Conference Transcript - POCI 2026-06-17

Joseph Forkey, CEO

I'm happy to talk to you about Precision Optics Corporation today. Our CFO, Wayne Cole, is here as well. If there's any difficult finance questions, he'll be answering those. As the name implies, Precision Optics Corporation is a technology company, so everything we do has something to do with optics. We have a number of specific technology areas within optics. Optics is very broad. We've made some decisions over the years to focus on some very specific areas within optics, which I'll tell you about. And we work with our customers mainly in medical device, although we're doing more and more in defense and aerospace, and I'll tell you a little bit about that as we go through. Our business model is relatively straightforward, so we develop technology. We take that technology out into the marketplace. We show it to potential customers. If our customers and we agree that our technology can enable their next generation product, then we enter into a program with them where we charge them basically on a time and materials basis. so this is a profit center, but we insist that while we're doing the design of their product and basically taking our technology, turning it into the color and shape and size that they need, they pay us on a time and materials basis, but we maintain the ability to use the intellectual property that we develop for other programs. Sometimes we have to negotiate a license for their program, but it's critical for us as a technology company that we continue to own and control the intellectual property. The real goal of the product development process is to get the program through the design phase, through the prototype phase, through the testing phase, so that we can roll the program into production. And because we've designed our technology into the product, we're the ideal partner for the production. For medical products and for defense aerospace products, they tend to be very sticky. So once we get a program into production, we expect it to last for a long time. We have some programs in medical device, we've been supplying the same product for 20 years and and one even for 30 years. And so the company grows as we get more and more programs through the product development pipeline and into production. The production increases and the company grows. We're at a bit of an inflection point today because we have two major programs that came out of the product development pipeline over the last couple of years and have gone into production. And so you can see here with our revenue historical, and the last entry here is guidance, but it's guidance for our fiscal year which ends at the end of this month so we have a July 1st through June 30th fiscal year and so you can see this is a pretty significant increase from 2025 to 2026 and this is being driven in large part by these two large programs which I'll tell you about you can also see that during this time period during this time period the engineering revenue which is the gray bar at the bottom, has come down. And that's because the two programs that were in the product development pipeline transferred into production. So product development went down, production went up. We're in the process of rebuilding that product development pipeline now. And so we expect that to increase as we move forward. So this big increase was really driven by the increase in these two production programs. It took us a little while in order to get the production infrastructure up and running as smoothly as we need to. And I'll talk about that as we go through this, but we're at a great place now with this increase in revenue and we expect over the long run for this to continue. Okay, let me talk a little bit about the technologies that we've developed that we have. The first one is micro optics and in this area we make some of the smallest individual optics in the world. We also have a design team that knows how to design for using these small micro optics and building them up into systems And then we have a manufacturing team that knows how to handle these optics and the mechanics that go with them and the electronics that go with them on these very small scales in order to be able to build entire systems that are among the world's smallest. The second area is 3D imaging in ultra-high resolution. And this really developed out of some work we did many years ago for Intuitive Surgical, developing their first 3D endoscope that was used with their robotic surgery system. The 3D endoscope market has sort of leveled off, and we can talk about that if anyone wants to, but we found that the same technology can be used in some of the next generation systems, looking at things like fluorescence, where you have image overlays, augmented reality, virtual reality. So we see lots of opportunities there. The third area is in the area of digital imaging, and this is really taking CMOS sensors that have been developed for laptops and for cell phones and using that CMOS technology in medical devices and in some cases in defense aerospace applications as well. So let me talk a little bit more about each one of these. The micro-optics really starts with our fabrication capabilities. So we have a micro-optics lab that does grinding and polishing of raw blocks of glass in order to make some of the smallest optics in the world. The smallest individual optic that we've made is about 50 microns in size, and that's about the width of a human hair. So we're starting with these very, very small optics that we fabricate in that fabrication lab. As I said before, we then have a design team and a manufacturing team that can pull all of these things together and turn them into entire systems. A great example of one of the systems that we make is a cardiac scope, which is small enough to go through the femoral artery and get snaked up into the heart in order to treat atrial fibrillation. This is a great example of where the micro optics and the micro optical system isn't just nice to have because you have a smaller incision. You just can't do the procedure if you don't have the very small optical system. So these are the kinds of micro optical systems that we're making. The second area is 3D endoscopes. And I already mentioned this really came out of work we did some 20 years ago. Without going into all the technical details, a 3D endoscope requires precision and specifications that are on the order of 100 times better. So two orders of magnitude better than a traditional 2D endoscope. And that has to do with the fact that for a 3D endoscope, you actually put two endoscopes side by side and lock them together. And one endoscope presents the image for one eye, the other endoscope presents the image for the other eye. This is what gives you parallax so you can see in 3D. As I said already, the market for 3D endoscopy has sort of rolled off and flattened off. So now we're finding other applications where this ultra-high-precision design and also manufacturing can be used in other places. And I'll talk about that a bit. The third area is digital imaging. I already said this is using the CMOS sensors, the image sensors that have been developed for cell phones and for laptops. We have a very strong partnership with Omnivision, which is one of the world's largest manufacturers, designers, and manufacturers of these image sensors. We've been working with them for about 10 years now. and we have a number of programs where we're using the CMOS-based technology in order to design and build entire endoscopes. One of the big benefits of the digital imaging system is that this replaces technology that had a much higher price tag, so the components that go into the system for a CMOS system are much lower, and we can actually get the price points low enough that we can now start talking about, and actually one of the big programs that's gone into production is for a single-use endoscope. So this is really a disposable endoscope. And that's opened up a whole other part of the market that the medical device industry is very interested in. So the key markets that we work in, I already mentioned our medical device and defense aerospace. As a small company, we have been very focused on medical device for a long time. We've been involved in medical device for our entire history. We were founded in 1982, so over 40 years we've been in medical device. The folks there know us. They know us quite well. They like to see what we're doing. And there are clear applications for endoscopic systems that can take good advantage of all of these technologies. For the micro optics, we can get to very small systems that can go places in the body that you just can't go otherwise. I already mentioned the cardiac case. There are other places like the brain where the incision size is really critical. spine. We do some programs with otoscopy in the ears or ophthalmology in the eyeball. We actually make an endoscope that gets inserted in the side of the eyeball. And if the incision is small enough, our endoscope's about a little over a millimeter. If the incision's small enough, the eye will self-heal. If the incision's too large, you have to put stitches in your eyeball, and nobody wants stitches in their eyeball, right? So these are the kinds of places where the micro optics have a big impact and have a lot of benefit. For the 3D endoscopes and ultra high resolution, I already mentioned a couple times robotic surgery. These are sort of whole body robotic systems, but there's lots of interest now in moving from high definition to 4K imaging, and so our technology can be used there. Also fluorescence, we're looking at biomarkers and overlaying the biomarker image with the visual image that the surgeon can see, things like that. And then finally, with digital imaging, I already mentioned single-use endoscopes. This part of the medical device industry is growing much faster than the rest of the industry. And that's because most endoscopes now are being converted from the traditional reusable endoscopes into single-use endoscopes. Single-use initially was pushed very hard by the FDA and by others in the industry as a safety issue. It basically, it virtually eliminates the possibility of cross-contamination where someone will come into the hospital with one issue and they contract the disease because the endoscope that's being used is not fully sterilized and so if you can use the endoscope once and then discard it it eliminates that possibility it turns out that the hospitals like it because it's much easier to track a single-use product than it is to track something that has to be cleaned and sterilized and sent out for repair it's not a capital equipment anymore and the surgeons really like it because they get a brand new image for every scope that they're using if you're using a reusable scope the image degrades just a little bit every single time and eventually it gets to the point where the surgeon's not happy with the image and they have to send that one out and get another image, another endoscope for the procedure. So there's a big push now in the industry. And as I'll talk about, one of our big programs is in single use. I mentioned that our outward marketing historically, because we're a small company, has been very focused on the medical device area. Over the years, we've worked in defense aerospace with a couple of companies and they have sort of watched what we're doing. And they have come to us with a number of programs now. We have two pretty significant programs for us in the defense aerospace market. And so as we're growing as a company, we're now making this one of our targeted areas that we're marketing outward to. And I will say satellite communications in particular, not surprising, we all know what's going on in the world, right? This is an area where we see lots of opportunities and we're getting lots of interest from the folks that we're going out and talking to. In general, the technology that we have reduces the size and the weight of the systems that are used in defense aerospace. Anything you lift off the ground, you want the components inside of that satellite, inside of that plane, that drone, whatever it is, to be smaller and lighter because you don't have to use as much fuel to get it off the ground. Directed energy weapons, without going into all the details, some of the laser weapons that are use for anti-drone capabilities require very small lenses on the end of fiber lasers in order to be able to combine more fiber lasers to get higher total energy. We've built prototypes for some of the directed energy weapons primes, but we haven't gotten big orders for them yet, but we think that there's probably an opportunity there. I talked earlier right in the beginning saying that we're at an inflection point. You can see it in our revenue. There are two large orders that are really driving the increase in revenue that have moved out of the product development pipeline and into production. The first one is a single-use cystoscopy program. Just to give you a sense of the ramp that we've been working on over the last two years, when this program initially started to move from product development into production, we were running at a run rate of about a thousand units a year. Today, we're running at a run rate of almost 50,000 units a year. So it's been a very significant increase in the production capability of the company. There have been some hiccups along the way and you'll see that when we look at some of the financials but we finally believe we've turned the corner on that this program today is running at a run rate of about eight million dollars and we have lots of indication that this will continue to grow going into the future the second major program is with with one of the large satellite companies that's putting up a satellite network satellite constellation if you like and we're making an optomechanical assembly that has very, very tight tolerances. Some of the elements that we're aligning are within five microns of each other in order to get the pointing of a laser beam that's sending a signal from one satellite to another satellite that's hundreds of thousands of miles away, pointing in exactly the right direction with the right characteristics of the laser. I told you in the beginning, 50 microns is the width of a human hair. So we're aligning things to one-tenth of the width of a human hair in all three dimensions. It's very challenging. it's very unique what we can do here and so this customer in particular and some others that we're talking to really recognize the value of this today this this product is running at about 12 million dollars a year run rate and we've talked on our last earnings call that our customer has told us that they have some some supply chain issues downstream and so they have some excess inventory we expect there'll be a bit of a pullback over the next couple quarters but long run this program is going to run continuously and it's going to continue to grow these satellites that we're supplying this for are in low earth orbit and low earth orbit satellites only survive for three to five years the kinds that they're working on then they actually have to turn them around and launch them into the atmosphere so that they burn up and don't become space junk so these in some sense are disposable satellites if you like it means that we'll have continuous revenue going forward on these one of the other things that's unique about us when it comes to the digital imaging systems is that we're horizontally integrated so we can do the entire imaging system from the point where you plug it into the wall to the point where you get the image out of the HDMI cable coming out the other side. And this was made possible in part by our acquisition of one of our, call them a friendly competitor, Lighthouse Imaging, which is an acquisition that we did four or five years ago. They had developed a core competency in the electrical engineering side of processing the images after they get turned into electrons. We had developed the core competency on the front end where we work with the photons, with the light that's coming in. And so putting those two groups together, those two technical groups together, really makes us a unique company in being able to supply the entire image chain from beginning to end. Customers like that because they don't want to have to go back and parse out who's responsible for which piece when something doesn't work well. And in fact, our large cystoscopy program that I just talked about, the SVP of ops who made the decision to bring us in, told me that he wouldn't have brought us in if we were POC by ourselves or Lighthouse Imaging by ourselves, but as the combination, we were the perfect partner to do this. And this is borne out by the fact that we're running in production today. The second thing that's a bit unique here is that we're vertically integrated so we can take the program from design to manufacture. This is built into our business model. And again, our customers see this as a big benefit because when they come to us to do the to design on the front end, they know that the thing that we're designing we're gonna be able to manufacture. There are customers who come to us, particularly with micro-optical systems, and they'll come to us and say, we have this great design that this designer put together and look how good it looks on the computer screen, and then we'll start showing them the size of the parts and we'll tell them that we have to redesign it because the intuition for how you put pieces together when you're talking about 100 micron pieces is very different than the intuition if you're putting one inch pieces together. right? So the fact that we're vertically integrated is a big benefit to our customers and part of our competitive advantage. About a year and a half ago, we launched a new incarnation, if you like, of the technology that we have. So what we've discovered over the years in doing a number of CMOS-based programs is, well, every customer has a unique set of parameters, a unique set of specifications, a lot of the underlying sort of internal guts of the system are very similar. And so what we've done is we've taken the best design elements for the different parts of a CMOS-based system, and we put them all together in a baseline system that we now can use as a starting point for new programs that our customers come in and ask us for. We've done this in a modular way, which means that if a customer comes in and has a unique requirement for one piece of the system we can redesign that one piece but keep all the other pieces that are around it so this does a number of things it reduces the time to market which we really like because we want to get to production our customer really likes it because they want to get into the market it reduces the cost that means we get a higher margin and we share some of that cost reduction with our customer which they like and the third thing is all of these these pieces have been tested and have gone through the the regulatory requirements testing for the FDA. So that means that the entire system that we put together based on this baseline model is likely to pass all the requirements as well. So it reduces the risk that we're going to have to go back and do multiple rounds of prototypes. This is our engineering pipeline. So you can see the two green lines on the top are the ones that have made it all the way across to production. These are the two big production programs that I mentioned and gave some detail on. You can see there are four or five other production programs that are in production as well that have been just going for a number of years. You can also see that there are four or five that are very close to production. They're past the verification validation stage, and so we expect these four or five programs to go into production in the next 12 months or so. And then you can see there are a number of programs that are still in the prototype stage. Our goal here is to get to two or three programs coming out of product development and going into production every year. Our goal is typically to have those programs contribute maybe a little under a million to somewhere between two and three million dollars a year when they first come out of production and go into sorry come out of the the product development pipeline and go into production so the go forward strategy is pretty straightforward we'll continue the expansion of the production lines that we already have particularly for these two large programs we'll continue to take those programs that are in the product development pipeline push those through into production and continue to ramp the total amount of production that we see. We're working to expand the product development pipeline because, again, the fact that we moved these two big programs into production was a great success because it increased the production revenue, but it also comes with a reduction in the product development. So we're rebuilding that product development pipeline now. The Unity platform program has taken a little longer than we anticipated to get traction in the marketplace, but that seems to be happening now. Two of the programs that we have in our pipeline now that are already orders that our customers are placed with us are using the unity platform and we have four or five other customers that we're talking to now about the unity platform and about programs coming into product development as a technology company we'll continue to invest in our engineering team i told you that we're investing a bit more now in the in the marketing side of things because we're targeting the adjacent market of defense aerospace outwardly as opposed to waiting for them to come to us there are a couple other adjacent markets where we see some applications so we'll continue some investments in that area. In the last 12 months, we've opened two new facilities, so we moved some of the engineering folks from the acquisition that we made into a new facility in South Portland, and we moved our headquarters from Gardner, Mass., which is in the middle of Massachusetts, a little farther east, to Littleton, Mass., which is now close enough that we can get access to the talent pool that's in closer to Boston. So we made a couple of facility updates. We need to do some more updates for the production side as the production continues to ramp. And then finally, I didn't talk a lot about this. I talked about Lighthouse, which was one acquisition that we made in the last five years or so. We made a second acquisition a few years before that, so we'll continue to look for other opportunities to accelerate growth with the acquisition. Just briefly on the financials, I've already talked about the revenue. You can see our gross margins dropped a fair bit over the last couple of years. This was really the consequence of us bringing these two big programs into production. We had some yield issues. We had some efficiency issues. It's a much larger production requirement than we've had in previous years. And so it took us a while to get that up and running. But the good news is we're quite confident that we have our arms around it now. You see the same thing with adjusted EBITDA. We see these as investments into the production side of the business. If you look more granularly at the quarter over quarter changes here from this fiscal year, which again ends in just a couple of months, You see Q1, Q2, Q3, we had continuous revenue increases, and you see, importantly, that the gross margin started to recover in the last quarter that we reported, which was the March ending quarter. And then also, along with this, you see that our adjusted EBITDA is just above breakeven. The last point I'll make here on the balance sheet is that we did do a financing in March, and virtually all of our major shareholders participated, which is great. Management and the board participated and we have a number of new investors, good high quality investors who came in as well. We raised a little over $11 million. And so at March 30th, we had 10 million on our balance sheet with less than a million and a half in debt. So the balance sheet is good and strong after we made that last financing. With that, I'll finish. and I think we have a couple minutes for questions. Three minutes for questions. Okay, great. The production that I was referring to is all domestic. But the broader answer is when we get in order, when we go into production, we'll source components from anywhere around the world. And we have a very robust supply chain because we have that second acquisition I didn't talk very much about was seven, eight years ago was a group called Ross Optical that's in El Paso. We've kept them operating as they have been. they buy and sell optics of larger sizes so they augment what we do with the micro optics quite well but they have a supply chain around the world some suppliers in Asia a whole bunch in Eastern Europe we're developing relationships in India so our attitude with the production is we'll buy the components from any place in the world if we can find someone who can make it and be cost effective but the final assembly is always done domestically because that's where the value add is and that's where the regulatory quality requirements are. To where it should be, yeah. So when we're fully utilized in product development, our margins are 45% more or less, maybe 50%. In production, it depends on the end use on the market. So the single-use products have a lot of pressure on the economics because the reimbursement rates are capped by Medicare and Medicaid, which are not true markets, right? So in those cases, when the volumes get high enough, the margins can be as low as 20% to 30%. Typically, at lower volumes, we'll start in the 30% to 35% range. For the satellite communications, those should be in the 40% to 45% range. Some of the other defense work that we do can be as high as 60% and 70%. So it really depends on the mix, and our target is to get to 40% with a blended margin. How do we forecast cash? I think the big contributors are working capital as we grow, right? And then we don't have a lot of CapEx. Our customers, we require our customers to pay us for the tools and fixtures that we need for production, even though we maintain ownership of the IP. So sometimes we'll tell them they have to pay for them. It can be their asset, but they can never move it, right? So we manage the CapEx expenses quite aggressively. The only other CapEx, of course, is the facilities, and we've done a lot of that already. It is, yeah. Yeah. So we incur some NRE costs, some R&D costs to keep the technology up. That's not right to keep advancing the technology. But as soon as a program comes into the product development, our customer pays for all that NRE. It is. Yeah. Now, to be fair, there are times when we have to go back and redo things a little bit.

Robert Blum, Head of Investor Relations

To get a sense for the new programs?

Joseph Forkey, CEO

What do you mean? Yeah, yeah. If you look at our engineering line in our filings, that's an indicator of how big the product development work is. Yes, that's right.