Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Welcome to the 91st Emerging Growth Conference and day one of our two-day virtual investor conference. I'm Ana Berry. Just a few notes. Today, we're running until 4:40 P.M. Eastern. When we switch to the next company, you'll see a black screen for a moment, but don't go anywhere. That's just us moving over to our next presenter. If you do experience downtime, refresh your browser, and our platform does work best on Google Chrome. If you're watching from an Apple device, you have to hit the play button to start the session. Now, during each company's presentation, you can submit questions through the webcast module, and we will attempt to address as many of these at the end of the presentation. Remember, all of our conferences are uploaded to the Emerging Growth Conference YouTube channel, so please subscribe.
That's youtube.com/emerginggrowthconference. Let's begin today with Vislink Technologies. It trades on the OTCQB under the symbol VISL. It's a global technology leader in capturing, delivering, and managing high-quality live video and associated data. Happy to welcome its CEO, Mickey Miller. Welcome to the conference today, Mickey. Nice to see you.
Thank you, Ana. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you to everyone who's joining today. We look forward to telling you about our company.
All right. The floor is yours, and call me back when you're ready for some questions.
Okay. Fantastic. Thank you, Ana. Vislink is a mission-critical, intelligent, wireless ISR network. Our ISR, meaning intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. We're a global leader in providing mission-critical, high-performance, real-time, AI-driven video intelligence, command, and control. We operate in the most marquee, high-stakes environments, like the Super Bowl. Wimbledon is in our sports and media product. In defense for training for ISR, our Air-to-Anywhere product, bringing images from the air to agents and warfighters on the ground. Then public safety, effectively doing the same thing. It's also included border and installation security. It's cutting-edge, hybrid, waveform-agnostic. It could be RF, MANET, 5G, 3GPP, satellite, combined with AI in complex environments. Just a Q4 2025 update. Yesterday, we announced our earnings. 2025 was a transformation year for us.
We did a hard pivot into growing our military government business, and we reported a $5.2 million quarter in Q4 of last year. That was a 56% increase from Q4 of 2024, and 37% increase from Q3 of 2025. Combined with that, we had a 29% year-on-year OpEx reduction, which we've done through consolidation and through implementing AI into our organization to become more efficient. What's been most important for us is our pivot from traditional broadcast. The broadcast live production business is a great business, but it's a 1%-2% growth industry. We see a much larger opportunity on the MilGov and the ability to dual use the same capabilities and technologies and apply those in defense.
For the first time, we're seeing our order base this year increase to above 50% for military government orders versus a traditional 24%. We made several acquisitions over the last few years to increase the technology capability we have and the reach of our products. We had five dual-use products launched that are now having a lot of success in the ISR, UAV, and tactical networking areas. We consolidated our manufacturing facilities. We have customers coming to us that were on the crewed side saying, "Can you help us on the uncrewed side to use your platform?" We've seen early momentum. In January of this year, we had $2 million of revenue and a $300K EBITDA, and our MilGov business was over 50% for the month.
Just some investment highlights as we see it from our perspective. This defense pivot, we all know what's happening in the world, not only here in the U.S., but also Europe as well as Middle East and Asia. Everyone is increasing their percent of GDP for defense spend for more secure environments. With that, we see a clear path to profitability as we grow in that business and as we align our platform to be able to effectively deploy our resources and our capabilities. The great thing about our company is we've got a long history of already dealing with defense and public safety. That includes the U.S. Army, the Air Force, DHS, Airbus, the OEMs, Northrop Grumman, as well as royal forces throughout the globe.
That's what we think with developing our new product portfolio that we've been working diligently on the last 18 months, that now we're in a position to accelerate those into traditional customers. We see that accelerating growth already happening, as mentioned in our Q4 2025 results. Our differentiating model is that we're waveform ag nostic. It could be RF, it could be 5G, satellite. We're able to combine those in a mission-critical way to be able to meet our customers' needs. We're at the intersection of analog and digital, of RF and IP, and we can use whatever RF platform or medium that's required to be able to give our customers a SWaP, meaning size, weight, and power, and it's optimized for that specific use case and mission.
We already saw $2.7 million of orders in our initial products. We view it as an attractive entry point in what we see as a high-growth defense technology business. This is an example of some of our marquee customers that we have in the segments that we serve. On the defense side, as I mentioned, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, as well as MODs throughout the world. Government safety here in the U.S., Baltimore County and Baltimore City, New York PD, New York State Police, LAPD, the DHS all use our technology to bring the image from the ground. Aerospace and defense, obviously in the markets we're in, we need to have good OEM relationships to be able to deliver those into the ships, and we've got great relationships across the board.
On the global media and broadcast side, the biggest of the biggest users, Disney, Comcast, Paramount, BBC, Amazon Prime, all major leagues throughout the world. Specifically what we do on the defense side is Air- to- Anywhere. We bring high quality, low latency, high-resolution images from the air to the ground, so you can do proactive surveillance and reconnaissance. Examples of the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl has just immense RF traffic. You can imagine all the cell phones, all the different microphones, all the different cameras. At this past Super Bowl, we had 56 simultaneous wireless cameras in a very congested RF environment, all providing low latency. As you can imagine, for a broadcaster to have a blue screen for an event like that would not go well with the content owners.
We're there to make sure that they can go from a line camera to a wireless camera with no interruption. A great example of what we do with MotoGP, one of the fastest-growing brands in the world, largely due to a lot of our technology, where we have over 100 cameras. There's cameras, four cameras on every bike. Some have it in the helmet, some have it on the shoulder. We have 36 live simultaneous RF channels. They pick this up and bring it to 22 venues in 18 countries over 36 weeks, and we're able to adopt and adapt into each one of those countries. It's proven in extreme RF environments, that's where our core competence exists.
Where we were before, largely broadcast fragmented product portfolio from a lot of acquisitions over many years, distributed engineering, four manufacturing facilities, high cost structure, limited profitability, and we had exposure to low margin declining SatCom markets. We now have defense being a goal of 50% or above for our orders in this year. We're focused on taking that technology that's used at the highest end of entertainment to use in a dual-use technology portfolio on defense. We've got a single world-class engineering center now, streamlined manufacturing facility. We're able to be profitable at sub-$20 million, and we've exited the SatCom business, where we saw lower margins and we were a number 50 as opposed to being top one or two in our markets. We're ready to scale this in the defense ISR, public safety, and tactical networking business.
As I mentioned, we had two major acquisitions over the years. Mobile Viewpoint brought us bonded technology, which allows us to bond whatever medium, whether it's Starlink or Webex or 5G, 4G, mesh, any IP platform we can bond. It allows you to do adaptive modulation. There's forward error correction, so if you have bit loss, you can pick that up, and you don't see it in your video. It enables to adapt the modulation so that if the channels are not there, you can effectively modulate it down so you can still get video. Then BMS was our acquisition that gave us exposure to Middle East and Asia from an ISR standpoint. Right now today, most major Gulf countries and countries in the Middle East use our technology for ISR, as well as in Asia.
BMS also had a good position with DHS, which we were able to leverage. They were the number two provider, and now we've combined. Why Vislink? Why do we win? As I mentioned, we're combined hybrid RF, cellular and satellite, sub-frame, meaning sub 30 ms, high reliability, high resilience. We have systems, not just a product, but a system that allows you to get these images to your representatives and agents in the field. We're able to bond across a multitude of different frameworks, and we have mission-grade SWaP, Size, Weight, and Power that are certified to the airborne use case. These are not products where we just say, "Hey, this is a broadcast product. Use it in airborne." It's designed to the DO-160 format, which is required for aviation, and it's understood by our customers to have all those qualifications.
Last is our MilGov incumbency. We've got, as I mentioned, over 200 customers that we've done business with over the years, and now it's bringing them our new technology so they can see how they can upgrade what they did with our installations in the mid-teens. We're uniquely combined in this RF engineering, ultra low latency video, hybrid networking right at that intersection of analog and digital. Our core differentiation from our technology capabilities, as I mentioned, the software-defined networks, we're able to handle wide band, so you don't need an individual front end for each one of your products. We can go from, you know, 1 Gb to 7 Gb. Then we have advanced RF and engineering around our antennas. As you can imagine, in the world of the future, antenna technology is very critical.
We have the capabilities there. We're optimized around video as video becomes such a key part of all communications, and then it's mission-critical hardware platforms that we're building on. We've taken this capability and now pivoted and directed it specifically tow ard s our MilGov customers. Some of the solution segments that we approach, reconnaissance, surveillance, security, reconnaissance and surveillance in the drone world, also for mobile or emergency response, disaster support. Obviously, the core, this all started in the news gathering element. Then in sports and entertainment, in studios, whether it's a Disney studio or ESPN studio or in venue at every major event you can imagine, the Dallas Cowboys, NFL teams, motorsports, as we mentioned, we're in F1, we're in MotoGP, and then body worn as well. We're trusted by defense, public safety, and broadcasters globally.
This gives you a sense of how we've driven our sales over the last few years and where we expect to go. We used to be an 80% broadcast and live production company from an orders perspective. Last year, we saw 45% of our orders in the military government area, and we see that to increase to 50%. Our goal is to get to 50%, 70%, 30%. That's not with broadcast going down. That's with broadcast growing at that 1%-5% rate. Overall, we expect to have good growth for the company with hyper growth in the military government area. Just an example of that, some of our new product introductions that we see getting traction here in Q1, the Aero5. We had our initial order with Airbus. This is a product that takes bonded cellular.
You can combine it with satellite, and I'll show this in a moment. AeroLink. We had our initial order with Danish MOD, which we announced last year. That deployed. That was a $1.1 million opportunity. It's providing surveillance for the Danish MOD for their borders. Mobile Commander II. We had a large European public safety organization that is using that to take images from the ground to their agents. That was quite a large order. We deployed our new product, MeshConnect, for the first time at the 2025 Super Bowl. Our RF over Fiber is being used by European broadcasters and public safety in multiple regions of the world. We're really excited about our new products. We've got a whole host of products to follow on that meets the needs of our defense and public safety customers, but also is used in broadcast.
This just gives you an example of our Aero5, what it does. Essentially, in a helicopter or fixed wing, you can put. They'll have an onboard camera if they're doing surveillance, and you can take our Aero5, which will give you the ability to have up to eight SIMs. Eight, think about it as wireless channels. If you're in the U.S., you could pick three with AT&T. You could pick three with Verizon and two with T-Mobile or all with T-Mobile or however you want to do it. Then you have Starlink that you combine it with. You need to make sure whether you're in the mountains or whether you're in urban areas or wherever you are, that you have high fidelity connectivity.
Basically, what the Aero 5 does, it looks at all those channels and determines where it compresses the image, and then it determines what's the best channels to send the various bits on, and then it combines them on the other end. That's our technology. Then we have a software system that distributes that to control centers and to PDAs, to any agents on the ground who are allowed to see it. So it allows you to have multi-path connectivity and then global distribution. This is more of an illustration of that. To give you a sense, this is our Starlink Mini with Aero. This can happen in a dense urban area, in an urban area, suburban as well as rural. This is just a pictorial just to say it's using multiple mediums to bring these images to the ground and distribute them throughout the workforce.
Lastly, this is where we're headed. We've been in radios for some time. We know how to create high-density, very high performance radios and systems. Now we're moving into networks where we're providing a complete network that extends that resilience, brings multiple nodes through software-defined networks. That's what we're in the process of doing. In the future, where we're going is spectrum dominance or spectrum supremacy. What that means when you talk to MODs around the world, the United States military as well, the key things that are drivers to next conflicts, future conflicts is three areas. One is Space. One is AI. The third is Electromagnetic Spectrum. If you don't win in those three areas, you don't win the fight. Where we're focused and where our expertise has been for years is in this area of electromagnetic spectrum. That's where our expertise is.
We understand it very well. We know how to operate in an environment that's congested and interfered with, as you see in various events globally, as well as in the theater of operation, but also where it's going, where you have an adversary who's trying to deny those areas. That's the key. The winner who's able to operate in those, if you can imagine where warfare will go. We talk about boots on the ground today to win. Ultimately, it will be bots on the ground or robots on the ground to be able to win these. You just see a much more increased machine to machine connection. That is through spectrum. If you don't control the spectrum, your ability to win the fight is diminished significantly. That's where our focus will be going. That's where we're working with MODs throughout the world to provide.
They recognize our strength there. They recognize our capabilities there. They want to work with us to be able to build the capabilities that they need in the future to win in those areas. We view it as control the spectrum, control the fight. Our mission is to avoid sending our young men and women in uniform into harm's way, and use machines to do that, whether it's unmanned sea, unmanned air or unmanned ground. That's where we're headed. We look forward to continue to communicate with you. We're going to increase our ability and capability to communicate with our investors now that we've made this year-long effort to turn this company and head it in the right direction, and we look forward to providing you with future updates. With that, Ana, we'll open it up for questions.
Perfect. Thank you, Mickey. Building on what you just shared, can you talk about which verticals are seeing the fastest growth right now? And are there any areas that might be declining?
Yeah. First, the areas that are increasing the most are the air-to-ground area for us. We just see the need for surveillance, for reconnaissance being a primary that MODs throughout the world are focused on. Secondly, we've seen in the tactical area, drones as well as manned and unmanned is a key area for again, this whole spectrum supremacy type of solution. That's where we see the large growth. Areas where we see some declines, you know. Broadcasters, we've seen what has happened globally. They've been hit by streaming. They've been hit by digital ads. They're now getting hit by AI. You know, the traditional broadcaster doesn't have the capital that they used to have to be able to invest in areas.
We're seeing that offset, quite frankly, through entertainment, you know, massive concerts that are happening, movies that are being created at concerts. We were involved in a James Cameron, Billie Eilish event in 4K, which was amazing, where they used our technology to be able to create a 4K movie of her event. We see that being a big area for growth, and a lot of that is due to the middle class globally has increased, and they have the capital and cash to be able to go to large events like that. Secondly, we see the leagues. You know, a lot of leagues globally are becoming more wealthy.
With that wealth they want to be able to communicate their story and their message much more succinctly, and the best way to do it is with high-quality video. An example of that, in the Dallas Cowboys, you know, when you see throughout that stadium there's 2,000+ screens, and then you have the big jumbotron. Below that, there's 100+ people that are working on the content specifically for that event. That technology is being brought to, whether it's the kiss cam or mobile images are all being brought to it by Vislink type of technology. We see that happening quite a bit as well.
Talk a little bit about what your long-term strategic focus is. Is it hardware, software, SaaS or hybrid?
That's a great question. We view ourselves as a software company that's delivered on proprietary hardware. Our hardware is basically a way to just create a platform for our software. It will continue to focus on our software capabilities, but in order to do that, you've gotta have great hardware that fits the SWaP requirement that I talked about, and so we're continuing to improve that. So from our standpoint, we have to have a strong hardware team, we have to have a strong firmware team, and we have to have a strong software team, and that's where our focus is. Now that we're all in a very focused design center, the team is focused on making that happen. You see that through other companies like Anduril and other players that are playing in the defense market. You gotta have the full stack.
In regard to your IP, how defensible is the technology?
We think it's incredibly defensible in the sense that when you look at that intersection of RF and IP. You know, RF was hot maybe 25 years ago when 2G networks were being deployed or 1G networks were deploying. With the consolidation, you saw the number of engineers that were coming out of university being RF engineers decrease dramatically. That's an area that's more, you know, it's science to it, but it's a lot of art to it. We've got the combination of young talent and experienced talent that understands RF at the base and how that, from an IP layer one, two, and three, how that all combines, and that's where our unique differentiation is, and we expect that to continue.
Can you talk about any projections of when you'll reach positive EBITDA or relist on a major exchange?
Yeah. Our goal is to be positive EBITDA this year. As I mentioned, in January we had a great start. We had a $2 million month, positive $300K EBITDA and we're working to build on that. Our goals is to see you know how things develop. We have that option available. We've kept the team in place that does our financials so that if we needed to uplist, we had the ability to do that. It was important for us to take the time to get off Nasdaq so we could focus on rebuilding, in which we did, and now will be a matter of building up. We keep that as an option, as we keep all our options available.
Mickey, you mentioned your differentiating factor, but someone wants to know why would a customer choose Vislink over in-house solutions or larger vendors?
First of all, we don't. There's not a lot of in-house solutions for our capabilities. When you look at some of the big, large subs or and contractors in the defense arena, a lot of them have traditional radios, but they don't have the kind of ISR-type radios we have from air to ground. As I mentioned, you see our whole list of OEMs that we work with. They do that because number one, their customers tell them they want a Vislink solution, and two, they don't have the internal capability to do it or they choose not to do it. We fill that nice niche, and we see that as a way to build because you know, historically it was a lot of manned equipment.
Now we see this whole unmanned, both air, as well as land and sea. We see that coming together, and uniquely, we're positioned to do a lot of connections there. The key piece is we're not a proprietary RF company only. We work with 5G and 4G, we work with satellite, LEO, MEO, Starlink. We work with a variety of different mediums, and it's what's needed for the customer for them to have the most success. We really target that. Then lastly, ours are mission-driven, our product design, so there's no one in the industry that has the kind of capability we have around a DO-160 certified product, both for cellular, Starlink, as well as for proprietary RF.
Talk a little bit about. I'm going to combine a few of these. What role will 5G, AI, drone, and possible facial recognitions play in your growth?
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question, and let me just take by different area. 5G we think is a great opportunity. Now that is predominantly, we'll see that in the public safety side 'cause obviously in the theater of operation there's not a lot of 5G. There may be, I would see that in a more of a private 5G framework where you're setting up a private 5G network that's connecting to air to ground. So we see growth there. The AI side, you know, AI, it's incredibly important to have AI on the edge. To have AI on the edge, you have to have a transport mechanism that's very low latency and very high resilience, reliability, and that's what we provide.
A lot of our solutions will have embedded AI, so customers then can do AI at the edge as opposed to, you know, for instance, a kill chain where you're looking from sensor to shooter to reduce that time. You don't want to be going up to the cloud or to a remote location. You want to be able to do things as quickly as possible. We'll see that as elements of it. I think you know, the areas of other growth, I think they talked about AI, they talked about 5G. What was the two others?
Drone and then facial recognition.
Drone, obviously, yeah, man-to-man, man-to-machine is going to be huge, whether it's a drone, whether it's in the air, whether it's on the ground or at sea. That connectivity, you'll only need more spectrum required for that requires our type of capabilities to be able to connect, communicate, command and provide video through those channels. We're in a great spot there. The facial recognition, you know, that's a policy issue by country. You know, obviously more countries it is being used today, and they use transport mechanisms for that. We don't get involved in that part of it. What resides on the network and what they run through is really up to the country and what their policies are with regard to that. I imagine, though, that will continue to increase the demand for these types of systems.
We have more questions, but I will send them to you because we are soon out of time, but I want you to end with this question, Mickey. What does success look like in two to three years?
We're growing a defense company here. That's our focus. We're going to continue to support our broadcaster customers that we've had for many years, our live production, the leagues that we support. The beauty of it, we can use our own technology, that technology, repurpose in these areas. We're bringing the latest and greatest of that technology and bringing that into defense and public safety where we'll see higher growth profile. Our goal, you know, we didn't come here to be a small company. We want to be a large company. We think we have a lot of opportunity and the conversations that we're in on a daily basis, we see a tremendous opportunity for a company like ours.
That's where our focus is, that's what our mission is, and our mission, like I said, is to take the men and women in uniform out of harm's way, and through the electromagnetic spectrum and controlling and having electromagnetic spectrum supremacy, that's where we plan to go.
Perfect. Well, thank you so much. Very exciting industry you're in this time. Thank you for joining us on the conference, and we would love to continue this conversation with you.
Thank you, Ana, and thanks everyone for joining.
All right, everyone, we'll be right back with our next presenter.
Three, two, one. Hi, I'm John Passalacqua. I'm the CEO of First Phosphate. It's good to be back here. I think the last time we did the Emerging Growth was about a month ago. A lot has happened in a month to the company. Basically, two great things have happened. First, the Canadian government put phosphate, the critical mineral onto the critical mineral list for the clean tech tax credit. What that means is that phosphate comes onto the A list of critical minerals, gets up there with lithium, copper, gallium, and all the rare earths. That opens us up to, you know, a 30% refundable tax credit when we go to build out our facilities. That's really important.
Also what happened is a few days later, the Canadian government announced a CAD 18.7 million non-refundable, non-dilutive contribution towards First Phosphate to get us through our feasibility study. These two things really show, you know, how phosphate is really coming onto its own and being understood as a very important critical mineral, not just for fertilizer, but especially for, you know, the energy transition and, you know, the clean tech transition as well. I'll tell you what we do. We're First Phosphate. We are igneous phosphate for the lithium iron phosphate battery industry. Igneous phosphate meaning it's hard rock phosphate.
It doesn't come from sedimentary phosphates, which are generally used in fertilizer, but hard rock phosphate that makes a lot of purified phosphoric acid for the batteries, for the LFP batteries. Let me get into it right away. Here you see a chart of lithium iron phosphate batteries and sort of their growth. It's a fantastic growth model. It's going to be growing straight up until you know until the 2030s, 2040s here, as is predicted. That's because you know almost over 60% of all batteries in the world now are lithium iron phosphate batteries and they've eclipsed all other batteries out there. The reason for this is you know just to show you here, you can see how versatile LFP battery technology is.
You know, if you see in the lump there that says electric vehicles in red, that's only about 15% of what LFP's about. If you look down a little bit in the blue area, you know, large-scale energy storage, AI data centers, telecom, charging stations, robotics, factory automation, defense, all other kinds of uses for LFP battery. LFP battery is a battery of mass adoption. It's very versatile and, you know, it's becoming the battery of mass adoption because of superior fire safety, well-defined performance, and the lowest cost on the market.
It's so important, in fact, that, you know, Elon Musk came out not so long ago and said that, you know, if only we could improve the use of battery storage with LFP battery, we'd be able to, you know, double the electricity production or distribution in the western world. This is important because, you know, it's really hard to expand energy production, but just by managing it better with LFP batteries and storage, we could really, you know, double sort of our output of energy. This really sent shock waves through the industry, and it led to, you know, a big rally in lithium stocks. There's over 150 publicly traded companies in the lithium space that, you know, have reacted quite well to this.
When you look to, you know, phosphate, which is, you know, the key driver of LFP battery, there's only a handful of companies out there that trade on public markets and phosphate, and they're all geared towards fertilizer. First Phosphate is possibly a company out there that's phosphate, high purity igneous phosphate, but just for the industry. The reason that we took this determination and focused specifically on the LFP battery industry as a phosphate producer and not on fertilizer is because what you see up on your screen right now, you know, over 60% of the cathode battery in an LFP battery is phosphate. Only 4% is lithium, and then 35% is iron.
You've got the lithium addressed with over 150 companies that trade across global stock exchanges. We thought it was really important to secure a source of phosphate for LFP battery in the Western world, and that's exactly what we've done. We're working on developing a phosphate mine and a full process for making LFP batteries in North America, starting with a mine that's based in North America. The importance of phosphate is seen also here in these diagrams, right? If you look on the left, the energy transition diagram, copper is the most important element for the energy transition, but number two is purified phosphoric acid.
The amount of purified phosphoric acid that we're going to need in the Western world to respond to LFP, if you look on the right, it's some are predicting that it's going to have to double, some are predicting that it's going to have to go up at least five to 10 times. It's really difficult to make that kind of purified phosphoric acid for the LFP battery with the current phosphate that we have, because first of all, it's all dedicated towards the fertilizer industry, and secondly, it's a sedimentary rock, which is not pure enough to make a lot of purified phosphoric acid. What we have here at First Phosphate, if you look on the left, the igneous phosphate rock, almost 95% of this translates into purified phosphoric acid that goes directly to making you know, battery acid.
Whereas if you have sedimentary rock, most of it just stays back in a fertilizer stream. That's really the beauty of igneous phosphate rock as we have it in Quebec, is that, you know, we can go directly into the LFP battery industry without having to touch the fertilizer industry, which is a commoditized space. We kinda get to go to the holy grail and where we really need to have the expansion in phosphate. You know, the real important thing to understand is that, you know, igneous phosphate rock is very rare. If you look at the picture of the world up on the left, you see these little blue dots that signify the areas where there is the igneous phosphate. Igneous phosphate is only 5% of the world's phosphate.
It's found, you know, kind of in Northern Europe, mostly in Russia. That's behind the sanctions now. There's some in Southern Africa, and there's some also in Brazil, but that's got a lot of rare earths in it, and most of it goes into the fertilizer industry. If you look up where you see Quebec just north of Maine there, on the top left diagram, we've got the igneous anorthosite. It's a very special type of igneous rock that is pretty easy to separate.
We're able to separate it. We're able to recover 92% of the phosphate, and we're able to get it to almost a 41% pure phosphate concentrate, 41% pure P2O5, the measure of phosphate, which is, you know, pretty much the world's highest percentage of phosphate concentrate producible. It's thanks to this rare igneous anorthosite rock that we have just in Quebec here in North America. You know, that is really the secret. It's the igneous rock, and it's the ability to make a lot of purified phosphoric acid and to step outside of the fertilizer industry. Something very rare and something that we have and that we're developing. Let me show you a little bit about the mine.
The mine that we are getting into feasibility study right now is the Bégin- Lamarche mine. If you look at the diagram on your screen, from left to right, that's about 2.5 km long. It's three in depth. Just with what we see there on screen, you have enough phosphate to basically power half of the fleet of new vehicles in North America for the next 25-50 years. It's about 350 GWh of LFP batteries that can be created from this resource. We've already turned you know this phosphate concentrate into purified phosphoric acid using our partners' in Belgium, Prayon. You can see the bottle on the right that's purified phosphoric acid that was produced from this resource.
We've got a good NPV, $2.1 billion, IRR of 37%, and a 2.9-year payback on a 23-year mine life right now to start, and a strip ratio of 1.51. The main and most important thing about the resource is if you can see here. This is the picture of the Eastern U.S. and Canadian seaboard. If you look where it says Bégin- Lamarche Phosphate, kind of in the top left of the diagram, that's where the mine will be. That's at 770 km from the deep-sea Port of Saguenay, where we have deep-sea port access to our off-takers in Europe. We also have access to the rail line to get to the rest of North America.
This is an extreme advantage because, you know, with critical minerals, there's they're limited, but when they're found, sometimes they're found in places where they can't be exploited. Here we're sitting in, you know, the perfect area where it can be exploited. We're sitting in an open pit situation. We're sitting at, you know, about 1 kilometer from paved provincial state highway. We're sitting on hydro lines, and we're sitting at 770 kilometers from the deep-sea Port of Saguenay. This is all very important for logistics. For this, we already have a, you know, a definitive binding off-take, one that has been prepaid with a very large customer in Europe, and that's going to be going through the Port of Saguenay.
We're at the Port of Saguenay. We'll be making the next step, which is taking the phosphate concentrate and making it into phosphoric acid. We already have a bankable definitive off-taker on the phosphoric acid as well. The company is quite advanced at the moment. As you might have seen, we just completed our 40,000 m drill program. We had a final drill program that was necessary in order to complete you know the geological model along the resource. We should have the final results coming out here in the next few weeks to a month.
Then after that, we'll be able to make a determination whether to move into a feasibility study, which, if we proceed, we're hoping to have the feasibility study completed by the end of December 2026, permitting by early 2027. We're targeting an open pit mine by 2029 to meet the requirements of our off-takers. Again, I'll show in the next page here, you know, the first step is extraction and concentration, and then it's moving it into phosphoric acid, and then to LFP cathode active material. That's the guts that goes into the batteries, and then the batteries are then used in the, you know, energy storage systems. Okie doke. Perfect. Yeah, this is something that the company's really proud of here.
In six steps, we were able to get from basically, you know, as they say, dirt in the ground to battery. We were able to get from the igneous anorthosite rock in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, that's all the way to creating, you know, LFP batteries fully from North American critical minerals in step six. Basically, you know, step one is the igneous anorthosite rock. Step two, we made that into phosphate concentrate through a solventless process. That would be kind of, you know, represent the mining of the material. Step three, we were able to make that into purified phosphoric acid with our partners in Belgium, Prayon. Step four, using material from GKN Hoeganaes in Tennessee, we were able to make iron phosphate. That's when you take iron and phosphate together, you get the precursor.
With lithium carbonate from Century Lithium, we were able to make LFP cathode active material in step five. In step six, our partners from Nouveau Monde Graphite, we were able to add graphite and our technology partner, Ultion out of Nevada, we were able to make the LFP battery cells that you see up there on screen, these battery cells, which I'm just showing up here in my hand, if anybody can see that. You know, these LFP battery cells, we made a batch of 200. These were the first LFP battery cells made in about 25 years of fully North American critical minerals. Why do I say that? It's because LFP technology was invented in North America about early 2000s.
Then shortly after that, after some work here in North America, the process moved over to China. Now for the first time in 25 years, we've brought that process back. Now, why is this important? It's important because the fact that we've been able to make these batteries, and we cycled them 2000 times, and they cycle just like normal batteries that you could buy anywhere out of Asia. These batteries, you know, basically perform just like any other battery. That means that all the critical minerals that went into this, all the six steps, is validated, as well as the process itself to make that and the partners that were involved in it. That's really important, right?
The process and the critical minerals are there to be able to fully onshore the LFP battery supply chain into North America. That's something that the company has done, something the company is very proud of, and something that the company has done with a number of key partners, which are all at commercial scale. None of this is R&D, none of this is pilot scale. All of this can be fully up-scaled very quickly into North America. You know, the other real big important reason for this is that if you remember in October, November of 2025, there was a spat between President Xi and President Trump over rare earths, over microchip technology, but over LFP battery technology.
It was threatened that the LFP battery technology would be withheld from export from China. Now you can see that we have the fundamental necessities that are necessary to you know, onshore the supply chain here into North America. That's what's most important about what we did here. Next is, you know, project de-risking, as we just discussed, right? It's all about the partners. The supply chain is something very large to build. You can't do it on your own. Having the right partners at the table is very important. We talked about Prayon, the world's largest producer of phosphoric acid. We talked about GKN Hoeganaes as the world's largest producer of steel powder.
We also have a full collaboration agreement with our indigenous group, Pekuakamiulnuatsh First Nation, out of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec. We've got letters of interest from the Quebec government. Like I was saying, from the Canadian government, we just received $16.7 million non-refundable contribution. That goes, you know, directly towards helping us to get through the feasibility study. Then also from the EXIM Bank, we've had a letter of in terest for $170 million towards all of our facilities. So really, it's, you know, it's key to work with the governments. It's key to work with partners, local and international, because the supply chain is not something that, you know, just one company can build.
The other thing that we're really proud of here is the management. We've been able to meet and beat all of our milestones to date. Our big thing has been really this year to complete our drilling campaign, our final drilling campaign, to really establish our final geological model here and to be able to move into a feasibility study, which we hope to be able to complete by the end of 2026. The other important elements, obviously, after that are and we hope to have an operating mine at some point in 2029 to meet the requests of our definitive bankable and prepaid off-takers. We're on quite a tight timeline here.
It's important, I think, to think big, and I think it's important to try to press as quickly as possible to bring these critical minerals projects, such as phosphate to light. They're worth more the quicker that they're brought to light. We've been on an extremely aggressive timeline. We've been able to meet it to date, and we hope to be able to continue along this very strong trajectory in future. The other thing that's really important about the company is that, you know, we're completely debt-free. We have raised $50 million of equity on our own without any investment banks. Our management and our board has contributed $4 million of that. Our management works 50% in shares and 50% in cash.
Our board, and even myself, we work 100% on stock. We do that so that we can maintain the resources into the company to be able to develop even more quickly. The capital structure is great. Management and board, we still hold 20% of the shares. High net worth institutions and our family and friends is another 40%. Then there's a public float about 40%, and our First Nations also have a small portion of it. Lastly, and most importantly, obviously, is our board and our management. I think we're very strong in capital markets. We're very strong in mining. We're very strong in technology, and we bring it all together, right?
In order to be able to get to this, the LFP battery, you have to have a strong supply chain that brings everything together, and you need to have really a cross-functional, very good that is able to work across all disciplines. It's been great to be here. If there's any questions that you might have, please then drop them below in the chat box, and I'll attempt to answer them back, if I can. In the meantime, it's been great, and I look forward to seeing you in the next couple months here at Emerging Markets. Thank you much. Take care. Have a good day.
Welcome back, everyone. Next, we have ZTEST Electronics Inc., trades on the OTCID under the symbol ZTSTF and on the CSE under the symbol ZTE. Through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Permatech Electronics Corporation, offers electronic manufacturing services to a wide range of customers, including printed circuit board assembly, materials management, and testing services. Today, we have President and CEO, Steve Smith, and the CFO, Mike Kindy . Welcome, gentlemen. We're happy to have you on our conference today.
Thanks very much.
All right, the floor is yours. Call me back when you're ready for some questions.
Thank you. Well, thank you for your time. We are ZTEST Electronics. As I alluded to, we trade on the OTCID and on the CSE. That's our forward-looking statements. I'm sure most people are familiar with that. What are we? Who are we? We operate through our wholly-owned subsidiary, Permatech Electronics. We got a 20,000 sq ft facility in North York, Ontario, just north of Toronto. We are engaged in printed circuit board assembly and materials management and testing services. We've got a wide variety of customers, medical, power, computer, telecommunications. Ask, what is a printed circuit board? Well, it's a thin board made of an insulating material on which conductive pathways are printed or etched. Once they're assembled, these pathways connect electronic components.
Pretty well what a circuit board is, it's the mother of all electronic products. They're vital to everyday everything, appliances, devices, the Internet of Things, Internet of vehicles, industrial Internet of Things, 5G, AI. Different PCBs are needed for a wide variety of applications. We are an IPC Class III compliant facility. Every board we build is compliant. Over 40 years, we have the highest grade of manufacturing reliability, as obviously is required for medical and aerospace and military applications. We manufacture custom boards in a wide variety of quantities. Obviously, we test and retest these boards, so we have minimal, next to nil returns over 40 years. A wide variety of turnkey services. We can provide materials, we can procure the materials necessary to build, or we can do assembly only.
We've got, as I mentioned, 40 years of experience. We have a fantastic turnaround time. We can meet deadlines. We've got all the certifications and standards, and our reliability is second to none. I think that's what makes it stand out. That's a major competitive advantage. Cost-effective. We're not the cheapest, but we're not the most expensive. Obviously, as it stands, we've got state-of-the-art technology, as we've invested over the last few years over $1 million in new machinery. The market view of printed circuit boards, well, according to Mordor Intelligence, it's growing at a compounded annual growth rate of over 5%. Main market, they suggest it's going to be over $109 billion by 2031. Who do we serve?
We serve trucking, consumer electronics, wearables, wireless, power, telecommunications, and we can tailor our processes to suit any industry. Again, more examples of medical, mining, consumer electronics, re mote car starters, AI for autonomous garbage trucks, powered sign readers, traffic controls, road shelters, wireless, RF, wearable smart lenses. More examples, industrial smart factory computers, voice and video, VoIP, power grid. That's a growing concern, obviously. Agriculture, industrial, and testing equipment. Our financials, we came out of the pandemic in really-
All right, everyone. They are having technical difficulties, but stay with us. They are logging right back in.
Opening.
Hi, Steve. Welcome back.
I think we lost you somehow.
All right. Do you want to kick back into whe re you were? I think.
Yeah.
Ryan?
Slide 11.
Slide 11. Okay.
Slide 11?
Yep.
Okay. Slide 11 is okay. Sorry, I can just go over what our examples of our industry products are. We supply to medical and mining, consumer electronics, trucking, wireless, wearables. More examples, smart factories, VoIP, power grid, switches, agricultural, industrial testing equipment. Our financial highlights, we came out of the pandemic, doing very quite well. We did about $10 million in revenue in June 2024, with $1.7 million on the bottom line. We ran into some of the h eadwinds that hit the EMS space in 2025, but we still gleaned over $8 million of revenue, and still, again, profitable to the tune of over $1 million on the bottom line.
Our Q3 results, again, as alluded to, we ran into a little bit of the headwinds that have affected all the EMS industries. Things have turned around for us. In December 2025, we had our best quarter since June 2024. Again, consistently, we put a bottom line down. Our share structure, we've got 36 million shares outstanding. We've got 2.4 million options, fully diluted around 39 million. Our long-term debt is CAD 22,000, but that is eliminated this month actually. We've got CAD 4.4 million in the bank. Our share price was around CAD 33 million , so that gives us around a CAD 12 million market cap. I'm the President CEO.
I got 35 years in the capital markets. We've got a very solid leadership team. Mike Kindy, who's here with me, is VP Finance and CFO. More than 40 years in the business as well. Good board with William J. Bender, our Director and Corporate Secretary. Been with the company more than 30 years. David Barnett, we added, CFA, great for analyzing potential M&A targets. Dean Tyliakos, the same. Businessman out of the West Co ast of Canada. Trevor Treweeke, who just added on with vast amount of experience in analyzing public companies. Thanks. Sorry that we got cut off there and any questions?
All right.
We are good.
Are you ready to jump into questions?
Certainly.
Okay. Let's talk about are you going to be affected by the shortage of the helium gas at all?
No. The only thing that's affecting in regards to components that are utilized in fabricating or PCB printed circuit boards, a lot of the components are now obviously being allocated or gleaned by AI. Still, I mean, we protected ourselves in that. If the prices rise in that sector, we're contractually protected, and also we have a supply management out for the next year and a half.
How does ZTEST Electronics differentiate itself in the highly competitive EMS and PCB assembly market?
I think we can say that our reliability and the fact that over 40 years really nothing has gone out the door and been returned, I think that is critical. For example, if you have a circuit board operating in a testing machine that tests, say, the flow of water between fire hydrants, I think that's fairly critical. And a myriad of different medical equipment, if anything fails, obviously that's critical. Our reliability, I think, differentiates us and allows us to stand out.
What percentage of revenue comes from PCB assembly versus testing versus materials management?
Mike, you might be able to touch on that one.
Yeah, our materials management is done in connection with PCBA. It's not done as a standalone revenue stream. The same with the testing. I want to make sure that it's understood that, you know, we don't bring in things specifically to test. We only do testing to satisfy the requi rements of our customers. Having said that, there's probably about 60%-70% of our revenue that is associated with materials management, where we actually do the procurement, we manage the material flow, and produce the PCB using those materials. Hopefully that addresses your question.
Can you talk about what the company is focused on? Is it low volume, high complexity with higher margins, or commoditized production with lower margins?
Primarily complex boards in relatively small runs. When I say relatively, we're not producing boards in the 100,000 quantity per run. It's a smaller run than that. But high complexity, and certainly high margin goes along with the combination that Steve alluded to of quality, customer service, flexibility, all of those attributes that allow us to charge a little bit more.
Perfect. What is the company's competitive moat, that will allow you to grow market share?
Well
Again, I think that goes back to reliability. Procuring customers in the PCB assembly business is a bit of a process. I mean, you just can't go out and advertise and people pick you up on Google. Say, "I need a medical PCB. I need something inserted into a like maybe three PCB that, you know, snake through a medical device. I don't think that those designers are really searching for an assembler. Our competitive advantage lies in the fact that we have a fantastic reputation, and the majority of our clients are obtained through word of mouth. Coming out again of the pandemic, we grew from 20+ customers to over 85 customers, and people say, "Do you have recurring revenue?" Well, no, it's not recurring, but the stickiness that our customers provide, like, well over 98% of our customers have remained with us, almost translates into a recurring revenue style.
Perfect. Can you talk about some of the problems you're facing, and what solutions do you have to overcome them?
The primary issues that we face is rising costs, the same as everybody else. You know, I think it's a combination of being able to anticipate what some of those issues are going to be, build that into our pricing model, and also do whatever we can to limit our exposure to those escalating costs.
All right. Thank you for that. How concentrated is revenue among top customers?
We have a number of large customers that they all go through their own cycles. There's probably a group of eight to 10 customers that at any given point in time, three out of those eight or 10 are going to represent about 40% of our periodic revenue. Again, those three customers will evolve and will revolve, so it's not the same customers each period, but it is part of that larger group of eight or 10 that do comprise the top customers each period.
Yeah. Really, so, like, the top five of the last three months are not necessarily the top five of the next three months. That does mitigate client concentration.
You spoke about your price point. Margins are approximately 42%, so what are your expectations? To increase, decrease, what are you thinking?
Right now our focus is on maintaining. We're facing a little bit of headwind, and any time that the EMS market goes through a lull like it has for the last 18 months, there's always price pressure as you come out of that period. We are right now in maintenance mode, dealing with escalating costs and the increased price pressure, with a view to, over the longer term, escalating those margins.
Are contracts recurring or are they project-based?
This market is predicated on relatively short-term ordering, so you're not going to get commitments from customers or suppliers that extend more than 12 months. Having said that, many boards are produced over extended periods of time, so we get reorders on boards. We also get reorders in the context of next generation boards and expanded productivity from our customers. From a customer point of view, we have a lot of recurring revenue, but it may not be that exact same board period after period after period.
In essence, it's not recurring, so it's not a SaaS model. Again, the stickiness of our clients almost makes it appear to be a recurring model. Once we get a client, we don't lose them.
Great. What industries drive the most revenue? Is it medical, telecom, industrial?
Again, getting back to the comments about the top customer, that varies from period to period. You know, electrical is going quite well right now as data centers wrap up. You know, boards are needed to support that data center infrastructure. That's going to have its run, and then will be replaced by transportation or mining or, you know, one of the other industries will surge to the forefront.
Is there expansion into higher margin verticals like defense, aerospace, AI hardware?
Yes, oftentimes indirectly. We service customers that are involved in military. We recently quoted a rather large job. The quote is certainly not a secure piece of business yet, but a rather large military related quote just went out. We are very much involved, but we are not specifically military certified at this time. It comes down to our customers being military certified, and then we piggyback on that.
What about any expansion into new geographies outside of Canada?
That's a good question, and that's actually what we're focusing on a lot is on the M&A side. With over $4 million in the bank, in essence, that is a main focus of our attention right now is looking for possible M&A targets. There are a myriad, a lot of smaller PCBA assembly companies and verticals, in essence. A coating company for a company that coats PCBs for harsh environments, or a design company specifically, and those are potential targets. Right now, over the last few years, some private companies are in essence maybe a little overvalued by the proprietors. As the fact is that there are a multitude of these companies prevalent. We are actively searching for targets to attain some inorganic growth.
A few questions I'll try to combine. Talk a little bit more about your plan to grow beyond $8 million-$9 million revenue, and can you scale without major CapEx?
I think the two are certainly tied together. We currently are running at approximately 80% capacity on our single shift. We easily can go to a second shift, which that second shift would not be an absolute doubling of our capacity. It would represent about a 75% increase, and all of that can be done without any additional capital expenditure.
Great. Talk a little bit about the demand from AI, EVs, IoT, and how's that impacting your pipeline?
AI right now is really putting a lot of pressure on certain chips, and memory is one of the big issues right now. Our circuit boards generally don't rely a whole lot on memory. So right now we're not feeling the squeeze, but that is going to continue to expand into reach into other electronic components. We recognize that, and we certainly are in constant contact with our supply chain to make sure that there are no bottlenecks and there are no impediments that are going to disrupt our production.
We're going to absolutely ensure that we maintain or attain or see the process for certifications for the EV side. Obviously, that's a main driver right now as well.
Can you talk about the amount you might have in your back order?
That's a forward-looking statement, but maybe.
Our back order system at any given point in time represents approximately six months' worth of revenue. It's not an absolute six months because some of the orders will be filled over nine or 10 months, some of them will be filled in six weeks. The overall value at any given point in time tends to run at about six months revenue.
Perfect. What does success look like for you in the next two to three years?
Yeah, that's a great question, what do we lay our heads on the pillow at night and think and dream about what we'd like to be? Certainly $10 million. You know, through organic, that's a slower process, but through, obviously, M&A activities, we hope, and again, this is a forward statement, we hope in the next three years or so to be double or more. Again, that's the hope, and again, that's a forward statement. It's through organic and inorganic, horizontal and vertical, and by maintaining the margins as well.
Perfect. Well, thank you, Steve and Mike, for joining us today.
Yeah.
We certainly look forward to following along with your progress. Thank you again.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ana.
All right, everyone, we'll be right back.