Hi, good afternoon, and thank you for participating in Beam Global's first quarter 2026 operating results conference call. We appreciate you joining us today. Desmond Wheatley, President, CEO, and Chairman of Beam Global is joining me by phone. Desmond will be giving his thoughts on 2026 and providing an update on recent activities at Beam Global, followed by a question and answer session. But first, I'd like to remind you that during this call, management will be making forward-looking statements, including statements that address BEAM's expectations for future performance or operational results. Forward-looking statements involve risks and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. For more information about these risks, please refer to the risk factors described in BEAM's most recently filed Form 10-K and other periodic reports with the SEC. The content of this call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, May 15, 2026. Accept as required by law, BEAM disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call. So I'm going to go ahead and start with a couple – a few key highlights. Our backlog grew 50% during the quarter from $6 million at December 31 of 25 to $9 million at March 31 of 26, with more than half attributable to the Smart City applications, approximately one-third to energy storage, and the balance to the EVR accumulated products. And perhaps most importantly, our Q2 2026 revenue through today has already exceeded our first quarter results, a clear signal that the business is accelerating. Operationally, the quarter was active. We made our first EV arc sale in Abu Dhabi for public EV charging. We launched a patented autonomous wireless charging system for autonomous vehicles. We were selected to supply patented battery systems for drones, supporting life-saving aerial operations globally. The In Europe achieved a record $1.7 million in smart city infrastructure orders in a single week across Romania, Crocea, Montenegro, Serbia, and Italy, approximately doubling the strongest weekly order volume achieved in 2025. And we secured the largest residential EV arc order to date in New York. We continue to operate with no debt, no going concern, and an unused $100 million line of credit. Turning to the financials, our first quarter revenue was $3.1 million, a decrease of 51% compared to $6.3 million in Q1 of 25. The decline reflects order timing, with two large orders moving out of the quarter, a seasonally slow period for our European operations, and the ongoing reduction in federal government EV spending. Our international customers comprise 51% of revenues in Q1 of 26 versus 25% in Q1 of 25. And revenues from non-government commercial entities increased 48% year-over-year to represent 78% of our total revenues, continuing the diversification trend we have been executing against. On gross profit, we reported a gross loss of $0.4 million or negative 13.3% compared to a gross profit of $0.5 million or 7.9% in Q1 of 25. Our gross results included $0.7 million of non-cash depreciation and tangible amortization in cost of revenues. Excluding these items, the adjusted non-GAAP gross margin was 9.4% compared to 20.6% in the prior year period. The decline reflects the impact of our fixed overhead allocations against a lower product volume and is not indicative of deterioration in our underlining unit economics, which continues to improve. Our operating expenses were $6.3 million compared to $16 million in Q1 of 25. The prior period includes a non-cash Goodwill impairment charge of $10.8 million, not represented this quarter. Excluding that charge, our operating expenses increased approximately $1 million year-over-year. This is primarily due to a $1.8 million non-cash provision for credit losses related to a single customer balance that was reserved in accordance with our policy. When we remove these one-timers, our reductions in compensation, the reduction is related to compensation, facilities, and other G&A expenses. which partially offset the increase. Our net loss was $6.9 million compared to $15.5 million in Q1 of 25. The Q1 of 26 net loss includes the $3.5 million of non-cash charges. Excluding these items, the non-GAAP net loss was $3.7 million compared to $3 million in Q1 of 25. We believe the relative consistency of our non-GAAP net loss across both periods, despite a 51% decline in revenue, reflects our discipline cost structure and is indicative of our meaningful operating leverage as revenue recovers. On liquidity, our working capital decreased $2.7 million to $6.2 million at March 31 of 26. Excluding the $1.8 million non-cash credit loss provision, the underlying operational decrease was approximately $0.9 million. Our cash increased $1 million during the quarter. We remain debt-free, and we have an unused $100 million credit facility. And we believe we are well-positioned to fund operations. In closing, our Q1 was a challenging quarter on revenue. Excuse me. I have something all of a sudden. Desmond, do you want to go ahead and hand it over to Desmond? All of a sudden, I'm joking.

Have a drink, Lisa. Thanks for that, and thanks all of you for tuning into this first quarter. Lisa, maybe you could mute your phone just while you choked to death there on the other line. Thanks, everybody, for tuning into the call. It was only about a month ago that we had the earnings call for the release of our 10K, and during that call, I went through a pretty comprehensive update on the happenings of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, both operationally and financially. So I'm going to keep my comments fairly brief today and leave plenty of time for any questions that you may have. Well, as Lisa said, our first quarter revenues in 2026 were not what we'd like them to have been. They are in no way an indication of an underlying or fundamental weakness in the business or our strategic plan. First quarter has historically always been a slow quarter for us. And that's particularly true of the contributions from our Beam Europe offices, where the orthodox Christmas and New Year pushes well into January. and weather and other considerations tend to slow down the deployment of the traditional infrastructure products which we manufacture and sell across Europe, like streetlights, traffic portals, and other street furniture. Coincidentally and unfortunately, from a timing point of view, we also had two large deployments of EVARC systems push from the first quarter into the second, which have had an outsized impact on our Q1 revenues. I guess we haven't lost those orders. They're both good orders, and we expect to recognize the revenue from them. Also, that's to be said that the war in the Middle East has not helped our efforts because we were actually anticipating some material revenues coming from our new operations being Middle East. But those, like everything else in the region, seem to have been put on hold while the authorities and decision makers prioritise dealing with the immediate impact of the war. I've just spent a significant amount of time at our BIM Middle East offices and while I certainly did observe a lack of momentum where all business dealings are concerned, it's also very clear that the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf region in general are determined to get through this conflict and come out on the other side stronger with even more aggressive plans for future growth and in fact we did actually make our first sale of EV arc for public charging in Abu Dhabi while I was there a couple of weeks ago we've already got it deployed for some other reasons but this was for public charging so while we didn't get the material contribution to revenues that we've been hoping for in the first quarter we have managed to make some sales in the Middle lease since that time and I'll spend a few minutes on my time in the lease later on the call. Back to our results. Like any manufacturing company with facilities across the world we have fixed overhead costs which do not reduce when the volumes of products which we deliver reduce. Those costs like rent insurance and other day-to-day operational costs associated with owning and maintaining our factories stay pretty much exactly the same whether we do a small volume of products or a very large volume. The result of this, as you've seen in the first quarter, is that our gross profits can be negatively impacted by the allocation of fixed overhead across a smaller number of units produced and delivered to the customer. That explains the decline that you see in the gross profits, which we reported during the quarter. But that's a metric that works both ways. As our sales volumes return to growth, and we certainly believe they will, the allocation of those fixed overheads becomes less and less burdensome. And in fact, we get a great deal of operating leverage coming from the fact that we do not need to invest in infrastructure to produce higher volumes of products we're already set up to do that i consider that the most important metric from an operational point of view are our unit economics and those i'm happy to report continue to improve and are currently running at greater than 30 percent across our entire portfolio with some products doing much better than that that's to say at the unit level we're spending less and less money to produce an individual product while our revenue numbers stay fixed or in some cases have even increased that in turn means that as our volumes increase and our overhead allocations are diluted over larger volumes of products those improved unit economics will return even better gross margins in the future we've demonstrated this to some extent over the last couple of years as you've seen improving gross margins when our volumes have been consistent or growing so while our revenues and gross margins declined during the first quarter. This is not part of a broader trend. I can say this with a high degree of confidence because again, as Lisa said, our contracted backlog was 50% higher at the end of the first quarter than it was at the beginning, showing growth in sales. Furthermore, I can tell you that as of today, we've already generated the same amount of revenue in just half of the second quarter as we generated in all of the first. And we now have the second half of the second quarter to continue this trend of growth, which we demonstrated so materially in the fourth quarter of 2025 which if you remember was 50 percent higher than the previous quarter it's also worth pointing out that we often generate more revenue late in any given quarter than we do at the beginning so that's another metric to consider incidentally the SEC is currently considering a move away from quarterly filing for companies like ours believing as I do that biannual reporting will be just as useful for the investment community and much less impactful and expensive for the reporting companies we spend an enormous amount of time and money going through this quarterly reporting had we already moved to biannual reporting i'm pretty confident that we could report a first half of this year which would not raise eyebrows for anything other than growth our sales and backlog numbers are increasing at a time when as i've already mentioned in previous calls we're responding to a complete cessation of orders of our electric vehicle charging products by what was previously our largest customer the U.S. federal government. And I think this is proof positive that our strategy of diversifying our product portfolio and also the geographic markets into which we're selling is working. Simply put, even absent what was previously our largest customer contributing to our revenues, we're returning to growth in sales and backlog. Revenue contributions from international customers were over half our first quarter revenues, up from under a quarter during the same period last year. That's a trend which I think we're going to see continuing and even growing as the year progresses. This shows that without a doubt it was the right move for us to expand internationally through our acquisitions in Europe and also the joint venture which we created in Abu Dhabi with the Platinum Group. In fact I can tell you that as of this moment the largest opportunities that we are currently addressing are all coming from our international expansion. Similarly our efforts to expand our selling beyond federal, state and municipal government customers are continuing to bear fruit. Sales to non-government entities in the first quarter were actually up by almost 50% and now comprise 78% of our total revenues in the quarter. When you consider that just two years ago, almost all of our revenues came from government contracts and the majority of those from the federal government, you can see that our efforts to broaden our sales funnel have really paid off. I'm particularly enthusiastic about the way our products are being used by new customers and in ways that we haven't previously seen. It's certainly a new thing for us to have our teams of battery engineers and scientists now perfecting battery solutions for top-secret weapons and highly specialized drones and robots. We now have U.S. law enforcement using our Beam Patrol product, which is a bundle of four electric motorcycles and our rapidly deployed North Grid charging products. Incidentally, this is a very popular solution in the Middle East. We recently presented this product to the chief of police of Dubai, and a cadre of senior ranking officers. Our Beam Middle East team is now putting together a proposal at the request of that law enforcement agency. We now have Beam Bike Solutions operating in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. This product bundle, which comprises 12 Beam Bike, Beam-branded electric bicycles, rapidly deployed in either scalable shoring infrastructure, and an application for Android or iOS, which controls the bikes and allows for billing, geolocation and a whole lot of other fantastic utility is also creating opportunity revenue for us which we've never had before i actually believe that this new opportunity will also increasingly provide a source of recurring and very profitable revenue another good example of a new technology solution which we've recently introduced to the market is our patented wireless autonomous charging for autonomous vehicles autonomous vehicles have been around for a long time but as with so many things solving for the last five percent of true autonomy has probably taken as much time investment and work as the first 95 percent but it looks as though we're there now millions of miles have been safely and successfully driven by autonomous vehicles on city streets across the world and the level of mainstream user adoption has surprised even many of the so-called experts in the field so while solving for that last five percent of autonomy used to be the biggest hurdle facing the industry now not surprisingly the biggest challenge faced by operators of fleets of autonomous vehicles is actually how to charge them. It might seem a bit surprising that the developers of this futuristic and very challenging technology have so far settled for predictable and traditional methods to charge autonomous vehicles. At the moment operators of fleets have all their vehicles come to a central location where a human being has to plug them in and try to charge them as quickly as possible so they can fleet as many vehicles as possible across a limited number charging cables. This is inefficient, very expensive, and certainly not autonomous. Beam Global's patented wireless off-grid charging technology allows an autonomous fleet operator to deploy charging throughout their service zone so that an autonomous taxi might never be more than two minutes away from the nearest wireless EV arc. Our research shows that we're able to keep autonomous taxis full throughout the day by simply having them charge for short periods on time between each ride this means that taxis no longer have to go back to a central location where there's an incredibly expensive and inefficient infrastructure waiting for them it also means that the infrastructure that they rely on to fill their vehicles is not vulnerable to centralized failures such as those that you get during a blackout or for some other reason the power fails to their centralized charging depot finally it means that we can provide about twice as many rides per vehicle as the current traditional taxi model provides in the markets we've studied. I think what that does to the cost and revenue model of those operators and you'll quickly appreciate why we're so bullish on this opportunity. This attitude beam technology is a game changer. I'm not alone in thinking that the autonomous vehicle are going to be the next big thing in transportation and a unique simple and highly efficient way of charting these vehicles will I believe bring very significant opportunities for growth and this is particularly true in the least where the regulatory environment and general appetite for these sorts of new technologies is much more favorable for the rapid and scaled growth that we expect to see. So it's clear that this geographic and product portfolio diversification and expansion has been crucial for us not just surviving the EV slowdown in the United States but actually it's been enabled us to take advantage of a whole new set of fantastic opportunities for which our products and technologies are ideally suited. I've said before that I'm convinced that the United States will return to electrification of transportation probably starting most aggressively at the federal level and when it does we'll be ready to take advantage of that returning opportunity too. What will be different next time is that it will come on top of and be effective to all the other revenue and profit opportunities that we've created in its absence. This level of diversification will not only create opportunities for more revenue and profits but it'll also insulate us from the kind of swings that we've just witnessed in this quarter where one or two large sales moving right can have an outsized impact on our results we're going to continue both of these diversification efforts as we evolve and as usual we're going to continue to do so with an extreme sense of financial discipline just as we always have on the product side you can see us continue to create new intellectual property in the first quarter we were granted patents which are important to defending our position with some of the unique and very relevant technologies we produce these patents which were granted both in the united states and the europe cover products which enable us to maximize off energy off-grid energy generation in ways which we're increasingly discovering are so very important in diverse markets across the world we also received another pattern for our battery portfolio which as i've said previously in this call is now creating opportunities and generating revenue for us in high growth military and commercial applications not least of which are the diverse and highly specialized unmanned vehicles or drones for which we are developing the spoke highly energy dense and safe battery pack solutions the drone market appears to still be in its infancy is growing very rapidly and is probably just a tiny fraction of what it's set to become being global is producing batteries for unmanned vehicles which operate in the air on the ground and both on and under the surface of the sea combining those activities with what we expect to see in terms of opportunity generation through our beam flight product i think you should expect to anticipate ever increasing contributions to our business from our focus on the drone market one of the most impressive attributes of our product portfolio It was its universal appeal anywhere I've traveled across the globe. I've just returned from a six-week business trip, which took me to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. I visited London, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi in Kenya, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Zanzibar in Tanzania, and Kigali in Rwanda before returning to the Middle East and then ending my trip in New York City. And those are all very diverse and different environments. And yet the enthusiasm and genuine need that I continue to discover for our products is universal. It's no product. It's no it's no secret that our products create a lot of value in New York City, where since 2015, they provide in rapidly deployed off grid electric vehicle charging and crucially vital backup power during grid failures caused by hurricanes or lack of grid capacity. Well, it turns out the utility grid constraints, the requirement for uninterrupted, robust and reliable electricity, and the provision of mobility are universal requirements, at least across those markets which I've visited in the last couple of years. While in East Africa, I met with senior government ministers, officials from the United Nations, NGOs, and commercial enterprises. Our ability to deploy transportation and energy infrastructure without going through construction or electrical work turns out to be just as important in East Africa as in New York City, although perhaps for somewhat different reasons, and also for many of the same reasons. Certainly, when talking to the United Nations about deploying tactical to democratize access to electricity and transportation in the region, Beam Global products' ability to provide that type of infrastructure without an ecosystem of service providers, officials and regulators and regulations who can draw these types of projects out and make them much more expensive for reasons both legal and illegal, it's a real game changer. It was encouraging to see the UN and other NGOs becoming so excited when they realized how much impact our products could have without all of the usual hurdles, risk, and never-ending processes. An indication of how much excitement there was around being global, perhaps, and the impact of our products can have in East Africa was the amount of mainstream national press coverage that my trip received. I was, in most cases, met at the airport, even sometimes at 1 o'clock in the morning, by the press, who were eager to question me about our energy and mobility products. I also spent time in interviews, both in studio and on location, discussing the merits of our approach and the enthusiasm of both government and enterprise in East Africa for these types of solutions. Again, these were not sort of esoteric niche publications. I'm talking about mainstream national media. Beam Global already has product deployed across broad swaths of particularly West Africa as a result of our acquisition of what is now Beam Europe. That team in Serbia has a great deal of experience in deploying infrastructure across many nations in Africa. That experience will be essential and a significant differentiator for us as we start to deploy our portfolio of innovative energy and transportation solutions and I look forward to bringing you news of our first wins in Africa and also the fantastic good that our products enable in environments where people have not previously had access to reliable and robust sources of electricity and even less so to affordable transportation. Just as there was never a universal adoption of landline telephones in Africa and yet now everyone has a mobile phone so I believe there will never be universal adoption of internal combustion engine vehicles. I do however feel certain that the young and growing population on the African continent will have access to mobility and that all of it will be electric we intend to provide solutions to cater to that enormous opportunity for growth products like our beam bike and beam patrol in particular absolute perfect fits as are our energy storage and generation solutions I also think it's likely there'll never be a mass and universal adoption of centralized utility grid like those to which we're used in the west Africa will have an opportunity to leapfrog that outdated model and develop an energy infrastructure which is highly disintegrated and dispersed, generating and storing electricity close to where it's used in a manner which is rapidly scalable and does not rely on vast centralized power stations and equally vast transmission and distribution infrastructure. That's a very last century approach to energy infrastructure and I firmly believe that the future will find an Africa which has universal access to electricity, most of which comes from renewable sources which are generated and stored close to the load now of course I'm describing an energy future in Africa which is made up of products just like the ones that being global patents and manufacturers today and I firmly believe that that market where over 60 percent of the population is under 25 years old will comprise a very significant opportunity for future growth and we opened the middle east not only because that market where there's a already a commitment to spend over a trillion dollars on sustainable energy infrastructure over the next decade or say provides excellent opportunity for our expansion but also because the location of the beam middle east headquarters provides an excellent access gateway to the african continent there's already significant investment from the united arab emirates and into sub-saharan africa and the politics economics and geography of that region make it an excellent portal for us well on the subject of the middle east we've just exhibited alongside our partners the Platinum Group at MITTE or Make It in the Emirates. This is certainly one of the largest, if not the largest, trade events in the Gulf states. We had a prominent and highly visible booth and we also had real-world deployment of our EV arc and Beambyte products working at the event. This was an excellent opportunity to get in front of the most influential decision makers and purchasers in the region. There's also an opportunity for us to further test the validity of our relationship with the platinum group tiered by his highness sheikh mohammed sultan bin khalifa online they certainly did not come up wanting and in fact again and again demonstrated their ability to bring the most influential leaders in the region to the beam middle east booth fortunately our products are so compelling and unique that once we're introduced to these types of influential people we do not have much difficulty in keeping their attention the fact is that while there were many fantastic solutions on display at this massive event you would have been hard pressed to find any which were more relevant and better suited to the Gulf markets than those which being global presented. As a result even during a time when we were justifiably concerned that the war might make the event less of a success than in previous years we were actually very encouraged by the volume of attendees and particularly the volume and quality of those attendees who visited of our location high ranking members of the government the military the police and industry particularly the oil and gas industry visited and spent meaningful amounts of time learning about our solutions I can't go into details at this point but oil and gas is now using our products in the Middle East as strange as that might sound to you I look forward to releasing more information about this as permitted by our very excellent and very very large customer over there the BNC Middle East has a significant amount of follow-up work prosecuting all of these opportunities and if sales are the best possible metric to judge one of these events then I believe they are then we were certainly not disappointed in that area in fact we actually sold one of the units that we had on display right there and then and deployed it for a customer the following day such as the robust and dynamic nature of our products that we can demonstrate electricity and mobility infrastructure products at a trade show and then have those products operating in the field for a customer less than 24 hours after the event concludes. Now before I wrap up I just want to come back to the financials for a moment or two and echo a couple of things that Lisa started out with. During 2025 we had to take a significant non-cash impairment of goodwill which was reflected in our net loss. This impairment of goodwill was driven by accounting rules and not by any belief on our part that there's been any decline in the value of our acquisitions. On the contrary. It should be obvious from the comments I've made during this call that our acquisitions are performing well and contributing significantly to the most material opportunities for growth that we have ahead of us. Now in the first quarter of 2026 we've taken another significant hit to the bottom line again driven by accounting rules rather than by what we actually believe is going on with the business. In this instance we've reserved for a couple million dollars worth of AR because the rules that actually tell us that that's what we need to do. But the fact is that we believe we will collect these monies. We have an excellent working relationship with a company to whom the AR is attributed and in fact I just spent a day with them in New York this week looking at a whole host of new and material opportunities which we hope to close together. This reserve has significantly impacted our bottom line and also our working capital just as the impairment did last year and that was purely driven by our share price but in both cases these are non-cash items and not in my belief uh truly reflective of what we're doing with the business so i encourage you all to look at our financial performance absent these non-cash impacts because it will give you a much better understanding for what's actually going on with the business and particularly where you're looking at the earnings per share, which are blown way out of proportion by these items. We continue to be debt-free, except for a couple of vehicle leases, and have sufficient cash and working capital to continue to execute on all of the opportunities that I've outlined during this call, hence no going concern. As a measure of our financial discipline, we've managed to hold our net loss essentially flat even in the face of what I believe is an anomalous decline in revenue in this first quarter we can only have done that through continuation of the rigorous discipline that we bring to all our financial activities when our revenue cadence returns to growth as I certainly expect it will we believe that we'll see a significant improvement in both growth and net profitability just as we have in the past please remember that as I said at the beginning this call we've already generated the same amount of revenue in the first half of the second quarter that we did in all of the first quarter so a good reason to believe that we will return to growth this year particularly in light of the fact that we very often get much more revenue in the second half of any given quarter than we do in the first so to sum up while we are disappointed in the first quarter revenue number which was largely driven by order timing and the war we were nevertheless able to continue to create an environment and set foundations for significant growth throughout the rest of this year. We're delivering products for incredibly relevant segments of the economy, both in the United States and the rest of the world. The work that we're doing with drones and autonomous vehicles is setting us up for what I believe could be potentially catalytic change, while our diversified product portfolio and geographic expansion is laying the foundation for credible and sustainable growth with upside associated with each value proposition and downside protection against political or market volatility I'm looking forward to a future earning pause this year in which I can relate more successes coming from each of the new verticals which we've developed and many others for now though I'll return the call to the operator and look forward to taking your questions thank you very much operator over to you thank you we will now begin the question and answer session to ask a question you may

press star then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then 2. And our first question for today will come from Tate Sullivan with the Maxim Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Desmond. Hi, good. On the UAE, I think you said you had a UAE sale and delivery on the same day of the conference. Is that correct and was it a EV dark and what was the timing around that?

Yes, I want to start by saying that that is not actually the first deployment of our products and the reason I'm just not really able to go into detail on the other deployment because of customer sensitivity so far. We don't believe that that's a situation that will persist because they're actually delighted with what we're doing and I think we will be at some point in the future able to discuss this. But you are quite right. But yes, we had a customer who was so impressed by the product and whose need was urgent and bought the product right there essentially off the show. And we deployed it rather than taking it back to a different location. We took it directly to the customer location and deployed it. And what's interesting about that is it's actually for public EV shorting. And we believe there's going to be a massive opportunity. more details on this and this customer coming up but they are a significant and central player in public electric vehicle charging in the region and they've got an awful lot of work to do there there's a really rapid increase in the deployment of electric vehicles alas almost all chinese in the region but there's a heavy push towards electrification and they need a lot of charging infrastructure and our ability to solve for this customer in a location where they had some urgency to deploy literally within 24 hours of the end of the event was a record that none of them have seen before and I think bodes very well for us as we continue to advance our sales there.

Do you have storage infrastructure? Do you have inventory available in the Middle East already with the joint venture partner?

Was that just related to the trade show? no no we actually we had to rob another opportunity which we believe will materialize and we will we do we are able to ship quickly from our facilities in Serbia four weeks on the water from Serbia to get there and so what we did is we approached the other opportunity we said hey listen we're you know with your permission we need to help this other customer out really quickly and they gave us that permission and we had promised them that we would expedite shipping a further product for them from our Serbian facilities and again I can't go into detail on this thing either but all I can tell is they said okay well in that case you need to ship a few more for us so we agreed to do that. Okay thank you very much. Yeah it was a good it was an excellent experience and obviously you know I mean there's nothing like selling product directly out of the show especially something like that and then there's nothing also like being able to fulfill a customer requirement with breathtaking speed that I mean literally they you know they have a lot of experience deploying good type infrastructure where they have to go through all the pain of the permitting and planning and engineering and trenching and electrical work and all that sort of stuff and I mean literally made their heads spin that we were able to get them up and running in less than 24 hours from the from the receipt of the purchase order so next question please The next question will come from Craig Irwin with Roth Capital Partners.

Please go ahead.

Good evening. Thanks for taking my question. Hey, Desmond. It was nice to see the backlog come up so quickly in the first quarter. So congratulations there. Now, I appreciate the really thorough commentary up front. And one of the areas that I'm very interested in these days is the drone market. And I spent the week at the Exponential Conference in Detroit, which is where most of the drone makers in the country gather to meet customers and regulators, et cetera. And, you know, your work with Ray Systems and then your other unnamed drone customer are your only two publicly announced contracts. You know, I assume that the customer engagement is also pretty substantial in that market as well. You know, I met many companies there doing business with end customers that are off-grid, everything from, you know, safari game farm owners using drones to help stop poaching of endangered species through to people doing daily 3D mapping of construction sites and obviously oil and gas surveillance and security surveillance, many, many applications that are off-grid, and you bring a credible solution. So, can you maybe flesh out for us what your engagement is with customers in the drone market? Do you see this as potentially additive to where you already have traction? And, you know, is there maybe another permutation of the EARC or your existing portfolio that would help you be super competitive in this market?

So that's a great question. I'm really sorry I didn't get to see you actually at that event. I hoped to be there, but unfortunately my travel in the Middle East and Africa prevented me from getting there on time. But look, you actually just brought up a couple of really interesting things For example, the anti-poaching activities While I was in East Africa and while I was in Kenya I met with the Kenya Wildlife Services And it just so happens that they are desperate for drone technologies to combat poaching but also to do the census, the counting the numbers of the sort of the wild large dream that's out there. It's one of their constant challenges is trying to figure out actually how many of these animals exist and where they are and what their needs and requirements are. So drones are going to play a very important role in that. But I'll tell you what else is. Well, before I come off that, and yes, they need off-grid charging infrastructure, just like our beam flight product to make that work, because where they operate they don't have electricity they don't want to run generators and you know there just isn't there isn't a better solution so the answer to your question is yes we have a very viable and very competitive solution for those types of things and that that's equally true in contested environments where you know you want to keep drones active in a mission in a contested environment but you don't have infrastructure to support them we have a game changing product in beam flight to make that happen. Additionally, we are also currently manufacturing batteries for drones. You mentioned a couple of those instances. The drone market, as you are very aware, is highly secretive about certain aspects of things that they do. And so as a result, we don't get permission, often from our drone customers, to describe exactly what we're doing with them. But as I said in my comments, we're now in drones in the air, on the land, and on and under the sea. And we're at the very early stages of that. Our ability to make bespoke and highly energy-dense batteries, which are form factor agnostic. So most drone operators don't want to carry around a big rectangle or a big heavy square. They want to try and fit energy storage into a form factor, which is more appealing to them. And we are uniquely, to my knowledge, we are uniquely able to do that. And that's why we, that's a big part of the reason we get selected by these operators. So we're at the very beginnings of this. And I see it as a huge growth opportunity for us, particularly in light of the fact that we have American-made batteries at a time when there's a huge amount of sensitivity around that. But I also want to come back to a couple other things that you mentioned. It's not just about drones for us. It turns out that in Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Services are also, they're having in common with everybody else who's involved in that space, the need for mobility solutions which don't rely on liquid fuels and internal combustion engine vehicles. For the same reason, frankly, the U.S. Marine Corps doesn't want to rely on those anymore. Expensive to get the fuel to a forward operating environment and, you know, lots of maintenance of risk associated with internal combustion engine vehicles that just do not exist with batteries and electric motors. And so one of the solutions that has got the most excitement there is our beam patrol solution. You've all seen these incredibly brave people, armed anti-poaching agents, moving around on the savannah, trying to track down equally armed and dangerous poachers. Well, our ability to put them onto electric motorcycles, as far as our beam patrol product, and allow them to very rapidly and more or less silently get up on top of the bad guys is just as important for those anti-coaching guys, in fact, probably more so even, than it is for the kind of law enforcement. As I mentioned, we presented this to the Dubai Police and Abu Dhabi Police Department while we're there, and our teams are in the process of putting together a proposal for them right now because it's a perfect solution for them. So I hope and I believe that you're going to see us not just increasing our groan penetration into those markets and playing a bigger and bigger role in the drone market but I also think you're going to see us deploying a lot of other mobility solutions electric motorcycles electric bikes off-road electric vehicles and those sorts of things to those types of environments where again liquid fuels are expensive I could by the way I can tell you that East Africa is having a real problem right now where fuel is concerned the fuel prices are skyrocketing there in ways that they're not here they import most of their fuel their oil from the middle east none of it's getting to them because of the Straits of Hormuz and it's a it's a really very very serious problem and being to the rescue we showed up just at the perfect period of time where everyone's like my god we can do all this stuff without relying on oil and using our own energy sources so yeah the timing's been very good for this and it's a great question and I want everybody to anticipate us doing a lot more within this growing market, but also with our other electric mobility solutions that don't require infrastructure or liquid fuels.

Well, Desmond, in there you mentioned fuel prices, right? And, you know, there's no coincidence that the used EV market in the U.S. was up about 40% as far as unit sales this last month. You know, the U.S. consumers don't face fuel scarcity, but they face a much more expensive proposition when they go to fuel their gas tanks. So, you know, we all know that EVs are out of favor with the investment public, but, you know, the value buyers, people that are spending their own precious dollars, are buying EVs, and I would assume that this translates into, you know, still healthy utilizations across the charging networks out there. Can you maybe comment about what your customers are seeing from a utilization level on their EV arcs they have out in the field? You know, has this, you know, kind of swing in interest in used EVs impacted the volume of incoming calls related to EV arc sales? You know, do you see this maybe bending the curve a little bit for you as far as how this comes together for you in 2026?

First of all, I know you travel a lot just as I do. And one of the things that you notice when you travel a lot is that everywhere you go in the world now, the adoption of electric vehicles is, I mean, it's just phenomenal. Just what I've seen in the last couple of years, the increase in it. And, again, particularly in places that, you know, seems antithetical. why would, you know, petro states like the UAE and Bahrain and Kuwait and Saudi be driving around electric vehicles? Well, because they figured out it's better to sell their all than it is to burn it. It's as simple as that. And so we're seeing a massive increase in adoption rates. But you're also right that in the U.S., that, you know, that EV falling out of favor thing, which, you know, I suppose it's for another conversation for another time to talk about why that happened but uh that that that thing is reversing now because people are seeing the incredible being reminded yet again of the incredible volatility of the of the you know fuels that are related to the oil and gas industry and the vulnerability associated very interesting article in the wall street journal this morning talking about the fact that we are you know oil prices have remained artificially low because the world is draining uh it's it's uh it's it's uh it's supplies that it's been sitting on its reserves rather but so that we they think that there's more pain coming even if the Straits of Hormuzza were to open up tomorrow they think there's a lot more pain coming later in the year where this is concerned even if the federal government you know does have a fuel tax holiday which of course that you know the wisdom of that money gets spent on things like roads and stuff so I you know there are a whole lot of problems with that but the long the short answer to your question is yes and you can see that through the increase in the percentage of sales to commercial customers that we've made where although the federal government's not buying at all and we you know we have seen some other reverses in some of the other governments and we're still those two the two orders that that moved right for us both of those were you know significant EVR orders and going into environments where yeah people who are feeling the strain from from increased fuel prices and perhaps recognizing that you know the risk and vulnerability around this is not a risk they want to take along with the just increasing acceptance of electric vehicles I think more and more people now are understanding that you know 300 plus miles of range is more than they need and the vehicles are very fun to drive don't require any maintenance or anything else it doesn't take much to tip a consumer and when they do they they tip really dramatically so yeah sorry long answer short answer is yes we are seeing increase in interest and as far as the utilization rates of our existing EV arcs is concerned they get hammered and that's because a lot of times people put EV arcs where they can't put traditional infrastructure and they do it because it's really vital to put the charging in those locations and so we see lots and lots of EVRs which are basically at capacity and that's something we used to kind of shy away from but now we're recognizing that's actually a real sales opportunity for us to go back saying you did the right thing first time it's time to repeat it three and four times because the adoption rates as we all anticipated have gone up significantly.

Well excellent that's good to hear congratulations on On the backlog progress in particular, and I'll take the rest of my questions offline. Thank you.

The next question will come from Ryan Stinks with V-Riley FBR. Please go ahead.

Hi, Ryan. Hey, Desmond. Thanks for taking the questions. Yeah, I'll start on the backlog. Lisa mentioned that half of backlog is comprised by smart city solutions and a third battery storage with a balance, largely EV arc. Is this how you're envisioning the revenue mix going forward, or are you more excited about certain segments or products outpacing the others?

The two things I'm most excited about right now from a point of view of catalytic change in our business in the future, and of course, you know, as the old Wall Street adage says, give a number or a date, but don't give both. So I'm going to tell you when exactly I think these things are going to happen. But the two things that I'm most excited about are, first, autonomous vehicles. I really, I think, you know, again, you don't tend to see it so much in America unless you're in markets like Austin and places where Waymo is already operating. But any of you who are on the call who have been to London will know how incredibly complicated it is to get around London. None of the streets are square or straight, rather, and street names change in the middle of the street and so on. Really complicated, very hard place to drive around. And yet Waymo is getting ready to deploy there with the regulatory approval. So it tells that autonomous vehicles have really come a long way. They're much safer to operate. Think about what will happen to insurance rates, the lack of parking requirement, no liquid fuels because they'll all be electric. I just think autonomy is going to be a huge deal. And what's broken in the autonomous vehicle market right now is the way people are charging. And they know it. We're talking to them and they totally understand the vulnerability, the costs, and the enormous task of trying to build these centralized charging depots with huge amounts of energy and huge amounts of risk associated with them. Our attented wireless autonomous charging solution totally solves for that, totally solves for it. And so I feel very confident that at some point we're going to make an announcement that we're doing something really meaningful there, and that's the sort of thing that could be a catalytic event for us. The other thing I'm very excited about certainly is the drone market. you know I mean all of us could read about that and we've seen the valuations coming from drone companies but it's much more than that the fact of the matter is drones are just incredibly effective Craig mentioned a couple of things you know that doing inspections in oil and gas industry and monitoring agriculture and all these other things we haven't even got we haven't even started on what you're going to see there and because we do some really special things with drones both on the charging and the energy storage side of it I think you should expect to see us playing a lot more in there. To your revenue mix question, no, that is not necessarily the way I see the revenue mix moving forward. The quarter was somewhat jiggered, as I've said already, by these two relatively large orders that moved right. Had that not been the case, you would have seen a completely different percentage make-up. What I'm working hard to do is get this company to a point where the percentage make-up from any given contributor to our business line is just not meaningful. And that's so that we can afford to take these hits when they come along without it being impactful to the bigger impact, to the bigger story. But at the same time, yes, smart cities, infrastructure is a very important part of our business, but we're a three-legged stool. It's mobility, it's energy, and it's intelligence and infrastructure. And we're attacking all of those and we expect to see growth in all of those areas but as I say the two things that have got me most excited right now autonomy and unmanned and I really think that you're going to see some remember everybody remember we three or four years ago we were trading at 75 dollars a share three quarters of a billion dollar market cap we are one thousand times the company we were then but the market's not giving us credit for that because the market doesn't view us doing anything that the market thinks is exciting right now. I think that can change very quickly with things like autonomy and within the drone market. And Beam has done a lot of work over the years developing a lot of very good patented technology that are perfect solutions for this. And then I guess the last thing I'll say is Africa. You know, you've thought of a billion-plus people there, 60% of them under 25 years old. Don't think that there's no money there. There's a lot of money there, both internally and also coming from other parts of the world. the UN was talking about bringing you know Brussels money down for some of the things that we're we're talking about doing there's a gigantic opportunity on that continent for us as well and I just don't know of anybody that's better suited to it that has a better ability again because of what as I said in my comments what gets people excited down there is if you can get everyone out of the the ecosystem for deployment construction electrical work permitting approvals all of these are opportunities for graft and costs and corruption and all the other things We just don't have any of that. We show up in a 20-foot container, and our relationship to the system is to quite single invoice, paid, goodbye. And that's just a very powerful solution to bring to a market like that. So I've got lots of stuff to get me really excited at the moment. And, you know, we've worked long and hard to position this company to do that. Our growth internationally and the growth in our product portfolio has positioned us just incredibly well to take care of it. and we've got the discipline financially to survive swings in the market and other things like that to the point where we can really take advantage of these things. That's going to be good for the company, good for our customers, and very good for our shareholders.

I appreciate all that detail. And then secondly, it sounds like revenue has really picked up here in the second half or rather the first half of the second quarter. Is it fair to expect further acceleration if the conflict in the Middle East is resolved, just given your opportunity there?

I think it's the fairest thing to expect is that if that conflict is not resolved, we are all in for a lot of hurt. And I'm not just talking about being global. But also, it has been incredibly, what's the best word I can use here without causing offense? And it's been a very unlucky timing for us that that war took off because we have been making good progress there. Again, our partners in the Platinum Group have put us in front of the very, very much the right people. And we have very, very much the right products to do that. But it's tough to get anybody to move forward with any type of major investment or anything at the moment because, again, they're thinking. I'll just tell all of you, while I was there, I had several sleepless nights because there were air raid warnings. and, you know, alerts coming in because every time, you know, the administration did something like Project Freedom, for example, the Iranians struck at the Emirates and, you know, again, it's not, you're not in fear or anything. It's not like there's bombs dropping around your life, but it's just disruptive. You're not sleeping properly and everybody else is thinking that way too. And we need this to end right away, you know, as quickly as possible for everybody's sake but but I suppose the corally to that is that yes you're right that I believe that once it does come to an end once things do free up over there I think you're going to see some significant contributions to our revenue and to our bottom line from that market that's why we went there and it's if you do spend time in that region and if you do look at what's going on there you don't need to go there you can just google it with autonomous vehicles with electrification of transportation and with their commitment to sustainable infrastructure and figuring out what to do with their oil other than burning it themselves but just one other quick comment on this the United Arab Emirates has pulled themselves out of OPEC now OPEC was previously limiting them to something like three million barrels a day they have capacity to go to five million barrels a day so the little bells going off in my head are they're going to more or less double their revenue to the UAE where we are and so there's going to be more cash for this kind of technology advancement post oil world that they're building with a vigor and by god do we intend to contribute and to to benefit from that.

I appreciate that and I'll turn it back. Thank you.

The first question, the next question will come from Noel Parks with Toohey Brothers Investment. Please go ahead.

Bye Noel. Good afternoon. I apologize if it It turns out you've already touched on this, I got on a little late. But I was wondering, particularly for the EVRs, you know, as we sort of see us maybe coming full circle back with energy security, you know, suddenly back on the front pages, one product line that had been pretty robust for the industry, charging industry overall was the outlook for sort of return-to-base fleet-type charging. And I just wondered if between either the U.S. or what you see in some of the emerging markets, sort of what the status of that business line is.

I mean, fleet has always been a very big part of our business and, you know, continues to be. Fleet operators are very good at figuring out total cost of ownership and figuring out what maintenance schedules look like. So they're the easiest people to convince about electric vehicles as soon as they get over their range anxiety. And then, you know, with a product like ours, we're able to go to a fleet operator and say to them, how would you like to have zero unit cost for energy moving forward? Think about what that means to budgeting. Imagine a fleet operator today who has to budget what future diesel or gasoline prices. I haven't got a clue. I mean, no idea. Nobody last year would have forecast that gasoline prices were going to do what they're doing right now because nobody last year would have forecast that the Straits of Hormuz were going to get shut down by this war. So just a forecasting aspect of this murder. With us, it's pretty easy to forecast the unit cost of energy from our products. It's zero forever. And so those sorts of things have always been important to fleet operators. I think you're going to see much more emphasis because of the points that Craig brought up about just the fact that these oil prices and volatility and uncertainty around that are going to drive more and more people, particularly operators, to electric vehicles, and so that you're going to see more and more of that. But to your point about return-to-base type sharding, I think that's very appropriate for certain types of fee operators. You know, New York PD, who's one of our customers, you know, lots of the Army stuff that we do and all that, those are vehicles which do always return to a base, and they often spend a long time idle. Even if they work two shifts, they still spend eight hours a day idle, somewhere and those are really good at addressing those. We can charge six fleet vehicles at the same time off a single EV arc at night time off our batteries and still provide them with a full daily range replenishment that the average fleet vehicle needs. So that makes sense. But I'm actually much more interested in this highly diversified charging infrastructure particularly where autonomous fleets are concerned. We don't want them going back to base. We want them a taxi should drop you off somewhere, be two minutes away from the nearest EV arc, jump on it, spend 15 minutes on that EV arc get back all the range that it's using on the last trip and just continue that rinse and repeat all day long 24 hours a day and as I say our own research what we've done look is look very carefully at the miles that taxis drive the incidents of their uses and all that we looked at all of that and we have figured out that with an EV arc we could we could keep an autonomous taxi operating and actually provide twice as many rides as a traditional taxi does or or one that returns to a base just by giving them this pop-off charging the whole time. So charging becomes like Wi-Fi everywhere, and the fleets are able to operate the whole time. And when you think about, again, what that does in terms of cost reduction, but also revenue increase per unit, it's really phenomenal. So lots of increase in fleet usage.

Great, great, and another thing, just of your sort of newer generation of product lines, I'm just wondering sort of beyond say EVR or the Legacy Streetlight business in Europe, which sort of the newer product lines is closest to, I don't know, sort of like maturity in terms of gross margins as opposed to some of the ones that are that are still a ways away maybe just because they're they are so new anything that's based on the EVARC product line is closest and so that being patrol, being bike, being scoot those because they are based very heavily

on the existing EVARC platform just performing completely different tasks with different value propositions uh the gross is uh is the is the one that's easiest to forecast and manage because it's almost exactly the same production schedule and by the way that was a very deliberate uh strategy on our part i have i've always liked the idea of having a broad section of products that have a very narrow requirement from a logistics supply chain and manufacturing uh point of view for just a reason that you just brought up um certainly uh beam flight still very nascent and what that's to do with the fact that it has to be uh pretty much bespoke for the for the drone that it services uh so it's it's harder to to to you know to to get the margin uh to forecast the margin accurately on that uh in the early days however it creates so much value uh that we we anticipate being able to get that on the on the top end um and then being spotted still young that's a streetlight replacement still young and we're still making very significant getting improvements to that. But the later generation that have been deployed costs far less money to produce and are much more impactful than the first that we deployed. And that's probably a journey that's got some legs on it. Just like EVARC. I mean, EVARC, we spent a long time getting that to the point where we can produce them as inexpensively as we can. And I believe, I believe, and Lucy, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that unit economics on EVARC now are better than 40%. We're 30 plus percent across our entire portfolio of products in terms of unit economic, gross margin, unit economics. But I think that EVR is closer to 40%, particularly when we make them in Serbia.

Terrific. Thanks a lot. Thank you.

This will conclude our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Desmond Wheatley for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Thanks again, everybody, for your time and for your continued interest. I just would, you know, again, point out that this has been a bit of a disappointing revenue and gross margin point of view quarter, but it is in no way an indication of what's happening at the company as I said earlier we're saw a thousand times what we were back when we had a three quarters of a billion dollar market cap and then also please please please guys as you write about us particularly when you're talking about EPS please take into consideration the non-cash impact on these things because it's just throwing us all over the place that impairment charge last year which again our acquisitions are far better than we've hoped them to be not worse but we had to take that goodwill impairment and and then this this other non-cash event this year just it's just great to let people know that that eps number's got a lot of non-cash stuff in it um i'm not telling you your jobs just just telling you how frustrating it is to me to have these numbers sometimes get out there and people you know people call me and they start screaming at me and say hang on did you read the did you read the filings you know um but beyond that just very grateful for your for your attention great questions and looking forward to the next one so thank you the conference is now concluded thank you for attending today's presentation you may now disconnect