Good morning and welcome to the Ocean Power Technologies Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. A webcast of this call is also available and could be accessed by a link on the company's website at www.oceanpowertechnologies.com. This conference call is being recorded and will be available for replay shortly after its completion. On the call today are Dr. Philipp Stratmann, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Bob Powers, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following the prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Now, I am pleased to introduce Bob Powers.

Thank you and good morning. After the market closed yesterday, we issued our earnings press release and filed our annual report on Form 10-K for the period ended April 30, 2024. Our public filings are available on the SEC website and within the Investor Relations section of the OPT website. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements that are within the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may include financial projections or other statements of the company's plans, objectives, expectations or intentions. These statements are based on assumptions made by management regarding future circumstances over which the company may have little or no control and involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Additional information about these risks and uncertainties can be found in the company's Form 10-K and subsequent filings with the SEC. The company disclaims any obligation or intention to update the forward-looking statements made on this call. Finally, we posted an updated investor presentation on our IR website. Please take a moment to review it as it provides a nice overview of our company and strategy. Now, I am pleased to introduce Dr. Philipp Stratmann.

Thank you, Bob and good morning. We appreciate you joining us. Fiscal 2024 was a great year and a significant step towards positive cash flow in calendar year 2025 for our company. This year saw substantially complete the research and development stage in our journey to profitability and build upon the significant increases in revenue, gross margin, pipeline and backlog we achieved during fiscal 2023. Today, I will focus on the significant developments occurring over the past year and the resulting confidence they provide toward achieving further material progress in fiscal 2025. First, we had several technological breakthroughs. During Q2, we revealed a ground-breaking milestone, the successful demonstration of the WAM-V attaching itself remotely to a buoy and establishing a connection that will enable charging. This achievement underscores our commitment to reshaping autonomous maritime operations by leveraging renewable energy for sustainable charging solution and paves the way for a future where autonomous vessels can operate for extended durations, opening doors to various applications within the maritime domain. We also recently announced we are approaching 15-megawatt hours of renewable energy production from our family of PowerBuoys. The recent launch of our next-generation PB off the coast of New Jersey has materially accelerated average energy production by combining solar, wind and wave energy production capabilities. These numbers show that non-grid connected marine energy production is not just for the R&D community but is a commercially available solution. Finally and potentially most significantly, we announced “Merrows”, our ground-breaking Artificial Intelligence capable Consolidated Solution offering comprehensive ocean surveillance. Through “Merrows”, we're able to integrate OPT's roaming technologies such as OMV with resident technologies like the PowerBuoys to offer an unparalleled level of surveillance and data analysis capability. Merrows sets OPT apart because of its ability to enhance data collection capabilities and provide artificial intelligence…

Thanks, Philipp. Let's begin with revenue. In Q4 '24, our revenues were $1.6 million, bringing total revenue for our fiscal year ended April 30, 2024, to $5.5 million and representing a 102% increase in revenue over fiscal year 2023. Combined with the 55% growth in revenue we experienced in fiscal 2023, fiscal 2024 revenue increased in excess of 3x over the past 2 years. This growth can be attributed to the conversion of backlog from our strong performance in WAM-V sales and strong growth in orders and pipeline. Our orders were $6.6 million for the year and growing. We expect -- we continue to expect order activity and revenue to ramp for fiscal 2025. Our gross profit for Q4 '24 stood at $0.9 million, bringing full year gross profit to $2.8 million, a significant increase over the prior year's full gross profit of $0.2 million. Again, this improvement marks the second year in a row in which our year-over-year gross margin has improved dramatically as we registered a movement from negative gross margin to positive gross margin in fiscal 2023. This improvement is attributed to our unmanned vehicle business, particularly the higher-margin WAM-V leasing business. I'm enthused about the progress we've made in this area and our momentum heading into fiscal year 2025. Our operating expenses for Q4 '24 amounted to $7.5 million and $32.2 million for fiscal 2024. The year-to-date figure includes approximately $3.9 million and extraordinary expenses related to the company defending litigation and other sales offensive [ph] tactics relative to the dissident shareholder activity previously described by Philipp. These costs include legal fees, advisory expenses and other related costs. We hope for these to be onetime cost, although there can be no guarantee that we will not incur similar costs in the future. As for the net…

[Operator Instructions] Our first questions come from the line of Jeff Grampp with Alliance Global Partners.

Thank you for the time. I was curious, first off, maybe we can start on the backlog side of things. You guys had some nice growth sequentially and even over the last few months since that number, you guys have continued to announce some nice ones publicly. So just wondering if there's maybe a more recent backlog number that you guys can share? Or maybe we need to wait, I don't know the month or so for the next earnings release.

Jeff, thanks for being on. Yes. You're entirely right. Obviously, there's been -- the growth has been fairly evident and steady and we keep on scaling up. As Bob said, we have just under $5 million of backlog at the end of the fiscal year that we're taking into the current fiscal year. We will be providing updates on that as that progresses at the next earnings call. But I think what's encouraging from our side. As we said, we put out guidance that we think contracted orders for fiscal '25 are going to be $12.5 million [ph]. And I think revenues will be very similar to that. If you look at the fact that we've entered the year with about $5 million of backlog plus what we announced, I think we feel very comfortable that the targets we put out there are achievable and we'll continue on the growth trajectory. But we'll certainly provide updates as we go through the year.

Fair enough. I appreciate that. And with respect to that, contracted order KPI that you guys put out there. What do you guys view as kind of the biggest risks to achieving that, whether those are external things that are perhaps out of your control related to customer decision time lines, things of that nature versus things that you guys are focused on internally. Like what keeps you guys up at night with respect to meeting that KPI that's not out there.

I think part of the things that we're obviously constantly looking at is conversion from initial conversations through to getting the PO in hand and then delivering for our customers. It is important for us to continue to deliver high-quality products because, as you've seen, several of our sales over the year have come from repeat customers. The benefit of repeat customers is obviously that, that also materially reduces the time that we get from the conversation through to the next delivery. I think we're also very targeted in the geographic expansions that we're looking at. We've had several recent announcements for Latin America and you've seen several announcements for the Middle East. And I think we are targeting those specifically. On those, there might be a slight delay that you see from contracted order [ph] to revenue because you're obviously going to have to go and ship systems that we currently assemble in the United States over to those destinations. And I think that's obviously always something we're looking at in terms of timing and where it sits within our kind of quarters and fiscal year.

Great. That's helpful. And if I could just sneak one more in. OpEx trended down nicely for -- to wrap up the fiscal year. You guys mentioned in the prepared remarks continuing to evaluate some ways to perhaps improve that. So is it fair to think that relative to that Q4 run rate that there's still some potential for OpEx improvement as we look into fiscal '25? Or how should we think about the overall expense profile of the business moving forward?

Yes, I think that is a fair statement to make. I mean, as we said, we've further controlled and contained third-party expenditures. We've gone through a further head count optimization and really focusing on what is needed to be delivered. And what's needed to be delivered is converting our systems -- system discussions into backlog into revenues, operating our systems for our customers and maintaining an edge where we continue to integrate solutions. And I think you would have seen a noticeable trend in us bringing on board more solution delivery partners, people like Teledyne, people like SES, work we're going to be doing with Unique and others. And I think all of those are going to help us bring down OpEx further and keep very tight control on the costs.

Great to hear. Looking forward to tracking the progress.

Our next questions come from the line of Shawn Severson with Water Tower Research.

Philipp, you've talked a little bit about the commercial inflection point having hit and we've seen a lot of that showing up in the results and the items you discussed. But -- what I'm trying to get at is understanding, was this just related to the time in the market and the commercialization of the product? Or was it related to greater sales effort? Or are there certain things you can point to that really seem to have pushed the commercialization inflection point through quickly here. And I'd say, like the last 6 months, it's really been noticeable.

Yes. I am noting, Shawn and thanks for the question. I think you're right, there's definitely been a change in pace that we've seen but I wouldn't just put it down to market conditions. Obviously, I think we all know what's going on in the markets in terms of autonomy, robotics and artificial intelligence. But I think at the heart of it lies the fact that we developed a set of solutions that were targeted at specific segments of the market. We brought on board a very targeted commercial team and obviously, with Matt Burdyny, our Chief Commercial Officer, really focusing on the ocean technology, defense and security and offshore energy markets and targeting customers and regions where we know that there is an actual market for our systems and solutions. I think the other thing that we did and is one of the reasons why we announced at the end of calendar 2023 that we had substantially completed all of our R&D activities is we focused on making the product and solution that we have, something that customers find easy to use and that actually provide a solution that saves them money and saves them carbon emissions instead of trying to perfect something that isn't yet operating. So I think we just became a lot more targeted and tenacious in going after opportunities in the market and working with our customers to help them solve their problems. Obviously, in a general market trends towards acceptance of autonomy help. But I think a lot of it has been down to a very targeted effort and focusing on doing what we do well instead of adding a much broader base of products that we could bring to there.

And kind of a follow on to that. You've mentioned shorter sales cycle with existing customers which makes sense, right? They're familiar with it and we would expect that. Are you seeing a shortening of the sales cycle with new customers as well? So I guess, always the concern is anything government-related or project-related like this, the sales cycles are very long and tenuous in some cases. But what are you seeing with nonrecurring customers but new customers as it relates to that?

Yes, it's a great question. I mean, Bob mentioned in his remarks, obviously, you can see it on the balance sheet, our inventory number has gone up. And that's helped us reduce the sales cycle that we're seeing with new customers as well. Because what we can now do is -- and actually, I just have my team in the middle of the night, do a demo phone overseas customer just tonight -- just last night, is the fact that having systems out and deployed under being able to bring a demonstration system to a customer when they're saying, "Hey, this seems interesting. How does this work?" We can turn around and going, "Well, why don't you come and see us and we're going to demonstrate it to you because we have one in the water," or we can go in the case of the vehicle, ship it to a customer and saying, "Well, why don't you try it out for a week. We'll come along and we'll provide our technicians." And it materially shortens that cycle because you're no longer going through paper exercises and then feasibility studies and then you're going to the next round -- the kind of the longer project approach that I think you sometimes see on kind of renewable developments per se. It enables us to go and step into what is more of an OpEx consideration at our customer side as opposed to them needing to squeeze it as CapEx into a larger project.

My last question is related to any political risk. I know it's such an emerging market, there probably isn't a lot but we do have questions sometimes. Is there any difference to you what happens in November as far as rollouts for commercialization?

I appreciate the question, Shawn. We look at the fact that we provide systems that strengthen National Security. And in our view, no matter what happens in November, National Security, as part of that Ocean Security, is going to be remaining a paramount importance to the United States and to our allies. At the same time, if you're looking at it globally, population keeps increasing globally and there is an increasing demand for energy. So, whether -- and the fact that our systems can be used for oil and gas producers, or by offshore wind producers. So we don't see a material political risk; and that's really because we provide dual-use technologies that enable any and all operators that are in the ocean to keep operations secure, cheaper and if so desired by them reduce their carbon footprint as well.

And congratulations on the progress, gentlemen.

Our next question is come from the line of Peter Ruggiere with Dawson James.

You guys have growth, it sounds very great. I have a lot of questions, actually. Just a question on the oil and gas part of it. It was a contract where some of you're working on several years back in the Gulf of Mexico with oil and gas decommissioning, are you guys still working towards that?

Peter, I appreciate the question. I think that contract might predate most of us here. In general, we do still work with many of -- or we provide systems to many of the oil and gas operators. As you've seen, a lot of the work that we've done is instead of us going and working with the large oil and gas operators directly, we are working through their service providers. And that is what's helped us increase the pace with which we are getting to sales and orders. If you're looking at the work we've been doing with Samara, Samara does work for all of the large oil and gas providers. So as a result of that, our vehicles are now starting to operate in that area. We are in ongoing discussions with various Tier 1 and Tier 2 service providers to look at buoys to work on work for exclusions and monitoring, like we did in the North Sea, do work on wellhead monitoring and so on and so forth. So it's certainly a segment we keep an active look on. But I think the approach to the segment has changed from going directly with the large oil and gas customers to the service providers because the service providers have a greater need for our systems and are able to spec them in more quickly.

Okay. Because we're working with Premier Oil for a long time in the Adriatic Sea, that was for a while. Are you still -- is that buoy still empowering that research facility in Chile?

No, that contract was completed last year. And the buoy was returned to us, has been refurbished and is currently being prepared for other deployments and projects that we are finalizing.

Okay. I heard you say that you’re -- the buoy has more power now than it did before, or producing more power. Is that correct?

Yes, that is correct. What we've done is, as we launched our next-generation buoy in order to become the follow-on model to the PB3. What we did is we reduced all externally moving parts on the system and move the wave energy conversion system entirely inside of the buoy. What that's enabled us is the ability to provide solar panels and small wind turbines on top of the buoy which provide additional power generation capabilities. It also means that we have opened a much broader range of regions that we can now supply product into. We recently announced that we are providing a buoy into the Middle East. There's very little wave activity in the Gulf region. But having the ability or now having the solar and wind systems on there means that we can also service those markets. We still work on the same principle that any power we generated is used to be stored as energy in the battery packs and then we power all the payloads on the batteries that we have inside of our buoys.

Okay. How many buoys do you have in the water right now? By any chance?

I'd have to double check that number for you. I think it's -- we have a couple of demonstration systems out and we are shipping a couple of systems over for various customers.

Okay. What do you see the biggest market because the WAM is sort of really interesting with the drones and stuff like that. Is that going to be the biggest market? Or is it the oil and gas possibly or the illegal fishing -- I know you did a big study in Japan and you have [indiscernible]; I guess, in the Philippines a couple of years back. And then the COVID thing happened and everything kind of got delayed, I believe, that's correct.

I think yes, we would -- we look at this under Merrows, this kind of overarching umbrella that we put together. We look at illegal fishing really being part of defense and security. And we do see defense and security as a major market and it so happens that the bulk of defense and security is the government as the end customer. But again, similar to oil and gas, we are approaching that by working with larger prime contractors that are able to help navigate the contracting mechanisms that exist within the government, so we can provide systems more quickly into that. And we do see opportunities for both of our underlying platforms, vehicles for autonomous roaming and buoys for permanent resident monitoring and intelligent surveillance and reconnaissance. I think offshore energy which includes oil and gas, is going to continue to be an important market for us. But what is interesting to us is that many of the applications that are being utilized by -- our customers use our systems for in offshore energy are similar to the applications that the defense and security side users which is around monitoring, using the ability that we could launch aerial drones, using the ability we can launch underwater drones to do offshore energy infrastructure inspections and also doing general survey work. So we have found that the solutions to provide overlap in those areas but I would see us continuing to service big markets.

Okay. On your -- like a couple of questions on the backlog, I understand but the pipeline you have on April 30, is it $71 million? And in the quarter before, it was $77 million, at the end of the third. Are you -- the size has went down a little bit. Is that because you're converting it into actually revenue at this point? And what does that pipeline consist of? My question on that.

Yes. So part of it is because we are converting opportunities in the pipeline into backlog and then obviously from backlog into revenues. I think we put our new IR deck last night. current pipeline is at $85 million and it consists of opportunities under negotiation, opportunities where we have submitted proposals, opportunities where we've executed NDAs with customers and are scoping what a future program project contract could -- would look like. So there will always be some fluctuation. But what is encouraging to us is on the basis of the size that we've got, as long as we keep on pulling down a small percentage of what we've got in the pipeline and then keep on refilling the pipeline, we get a really nice churn that we can start seeing that is going to translate into year-on-year growth and a steady baseline of revenues.

Okay. And your margins are about -- gross margin of 50%, correct? Around there?

Yes, gross margins have stabilized for the last few quarters in that 50% to 55% region.

It used to be a lot lower, I believe.

I think you're correct. I think -- and a lot of that has got to do that. We've changed from doing demonstrations or chasing research and development grants to having a set of commercially available solutions and platforms that we're providing to customers who are wanting to use these and it's becoming much more of a -- it's a commercial service offering that we provide.

Right. And it might be the last question but the contract orders that you put on the '25 guidance, $12.5 million. Does that include everything? Or you -- is that just a low number of certain -- could you do $50 million, $100 million in revenues. $12.5 million, that's not the number for the entire year. Is it for total revenue?

$12.5 million is what we're putting out there as guidance for this year. If you look at it, it will be 2.5x scale over the last year, now we did just over 2x from the year before that. And that is certainly what we see -- that's sustainable growth that -- that we can go and fulfill by maintaining tight control over costs and delivering high-quality products, because, ultimately, we are still needing -- these things need to be built and need to be shipped. But we are maintaining an ongoing focus on growth by doing growth without sacrificing quality and the ability to maintain margin.

Okay, all right. Well, thank you very much.

No. Thank you, Peter. Appreciate your question. Thank you for being a long-term shareholder.

As we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session, I would now like to turn the floor back over to Dr. Philipp Stratmann for closing remarks.

Thank you for being a shareholder and for supporting our ongoing growth and execution of our strategy. We are excited and look forward to continuing to deliver for you, our customers and all of our stakeholders. Thank you.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. We appreciate your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Enjoy the rest of your day.