge.
Secondly, we have actually seen an influx of requests for training and simulation opportunities. Training and stimulation usually is the first indicator of conflict because you want to train your troops. And we're seeing that globally, more specifically in Europe and some here in the United States. And then lastly, we're seeing tremendous increases of demand for optical systems, for soldier warn systems, and also first person viewer drone control requests.
So that's across the world, Korea to Europe, to the United States. So, we have not seen a slowdown at this point.

Jaeson Schmidt

Okay, that's really helpful. And then just shifting gears to the one coping initiatives, what's the timeline for most of those to be fully completed?

Michael Murray

So we have a very aggressive schedule, Jason. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we're implementing the first optical test solution this quarter. And each quarter, we have phases of new automation that we're adding. And to be clear, We're not looking to reduce headcount because of this. We're looking to add throughput to the fab to support the volumes that we're currently seeing in backlog as well as a number of opportunities that we expect to come in. Now I didn't answer the second part of your last question. I apologize. So we have seen pretty significant orders in Q1. We are expecting to announce several new orders as well. We just couldn't get them out before the call. But we have been receiving fairly significant and steady order book activity for 2025, as well as 2026.
So look for more of those press releases shortly.

Jaeson Schmidt

Gotcha. I appreciate all the color thanks a lot guys.

Michael Murray

Thanks Jason.

Operator

Glenn Mattson, Ladenburg,

Glenn Mattson

Hi, yeah, thanks for taking the questions. Curious, maybe rich on the gross margin. It had been going to sequentially going up for a couple quarters that take down this quarter. Can you just give me some dynamics of what the difference is there and then your best estimate for how we should think about it for next year.

Richard Sneider

Yeah. So we, as part of the one COI initiative, the markets we focused on, we took, I wouldn't say aggressive positions. But we really looked at what we thought the business was going to be in 2025 and took some reserves on inventories in markets that we just didn't think we were going to really pursue. Going forward, with, basically some of the products are getting older. But that's probably the only real anomaly in the quarter. Otherwise, it's just a lot of volume.
There's some inefficiencies when we're trying to create that much volume, which is why the automation is so critical for us. To date, when we try to scale, we're hiring people, cause there's still a lot of touch labor. And so that's why for us to leverage, really get the margins moving in the right direction, automation is the key. So the good news is we got a lot of volume. We just gotta be able to make it a little cheaper, to expand the margins. And we do expect margin expansion, throughout 2025.

Glenn Mattson

What. So what kind of what the middle of the year look like, is that what you think is, we'll get to, we'll be in that range or a little beyond that with the with the automation or.

Richard Sneider

Yeah, I mean --

Glenn Mattson

So I guess in like the high point was Q3 you were like 24% product or or so is that feel like the range you want to be in or is -- ?

Richard Sneider

That the, yes, that's wxactly right.

Michael Murray

And Glenn, this is Michael, there's also a bit of mix in Q4. We had several smaller, programs that came back into revenue. A in Q4 actually that we were not expecting in some cases that were lower margin than expected. So we think that Q3 of '24 is the model in terms of margins. And we think with these inspection systems and automation systems that we're adding to the FA we'll improve that margin as we increase our revenue, we want to hold our headcount firm. And not add headcount but add automation so that we can produce more with what we have and create those margin capture opportunities.

Glenn Mattson

Thanks, that's helpful. And can I give you the opportunity to discuss if there's any update or do you have any guesstimate on when to be an update on the lawsuit?

Michael Murray

No, I have no update at this point. We have not heard from the courts in Colorado. We have been actively putting in motions throughout Q4 around the case with. In Massachusetts actually, that Blue Radios is involved with. And we entered those motions in Q4 to highlight the summary judgment in Massachusetts, as well as some inconsistencies that we saw in testimonies.
And some contradictions that we see between the cases. So those motions went in in Q4. They're available online, I believe you can look at them for your own edification on pacer.org. So but we have not heard any judgments on those motions. There's no hearing scheduled and we have not heard from the Colorado court at this point in time.

Richard Sneider

Yeah, just for clarification for folks who may not be aware, not only did Blue Radio sue us, they sued our law firm. And that lawsuit against our law firm was thrown out on summary judgment, with no validity.

Michael Murray

And it's fair to say that Blue Radios we believe has or will put in their appeal on that case in Massachusetts, to be clear.

Glenn Mattson

Amazing. It's been almost a year or or close to a year since that really come out. There's no, way to force the judge's hand in terms of, speeding up the process, I guess. And then also while you're answering that, is there much expectation for further legal expense this year as this thing winds down or or if there's any appeals or anything like that? Thanks.

Michael Murray

Sure. So, right now you're correct, it's one full calendar year since the jury verdict.
That's number one. Number two, I think we don't foresee any further major expense with the exception of the appeal of whatever judgment, final judgment we receive in Colorado if it's adverse. But I'm becoming more confident in our ability to reduce the damages. number one, two, I very much more confident in our ability to appeal any judgment in Colorado based on what's happening in Massachusetts, as well as some of the motions that our law firm has put in in Q4.
So I would say that we look forward to moving this forward. And the battle has just begun. It's not over. I think we're very much focused on our appeal. But that appeal, Glenn, is not a forever type of cost. It is bounded by the document that you put into the appellate court. And we don't foresee it being significant in terms of the cost structure to appeal this judgment if and when we receive it. So we think we'll get a normalized cost structure here in Q1, in Q2, and the appeal we believe will be, $7 million of cost.

Glenn Mattson

Sorry, did you say several or $7 million? I didn't hear what you said there. .

Michael Murray

Sub $1 million so below $1 million and that, yeah, and that's a one time cost that's not a recurring cost, it's a one time cost to put the appeal in place.

Glenn Mattson

Okay, great, thanks for the call guys. Good luck.

Operator

Thank you. We have no further questions in the queue. So I'll turn the call back over to Michael Murray for any closing remarks.

Michael Murray

Wonderful, thank you, operator. Again, thank you very much to our shareholders, our employees. And our customers for their patience with filing our 10-K. We're excited about this year and the future, and we look forward to talking to you very shortly on our Q1 '25. Thanks very much, folks.

Operator

Thank you and ladies and gentlemen that does conclude today's program. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time.