Good morning, and welcome to the Ocean Power Technologies Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. A webcast of this call is also available and can 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. [Operator Instructions] Now I am pleased to introduce Bob Powers. Please go ahead, sir.

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, 2025. 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.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Fiscal 2025 was a transformational year for OPT. We delivered real measurable value in a global market undergoing rapid change, and we entered fiscal year '26 positioned to lead in the sustainable data-driven blue economy. Today, I'll walk you through our most important achievements, the momentum they've created and the opportunities ahead as we execute our strategic growth plan. In fiscal '25, OPT was granted a U.S. Department of Defense Facility Security Clearance at the Secret level, a milestone that significantly expands our eligibility for classified defense work. This clearance not only affirms OPT's compliance with federal security protocols, but also opens the door to high-value multiyear programs where few companies are even allowed to compete. It expands our addressable market and deepens our partnership potential. Let's talk about backlog and visibility. I'm incredibly excited to announce that we entered fiscal '26 with $12.5 million in funded backlog, the highest in our history. This reflects multi-quarter fulfillment of both international defense and commercial contracts and signals strong customer confidence in our solutions and our ability to execute. It is a clear indicator that our strategy is working and that demand is real and growing. Over the past year, we deployed our artificial intelligence capable Merrows and WAM-V platforms across the Middle East, Latin America and the Indo-Pacific, establishing a meaningful global footprint in allied defense and commercial markets. These deployments validate not just demand, but our readiness to deliver. They demonstrate that our autonomous platforms can operate across maritime, surface and subsea domains in some of the world's most demanding environments. That's real-world mission relevance and it sets us apart. We also expanded key partnerships with defense, drone and subsea leaders, including Red Cat, Teledyne Marine and regional integrators in the…

Thanks, Philipp. Let's begin with our financial performance for the year. Fiscal 2025 was a record year for revenue. We generated $5.9 million, a 7% increase over the $5.5 million recognized in the prior year. What makes this growth especially meaningful is that it was achieved alongside a 26% reduction in operating expenses, which I'll cover in more detail shortly. The revenue growth reflects the strength of our strategy, the discipline of our execution and the growing demand for OPT's autonomous and maritime solutions. One of the biggest drivers was our expansion in Latin America, which made a meaningful contribution to both our FY '25 revenue and the $12.5 million in backlog Philipp referenced. This underscores our focus on diversifying revenue across high-growth international markets, and we believe it sets the stage for future expansion. Looking ahead, scaling revenue remains a key priority as we convert backlog into deliveries and expand into new channels. Our focus remains squarely on delivering consistent performance and long-term value for shareholders. Turning to expenses. Operating expenses for fiscal 2025 totaled $23.4 million, down 27% from the $32.2 million in FY '24. This $8.8 million reduction reflects deliberate organization-wide efforts to optimize headcount, reduce third-party costs and tighten expense control across all functions. This level of cost discipline, combined with top line growth shows that we're building a model with meaningful operating leverage, a critical step towards sustainable profitability. As a result, our loss for the year improved by 22% from $27.5 million to $21.5 million. This progress shows we're staying disciplined with spending while still growing the business and meeting our customer commitments. On the balance sheet, as of April 30, 2025, our total cash position, including cash, restricted cash, equivalents and short-term investments stood at $6.7 million compared to $3.2 million for the…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Glenn Mattson from Ladenburg Thalmann.

Congrats on the strong growth in backlog and pipeline. I'm curious a little bit more about the pipeline. Just can you give us some understanding and background about how you compile that number and just some background around the conversion and how well -- how mature some of that is? So just color on that would be great.

Yes, absolutely. Glenn, thanks for being on. The way -- as you've seen, the way we look at our pipeline, it is everything that is an actual opportunity where we're under discussions with a customer. With the retooling of the commercial team, and you've seen we recently onboarded a new SVP for Commercial, Jason Weed, who's a retired U.S. Navy captain and others that we've brought on. We've really positioned the company to now start increasing and accelerating the conversion rate as we're looking at what is a qualified opportunity or opportunity under negotiation with the customer to then focusing on the delivery portion of the pipeline and then converting that to revenues. With the key appointees in the present administration in place, we feel very confident about seeing an increase in the conversion rates. And equally, as the world starts recognizing that a hybrid fleet and unmanned operations in the ocean are a critical portion of operations, we look forward to participating in that. So I think as we stated, these are qualified opportunities, opportunities under negotiation, and we are increasing -- or we're feeling confident about increasing the conversion rate as we move through the current fiscal year.

And then I guess as a follow-up, the -- you've done a great job cutting costs. Can you just talk about your capacity and ability to meet demand should it accelerate faster than you expect or...

Yes, absolutely. We've got -- obviously, we've got the facility in New Jersey, where we got just under 60,000 square feet. We got our smaller prototyping facility in the Bay Area in Northern California. And under the leadership of our operational team, we have redesigned the layout of parts of our facilities so that we can scale up more quickly. But obviously, as you pointed out on the cost cutting, we're doing so in a way that is conscious of working capital. so that we can convert as and when required without front-loading too much into inventory prior to starting the conversion.

Next question is coming from Peter Gastreich from Water Tower Research.

Peter from Water Tower. So congratulations to the team on your results and executing on your strategy in 2025. It's really great to see this meaningful momentum in your backlog and also the cost cuts. It looks like you're well positioned starting off in 2026. I just have a couple of questions. One on the backlog and the other is on the gross margin. Just related to the backlog, could you talk -- first of all, so thanks for the previous question on that as well. But could you please talk about the breakdown of the backlog in terms of product type? Any type of color you can give on that would be great.

Thanks for being on, Peter. And it is -- what we are pleased with in the backlog is the fact that it is a very healthy split between buoys, vehicles and associated services. What we're also starting to see, and as I mentioned in my remarks earlier, with becoming an AUVSI Trusted Operator, we're seeing an uptick in service revenues related to training that are sitting in -- starting to sit in backlog and certainly sitting in the pipeline. So we feel good about the fact that this is not based on one single one of our solution, but truly is part of what we set out to do, which is deliver autonomous persistent and resident ocean intelligence, whether that is buoys, vehicles, enabled software that sits at the edge across them or whether it is services that are related to getting these items deployed.

Okay. And yes, just a question on the gross margin. So over the last year, your gross margin was on the decline and -- just looking out towards your backlog right now and eventually having that feed through, how should we be thinking about how your gross margin would be evolving sort of broadly going forward?

Yes. I think we're seeing an uptick again where gross margin is going to start heading. Some of that has been related to the fact, as Bob mentioned, we've been working on projects such as Overmatch and others, which have been revenue generating, but more focused on larger scale demonstration efforts. As we transition further into operational use of the systems, we look forward to seeing that corresponding uptick in gross margins, which are driven to some extent by the service revenues that I just mentioned as those, a, they're recurring; and b, they do carry with them a higher gross margin when we start delivering them.

Thank you. We reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over for any further or closing comments.

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

Thank you. That does conclude today's teleconference and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.